It’s a crucial (and largely underrated) part of writing website content: the call to action.

What’s the Point?
When users visit your site, they’re either looking for something specific (which is why you make your navigation incredibly user-friendly- so they can get in and get out.) or they’re interested in learning more about your company/product. Either way, what they don’t want is to reach the end of a page and think “Okay, what do I do now?”

Calls to action help increase conversions on your end, but they also make the visitor feel more confident about getting what they want out of your site. For example, let’s say you have a website for your party planning business. The visitor just read a page about the most important steps of party planning. You need to make it easy for them to take the next step. Give them a reason to spend a few more minutes on your site by guiding them through the process of learning, and then taking action. It’s as simple as including a sentence like this to your page. “Interested in how we can help plan your party? Schedule a consultation here!” Then link to your contact page which clearly provides the information they’ll need to get a hold of you, or link directly to the online form where they can submit their information and wait for you to get a hold of them. Easy, easy easy.

Internal and External Calls to Action.
There are ways to track what your users are doing online through various forms of analytics. That being said, you can vary your call to action. Maybe you want the visitor to simply click to the next page to read more about the topic. Or maybe your goal is persuade them to fill out an online quote form.

I like to distinguish these by whether or not the action taken will happen internally (read more!) or extend outside the site (Fill out this form for more information. We’ll be in touch soon!). If your site is content heavy, it’s beneficial to have these tidbits infused throughout the content on each page.

Working a Call to Action into Your Site.
There are a million and a half tips out there telling you how to write a strongly worded, effective call to action that will get visitors to drop what they’re doing and buy your product. But you know as well as I do that a call to action can be much more than persuading someone to buy something. The “Action” can in fact be anything. It can be big and loud, or it can be subtle and helpful. Both can be good choices depending on the context! First and foremost, you have to decide exactly what you want your visitors to do.

The Action, and How to Implement it.
Here are some examples of how to put into action the action you want your uses to take.
Action: Call the office for more information
Make it Happen: Link to the contact page, and/or list the phone number right there in the text.
Example: “Talk to an expert today!” “Call us!” “For more information, please call or e-mail us.”

Action: Fill out the contact form so someone can get in touch with you.
Make it Happen:  Link right to the form. Make it as easy as possible for the user.
Example: “Fill out the form below for more information- we’ll be in touch soon!”

Action: Schedule an appointment
Make it Happen: Link to the page where the user can either schedule online, or call someone direct to get it set up.
Example: “To schedule an appointment, give us a call or fill out the form here.”

Action: Read more
Make it Happen: Post a compelling snippet of the content on one page, and include a link to the rest of the content via a “Read more” link.
Example: “Read the rest of the story here.”

A good call to action can generate measurable ROI one way or another, so working it into your website is not only easy, but necessary.

I have a deep appreciation for group communication. People working together, touching base frequently, actively collaborating and working toward the best possible result. There’s nothing negative about that.

I just think there are ways to go about it that don’t require half a day’s attention. Frequent e-mails showing progress, phone calls to touch base, and some occasional face time is nice! And I like to think our clients agree. After all, once we’ve determined we’re all on the same page, don’t they want us spending more time working on their project than talking about it?

It’s always nice to find other people who think like we do, and Trent Walton does. He shares our belief that it’s more about the overall experience we create for our users, rather than the bits and pieces we use to get there. Although we strain immensely over all of those bits, and pour tirelessly over each of the pieces, what brings us the most joy is someone telling us “your work really helped me today.”

And that is what we strive for, because the whole is greater than the sum of all its parts.

We fixed our own problem… then decided it might be useful to other people, too!

We came up with an experiment to incorporate our todo lists into that same Moleskine pocket notebook we carry around all the time anyway. All you do is peel and stick the StickTo right onto the page, write your todos, and check ‘em off as you go. Instant organization. There’s even a tab that sticks out to remind you you’re not quite done with your list yet. No worries, though- when you are done, you can just rip off that tab and get on with it.

When most of our organization happens online, it’s nice to have a tangible reminder that our physical lives can be just as put together.

Check them out here

Before I started working with Paste, my experiences with support had been frustrating. One particularly infuriating instance comes to mind…

Two years ago, my cell phone was having major malfunctions, and the actual store representative told me I’d have to call their main support line for help.

Seriously?

So I called support and listened to an automated woman talk for half an hour about all the other services available… none of which I cared about. Not even a little bit. I just wanted to know what was wrong with my phone and how to fix it. When I finally got to talk to a real person, she was such a low level customer service rep that she couldn’t help, either. She told me to send in my phone (seriously?!?!) and she’d have their technical engineers take a look at it.

Oh, and apparently they thought I would just live in social reclusion for a couple weeks because they didn’t offer a replacement while they tore mine apart. The worst part- nobody seemed to care. A major part of my life was being taken away from me because of their faulty programming, and I didn’t get so much as a simple apology. I didn’t even bother sending my phone in- I switched carriers instead. Easiest decision I ever made.

Because of that, and some other bad experiences, I generally held the impression that people who worked in support couldn’t really help you.

Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to do a little support of my own, and thank goodness for all my bad experiences.

I think you have to look at every support e-mail as a big deal. All of them, equally big deals. Because no matter how minor the issue, or how easy it is to fix or explain on your end, the person on the other end of the e-mail is still frustrated enough to let you know about it- and that’s what really matters. The importance of a simple thing like starting out the response with “I’m really sorry you’re having trouble!” and providing more explanation than the user asked for are not lost on me. Not to mention always offering a solution of some kind.

Not only is each e-mail a big deal, but you have to assume that the person using your app is using it as a somewhat major part of their daily lives- like my phone. Without it, they’re not as effective as they were before, and that’s your fault. I think you have to treat their problem like it’s the most important thing you’ll address that day.

So I love answering support questions. Each e-mail is a chance to make someone happy- and I’ll take that opportunity a hundred times a day.

In fact, as a web developer it’s somewhat daunting. You can have a thought like “what if I made a tool to keep track of when my next oil change comes due?” and a few seconds later realize that dozens of apps have beat you to the punch.

Sure, you could maybe improve the interface, make it prettier, promote it better, integrate it with Twitter, etc. But it seems like there’s nothing left in big chunks that isn’t a minute improvement on a small facet of something else.

Let’s skip to another subject for a second.

In 1997 NASA, in conjunction with the European and Italian Space Agencies, launched the Cassini-Huygens space probe. It had a far-reaching set of goals, most of which seemed more optimistic than legitimate. It’s track was outward from Earth- taking a layman’s tour of our solar system as it became accessible by coincidentally calculated orbit.

After near-space tours of Earth’s moon, Venus, and Jupiter, Cassini was en-route to one of Saturn’s moons named Enceladus. By this time it was 2005, and Cassini had already discovered three new moons of Saturn, tested General Relativity and made countless other minor discoveries leading to better understandings of our close corner of the universe.

As Cassini neared Enceladus for it’s second trip, nearby a faint glow was picked up around the moon. Just 310 miles in diameter, this moon is barely a chunk of rock in cosmic terms, but Enceladus clearly had an atmosphere. What’s more, it’s irregular halo clearly showed something more exciting. Something called cryovolcanism, which is essentially ice-spewing volcanoes. Amazing.

By analyzing the light given off by the halo around the moon, its effect on nearby Saturn’s rings, and it’s pockmarked surface, scientists were able to say with near certainty that the tiny moon had a salty sea beneath all that ice and rock.

It’s a seemingly minor finding, but in terrestrial terms, literally every time we find liquid water on the Earth there is some sort of living eco-system thriving within. Always.

So here we have a hopeful expedition, a collaboration of many minds, and many goals. Countless thousands of things could go wrong; many did. Despite the odds, the cost, and the time elapsed, real discovery happened that moved humanity forward.

I don’t believe you can calculate its worth in dollars. At least not today. But I don’t believe anyone rational would discount the worth of the eye-widening endeavor.

Sometimes we don’t know where a journey is going to lead. Often times (every time?) we need to set aside our ego, and turn our focus toward curiosity and wonder. What if? It may seem grandiose to compare an oil change web app to astrophysics and rocket science.

I suspect the analogy is more accurate than we realize. Somewhere in NASA, someone is designing a piece of a latch that goes on an instrument that goes on a satellite that fits in a rocket that hundreds of people have slaved over for years. Some day that latch needs to do its job, making sure that snap happens at the right time so the little lens can see that brilliant corona that lets us understand the tiny moon floating in the dusty ring around the huge planet that just might contain a few living microbes that are the very first discovered outside of our home planet Earth.

I think the problem with discovery is that it’s nearly purposeless in its beginning. But I don’t think you can discount it because of that. That tiny web app may never make you rich, it may never improve more than a few people’s lives, but it was your job to follow your curiosity and make it happen. There are many greater things than monetary reward in this short life, on this tiny planet. We all owe it to ourselves, and each other to put aside our egos, and do our small part to make the big picture move forward.

If you want more on science and inspiration, follow this article up with this video.

“Coveting possessions is unhealthy. Here’s how I look at it:

All of the computers on Ebay are mine. In fact, everything on Ebay is already mine. All of those things are just in long term storage that I pay nothing for. Storage is free.

When I want to take something out of storage, I just pay the for the storage costs for that particular thing up to that point, plus a nominal shipping fee, and my things are delivered to me so I can use them. When I am done with them, I return them to storage via Craigslist or Ebay, and I am given a fee as compensation for freeing up the storage facilities resources.” – via Jackcheng in The Office of Frank Chimero

But I have to admit I can relate to the statement. Everywhere I look on the internet I see the same old crap. Recombinations of old ideas. Mostly minor improvements on “old” ideas that were created only just months ago. I suppose as an industry we’re just iterating on our own ideas. I suppose it’s healthy.

But I can’t help thinking it’s getting a little old. I’m not pretending we’re above this criticism. Some people have said that Staction was just Twitter+Basecamp. Jumpchart was called “a specialized wiki.” Paprika is probably an even smaller evolutionary leap.

We’ve been working for seemingly endless months on tweaks to our current apps. In the background we’ve been dreaming of new apps. I have lists of ideas. Many lists, -big lists. I can pretty much summarize them for you, -they’re all essentially just a different way to collect data from form fields and process it. That’s what all productivity apps do.

So what can you do to invent? Someone types text on a keyboard, and you store it. Or use rudimentary processing to try and understand it. Or attach meta information to it to try and make it more useful. Ad infinitum.

So have we as an industry maxed out the number of ways we can creatively combine todos, milestones, text, and files? What’s the next thing in productivity apps?

I think that’s wishful thinking.

As humans, we can be guilty of sitting around, waiting for the next big idea to hit us. We reactively reflect, think about things, expose ourselves to relevant material and hope to have some sort of epiphany that will make us the next Alexander Graham Bell. But it’s just another excuse for not producing. Is waiting for something to be revealed to us just divine laziness?

Think about some of the biggest inventions in history. The telephone. The lightbulb. The computer. The inventors of all these things worked their butts off over a period of time to get the results they ended up with. They pitched their ideas. They got rejected time after time. But they made progress, then made improvements on their progress. They got to their finished product in increments- not all in one day.

So, instead of waiting for greatness to strike and our names to go down in the history books in the blink of an eye, we should spend our time improving on the baby steps we’ve already taken…. The path less traveled.

Interesting related reading: Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun

I haven’t been in this business for long, but if there’s one thing I’ve seen proven to be true, it’s that the launch of an app is only step one. Yeah, it’s a big step, and something you should be really proud of, but it only signifies the beginning of a long stretch of finish lines to be crossed.

It’s an endurance race. There are always hurdles to clear, coaches yelling at you to do better, and teammates who are counting on you. Each update or feature addition takes preparation and time; each user comment takes careful consideration.

But every time you cross one of the little finish lines, you remember why you love what you do. That satisfaction is what motivates you to train for the next ribbon you snap. And each time you stretch your arms toward the sky in victory, you’ve made progress toward a better app.