Let’s think outside of digital parameters to define the term. Take a 14 year old girl. Her father asks her to take out the garbage every Thursday night. She moans and groans, even though she knows it’s coming every week, and she is absolutely aggravated that she has to leave her favorite TV episode or halt her texting to take out the trash.

Although extreme, it reinforces a concept that I’ve advocated since founding Brolik in 2004. Designers are experts, and we do things for a reason. I don’t show clients multiple design options. A large number of people consider what a designer does as “art” or “making things pretty,” which are both subjective. In reality, a designer’s job is very objective- to produce a calculated, thoughtful and ultimately “successful” design that is goal-based and function-driven. Design is rooted in extensive research, experience, and learned skill, and it needs to persuade an audience to react emotionally and to do whatever it is you want them to do.

Presenting multiple design options just doesn’t fit that model.

There is always one “answer” that is most correct in any design problem.
Remember that good design is extremely purposeful, and a good designer doesn’t typically use the color green, for instance, just because they like it. They use it because the target audience likes it and will predictably react to it in a certain way.

In Paul Rand’s case, while dealing with Jobs, he refuses to brighten the color yellow as per Jobs’ request. That’s bold, but I can tell you one thing- he used that exact shade of a yellow for a very specific reason. Rand, an expert for decades at this point, was in a unique position to tell a paying client “no,” but most designers aren’t in that position and must compromise design for their client’s whim. To put it another way, the client can make the design less successful.

Furthermore, choice is dangerous.
There’s a TED Talk about happiness where a study group is asked to choose one of two different photos. They get to keep the one they choose, and the other is sent away. Half of the group is told they have five days to change their mind, and the other half gets no chance to rethink their decision. A few days later, participants were surveyed about how happy they were with their photos. The group that could not return their photo loved their choice. The group that got a chance to swap their photo was less satisfied. They all wonder if maybe they’d be happier with the one they didn’t choose.

That’s some crazy psychology, but it’s worth noting. There was no explicit quality difference between the actual photos. You could argue that having a choice alone made participants less happy with a product that they would have been (and should have been) content with in the first place.

Iterate!
Unlike Rand, I don’t believe that designers are always right and that they should be the final say when designing for someone else’s business. I do believe that instead of giving choices upfront, the best and most successful designs are arrived at through a solid discovery phase and then iteration. Show a working, functioning, real life design and then start discussing changes from there.

Lastly, time is money.
Just in case you aren’t convinced, let’s talk money. Why would you ask a designer to spend their limited hours split amongst three different designs for the same project? You’d be better served to have them spend three times as long on one design.

Furthermore, if your designer puts the required effort into the initial design, they’ll have nothing left but fluff to fill out more options for you. Once you arrive at the “correct answer,” the other designs are simply incorrect!

It all starts with you.
To get what you want from your designer, forget about forcing them to give options. Focus your time on giving them resources. Share links to things you like. Share what your competitors are doing. Show them a random magazine ad you like. Tell them about your vision for the company’s future, fill them in on your company’s history, and ask them questions. That’s how you get what you want. Give them the tools to do their job. You didn’t hire them just because they know how to use Photoshop. You hired them because they’re experts in their field, and they can use their expertise to help you excel in yours.

Let Websites be Websites
We need to rethink websites and how we design and interact with them. We should stop thinking about them like they’re printed material on paper. Let’s embrace the movement and interaction that modern technology allows us to have with our message. Websites should provide the most optimized, quickest and most enjoyable user experience no matter where they’re viewed. In order to do that, we need to employ the principles of responsive web design.

Responsive web design is design that grows and flows within the browser window. Using only one code base, a website can grow to fit the largest screen or shrink and stack to fit the smallest mobile screen, all with elegance and attention paid to design and usability. The trick is to forget about some of the restraints we currently impose on websites while deciding what is “good” and “pleasing” and “efficient” design, and to embrace some new thinking.

Is this starting to sound too philosophical?

Well, OK. Fine. Instead of talking about the design philosophies behind responsive web design, here are a few reasons why a business can benefit from thinking about the Web in a new way.

Adaptability
The Internet is an open and adaptable medium that can show up anywhere, from computers and phones to TVs to vanity mirrors and car seat headrests. Who knows where the next screen or projection surface will be? Content for such an adaptable medium should be able to adapt. This reduces redundancy in planning, development, and maintenance and therefore decreases cost. One code base can serve any and every device at the same time.

Furthermore, there will always be some new device that people decide to start surfing the Internet on. If your site is responsive, there’s no need to decide if it’s worth the cost to build a version of your site for the new device. It’s already built and displaying beautifully.

Consistent Branding
For a lot of companies, online presence is almost entirely a branding exercise. It’s all about being there when your customer is looking for you. A successful brand is one that customers can identify with, relate to, and ultimately fall in love with. It makes sense that after spending the time to bake that brand into a perfect website, it should always look the same. With a responsive design, that brand will form fit to whatever medium it’s being displayed on. There’s never confusion or guessing for your customer, and there’s only one update each time you need to make a change.

Evolution
In a very short time, all of the smartest and most agile brands will boast responsive websites, and everyone else will be clamoring to catch up. Efficiency and good sense will undoubtedly win out, and when that time comes, instead of trying to keep up, you’ll be miles ahead.

It’s hard to tell companies that they should, without a doubt, look at implementing a responsive website. There are limitations. There are drawbacks.

It’s really easy, however, to tell companies that they’d better open up to a new way of thinking about the Web. They’d better be receptive to some big and beneficial change, and they’d better be ready to implement when the time comes. Those who don’t react will fall behind. It’s a lot like when older companies used to argue the importance of a website in the first place… remember those days!?

This article was originally published in Philly Ad News

Two of my Favorite Responsive Sites Right Now
(Play around with the window size to see how these sites shift and rearrange for different device sizes… or open them up on your phone and your computer at the same time.)
http://anderssonwise.com
http://bostonglobe.com

Sure, Why Not Press The Button?
You’re an avid user of Twitter and you’re pushing 2,000 friends on Facebook. You check the box and watch while the application computes your social status. It comes back with a score of 35 out of 100 and offers $5 off your purchase if you share your new buy with friends on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Decisions, decisions. Do you share your purchase with everyone you know? That’s pretty annoying. If you only share it with your “shopping circle” on Google+, you get $1.50 off. Is it even worth it?

You press the button. The price for the garment drops $1.50 and your transaction is complete. You casually show your on-screen receipt as you pass by the employee at the door. He offers you a bag, and you accept. The clothing brand just paid $1.50 to blast your inner circle with some free marketing. Well, not free, but for a lot less than it would cost to reach the same amount of people with an ad in a magazine or an online ad campaign, and hopefully with more credibility.

It’s Already Begun…
For those of you tech types and marketers who are aggressively driving the engine into this future of purchasing, good for you. Klout, for example is making noise with their social status ranking, the Klout Score. If you go to Klout.com and connect your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, they’ll give you a score and attempt to tell you what topics you’re considered “influential” in. On top of that, they’re already working with businesses to identify top influencers to offer them perks. An interesting example is the promotion of Stephen King’s new book Mile 81, where based on your Klout score, readers receive a free e-book download in exchange for Tweeting out the promotion and the book.

Take this a step further in the future. Imagine every product, every restaurant and every event you’re interested in calculates your social score as you walk through the door. If you want to get in, you better tell your friends you’re at the club. If you want to get in without a door charge, you better have a high social status.

There Are Some Concerns…
There are a few major problems with the future of shopping, as it pertains to social status and buying, and why it may run into some serious push-back. Giving discounts as an incentive to share a purchase on Facebook promotes biased brand advertising (what many would consider social media garbage) jamming up your feed. If your Facebook feed is full of “I bought this and that”, you’re going to stop trusting your friends.

Another problem is the rich and influential get the price breaks while the poor and tech-illiterate don’t get the deal. It accentuates the disparity between the social class that buys every new iteration of the iPhone and the everyday cell phone user that has never heard of a data plan or downloaded a mobile app. But do these people shop at Banana Republic or Victoria Secret anyhow, and do they even exist in 2015? Sure they do. Only 27% of US mobile phones are currently smartphones (according to comScore’s 2010 Mobile Year In Review report). Globally, only 1 of 5 people own smartphones. But, what will that number look like in 2015 and what percentage of people will use their smartphones to browse and buy on a daily basis? Assuming smartphone growth continues at it’s current rapid pace, by 2015 there will be a new value put on each customer, and these brands (the smart ones, anyway) will achieve as much social publicity as they can get from their socially-savvy consumers.

The Truth Is…
If you aren’t carrying an expensive smart phone and aren’t spending time on the social web, people still care about you. You will simply become less and less valuable in the eyes of your favorite brands and will be penalized, paying top dollar for their products. It’s high school all over again. Lady Gaga gets paid thousands for an endorsed tweet. You get nothing…unless you’re one of the cool kids (based on your calculated online social ranking) of course.

This article was originally published in Philly Ad News

Turntable.fm originally started as Stickybits, a QR code scanning, geotagging, hodgepodge of a tech start up. They raised $2 million in initial funding. When Stickybits didn’t take off, they pivoted their business and transformed into Turntable.fm, using their remaining money and resources to launch the product into its current state.

How does it work?
Users can create or join rooms. In each room, there are five DJs at any one time and up to two hundred other users who sit and listen.  DJs can then search for songs through the Turntable system or upload their own. The rooms then cycle through the DJs one song at a time while the rest of the crowd listens and “awesomes” or “lames” the song. If a song gets enough “lames,” it gets skipped. The DJs have incentive to play popular songs in order to collect “awesomes,” which unlock bigger and better avatars. This gamification makes Turntable “fun and engaging” for users and gives it a leg up on the competition.

Why is Turntable special?
Because people are far better curators than any algorithm. This is social music. People love music and they love sharing it. There are still some major hurdles for them to overcome, but Turntable has that “it” factor that Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare all respectively have shared since their launch into the world of social media.

Record labels and their attitudes on copyright laws present the last major hurdle for Turntable. Currently, all of their music is licensed through Medianet, a digital content provider, employing the protection of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Turntable, just like Pandora, claims to be a “non-interactive radio service,” which allows it to work under the DMCA. They pay a flat fee to the music owners for each song played. But there are several grey areas within the DMCA that need to get ironed out before Turntable can fixate itself within the social media landscape.

Where is Turntable going?
In the Brolik office, Turntable.fm has replaced iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, Hypem and the other numerous music services we previously used. Although Turntable is still rather young, it has some serious potential. We’ve set up a Brolik Turntable room for the office, and anyone can come in and play a song for themselves and our office via our wireless speakers (fair warning, we’re not always in there).

Once you start thinking about other businesses that can employ it, some real possibilities emerge. Imagine if you could go to your local bar and DJ with other regulars (and a few staff members to keep it organized). Or before you head off to the gym, you jump into your gym’s Turntable room and line up a playlist for the next hour. A few artists such as Ra Ra Riot and Talib Kweli have even started using Turntable.fm to showcase new songs and connect with fans first hand.

Turntable.fm is special. No other site has brought together social networking and music in such a successful blend. Let’s hope that the record companies see it as a beneficial tool that they can use and don’t thwart it before it can grow and evolve. At this point, all that we can do is sit back and watch this small start up begin to address the hurdles that still remain. But for now, we sit, wait, and keep listening.

What will your responsibilities be in this role?
While my main focus will be on the Philadelphia and tri-state area, I also look to bring other national accounts that i have relationships with into the fold. Initial focus will be in the following areas: web and mobile commerce markets, marketing and branding via smart phone applications and social media marketing & advertising.

What particular industries/clients do you hope to work with at Brolik?
I have been in the gaming industry for 12 plus years with the majority of my time on the licensing and marketing side. The mobile industry through app development and social media has created a very viable and receptive market in which key brands can marketed.  I look to utilize my contacts in the video game arena to help expand and grow the Brolik business.

What other positions have you held at other companies, what were your responsibilities and when did you work there?
I run my own independent licensing marketing and sales company.  I have worked with several small to medium size companies in the professional sports and video game areas.  In the past I worked for some very large companies and felt the need to develop my own business.

Have you worked with any noteworthy clients in the past that you would like to mention?
To date I have had the pleasure of working with several great companies: Louisville Slugger, Life Fitness, Everlast, Callaway, Prince, X Games, Sanrio (Hello Kitty), Pokemon, Nickelodeon, MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL and the Arena Football League.

What colleges/universities have you graduated, with what degree and when?
I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania w/ liberal arts degree in 1989.

Do you belong to any relevant associations or groups and do you hold a leadership position within?
I am involved with two charities:  I am a Committee Chair for Alex’s Lemonade Stand.  I have had the opportunity to be involved with Alex’s for about 5 years.  I am also on the board of the David B. Weiss Memorial Foundation.  This is a new foundation that was unfortunately named after a friend of mine who died earlier this year.

Is there anything you would like to include that was not addressed in the previous questions?
I have been hired to add my experience to help gain more presence in the B2B areas in Philadelphia in several key areas: restaurants, wine & spirits/beverages, fashion, jewelry, finance, health.  In addition, the possibility of extending beyond with some key national companies is a goal as well.

What do you do for fun?
I’m married with 3 kids ages 14, 12 and 10.  When I’m not at one of their various sporting events, I enjoy working out, running, playing basketball and I’m an avid Philadelphia sports fan.

So what is content marketing?
It’s creating valuable content through blogging, podcasts, seminars, white papers, etc and distributing that material to people who will associate a positive connection to your brand or services. Content Engineering takes that a step further– it’s using trends in analytics to optimize the views, downloads, clicks, traffic, and overall saturation and performance of the content you are marketing, before you publish it.

Why does it matter if we engineer the content?
Well, Google (and other search engines) reward websites that provide helpful and relevant content and make it easy to find. Relevant doesn’t just mean it’s helpful to some people, it means that popular search terms, the blog title and blog content all connect, forming a relevant search experience for the reader. In other words, people search and find what they are looking for, consistently. As a result of your strategic content engineering, your website will be more credible and optimized.

This type of engineering can be as simple as doing keyword research to analyze the competition and volume of a keyword or group of keywords before publishing your blog post using tools like Wordtracker or Google Keyword Tool. Let me give you an example…I had a handful of options for the title of this blog:

Hi, I’m a Content Engineer, and I’m Doing it Right Now. (Interesting, but not good for SEO)
The Basics of Content Marketing, Keywords and SEO for Blogging
What’s the Value of my Blog?
How do I Search Optimize my Site with a Blog? (Getting closer…)
How To Blog Your Way To More Search Traffic (WINNER!)

The difference between these titles could be hundreds or potentially thousands of unique visitors in the next few months. It’s hard to predict exactly what the outcome would be for each title, but looking at the keywords in each, the titles range from very competitive to high volume / low competition (and that’s what we want).

For example, the term “Content Engineer” shows ZERO searches in the Wordtracker database. That’s right, being the top site on Google for those who search for “Content Engineer” will gain you exactly nothing. Nobody knows the term (surprise!), and so nobody is searching for it. Conversely, the term “How to” was included in almost 250 million searches in the Wordtracker database and “How to Blog” in over 20 million. While not everyone who searches for “How to blog” is looking to increase search visibility, there’s a good chance that people who are looking to blog want people to read it, making this a very pertinent article.

If you’ve read to this point and learned something new, then I guess I’ve done my job and I’m sure Google appreciates it. So, before you just post your next blog, think about the amount of potential interest based on the topic your writing about and don’t just come up with a clever title. Find the right title for SEO. You’ll be happy with the results.

Now, almost 8 years later, it would appear that everyone has realized that websites aren’t movies. Now that people are used to browsing the Internet, they want and need certain things to stay interested. Nearly everyone (except the restaurant industry) has done away with intro videos and sitewide music, but it’s still really hard for people to break away from another medium that the web tends to impersonate. Print design.

The Web is Definitely Not Print
At their core, print and web are very similar. Both mediums convey a message, both aim to lead the viewer around a “page” or “canvas,” and they both need good design to do so. The web, though, has a number of really useful traits that print doesn’t have- things like an unlimited canvas size, the ability to hide and show information, and the ability to adjust design based on user preference- to name a few. The boundaries of print design are defined by the medium’s lack of these traits. As of today, those same boundaries are (for some reason) being placed on web design.

What I’d like to propose is that the web doesn’t have the inherent boundaries that print has, so we need to stop treating web design like it’s print design. We need to stop thinking about the web in terms of print, and we especially need to stop talking about the web using print terminology. Remember (and I know it’s hard), that the web is not print.

Even though there are a lot of reasons why the web should not be thought of in print terms, I want to focus on a couple important reasons just to get you thinking.

The Canvas
You know why we call it a “web page”? It’s because we’re referring to a page, like a page of print. A page, however, has a fixed size. It has edges that limit it because it’s physical. In print design, if we have a lot of information to get across to a user, and we only have a small page, we’re forced to shrink all of the information to fit on that single page. Good designers know how to organize that information so that it still looks friendly, readable and carries a brand, but at some point the limits of a physical page can really hurt an otherwise perfect set of information.

A website, though, in a browser window, is a virtual and essentially limitless space on your computer monitor with no such constraints. Clients are always asking us to keep information “above the fold,” even if that means shrinking font sizes or reducing image sizes. But when designers try to cram information above the fold on one computer screen, another smaller screen still hides information and a larger screen looks empty with a ton of white space at the bottom. The web isn’t meant to have a fold. It’s movable, and it’s meant to be interacted with.

The Andersson-Wise website is a great example of how a design should react to screen size, not be constrained by it. Resize your window to different proportions to see it in action.

Instead of treating a website as a page, it’s better to think of it as a window– a window that looks into a sea of information that can be scrolled, moved, scaled, etc.

User Preference and Control
Another trait that print lacks is the ability to cater to user preference. Some like their words big, others very tiny. Some even prefer to read text that’s white on black, so it’s easier on the eyes. The modern browser allows us to control these things, but the modern web designer tries as hard as possible to override these settings, sticking to a strict, pixel-based font size and a fixed site width. We even purposely cut a design off on each edge and leave a bunch of unused “background” just because it’s a constraint that we’re all used to. (Don’t get me wrong, I know we have to do these things sometimes, but hopefully you’re starting to get the point here.)

That’s only one example of a user preference. Think about the user who has thirteen windows open on their screen at once, so your website is only a tiny square in the corner of their screen. Where’s the fold for them? How’s your font size look there?

And what about mobile?!

The Point
The point here is not to run out to your web design firm and overhaul all of your fixed-pixel font sizes, opting instead for a percentage-based font system that scales to a user’s browser window. (That would be awesome, though.) The point is really to start looking at the web as the living, breathing, interactive organism that it is. The more your users control their experience, the happier they are. It’s scary as a designer, as we tend to be control freaks, trying as hard as we can to finesse each and every pixel until our composition is “perfect.” But we need to design for the unknown. It’s even got a name: Responsive Design. Some consider it a zen-like philosophy towards web design, because it just goes with the flow. One “design” can work on a huge TV screen and on a tiny smartphone equally well.

I’ve found that the challenge of creating a design that can move and react and still look great is exponentially more fulfilling than creating a static, non-changing, single layout. Learning to embrace the spontaneous design moments that happen as our images and text slide and scale is essential to a more user-friendly and evolved World Wide Web. It’s more challenging, but it’s more rewarding. The sooner we all stop thinking about the web as print design, the faster the web can progress as its own new and different medium, with its own set of capabilities and possibilities.

Additional Information

Andersson Wise – a great example of what the web can be and where it’s going.
http://anderssonwise.com/

Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte - If you’re a coder and are interested in responsive design, this book is a quick read and a great resource… in fact, the author coined the term “responsive design.”
http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design

A Dao of Web Design by John Allsopp – Great article (from 2000!) that explains some philosophy relating to the web as its own medium.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dao/

For designer/coders – A Smashing Magazine compilation of tricks and techniques that we’ll start to see as more designers start embracing the web for what it really can be.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/07/22/responsive-web-design-techniques-tools-and-design-strategies/

Of all the reasons to pay for a degree in graphic design, I consider typesetting the most important. I’ve seen plenty of “amateur” designers who master Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, but fall short of creating professional layouts because the nuances of type are insanely difficult to just pick up.

On the web, huge numbers of “amateur” designers take that difficult task and make it more difficult by appealing to a fleeting, click-happy audience. The web reader is much more finicky and typically holds the attention span of a gnat. (Plus they’re tweeting on their phone while reading your website.) Without proper typesetting, you’re going to lose potential audience, readership or business.

So here are some factors to consider when typesetting for print or the web. I’ll start with some traditional rules that are overarching type rules, no matter where your type appears, then I’ll get into web-specific rules.

• Watch the Line Length
  Believe it or not, there is an optimal amount of characters per line where a reader’s brain stays interested, and their eyes don’t get fatigued. The perfect balance of reading and breaking (“breaking” being the mental pause you get as you go from the end of one line to the beginning of the next) will make your text easy to read, and a shorter line length will make your text initially feel accessible instead of overwhelming.

  How long is too long? The entire width of a webpage is ridiculously too long. Think of books and newspapers and how they break large blocks of text into columns. The typical, optimal line length is somewhere around 70-80 characters (including spaces), but really it’s a judgement call based on actually reading the text and seeing how easy or hard it is to read and digest.

• Pay Attention to Space (Between the Letters, the Words, and the Lines)
  Graphic designers pay attention to every detail about their typography. By controlling the space between each letter overall (called “tracking”), we can make text more digestible and easier to skim. By adjusting the space between each line of text (called “leading”), we can help the reader move quickly up and down long blocks of text. Even manually adjusting each letter’s relationship to the letters around it (called “kerning”), can create a surprisingly more solid message.

• Create Hierarchy
  Probably the most important factor when initially setting type is to create hierarchy. A designer needs his or her reader to know in less than one second what’s important to read first, where to look next, where to look after that, etc. Or maybe the reader knows what she’s looking for and needs to quickly find only that. Changing sizes, weights, placement, white space, line rules and color are just a few ways to start distinguishing one piece of content from another and controlling how your reader sees your information.

• Be Generous with White Space
  The final traditional typesetting “tip” I’ll go over is white space. White space is the space around blocks of text, images or any object on your page. It’s very important to frame your content with white space so that it feels easy to dive into and doesn’t overwhelm your reader.

Now let’s get into a few web-specific typesetting rules. This is the “new breed” of typography, and once you start looking around the Internet with this stuff in mind, you’ll see that not many web designers are doing this right.

• Plan for Skimmers
  On the web, a typical reader has a much shorter attention span than someone reading print material. Usually people are trying to quickly find the information they want amongst the sea of junk that is the Internet. So they skim.

  If we read every word of text as we search for the information we wanted, we’d never find anything. Therefore, when typesetting for the web, keep an F-shaped reading pattern in mind. Users read left to right and top to bottom (at least in the US). This means that skimmers will read the first couple words of a paragraph, and if it doesn’t look like it’s going to have the info they want, they’ll skip right down to the first couple words of the next paragraph.

  Keep your text short and broken up. I like to follow two simple guidelines. No more than two or three sentences per paragraph, and every paragraph gets a title. Of course, I can’t always stick to that exactly, but I certainly try.

• Typeset for Interaction
  Web readers know that the information they need isn’t necessarily on the page they’re currently looking at. Moving page to page in a non-linear fashion is one of the hugest advantages of the Internet in general. So readers are not only skimming your actual content, they’re skimming your links, too, in case there’s a better place for them to land.

  Make your hyperlinks stand out well, and make the copy count. Web readers skim by reading the first 11 characters of headlines and hyperlinks.

Next time you’re reading something online and it’s subconsciously slowing you down or tiring you out, think about factors like letter spacing, line spacing, and line length. When you look at your own website’s content and wonder who’s actually reading it, consider how easy it is to scan the information so your reader knows exactly what she’s going to read before she reads it.

Graphic designers train in typography for years, but most web designers don’t. I don’t think we need to get too snobby or artsy with our type on the web, because after all, it’s ever-changing, dynamically generated, and largely utilitarian. But, what good is your website if no one wants to read it? You might as well put your logo and a picture of your product over a couple paragraphs of Mandarin Chinese.

1. Create a memorable brand identity and a strong voice to go with it (sorry all you product-centric folks out there, you’re generic without it).

2. Create a Facebook fan page and experiment with Facebook ad campaigns. You might be surprised at how quickly your following will grow. Just make sure you’re staying active with quality content, offers, and conversations. Each Facebook fan is valuable.

3. Get your product in the hands of people who want you to succeed and will talk to everyone they know, even if they don’t pay you a cent.

4. Find someone willing to write about you, then give them a reason to. Warby Parker got their start this way.

5. Make product returns as easy for your customers as possible to eliminate risk for the customer. Piperlime does this really well, and so does Gilt.

6. Go beyond the “browse and buy” mentality and integrate social tools to allow your customers to ask their friends’ opinions, share their purchases, and “like” your brand. Reward them for doing it, too.

7. Keep your website and customer experience slick, simple and extremely usable.

8. Pay attention to analytics. Focus on improving every page/click and converting every visitor.

9. Focus on CRM integration as early on as possible to organize customer accounts, email subscribers, purchase history and analytics from one central location. A few years from now you’ll be very happy you did.

Do you have other tips to contribute? Comment…