It is a phrase I use on a daily basis, because I find it so important to everything.

You have to make people care: to fill out a form, visit a website, give their details to you, make that event, try that new activity.

I see it as a scale of: not caring, which leads into a caring cutover point which leads into people caring.

If people don’t care about this thing you are doing, then they won’t interact.

If they do, they will.

To me, it is as simple as that.

But making them care can be hard.

You have to really understand them to know what will make them care.

Today, I saw a new website launched to the Electorial Commission trying to get people to register to vote.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3258/electoral_commission_spends_55_000_on_ice_cream_scoops_and_cats

I struggle to see how this makes people care about registering to vote.

If people don’t care, they won’t do.

Make them care.

Screenshot of Twitter when it first launched

I joined the site on the 27th February 2007 (it launched in March 2006), which seems a scary long time ago in the web, and so I was hunting around for a review of the site when it first launched. This post from Techcrunch is pretty interesting to read — here are a few quotes from the article:

I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website.

If this was a new startup, a one or two person shop, I’d give it a thumbs up for innovation and good execution on a simple but viral idea.

Now, it has over 200 million registered accounts, with over 1 billion tweets posted every week, and whilst it first promoted itself as an SMS-based update of course the rise of the smartphone has meant that much more could be achieved on the go, but its focus from the very start has remained of realtime status updates, wherever you are.

Another month, another redesign. I think this all stems from the fact that I have never really been 100% happy with my website.

So, it is back to basics. With an update of WordPress comes their default theme, so I can concentrate on the content before I work on a custom design.

It’s all about the content

From day one, I have really used this site as a dumping ground, posting anything on here, not really thinking about the audience and so for this new era, I want to focus the content and deliver something of use (hopefully) to the people reading it.

Get out the statistics

I had never really looked into the popular sections of the site, so I dug out the page visits over the last few years, to see which elements were the most visited; here they are:

• /2010/01/19/dribbble-invite-giveaway/
• /2009/04/28/six-high-resolution-cloud-images/
• /projects/
• /2009/10/16/the-kitchen-sink-of-html/
• /2009/07/30/august-2009-wallpaper/
• /about/
• /2009/06/25/july-2009-wallpaper/
• /category/wallpaper/
• /2009/02/06/the-h1-debate/
• /2009/05/28/june-2009-wallpaper/
• /2009/10/13/good-design-is-invisible/
• /2009/04/24/london-2012-coin-design-competition/
• /2010/03/19/css3-multiple-backgrounds/
• /2009/08/31/september-2009-wallpaper/
• /2009/07/17/creativity/
• /category/downloads/
• /contact/
• /2010/01/10/type-the-secret-history-of-letters/
• /2010/02/22/should-the-grid-be-visible/
• /2009/11/15/thinking-with-type/
• /category/design/
• /2009/10/29/november-2009-wallpaper/
• /2009/01/19/if-you-make-everything-bold-nothing-is-bold/
• /2009/08/14/background-alignment-bug-fix/
• /2009/12/04/december-2009-wallpaper/
• /category/freebies/
• /2009/07/01/the-one-song-sketch/
• /2009/01/11/how-i-got-into-web-design/
• /2009/04/22/five-simple-steps/
• /2009/01/12/design-work-on-footytweets/

So, what can I learn from this:

1. Giving away free stuff interests people and drives an audience to your site
2. The ‘about’ page is very important
3. Design-centric posts are most popular

So having analysed this, I want to expand a section with HTML/CSS code snippets, further develop my profile on the site, and spend time writing some posts on design, something I have always wanted to do more of.

Timescale?

My first mistake would be to set a limit of this. The only times I have pushed the development of this site forward is during several hours at the weekends (or on a bank holiday like today). I don’t want to rush it, because the chances are that I haven’t thought about it enough, and it’ll mean I want to redesign it again too quickly, so for now, I will concentrate on writing more, and will slowly develop the plans for the site in the next few months.

Now I must state that as primarily a designer, the developer role doesn’t come as easy to me. The main reason I use WordPress on this blog is that is was so quick and easy to set up.

However with speed being a major factor with mobile web, Google rankings and the complexity of WordPress, I’m pretty sure that a billy-basic CMS would load a lot quicker. But do people really care?

Reality probably means that I’ll stick with WordPress, upgrade to v3 and be able to write blog posts like I am now on my iPhone.

So, have you ever written your own CMS, or wanted to, or do you think that off-the-shelf systems are more than capable?

http://www.highersites.co.uk

We’re a web design company in Somerset, and although I have only recently joined the team in April, I have thoroughly enjoyed it so far – working on some great sites with an awesome team!

I have some very exclusive Dribbble invites – 2 to be exact.

If you haven’t heard of it before, Dribbble is a site which allows you to upload 400x300px previews of your design work. I have been hugely impressed with it so far, and invites are very elusive.

If you would like the opportunity of winning a Dribbble invite, please leave a comment (with an email address and website/twitter account) below, and later on I will choose the lucky two and contact them directly.