<story><title>Web Design Trends</title><url>http://weavora.com/blog/2012/10/21/web-design-trends-we-love</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ef4</author><text>The first item, long single page designs, has &lt;i&gt;always&lt;/i&gt; been a favorite of skilled marketers. It goes back even to pre-web snailmail marketing.&lt;p&gt;In comparison tests, longer copy almost always wins. You keep offering more and more reasons to buy, and you keep converting more and more readers.&lt;p&gt;This relates to one of the basic observations about selling: people don&apos;t like to change their minds. They won&apos;t spontaneously go from &quot;no&quot; to &quot;yes&quot;. But if you offer a new piece of information, they can change their mind without admitting they were &quot;wrong&quot; before. Every new piece of information, or new story, is another opportunity for them to get to &quot;yes&quot;.&lt;p&gt;Obviously, the copy also needs to be &lt;i&gt;good&lt;/i&gt;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crazygringo</author><text>Seriously -- I am &lt;i&gt;dying&lt;/i&gt; to get some kind of good, nuanced study on this.&lt;p&gt;On the one side, defending long-form copy ads are David Ogilvy (probably popularly considered to be the greatest advertising genius ever, and who rigorously statistically tested all his methods), and today, companies like Apple.&lt;p&gt;On the other side, are lots of Web 2.0 A/B testing results that basically say, shorter is better.&lt;p&gt;Now, I&apos;m sure there are times when each are right. But I&apos;ve never heard anyone explain &lt;i&gt;when&lt;/i&gt; long-form is better vs &lt;i&gt;when&lt;/i&gt; short-form is better, and when each performs worse.&lt;p&gt;Is it high-end products (long copy) vs low-end products (short copy)? Is it &quot;experience&quot; products vs &quot;utility&quot; products? Is it left-brain vs right-brain consumers? Is it impulse buys vs researched buys? I could invent a million ideas, but I want proof, not hypotheses.&lt;p&gt;I am positively desperate for some kind of researched and statistically backed-up explanation that figures out the factors on both sides!</text></comment>
<story><title>Web Design Trends</title><url>http://weavora.com/blog/2012/10/21/web-design-trends-we-love</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ef4</author><text>The first item, long single page designs, has &lt;i&gt;always&lt;/i&gt; been a favorite of skilled marketers. It goes back even to pre-web snailmail marketing.&lt;p&gt;In comparison tests, longer copy almost always wins. You keep offering more and more reasons to buy, and you keep converting more and more readers.&lt;p&gt;This relates to one of the basic observations about selling: people don&apos;t like to change their minds. They won&apos;t spontaneously go from &quot;no&quot; to &quot;yes&quot;. But if you offer a new piece of information, they can change their mind without admitting they were &quot;wrong&quot; before. Every new piece of information, or new story, is another opportunity for them to get to &quot;yes&quot;.&lt;p&gt;Obviously, the copy also needs to be &lt;i&gt;good&lt;/i&gt;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>losvedir</author><text>&amp;#62; &lt;i&gt;In comparison tests, longer copy almost always wins.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Really? I&apos;d love to see A/B results somewhere of this, as it doesn&apos;t agree with my experience. Maybe it depends on industry. Or, maybe sufficiently good copy beats out shorter designs, but most people just can&apos;t generate that kind of copy. (Though it sounds like we&apos;re getting to a New True Scotsman a bit.)&lt;p&gt;When my start-up did an A/B test of our homepage, we found less content won out. Also 37 signals did their series on optimization, and had strong results[1] that shorter beat out long form, too.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-testing-part-3-final&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-tes...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>