Groupon made it’s first deal in late 2008 with a half-price pizza offer.  Today Goupon is offering deals in 43 countries with an estimated revenue of around $2 billion.  Andy Jones, Director of Customer Experience at Salmon takes a look at their site and gives his take on eight things he believes they do well, leading to a design that is not only compelling and visually coherent but also very persuasive.

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Microcopy might be just a small part of the online experience but it’s vitally important to customer experience and conversion and often overlooked.

So when you are designing for the web, take a minute to stand back and think about the microcopy, as ironically the smallest bits of copy can have the biggest impact on business and be the cause of a great or ghastly online customer experience.

Microcopy refers to the little instructions and phrases used on web pages to guide and reassure customers and can make the difference between someone signing up for something, or entering their credit card details or not.

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Deep links into QR (Quick Response) codes are becoming ever more popular.  Retailers are beginning to use deep links into their content on another channel using QR codes. A QR code is a specific matrix barcode – or two dimensional code , readable by QR barcode readers and camera phones.  The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background and the information encoded can be text, URL or other data.

DIY retailer B&Q uses it in stores around physical products allowing customers to scan the QR code to watch the “how to video”.  At Christmas, supermarket Waitrose used QR codes in TV and magazine adverts allowing customers to deep-link into recipes.  Halfords, a Salmon client, has been using QR Codes in press advertising since Christmas with links to its mobile home page.  It has also used them in-store to promote specific product ranges.

Meguiars use QR Codes

For more information Econsultancy have a list of 10 ways marketers can use QR Codes in business, whether B2B or B2C.

The eagle-eyed among you will have seen that Salmon has been very busy in the interim.  If you missed it – the latest version of Halfords.com recently went live, and already got a review yesterday by Graham Charlton, a researcher at e-consultancy.com.  Both are worth taking a look at.

Right now, it seems, nothing fires up a design debate better than the term ‘Web 2.0′. For every positive argument for features like drag and drop – there is a counter argument relating to conversion rates. For every advocate of a single page checkout – there is the overall Customer Experience to think about. And so it goes on: semantic web, widgets, mashups or folksonomies etc….lets not even go there.

But the debate, and the point at which web design is at today, does mask the simple rule that great web design is (and always has been) about implementing appropriate design – as opposed to doing simply what is technically possible.

Yesterday, two more insightful pieces emerged that might well fan the flames of debate for a while yet, with both pieces sitting on the ‘pragmatic but effective’ side of the fence.

First up e-consultancy reported how Argos is beating their competition with “user friendly web design” (disclosure: this is a design implemented by Salmon). And secondly, Mike Southon (in an FT piece) in reference to Will McInnes (from NixonMcInnes) debates a possibly counter-intuitive suggestion of “having an ugly but effective website.”

What is clear is that if you are investing in web design you need a thorough, detailed, holistic understanding of web 2.0. And because every brand is different, finding out where to draw the line between ‘appropriate’ and ‘possible’ is a smart move indeed.