Must Design

Angela Jones, a freelance designer in St. Charles, Illinois, uncovers how 7 websites promote their products in exciting ways.

Marty Note - Great From Boring
Loved this post, but they bury the lead. Their tips aren't sub-heads but buried in the copy about the example. I liberated their 5 tips to create exciting sites for boring products:

* Employ imagery and icons that speak to the benefits (i.e. tell a story and match with cool visuals).
* Focus on HEADLINES that describe your benefits (i.e. use trusted sources and let THEM tell your story).
* Write creative copy (there are NO BORING PRODUCTS only boring stories lol).
* Minimal and easy to navigate (always a winner in my  book too, but especially if what you are selling is boring. YES I will spend 3x the time it should have taken to order the new iPhone despite the horrible web design, your product...not so much, so make it easy to buy.)
* Create Community & Let THEM (your customers) supply the amazing stories. When YOU tell your brand's story it is always more boring than the same words from a customer.
* VISUALS - boring products benefit from great visuals. Tilt your boring product, hang it from the rafters, find a way to depict excitement and excitement flows downstream to your product.

8 Reasons Web Designers Should Edit Video Too

This post shares four resume-reasons web designers should learn to edit videos such as::

* Video is growing fast.
* Make more money.
* Expands career opportunities.

* Great For self-promotion.

Team Curagami ( http://www.curagami.com ) has 4 more reasons that are more abstract but no less valuable:

* Videos, like websites, tell stories.

* Designing to seamlessly incorporate video is an important challenge few have mastered.

* Video editing is similar to web design just add time.

* Video editing brings a new dimension to web design (i.e. it adds time).

We designers with video skills design better websites and better videos.

Storytelling Web Design
How can a website tell a story? By rethinking websites as related content capable of telling a story in either direction and on their own we see the difficulty we face when telling stories using websites.

Websites go forward and backward in time because any page can become a "homepage" based on links or search. A webpage needs to be self sufficient - telling a story on their own - and connected in a dasiy chain where each step along the chain reinforces the chain's connections and "storyline".

This post discusses ways to use tools such as videos and arresting visuals. Graphics are a HUGE and helpful device online. If your story includes icons you've created a navigational language teaching readers to look for symbols when they want to move through the deck.

This is one of the reasons I love icons. Icons aren't fixed in space or time and their connection to each other can be strong or weak. The key is to keep readers reading. The challenge is thinking about information architecture that can easily pay off on its own and point in different directions based on how readers consume the content.

Best storytelling sites I've discovered include:

http://www.robinhood.org/

http://www.redcross.org/

http://www.ihadcancer.com/

Notice a trend? Nonprofits tell better stories in general and their websites  function more as great story telling aids than most for profit companies. If you have favorite storytelling websites please share and we will curate in.

Nonprofit Websites
Nonprofit websites are designed to tell stories something we all need to do these days. My favs include Housing Works, Too Young To Wed and Melting Away.