The UX/design budget for banners and landing pages is typically cut (if it existed at all in the first place), with the majority of the budget going instead toward ad spend. This practice is shortsighted and hurting your campaign performance.

Today, digital-telepathy is taking a stand. We’re launching Impress, a customer acquisition product focused on high-quality banners and landing page packages that drive real results without the big price tag.

First Impressions Matter

We all know that the vast majority of display ads go unclicked and unnoticed. ComScore reports that only 16% of display ads ever get clicked, and the term “banner blindness” was coined more than a decade ago. The main culprit? Lousy design. Unfortunately, it’s tough to know upfront how much design will improve campaign performance. This often results in a big ad spend budget with very little left for design. Which is a big mistake.

Let’s look at a sample campaign to see how this plays out:

Scenario 1
You’re going to spend $10,000 advertising a new product. You want as much of your cash going to ads as possible, so you invest an extra $250 for some design for your banners and a landing page. Your product sells for $100 each. Your banners get a 0.2% clickthrough rate (CTR) and your landing page converts visitors to new customers at 0.4%.

Ad Spend: $10,000
Creative: $250
CPM: $3
Impressions: 3,333,333
CTR: 0.2%
Conversion rate: 0.4%
Purchases: 27
Revenue: $2,700
Net profit: ($7,550)

Scenario 2
Same as above, but this time we’re going to invest in our design by using an Impress campaign that uses thoughtful design to drive conversions. Let’s see what happens

Ad Spend: $10,000
Impress creative: $1,000
CPM: $3
Impressions: 3,333,333
CTR: 0.4%
Conversion rate: 1%
Purchases: 133
Revenue: $13,300
Net profit: $2,300

As you can see in this case having design that works swings the campaign from a major loser to a winning, profitable campaign. All for $750 extra dollars, and some thoughtful design work up front. And while this is a hypothetical example, we’ve seen these same types of gains for companies using Impress.

ReTargeter used Impress to overhaul their banner creative. After diligently optimizing their banners, they were left with only incremental gains. Using the same methodology that comes with Impress, we created a powerful first impression, and tested the new designs against their existing creative.

The results? The Impress design out-performed the old, driving 3x higher clickthroughs.

From Banner to Landing Page

Once you get the coveted click, you have to deliver with the landing page. The design must be clear, consistent and intuitive in order to turn those clicks into conversions. Which is why most Impress packages include both banner and landing page designs. Instead of stopping with the design of the ad unit, Impress treats the ad unit and landing page as a symbiotic entity, where each one relies on the other for success.

Impress landing pages focus on the quality of the user experience to ensure that your visitors convert, rather than bounce. With thoughtful copy, design, user flows and calls to action, Impress maximizes the opportunity for each person that makes it to the landing page.

Make the First Impression Matter with Impress

With Impress you get high-quality banner and landing page designs that are thoughtfully created to help you get more for your online marketing investment. Starting at just $999 you can choose from one of three packages designed to drive your return on investment.

Each package includes:

• digital-telepathy’s signature high quality design and user experience expertise in both banner and landing page design
• A detailed project questionnaire that ensures that the final deliverables are custom tailored to your specific business needs
• A 30-day review of performance to analyze how well the new banners and landing pages are working and to suggest any changes to optimize for conversion

Good First Impressions are Designed

Businesses need to invest more of their customer acquisition budget into design. Our job as designers to ensure that message is heard loud and clear. We hope that Impress will provide design-driven results that are easy and affordable for any business to achieve. If you want better results out of your customer acquisition campaigns, check out Impress. As they say, you only get one shot at your first impression, it’s imperative you make it one that matters.

We recently discussed a similar topic to this on UXMagazine. Feel free to check it out for a further look into making good first impressions.

Well, breathe easy friends, the Simple Social Bar is here to save the day…and your website.

Spawned from the idea of the popular Share Bar plugin, the team at dt wants to help you increase Tweets, Likes, Stumbles, and more with our newest creation – the Simple Social Bar.

Designed to be easy to implement and customize, the Simple Social Bar Wordpess plugin is based on completely new and easier to understand code that makes community participation and personal customization a piece of cake. No need for additional database tables, instead private custom post types are used for social link buttons.

You also have better control over where the bar will appear. Install the plugin and watch the Simple Social Bar seamlessly fade in as your readers scroll down through your  content. All the necessary share options are easily available throughout your post in an effort to increase the likelihood that your content gets shared.

Top it all off with a simpler administrative interface that uses drag and drop capabilities and you have a great tool that makes sharing all the content on your site a breeze.

The Simple Social Bar works in IE7+, FireFox 2, Chrome 2+, Safari 3+, Opera 9+ and is free to use.

Download The Simple Social Bar Here: Simple Social Bar

The last ten years of DT have been a great journey.  We’ve worked with all kinds of amazing people, on all sorts of fun projects.  As a bunch of people who are committed to designing the web, we’ve extended our passion to create some pretty nifty software products, like SlideDeck and Hello Bar.  These two have grown from ideas, to proof-of-concept, to real-life products. We’re looking for someone to help us take these (and many more) products to the next level.  So…We’re excited to announce that we’re hiring a Product Manager for DT Labs.  You’ll work with a team of great individuals and help to change the design of the web.

Take a look at these people below – do they inspire and excite you?  You might be the next person to join our team.

You get the job done time and time again	You break the rules and set your sights high
You are creative and dream big	You’re not afraid to laugh at your own expense
Nothing is impossible to you

Apply Now

Since UX is such an expansive, ever-changing field and discipline it can be difficult to know where to start if you’re a beginner, or how to take the next step in advancing your craft if you’re a professional. Well no need to worry, that is what we are here for! Dt went out and scoured the internet to cultivate this list of great UX-themed conversations on Quora. There is something for everyone in the topics below-whether you’re just getting started or you want to advance your skills.

Here are 16 great UX-themed conversations in which you can read and participate on Quora:

• What are some meaningful and notable user experience quotes?
• How do I figure out the problem if our users say our web service is very useful and something they always needed, but don’t come back?
• What is the most designer friendly and intuitive wireframing/UX app?
• UX Design: What are the reasons that Quora, Facebook, and Twitter have unused space on the right and left?
• Product Design: What’s the difference between UI Design and UX Design?
• Are many start ups happy to work with an external (UX/UI) designer or team rather than recruit in-house?
• Which books can help me become an expert in UI, UX and usability standards?
• Internet Startups: Should I focus on getting a good UX or getting something quick out of the door?
• What are the most influential design blogs?
• Productivity: What is the best way to organize digital files for a design project?
• If you are looking for good UX Designers, what are the main skills you want these designers to possess?
• Is it becoming more relevant for designers to showcase their work on portfolio sites vs. their personal sites?
• How do you articulate and demonstrate the actual business value of your UX designs?
• How do you communicate your design solutions to developers and convince them that it might be the right solution?
• What type of education is needed to work professionally in UI/UX?
• As far as UX and usability goes, is it better to have a website with a lighter color scheme vs. a darker color scheme?

Know of a great discussion going on that we missed? Let us know in the comments!

Well, the above scenario happened to us at dt more than we care to remember and we set out to give users a little insurance on their Basecamp messages. So we built the Autosave for Basecamp Chrome extension to seamlessly autosave any message or comment just in case your Chrome browser crashes or you accidentally close your window. All you have to do is navigate back to the message/comment and “Viola!” – your text and ideas are safe and sound.

Utilizing HTML 5 local storage capabilities, this extension will autosave your message so you can refresh or resume typing the message at a later time. Don’t worry about having multiple messages being autosaved since each message is saved uniquely based off the URL. You can also manually clear out saved messages or the extension will automatically clear out a message once the form has been submitted.

To download and review the full list of features supported with this extension click on the link below.

Download: Autosave for Basecamp

One of our users, Melvin from Volcanic Web Design, updated his Hello Bar (a simple notification bar on the top of your website) to drive awareness for the Japan earthquake and promote donations to Red Cross.  He suggested that we allow anyone to post a Hello Bar on their website and do the same.

We’re in. If you want to participate, you have 2 options:

1. New Users – sign up for a Hello Bar account with the invite code “helpjapan” and create a Hello Bar with a message and link of your choice. Existing users – just simply update the message/link of your current Hello Bar.

2. If you don’t want to sign up for an account, you can simply paste the below code anywhere within the <body> tag of your website. This will display our default message to support Japan. You can remove the code at any time to remove the Hello Bar. Here are some tips for adding the code.

<script type="text/javascript" src="//www.hellobar.com/hellobar.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
new HelloBar(1,9126);
</script>
<noscript>Help The Victims of the 8.9 Earthquake in Japan by Spreading Awareness and Aid. Visit http://goo.gl/wjZQz to donate.
</noscript>

We will do our best to share the results of your collective efforts. Please comment if you have questions or other ideas.

The Hello Bar has served over 50,000,000 impressions and encouraged more than 500,000 new clicks. We’ve highlighted some of our favorite users and provided some insight into how they benefit from Hello Bar.

These users are all benefiting from Hello Bar’s simplicity and easy to use statistics system. Hello Bar is currently in private beta, but we’re always approving new users and you can sign up at the Hello Bar Homepage. If you’re looking for a Hello Bar invite, post a comment below. You can also search or ping Twitter as new users commonly share their extra invites.

If you’ve got a Hello Bar + web page combination you’d like us to see, then post it in the comments below along with a little blurb explaining your thought process behind the bar. Trust me, we’d love to hear it and we do enjoy feedback.

Stats: Date range selection & different range formats

Previously the stats section showed you one month, one week, or today’s stats. We’ve taken this to the next logical step and added more complex date range selection. We now support date range selection and show the last 30 days instead of this month. We hope that this change enables you to find the data you’re looking for, while being a welcome addition.

Options: Settings for showing, hiding & closing control

Each Hello Bar has an array of settings that you can use to customize the bar’s behavior. We’ve added two new options to the Hello Bar settings pane:

• Show This option is the counterpart to the Hide option. Show allows you to set a delay before your Hello bar is shown to your visitors.
• Closeable is an option that determines whether the visitor has control over the Hello Bar’s state. The tongue is not shown and there is no up-arrow that would normally allow the visitor to close the Hello Bar.

Using the new options you could create a Hello Bar that stays hidden for the first 15 seconds; as a visitor scans your site. The Hello Bar could then spring open as the visitor is making the critical decision of whether to stick around or go elsewhere. For an interesting twist you could also create a bar that is shown on page load, hides itself after 15 seconds, and then shows itself after 30 seconds if the user is still around. If you’ve got any other ideas on how these new features could be used, I’d love to hear them.

Check out the new options, and let us know what you think.

Here are some of the topics covered:

1. Brief backstory of how dt was started
2. How we came up with SlideDeck
3. The future of Hello Bar
4. Our web app development tool and best practices
5. The future of web design

Read the Article

The Hello Bar for WordPress plugin is a really simple plugin that allows you to copy and paste your Hello Bar code snippet from hellobar.com, straight to your WordPress admin interface. The plugin also allows you to choose whether you’d like your code snippet to be placed in the <head> tag or at the end of the <body> tag of your HTML layout.

Feel free to try the plugin and let us know what you think:
Hello Bar for WordPress in the WordPress Plugin directory.