The following article was first published in the UK2.net Blog by Liz Ponsford and has been reproduced with permission.

If you are reading this then you probably already have a website and the chances are that you already have done some keyword research, but if not and you want to understand how to stand a chance of making money online without having to rely completely on PPC to drive traffic, then here are our Top 10 considerations for monetising your site.

1. Keyword research

It all must start with keywords. Knowing what people are searching for on line and giving it to them is THE most crucial fact to keep at the forefront of your mind when planning any web site.

Google keyword tools show you the global searches and trends to help you ascertain what gets the most traffic and least competition (which will be easier to rank for). At the bottom of your search results you will also find a list of keywords which are worth considering adding to your LSI (Latent Semantic Index) list – these keywords are keywords you can use in your content safely to add to the strength of the main keyword and are considered by Google to be well related to your main keyword. It avoids keyword spamming and helps your rankings.

See screenshot below from Google’s search results showing the keywords:

Wordtracker is also a great tool which although costs money can see search numbers across other search engines all in one place. There is a Firefox add-on tool called Wordtracker SEO Blogger which gives you daily searches across Google, Yahoo and Bing if you don’t want to shell out for Wordtracker. Sadly they still need to make it useable in more recent versions of Firefox though!  As you are blogging it will tell you how many times you have used your chosen keywords too.

If you are building sites in many different niches then check out Micro Niche Finder too as this is fantastic at enabling you to see which niches are less competitive so you don’t waste time. You will find videos on YouTube and it is one of my personal favourite resources.

2. Building your web site

There is nothing to stop you building your own web site when you sign up to hosting with UK2.net. We have a Site Builder tool which will help you do everything you need. We also have one click install Word Press which is very popular due to it being so search engine friendly. If you are writing content sites then Word Press should definitely be your first choice. There are lots of videos and instructions and you can get some specialists themes to make your site more beautiful. UK2 will be giving its users access to over 200 premium WordPress themes soon too so watch out for that.

3.   Monetising your blog or web site

As you build your site and it starts to rank well, you will need to consider monetisation. Consider that text links still beat banners for click throughs even though there is a surge in banner use by companies across the web.

If you want to use Google Adsense and are happy that the clicks will pay you enough, sign up for a Google Adsense account and get the code and paste it wherever you want on your page so it looks natural. You can make it look natural by making sure that the colours match your web site making the links look as if they are part of your copy. That way people won’t see them so much as ads but a part of your useful information, and will be therefore more likely to click. You can get all kinds of different sizes but be careful to place the code in a place where it is likely to be clicked. I wouldn’t advise more than three ad listings to any one box.

Another and now more popular way to monetise is by placing other peoples’ banners on your site which you can get from the affiliate networks.

4. Getting your affiliate links

Think about the demographics of your site visitors and you will soon realise that there may be other areas of interest for your visitors. For example if you are blogging about ski holidays, then your readers may be interested in not just ski equipment but tickets to music festivals or music downloads, or related books and computer games. It’s all about understanding your visitors’ mindset. My advice would be to join the affiliate forums such as affiliates4u and ask questions of other affiliates on there to help you decide which network is the best for you. You can join more than one and its easy and free but consider the payment thresholds that each network has or you could spread yourself too thinly and not earn enough on one network to get paid.

Popular ones include Trade Doubler, Commission Junction, Affiliate Window, Web Gains and Affiliate Future but there are plenty more which are very good too. Some programmes will pay a percentage of the sale and some will pay a standard customer acquisition fee (CPA). Choosing a high converting programme is more important than a high paying one so do your homework on this.

5.  Deciding on which affiliate programmes to join

As I already mentioned take time to think about the complimentary things your reader will be interested as you may want to develop pages for those things at a later date.

Simply search the network for different companies and don’t always let the commission percentage rule your heart as it’s not always the best way to start earning cash by choosing the highest payouts (but it helps!) Many affiliates prefer to see all their income on one network dashboard but personally I think it’s best to join a few so you can set up RSS feeds of the latest offers and get access to a wide range of different offers. Also. Check out forums such as Affiliates4U for good advice on this.

Once you decide on the programmes you want, apply to join and fill in all the details and you should get a response in a couple of days or less. You can view statistics on the go through various mobile apps once you get set up too. I found one recently called Ad Live where you can view statistics from Tradedoubler, CJ, ClickBank, Adbrite, Ad Mob and more.  Hopefully they will add more networks and do note that it is in Beta at the moment.

6. Adding your links and banners

Once your application is approved, you will have access to all the creatives which will include, voucher code text ads, banner ads and plain text ads, product feeds and sometimes email creatives.  If you are a savvy affiliate marketer you may want to get to know the affiliate manager who will gladly work with you to help you get access to other marketing information such as emails templates that may not necessarily on the network. An affiliate manager will be interested in this if you send a newsletter out to your visitors for example.

Use text links to integrate seamlessly into your content so where you have the phrase of a product for example, turn this into a hyperlink to link to your chosen affiliate programme. If you need a deep product link and don’t see it then speak to your affiliate manager.

If you are using banners, it’s no good placing them at the bottom of your page where people have to scroll down to click on them. Best practice says that banners get the most clicks when placed on the right hand side of the page. Think about how many times you have inadvertently clicked the skyscraper on your Hotmail  page  whilst trying to scroll down the page and you will know why this is.

The most important thing is that content is king, and if you think your site will be a money spinner if it’s full of ads, then I urge you to reconsider. As Affiliate Manager, I noticed one of our top performers in terms of impressions was getting no conversions at all. I investigated further and saw that the site was full of ads. This website owner was simply wasting their traffic as the CTR was very low.

7. Cloaking your Affiliate links

If Google sees direct affiliate links, they could sandbox your site before you even start to rank. The Sandbox is a dark place that no affiliate wants to end up in! Therefore to avoid this you must cloak your links. You can use 303 redirects or specific link cloaker plug ins to do this for you. There is lots of info on the web about this so I am not going to add to it all here. Just do your homework on cloaking links and find what works for you.

8.  Keep it fresh

Once you have your affiliate links set up, test them for a couple of months then see if there are new ads from that merchant to use instead of the old ones. If not you can always ask your affiliate manager to provide you with some new ones and even ask for a bespoke ad if you have a really good idea. Marketers always want good ideas and proactive affiliates – it’s the law!

Google also loves new content and a recent blog post if worded and titled correctly for things you know people are searching for can really help boost your traffic and sales.

If your web site isn’t performing as well as you hoped but getting some traction, then have a look at the other web sites that come up in searches for your keywords and get some layout ideas from them. Colour, typeface and images all have an effect on the reader but useful content can sometimes overtake this and I have seen blogs with only three pages and simple text links earning the owner up to £2k a month.

Many websites which carry ads have a policy of changing them, or even changing advertisers, on a monthly or quarterly basis to keep things fresh and appealing for regular readers.

Make sure you keep up to date with seasonal offers from your chosen merchants and you promote these heavily as they usually offer a great window of opportunity which is only there for a short time.

9. Monitor your ads

All the affiliate networks will be able to provide you with creative reports about the banners you are carrying. In time you will get a real picture of what’s working and what s not. There is nothing to stop you using both network ads and Google ads as the visitor is likely to click on something when heading off your page, but beware of putting more than three ad spaces on your page.
You could test different sizes of ads. A 125×125 or a text ad can sometimes be more effective than a larger banner ad. Size is definitely not the issue here and small can be beautiful. Liaise with your affiliate manager to find out what they think too. Here at UK2, we see the most clicks from 125×125, text links and 250×250 but these vary on each network we use.

10. Driving traffic

The more visitors, then the more conversions you should get, assuming your site is well thought out and the merchants page is a good converting page too. Site promotion can be done in a myriad of ways and there are lots of videos on Youtube to help you with this.

They include video marketing – make sure you use your keywords in your video titles, article writing, social media – answer questions on forums and groups that relate to your niche (using links back to your site of course), Squidoo lens pages reciprocal linking of other blogs in your niche that rank well for your keywords, Twitter – how could we forget and even Facebook groups. Blog posts for your full array of keywords and related keyword phrases will also work wonders.

Once your site is making money, then its time to ramp it up with some PPC. If you are going to use this, I recommend using a service such as Aweber and finding a product (or developing a product to give away if someone signs up with their email.) That way you can re-market to your email list which is a whole other topic.

The UK2.Net affiliate program is live on four different networks, Aff.Biz, Affiliate Future, Commission Junction and Tradedoubler.

As well as massive commissions, UK2.net also offer the following benefits:

• Premier tracking tools with multiple deployments and Sub IDs
• Regularly updated newsletters and fresh, fast creatives
• Exceptional support from Azam Marketing and the UK2.net in-house marketing team

If you wish to know more about joining the UK2.net Affiliate programme, feel free to get in touch for more details. You may contact Liz Ponsford on the following email address: liz.ponsford [at] uk2.net

While many digital marketers are focusing on newer, sexier forms of customer acquisition and retention, often for little other reason than to be ‘trendy’, many of the wisest heads in the industry are focusing on the ongoing power of email marketing to generate impressive results.

Azam Marketing’s eCRM specialists now manage nearly 12.4 million records, either internal datasets or external ones for the likes of Trinity Mirror and Auto Trader, and in this, the first of a series of blog posts at Azam.info will share their expertise on how to get better results from email marketing. Part 1 of the series gives advice on ensuring your creative looks tip-top when it gets into recipients’ inboxes.

An email marketer sees many badly designed email creatives.

Even respectable design agencies are sometimes out of their depth when it comes to designing email creative. It is complicated as ISPs such as Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, Gmail and Outlook, all render email creative in different ways.

We will look at some of the reasons why you can suffer rendering issues with some ISP’s inboxes and not others.

Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Fireworks are commonly used to slice the creative and replace the image text with HTML coded text using Dreamweaver or alternative HTML editors. Unfortunately this may create a problem with rendering, especially if you have a 50/50 or higher image-to-text ratio.

Some people use CSS for their websites using Dreamweaver. This is usually set automatically within the program. It can be switched off via the options menu within Dreamweaver. CSS is a great language but not for email creatives. Many ISPs strip out CSS coding and if you have it within your creative it may cause fonts and other features to not show the way you wanted.

To avoid this, we would recommended you use the standard <font> tags or inline CSS within the email creative. To get to grips with inline CSS here is a website with an excellent tutorial.

If the problem with email rendering is not rectified by swapping CSS with normal font tags here is some more advice:

Normal rendering problems occur when text size is enlarged differently to the email creative. Examples of this may be that you have long text you’re displaying in a relatively narrow column. You use a line of underline characters rather than a horizontal line or div border as a column item separator. You’re using a narrow column, which will widen until it breaks up the images surrounding it. Here are your options:

- Add spaces wherever possible so you get the word wrap you’re seeking.

- Use a narrower font

- Don’t use underlines, periods and hyphens as div box dividers unless you make them short and centred.

- Space columns further apart

- Avoid coloured divs so at least one can still tell what the words are in spite of overlap

- Put a link at the top of the email that lets recipients see a version of the creative online

In our next three articles in this series, we will give guidance on improving your open rates, dealing with soft bounces, and ensuring your emails render correctly in mobile devices such as Blackberrys. Subscribe to Azam.info here. In the meanwhile, you may study Nadeem Azam’s presentation on growing and monetising your email database here.


If you’d like to hire Azam Marketing’s award-winning specialist to assist in any way, shape or form with your eCRM, database management or email marketing activities, get in touch by calling +44 (0) 20 7436 4496 or emailing results [at] azam.net

We’re thrilled to welcome two new faces to help with our growing client list – paid search superstar Saija Mahon and web and graphic design guru Pedro Rodrigues!

Saija joins Azam’s paid search division as Search Manager, having worked for many top media agencies including Walker Media and Profero where she managed successful campaigns for Barclays, Channel 4, figleaves, AstraZeneca and Air New Zealand.

A PPC specialist through and through, Saija is looking forward to expanding her digital knowledge at Azam and eventually lending an extra pair of hands to our busy affiliate and email divisions!

Pedro is a professional web designer with over 10 years experience in Graphic, Digital & UX Design, and has previously collaborated and worked for a stellar list of clients including Apple, Microsoft, Vodafone, Duracell, Ford, Rightmove plc, Wunderman Agency, ENGINE Group, HOK International, Kelkoo and Polytechnic Institute of Porto.

Other skills within Pedro’s impressive portfolio include graphic design, information design, photography, music production & sound engineering.

In traditional Azam fashion, I asked Saija and Pedro to tell us more about themselves and their interests outside of work – here’s what they revealed!

Saija Mahon

Describe yourself in three words: Bubbly, friendly, smiley!
Favourite Quotation: “a computer once beat me at
chess – but it was no match for me at kickboxing”
- Emo Philips
Favourite Book: SEO for Dummies
Favourite Film: The Matrix trilogy
Favourite Website: Twitter……OK I’ll admit it: ASOS.com – I do love shopping online!
Hobbies and Interests: Ballroom and latin dancing, salsa
Proudest Achievement: My daughter
Most Embarrassing Moment: Kindly offering my seat to
a lady who I thought was pregnant… she wasn’t.
3 Interesting Facts about You: I own a pet lizard, I speak Finnish, Swedish and English… and I’ve been dancing ‘strictly come dancing’ – style for over 20 years, competitively and as a hobby nowadays

Get in touch with Saija:

Email: saija [at] azam.net
Mobile: 07789 268 813

Pedro Rodrigues

Describe yourself in three words: Intellectual, Spiritual and Honourable
Favourite Quotation: “Life is far too important to be taken seriously” – Oscar Wilde
Favourite Book: The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
Favourite Film: Le Fabuleux Destin D’Amélie Poulain
Favourite Website: TED.com
Hobbies and Interests: Music, astrology, numerology and writing
Proudest Achievement: Asking my parents to adopt
me when I was just 4 years old…
3 Interesting Facts about You: I have a deep interest in spirituality and the occult, I was adopted at the age
of 4, I can’t function properly without rhythm and harmony in my soul

Get in touch with Pedro:

Email: pedro [at] azam.net
Windows messenger: pedrorodriguesdesigner [at] hotmail.com
Skype: corvilo.ramalho
Mobile: 07789 268 813

Would you like to work with Azam’s award-winning team of marketing and design experts? For details of our current job vacancies, contact us

Due to a doubling in our client base in the last 12 months we are on a recruitment drive once again and seeking new digital superstars to join the growing Azam Marketing team. Below are a list of exciting vacancies we have.

These are all senior roles; you must have at least two years full-time or three years part-time experience in the discipline you are applying for the position in. If you are multi-skilled it may be possible to combine roles to suit your passions.

Click on the job title for detailed information about each role.

Programmer/Website Designer/Graphic Designer – full-time

Business Development Manager – full-time or part-time.

Paid Search Marketing Specialist – full-time

Search Engine Optimisation Specialist – part-time

Affiliate Marketing Manager – full-time or maximum part-time

Chief Executive Officer – full-time

We are also seeking a Bookkeeper/Credit Controller and Public Relations Manager.

You may find out more about Azam Marketing on our website and see all the fun we have in our Facebook Fan Group.

Please send applications to Melissa White at hr [at] azam.net

Applications without the information requested in the job ads will not be considered.

If you recommend a candidate to us who we hire, we will pay a generous referral fee.

Wow – I’ve just returned from my first A4U Expo and what a fantastic time I had meeting new and old faces and finding out the latest news and predictions about the future of the online marketing industry.

Matt Wood and his team did themselves proud organising an exciting line up of relevant and informative presentations over a series of two days.

I attended as many sessions as I could from “Real World Affiliate Management Tips” and “10 Ways to get the Most out of your Paid Search Affiliates” to “Lead Generation: The Fastest Segment in Online Advertising” and “Effective Voucher Code Implementation,” but I have to say my favourite by far was “How to Increase Conversions: A New Approach Based on Psychological Methods”.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Conversion Rate Experts session but I went along hoping it would expand my knowledgebase as an Affiliate Manager and allow me to think outside the box in terms of helping our affiliates and merchants to increase sales and conversion.

And it did exactly that. Ben Jesson, CEO and Dr Karl Blanks, Chairman, revealed a number of tools and techniques that can help evaluate why visitors do not convert on a website and how this can be resolved.

Ben Jesson gave away a number of useful tips on how to gain customer insight and feedback, including recommending websites such as Ethniodev.com (recruiting people for research), Clicktale.com (watching movies of visitors’ browser behaviour) and Kampyle.com (receiving feedback from users). These tools allow webmasters to download and install feedback forms and analytic tools to understand why their websites may be failing to convert as well as they could from a consumer perspective.

Ben encouraged attendees to obtain feedback from visitors to their websites, even if only for a short period of time, and the low cost services he mentioned were usertesting.com, 4Q and SurveyMonkey.com.

He also emphasised how it was invaluable to keep a tab on what was being said about your business or products and recommended the free tools Google Alerts, serph, Twing, Omgili and Yahoo! Answers.

Rocket Scientist Dr Karl Blanks also discussed how merchants can present their offer in such a persuasive manner that expensive technical amendments are not always necessary – brilliant for businesses with tight budgets or limited IT assistance.

He advised tackling objections head on – offering clear reasons why your product should be bought over others and providing facts and figures to show evidence of your success, as well as using emotion supported by logic to convince shoppers to buy – showing your service as something fun that generates serious results or a modest device that leads to highly visible outcomes, can be an easy way of turning visitors into buyers without eating into your profit margins.

I came away from the presentation feeling inspired and armed with a number of tips and ideas that would be useful to any of my clients and this seemed to be the general feeling amongst most of the audience.

You can visit www.conversion-rate-experts.com/101ways to read a detailed report from Ben Jesson and Dr Karl Blanks. They have also just published a page on their site listing 14 free tools to increase site conversions that they mentioned in their seminar.

If you were lucky enough to attend this or any other of the presentations at the a4u expo, let us know your thoughts about them below. Which was your favourite?

Related Links: a4u Expo London 2007 pictures.

In the third part of his series on the design of Froggybank.co.uk, Azam Marketing’s Director of Design and Development Ather Mehdi writes about the time-consuming but necessary final steps involved in designing a major website.

We thought today would be ideal to publish the final article in Ather’s acclaimed series as it is wedding day. A heartfelt congratulations to Ather from all his colleagues in the Azam Marketing team!

Ready, Steady, Go!

With all the background research having been done (Part I, Part II), it was time we started sketching and refining the designs for FroggyBank. I hesitate to admit the whole design process took us good two months of fierce brainstorming and prototyping.

The Initial Steps

Site structure: We began by listing the details of the elements that would go on different sections of the website. We shuffled around the layout of the features endlessly. We highlighted what was most important for users and made these and related sections easily accessible for users.

Mockup designs: After the initial site structure was decided, the design team started playing around with the page elements and produced a number of design variations which were unique, usable and visually appealing.

Editing rounds: Just about when we thought the design elements were complete and the job was nearly finished, we were confronted with new feedback, arguments and counter-arguments to revise elements. The client, eDealsUK, was a delight to work with because, despite their need to launch a 100% cashback website as soon as possible, they were there with us every step of the way and supported us through dozens of revisions. We restructed and refined the site at least forty times.

 Proofing and Beta Testing

After countless rounds of redesign, we were confident we had something which truly answered all the client’s needs.

The final prototypes were approved, followed by an interval to convert and implement the new designs on the actual site code. The project was completed with a final round of testing and design purification.

After a year of work, FroggyBank was finally launched on 16 April, 2008.

Final Words

As for the final design as it stands today, we are pleased of its simplicity which explains the purpose of FroggyBank from the first glance.

Every design job has its tedious bits, but we absolutely loved designing Froggybank and giving it a look which is both functional and easy to get to grips with. We congratulate the programmers at eDealsUK who worked very hard to implement the prototypes so wonderfully.

Since the website’s launch, we have received tons of comments in appreciation of the design and usability of Froggybank.co.uk.

The design work was completed at this stage, but then the project was handed over to other divisions within Azam Marketing, specifically the Affiliate Management, Public Relations and Paid Search ones to attract members to the service. The site has been a runaway success, mentioned in hundreds of newspapers and websites, and we are delighted to have helped Froggybank leapfrog 105 cashback sites to become the 8^th most popular in the UK in just a space of three months (popularity based on Alexa rankings, as published on Cashbacknews).

Coming Tomorrow: See a scan of Azam Marketing’s Sinead Hernen in today’s Daily Express as we continue with our marketing blitz to develop Froggybank’s presence.

Job Opportunities: Would you like to join our growing design team and get your teeth into exciting projects like the above? See our job listing here.

In my previous post we discussed how we initiated the process of pre-development conceptualization by conducting thorough research and engaging the team in brainstorming sessions to come up with a design strategy for Froggybank. In case you missed the post here it is.

Our Evaluation of the First Design

Here is a quick list of the basic flaws we found in our first design: 

1. It was too empty at the top and too cluttered and text heavy at the bottom.
2. The colours were very common and did not establish any distinctive feel.
3. The logo appeared weak and did not possess symmetry.
4. The entire design lacked a brand theme or cues, hints or colours whose usage could be extended and developed.

It was time we undertook thorough research to educate ourselves to deliver something more meaningful.

The Essence of Froggybank

We asked what Froggybank was. What were we selling? What do the customers want? Would Froggybank deliver all of that? Had we understood what Froggybank was all about? And a hundred other questions like that.

Those are the sort of questions you will find on every good designers checklist, be it for a simple logo design or an entire company branding strategization.

Not only did the owners of Froggybank plan to engineer something which could outperform competitors technically at all levels, but also something much more sophisticated from a design perspective.

The USP (Unique Selling Proposition) of Froggybank

For eDealsUK Limited, the company behind Froggybank, the project was to be much more than a commercial quest. Over the months I witnessed them contacting numerous charities and welfare organizations: plans were underway to use the website to buy carbon offset to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds, raise money for charities and do things for the world that far exceed the desires of most entrepreneurs.

If you’d like to read more about how Froggybank aims to help the environment, go here, and you can see how the website supports charity fundraising activities here.

Having studied dozens of cashback websites and collated information from several experts in the sector, it was very clear that we stood in an open field with no established design trends or rules to play by. We had absolute freedom to go in any direction that we wanted and were given a blank canvas to work with by the Directors of eDealsUK. They chose to liberate the designers and, rather than forcing us to stick rigidly to what had worked for them with previous cashback sites, challenged us to come up with something fresh.

They were determined to differentiate Froggybank from conventional cashback websites, and wanted Froggybank to be more than them not only in terms of what it offered but in the aesthetics.

The reason for undertaking the above research was to better connect ourselves and our team with the product and create something which could reflect the true essence of the brand to be. At this stage we had enough bricks and mortar to start creating something meaningful for Froggybank.

Branding Guidelines

After painstaking brainstorming sessions we decided the following branding parameters for our design team to adhere to.

Logo/Brand Identity

Both Azam Marketing and eDealsUK’s teams agreed that the chosen name Froggybank would only distinguish itself if we built a brand character around it.

The logo design creation task was commissioned to a logo specialist and after a few dozen revisions we had something which gave us a sense of direction to start building a theme.

This was the first version of the logo:

A few weeks and 15 revisions later:

The current logo: 

Creative can be made quickly, but the fact is most of the brands we have grown to love and adore have gone through the same process of design, redesign, redesign as Froggybank did.

Layout Plans

The layout design had to look clean, fresh and use minimal graphical elements. It needed white space and breathing room.

It had to provide users with all the essential options for maximum usability and help them reach every part of the site with the minimum number of clicks.

It had to use common layout features which users might expect from a shopping website.

Having to adhere to such rules is quite a challenge while still being required to come up with a unique flavour!

Colours

A bright monotone colour combination to be used throughout, across all mediums.

Fonts

To allow maximum flexibility and faster browsing, only ordinary fonts had to be used wherever possible.

Images

In recent years the overuse of stock photography – or even professional photography – on most types of websites has developed a negative reputation, so Froggybank must try to limit use of photography.

Use of illustrations could be permitted as long as they did not clash with the Froggybank logo.

Branding Cues

This was something which will be discussed in the third and final part of this series of articles.

Subscribe to updates to Azam Marketing’s blog.

Ather Mehdi, Director of Design and Development at Azam Marketing, presents the first in a trilogy of articles which go through the steps involved in designing a major website. We hope these will be of benefit to up-and-coming designers.

I am excited the time has finally arrived for me to write my first article discussing web design. We have worked on over 200 websites at Azam Marketing and Froggybank.co.uk was one of our most challenging, but also most rewarding.

Froggybank.co.uk

Our first design case study is Froggybank.co.uk. I have tried to summarize the entire design process including first thoughts, evaluation and final approval to allow our readers a comprehensive insight into the evolution of Froggybank.co.uk’s design over a period of several months.

Foggybank.co.uk – The Brief

1. Education – Cashback is still a relatively new term for many, and a large number of visitors do not understand the concept. Therefore, the website must educate visitors and address all concerns about cashback shopping. eDealsUK’s staff highlighted the fact that web visitors don’t read everything. Hence, the design should emphasize what’s essential and what’s not.
2. Branding – A lively and fresh brand is essential. It should be easily recognizable, appealing, consistent and flexible through various mediums besides internet.
3. Simplicity – Simple designs yield better returns. Keeping the contents and design focused on delivering what the user wants ends up leading to better conversions.
4. Style – A dash of 2.0 will not harm the branding but it must remain simple and interesting for longevity.
5. Incentivisation – Design for a Cause – eDealsUK wanted to include some noble features into the project, including buying carbon offsetting for each new member and giving users an option of keeping their cashback or donating to a good cause. This proved another challenge for us: to incorporate a feel of environmental-friendliness, professionalism and seriousness through design, so that people both see the site’s green credentials and donate their money with trust.