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Pricing tables is perhaps one of the most important feature of any product/web service website.
It's challenging to strike the right balance between presenting large amount of specs and making them all seems clear and understandable. Definitely tricky as you also don't want to seems like you overselling your product/services, but then again you don't want to undersell either.
At the same time, you have to lay out all the plans in a way that highlights your most popular plan without isolating the rest. Sounds complex? Fret not! We have round up 10 fantastic pricing tables that will help you in creating your own! Let the sales figures roll!
This is amongst my favorite pricing table for a number of reasons.
I like the idea of telling the user what the plan is ideal for different groups of people. Usage of icons that very clearly illustrate what the plan is about. It shows the cost for monthly/ yearly and how much you can expect to save if you take up the yearly plan.
Eliminating the need for another column to put the row titles ("Channels", "Streaming", etc...) by putting it at the center column. However this method works the best if you have 3 price plans. Anything more or less, it will probably not be as effective.
Very beautiful usage of analogous colors! You just can't go wrong with analogous colors ( well most of the time ).
I like how the middle plan pops up a little to show that it's the most popular plan. Having two "Sign up" buttons for each plan may be a little over-broad, but it sure doesn't hurt if the user click on it right? :P
Very neat and elegant way to present the price plans. However, it seems the price itself is not the main focus, but the specs. I would think it would help to highlight the price in a different color to differentiate it from the mundane long specs.
Like the gradient from light to dark, bringing the user's eyes from top to bottom ( sign up button). The shade of green used just reminds us of $$$. The "30-day risk free trail" is strategically placed and not to mention, it's animated upon mouseover!
Great use of stylized icons to illustrate the different plans. Simple, sleek, and straight to the point. Splendid!
Colorful price table for a change! Very nice color palettes and font use. Notice how each line of specs are in different shades of yellow? Makes it much easier to read as it gives the eyes the impression of reading by line item.
Great concept! Visibly highlighting the "Best Deal" plan right smack in the middle, with a larger "Sign Up" button than the rest.
I totally dig the yellow brush highlight for "30-day Free Trial". Although I'm not sure about glorifying the "Trial" plan much more than the "Paid" plans. I'm also a little confused by the "Sign Up" and "Buy Now" link at the bottom when they actually means the same thing.
Classic price plan table. All is good except that all the small text and mostly white font is kind of making my eyes squint a little bit.
A very different approach whereby in this case it doesn't show you all the plans for comparison ( as it's not really a price plan comparison table, more like a service pricing table ). However, this approach might work for a price comparison table if the tabs will display on mouseover ( instead of clicking), and the action button is a "Sign Up".
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Carousels are not only lots of fun to look at, they are also one of the most efficient ways to showcase important contents at prime areas of your website.
So go ahead and spice up your online playground with some merry-go-round! There is no magic number of contents to feature but we reckon 3 - 5 rocking horses should do the trick.
Here are some of the more creative and inspiring ways to do the spin!
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Clever use of transparent PNG and shadows to create the floating effect. Pretty awesome to view the whole site on a widescreen computer.
Kind of the same concept as "Jay Hollywood" but a more graphically & metaphorically intense version.
However in this case, i prefer to view it on a non-wide screen as it looks a little too overwhelming with widescreen on and have all the graphic elements at the side screaming from the corner of your eyes. I like the way the graphics are jutting out of the baseline though.
Great usage of the on/off glassy button effect not to mention they look so yummy I could eat them all up! Who knew great design can make one hungry? Only Apple can. :P
An interesting way to use horizontal scroll bar to categorize the product lines. However when I click on the arrows, the scroll bar tends to overshot the category text and makes it looks rather weird.
Vertical for a change! Very smooth and slick graphics and animation for the navigation and appropriate icons to tie in with the main banners too!
Carousels not only moves side ways, the rocking hoses goes up and down too! That's what this site decided to do for their carousel.
It's refreshing for a change and i just love how the graphic elements are protruding out into the green zone, giving it a certain depth to the other wise very clean and simple layout.
I just love the way this whole website looks. Everything just seems to be prefect right down to the pixels. What a great way to showcase the portfolio!
This site takes carousel to a whole new level! The whole site is literally merry-go-round-ing your computer screen! It's definitely interesting but i don't really dig the submenu carousel effect.
Love the tabs! Makes one want to click and not only that, the user know what they are clicking into! Needless to say, I went straight for the Lemon Desserts :P
There are several ways you can navigate this carousel.
1) By clicking on the photos
2) Sliding the horizontal scrollbar
3) clicking on the arrows.
It would have looked more elegant without the arrow and scrolls. But overall, this is a really neat way of showing more links and unlimited contents.
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What do you think of when you think of the color yellow?
Yellow is a pretty tough color to pull off on a website just as it is on print media but these showcases really nailed it! Kick back and have some lemonade while we round up 10 freshly squeezed yellow websites from around the world!
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12!
To many people, online social community, also called social network is not a fresh term. However, besides facebook, myspace or friendster, how much do you really know about social network? I was not really sure how many types of social network are there too until we did this small research. Here we are, sharing our discovery – there are generally 12 types of social communities existing.
1. Mass Crowd Communities
2. Business Connection Network
3. Industry Specific Social Network
4. Community Built for a sharing application or content
5. Match Making Communities
6. Communities with same interests & hobbies!
7. Education Related Communities
8. Academic and Research
9. Communities for Families
10. Community for Internal Collaboration
11. Community for Customers
12. Social Network Platform for Niche Communities
Let us just pull out some examples to show you.
1.Mass Crowd Communities
Social Network like facebook, myspace or tianya, although they began with only targeting at a specific segment, they have expanded to welcome anyone. People join with different objectives and there are many sub groups can be formed within.
Advertisement and integration with online gaming are the common revenue streams for such communities simply because they have large membership and traffic.
2.Business Connection Network
Famous online social networks like Linkedin, Xing or wealink (a China community) appear to be more popular to the corporate group. People come to these networks with a more specific objective – to create and maintain business relationship.
Premium services to obtain more information to enhance networking or increase appearance to attract more attention are very applicable to such social networks. For example, let’s look at what a premium account on LinkedIn can do for you.
3.Industry Specific Social Network
After mentioning the more famous one that almost everyone knows. We start to bring you to get to know those more target segment specific social networks. Industry Specific Social Network is a good transition from Business network like Linkedin. Let us just introduce one here – i-Meet. I-Meet.com is a social network created for the MICE (Meeting, Incentive, Conference and Exhibition) industry.
It allows meeting planners and service & product suppliers to connect. For example, if a meeting planner from Philadelphia wants to know more about the meeting facilities in Singapore, i-Meet is the place where he/she can find the right suppliers in Singapore and request for more information. Moreover, the planner could probably find out more information from other planners’ shared information like photos, videos and blogs on i-Meet.
The greatest value i-Meet has brought to the suppliers is sales lead generation. This is one of the strongest revenue streams for such a network. Remember, “lead generation” is the keyword!
4.Community Built for a sharing application or content
Having enough talks about business and money, let us bring you to another type of community everyone loves. Sites like Youtube, Flickr and imeem started with a core application for sharing for video, photo and music. As the membership grew, communities were built to facilitate easier sharing. You can become the fan of someone and you can see their latest uploads conveniently. Amongst this type of communities, I would like to bring your attention to a news sharing communities like NowPublic.com simply because before this research, I have not explored much about news sharing communities.
The application of community has been extended further. A very interesting example is a site called Jujups.
Jujups has an application for you to DIY you own cards, mugs, t-shirts, photo frames and even chocolates in an extremely easy way. Kids love it, so is everyone else. More than just creating, you can check out how other people do it.
Communities like this usually can sell premium content. For example, on Jujups, you don’t really have to create your own chocolate. If you see someone did a very nice one, you can pay to have it. It is C-to-C business built on top of the sharing.
5.Match Making Communities
Match making is one of the most important application of social network too. We probably know how it works. You put up your profile and you check out people’s profile. If you like that person, you can try to connect with the person online. There are also many offline activities organized to facilitate the meetup. Of course, there are also similar communities not for seeking lifelong partners but just friends or short term partners.
Match making communities usually makes money through subscription or premium services like offline introduction and meet-up services.
6.Communities with same interests & hobbies!
I put an exclamation mark to express my favor towards this type of communities because it not about business, it is not about sharing but it is about meaning of life. Hey there, don’t you have some hobbies and you are always keen to look for someone to share the same joy?
Let me share with you my favorite ones. I love cats and I am active in mycatspace.com
I love scuba diving since the first time I did it and I am active in Scubuddies.com.
Communities like these have custom feature created just for the niche need. For example, I can keep my dive log on Scubuddies instead of carrying a book around and afraid of losing it all the time.
One strength of such communities is that the membership is very well defined and advertisers love it. Integration with e-commerce is also an obvious good way to bring revenue.
7.Education Related Communities
In fact, there are many sub categories of social network which is related to education. For example, many schools have online communities for the students and teachers. There are also communities for alumni. Here I show two examples which I find them most refreshing.
BeRecruited.com is a social network to connect college coaches and high school athletes. Athletes can post their profiles to market themselves and the coaches can scout and pick the right talents and their teammates.
BizAlum is an Alumni Community Portal managed by School of Business at National University of Singapore. Besides having most of the alumni members to join and interact, students are brought to be aware of this portal even before they graduate. This is for them to seek for advice and mentorship from the alumni. Somewhat similar to BeRecruited.com, recruitment is a great value brought by this alumni portal.
Communities like these are hard to determine what the best revenue model is. Most of them are driven by NGO and has sufficient fund to run it. Social value created is more concerned than monetary returns.
8.Academic and Research
Due to the exclusivity of some projects, we are not able to explore this freely as we like. However, there are living examples showing how effective the idea of social network is being applied in the scientific research.
Connotea.org is one social network for anyone to store their research references and shared with others.
In MIT, there is a Community Annotation Project (CAP), which is a collaborative effort to engage experts in the biology of Neurospora crassa to improve the quality of the N. crassa genome annotation. The membership consists of scientist from all over the world. We don’t get a login to see what it is inside and that curiosity to know more is still burning in my heart. \
Most of the time, such a community is driven by a public project and thus revenue is not really the objective.
9.Communities for Families
Connection between family members is the strongest and most long lasting in man kind’s society. Demand for such a community arises as the world is getting more and more globalized and family members are no longer living together but sometimes quite far apart.
Uniqueness of such communities is demonstrated by some very unique application just for families. For example, you can build your family tree.
Communities targeting at families can monetize by integration with family oriented services like photo printing, gift ideas, picnic service, family trips and so on. This is a field with huge potential.
10.Community for Internal Collaboration
Most companies see a strong need for internal community among employees for discussion,knowledge sharing and culture building, as an upgrade to existing office automation software. Here is one example.
In Techsailor, we use a social network as one of the mean to gel our colleagues together. Our email communication is meant for work and the social network is meant for all the fun stuffs. It is the “killer app” that helps us to attract many talents people to join us because it simply demonstrates how vibrant our company is. It is also a place for us to organize discussion and idea generation. Through real life experience, it does add a great deal of value into our working life in the company.
11.Community for Customers
These are communities set up by brands to aggregate their customers or potential customers to share, feedback and participate in activities. Such a community enhances customers’ experience and satisfaction. Also, it helps to up sale value added services and increase customer retention.
Let us share one of the greatest customer communities around, the Nike Active Plus Community for runners.
Runners can record their running miles onto the community, compete with friends and share training tips. Also, there are many running and walking activities around to boost the attention to the community. As Business Week put it, “Nike has built a legion of fans”.
E-Commerce can be built within such a network. However, the Return of Investment of building and driving such a community is just not the amount of sales done within this network, but the brand loyalty and sale outside this network must be also accounted for.
12.Social Network Platform for Niche Communities
These are also community platforms for people to set up their own communities. User can use one account to join multiple communities which they are interested in. Two examples here – ning.com in US and Jujuya.com in China:
Platform for Social Communities is very versatile. In fact, they have the potential of capturing even more member than facebook. One of the common revenue streams for such a platform is to provide chargeable premium features for the network. Jujuya.com is also integrating with e-commerce, mainly for business to reach the targeted groups of users.
That is all for the 12 types of social community. If you discover that I have missed out any, please let us know. Our research is meant for us to have a systematic study of what values can a social community bring to a business or organization. In our coming blog, we will be analyzing one of the social network in greater details to understand better how can a social network be positioned in the value chain to enhance efficiency of business flow. Stay tuned and have a great Halloween!
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One of our colleagues showed us this strange screenshot while signning in for the first time on Windows Live Messenger
Guess even IM's have their boo-boo moments :)
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