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Needing Designs on a Better Website?

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bigstock-Brand-Branding-Marketing-Produ-104597561-300x263Is it about time that your business website got some spring cleaning?

For too many business owners, their websites almost become an afterthought following years in the business or even when starting up. Unfortunately, such thinking can lead to missed revenue and a low Google ranking.

So, what designs will you move forward with now and down the road to make sure your website is a proven winner?

Look and Feel of Success

You first need to start with realizing that your business website can always use some improving.

From there, what kind of improvements might you need?

Among the areas to focus on:

  • Design – First and foremost, is your site eye-catching, a site that will keep returning customers and those you are looking to land coming to your site again and again? The design of your site goes a long way in determining how inspired consumers will be to keep returning. Whether you opt for phoenix web design or numerous other choices, make the best selection the first time around. When you find the right designed from day one, you spend less time and effort getting your designs the way you want them, ultimately saving money over time;
  • Content – What goes on your site certainly matters too. If you toss up any content (without determining why it should be on the site in the first place), you risk several things. First, lackluster content is a problem because your website traffic is likely to be minimal at best. Secondly, your search engine ranking will suffer as a result, leaving your site way down the list when consumers search for your respective product or service. Be sure the content is not only authoritative and informative, but also is free of major gaffes. You also need to have content that consumers (and other businesses for that matter) will want to share with the public. When they do that, your traffic is likely to pick up, giving you the ability to drive more business in your direction;
  • Imagery – As important as your content is, having nothing other than content is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Colorful images should dot your site’s landscape. You would also be well-served to include some relevant videos. Having a company video about what your team does and how your brand stands apart from competitors is a great tool to have. Also look to include as many people-friendly images and videos as possible. When making videos, be sure they are exciting (include some music in the background while you are at it). A five-minute webinar with a person sitting there reading a script will put viewers to sleep in record time;
  • Podcasts – If you haven’t taken notice, podcasts are becoming more and more of an attraction to business websites. Companies see the value in making short podcasts available to the public, especially ones that are informative on trends in respective industries, how products or services impact the lives of consumers, what the future is for a respective market etc. You can even consider including short commercial breaks in the podcasts, though keep them to a minimum. In offering these, you can attract advertisers and increase your advertising dollars;
  • Accessibility – How accessible your website is (especially contacting you, your department managers etc.) is also something you should never overlook. When a consumer pulls up a business site, they might very well have questions, issues etc. they want to discuss. In doing so, they need easy access to a contact email or phone number. Better yet, if you have myriad of departments in your business, be sure to list those in charge of each unit (email, office phone etc.). This is better than having a general office email or phone number for consumers to have to contact. When a consumer can go directly to the individual they need, it saves them time and also saves your office team time.

Your website is oftentimes the bread and butter of your brand, so don’t underestimate how powerful of a tool it can be.

If your site has been lacking that punch as of late, put a focus on needing designs on a better one.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Dave Thomas covers business topics on the web.

How to Work with a Web Design Firm; 5 Questions with Andy Crestodina

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When you’re starting a business, one of the first items on the agenda is putting together a website. But it can be really tricky to figure out who can help you get it done.

site is under construction

Luckily, I managed to snag some time with the very busy Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media. I asked him some questions about how to hire and work with a reputable web design firm. (Thanks Andy!)

Every entrepreneur starts out thinking they can cobble together a decent website with HTML, spit, duct tape, and the design knowledge they picked up in college. How do you know it’s time to get professional help?

You know your website is bad when you hope that people don’t visit it. It sounds like a joke, but it’s not uncommon. You tell people the address, but add a disclaimer: I’m still working on it… I made it myself… I’m planning to redesign it soon…

If it’s not obvious from a lack-of-pride, it may be obvious in your Analytics. If traffic isn’t up from last year and if it’s not turning 1% – 3% of visitors into customers and leads, something is probably wrong.

What are some critical indicators that you’re talking to a rip-off artist rather than a professional web design shop? Some of them look pretty convincing.

If you connect with the company through a referral, that helps. Beyond this, I recommend asking some specific questions:

  • Can I meet the team? This will tell you if they’re a company of full time people, or a collection of freelancers. There’s more risk of issues if they’re all freelancers or if they outsource the work.
  • Have you ever done a similar project for a similar company? Ideally, the answer is yes. Ask about the return on the investment and the results in Analytics.
  • What kind of support do you offer after the site goes live? If they have a team dedicated to helping clients post-launch, you’re more likely to be happy in the long run. If their support team is the same as the project team, they may not be great at service over the long run…

They should be really excited to answer your questions. You should be able to feel some passion. If they sound worried about your project, you should probably be a bit worried about trusting them with the project.

What should we expect in an initial consultation with a web consultant? Do we need to have anything prepared in advance?

You should expect to get a demo of their process. Most web companies have a process that they believe in. Seeing this will give you a sense for what to expect. The process should emphasize the people, the scope and the timeframe.

Listen for evidence that the process and the projects are focused on results. Listen for signs that they understand Analytics. They should talk a bit about search engines, visitor psychology and future updates. This shows they care about the three most important things: traffic, conversion rates and easy updates.

How often should a website be re-designed or refreshed? If it’s working well, do you still need to change it periodically?

Website content should be updated regularly, but that doesn’t mean you have to blog everyday. In a recent post about how often to blog, we suggested that blogging and email frequency be aligned to the sales cycle in your industry.

But if the site performs well, it should be years before a complete redesign is necessary. The lifespan of a great website is three to five years!

What’s the most common web design mistake you see small businesses making right now? You don’t have to name names.
There are so many common mistakes! Here’s a quick list…

  1. Generic Navigation
    If the navigation looks like this… “About, Services, Blog, Contact” …then you’re probably missing opportunities to communicate quickly to visitors and indicate relevance to search engines.
  2. Contact Pages Without Forms
    If the contact page doesn’t have a form, it doesn’t have a thank you page, which means you can’t easily track leads in Google Analytics. A contact page with an email link is a problem.
  3. Long Paragraphs
    Remember, visitors are busy. They want to scan. Be concise.
  4. The Home Page Title Tag Says “Home”
    This little bit of text is the single most important piece of SEO real estate on the website. You wouldn’t write a book and call it “Book” so don’t make the title of your home page, “Home”
  5. Abandoned Spaceship Syndrome
    The about page should have names and faces of the team. Better yet, make a page for each person. People buy from people, so add personality to the site. Small business have an advantage here, but a lot of small companies miss the opportunity.

There are a dozen other common mistakes, but these ones are pretty easy to fix. Hope this is helpful!

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Photo Credit: jakeisdead via Compfight cc

You Should be Using HTML5, and Here Are 7 Reasons Why

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By Teddy Hunt

Web development has gradually become easier over time. Gone are the days of messing around on Geocities and creating eye-sore websites. The best new thing in web development is HTML5. If you’re not using it, you’re really missing out. Here are a few reasons you should be using HTML5 (any code used in the text was changed to brackets to avoid formatting issues).

HTML code

Image via Flickr by Sebastian Fuss

Neater Code

If you’ve dealt with anything other than HTML5, you know exactly how messy code can get. With HTML5, though, you can create clear, descriptive semantic code. You’ll be able to easily separate function from style. Before, you’d have to use [div] for each individual block of content. HTML5 has [article], [header], [footer], and [nav] tags, as well as a few other ones that make it much more organized.

Mobile Support

You want your site to be accessible across all platforms, regardless of device, right? Then it’s time to adopt HTML5. HTML5 is fully supported by mobile browsers, so you won’t have any issues with people on mobile devices unable to see your content. With Flash support being officially off the radar for mobile support, HTML5 is the next best option. HTML5 will let your users view your content in full screen. You can also define width and zoom settings.

Full Audio and Video Support

Remember the pains of trying to embed a video or a piece of audio onto your site? It usually involved a lot of tags and troubleshooting when it inevitably wouldn’t work. You’d end up with code to embed a video that would sprawl across ten or more lines! Thanks to HTML5, those days are long gone.

HTML5 treats video and audio similar to image tags, using instead of anything else. You’ll probably need to add a bit of extra code to get the video working for older browsers that don’t support HTML5, but even then that’s only five or six lines of extra code. Now you can finally enhance your content without a ton of confusing code.

Location Support

Taking a step from mobile devices, HTML5 fully supports geolocation. This can help in many ways. For example, if the customer is trying to figure out how much they’ll pay for shipping to get an item shipped to them, it’ll skip the multiple menus asking for location that they’d have to sit through otherwise. HTML5 will utilize whatever it can to get a user’s location — your wireless network connection, the GPS on your phone, your IP address, etc. You can, of course, allow the user to disable this feature should they want to do so.

The Storage of Content

The way content is cached for later viewing is unique with HTML5. It’s sort of like the older cookies method, combined with cloud storage. The data will still be there even after the browser is closed. You don’t have to worry about deleting cookies. Storing data in the browser means you can cache data and load previous data, which will reduce overall load times.

Games!

Developing games for HTML5 is a breeze thanks to the [canvas] tag. It’ll be a lot easier to troubleshoot any issues you have thanks to HTML5’s way of displaying code. There are quite a few tutorials about how to develop games in HTML5, using examples that make use of CSS and jQuery.

Everything Supports It

HTML5 was designed with everyone in mind and it shows — it’s supported by Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and even Internet Explorer. Even though older browsers support it, some won’t be able to display certain aspects of HTML5. Fortunately, you can just add a Javascript shiv to allow those items to be displayed on older browsers.

When it comes to developing your website, there are a ton of directions you can go. HTML5 should be the first thing that you consider. Not only does it work across all desktop browsers, but most mobile browsers support it as well. Stop alienating your audience and clean up your code by adopting HTML5.

Have you seen an increase in traffic since using HTML5? Leave a comment and let us know!

Author’s Bio: Teddy Hunt is a freelance content writer with a focus on technology. When not behind a computer, Teddy spends the majority of his free time outdoors and resides in Tampa, Florida.

Instant Impressions: 7 Popular Web Design Trends

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By Teddy Hunt

The Internet is continuously involving, and people are constantly finding new ways to attract others to their website. Design trends are about as shifty as fashion, so it’s important to keep your website updated with the latest that web design has to offer. With that said, here are seven of the most popular web design trends spicing things up in 2014.

Funky Typography

Funky as in experimental, not funky as in overly complex and unreadable. Graphic designers are having as much fun as ever playing around with fonts and injecting them with flare. These fonts are spicier than your average serif or san-serif like Times New Roman or Helvetica. As the web further expands and more people take to creating their own websites, the need to branch out and come up with unique fonts that stand out is more important than ever before.

Super-Sized Navigation Menus

There’s been a plethora of fancy navigation menus designed, tested, and approved over the past few years, with mobile responsive design (we’ll get to that later) and HTML5/CSS3 influencing that. But the most recent trend seems to involve super-sized menus that expand to huge blocks of content and links. These menus are commonly found on websites that publish great volumes of unique content in high volumes. Although it takes up a lot of space on the page, it provides visitors a broader choice to navigate your website.

Mobile-First Design

The purpose of mobile-first design is to develop your website so that it has a responsive layout that’s accessible by mobile users without sacrificing quality. Essentially, you want to cut of the excess fluff and keep the critical elements. From this perspective, it’s easier to scale up your website’s design to devices that have wider screens. Mobile-first design emphasizes the mobile experience and becomes the foundation for the entire layout. Just make sure that you’re not committing mobile web design mistakes when designing your website.

More Videos

Website visitors are spending less time reading text and more time watching videos and looking at pictures (infographics). With that in mind, it’s time to trash the boring blurbs about what your company can offer and showcase that point in video format (don’t make them too long, though).

Not only is this media format more popular today, but it’s also easily sharable on social media, resulting in more views and greater brand awareness.

Endless Scrolling

Guess what? Scrolling through an in-depth website is easier and faster than clicking through 25 different links to get access to the information you want — and graphic designers are noticing.

These websites aren’t cluttered with content on long scrolling pages, either.

Designers use new website design techniques to format and organize the content in a way that’s easy to read and comprehend. Endless scrolling design can change the layout and design of the page as your scroll further, making you forget you’re scrolling through a lot of information to begin with.

Simple and Subtle Color Schemes

color wheel

The days of eye-popping graphics, complex animations, and crazy color schemes are coming to an end — at least for now. If you’re a smart graphic designer, you’ll use one or two colors instead in the future. One of the more popular trends today is to use a single bright color and a single clean background color like red, teal, or orange (including images or black and white text on top). Not only is this effect minimalistic, but it’s user-friendly.

3D Transition Effects

Whether it’s in animated image galleries, elements, or navigation menus, 3D animations are becoming more popular by the day. You can create 3D effects using jQuery; although, CSS3 has slowly caught up. Unfortunately, not all browsers support these types of animations, so designers avoid using too many on one page. Check out these 3D animated code examples to work from if you want to give a shot.

What website design trends do you expect in the near future? Have you implemented any that make your website stand out better than before? Leave a comment and share your thoughts on the subject.

Author’s Bio: Teddy Hunt is a freelance content writer with a focus on technology. When not behind a computer, Teddy spends the majority of his free time outdoors and resides in Tampa, Florida.

Photo Credit: Viktor Hertz via Compfight cc

6 Reasons Poor Web Design Drives Traffic Away From Your Site

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By Teddy Hunt

The purpose of designing a website is to drive traffic to it. When it’s done well, you’ll get more views and effectively promote the product or service you’re selling. If you’re not getting the results you want, perhaps your website’s design just isn’t cutting it. Sure, you might think it’s as attractive as a pot of gold, but that doesn’t mean people who are visiting it will think so too.

Fortunately, some of your problems might just stem from fundamental design issues.

With that said, here are six reasons poor web design drives traffic away from your site, and how to fix it.

1. Your Design Includes a Hideous Background

The fastest way to drive traffic away from your website is to incorporate a background that’s hideous enough scare a blind man. A bad background is either overly busy, poorly contrasted, or animated. If you think your obnoxious background will keep users’ attention, think again.

Instead, use one single color for your background and keep it as simple as possible. If you use more than one color, make sure they compliment each other in a subtle way.

2. Your Design is Tough to Navigate

Getting people to visit your website is an accomplishment in and of itself, but if you’re not keeping them there then what’s the point. A website that’s tough to navigate is another way to keep people from coming back once they click the “x” on the top-right corner of the browser.

People don’t want to aimlessly search for what they want or need. Organize your website strategically so that users can easily navigate it without getting lost and left for dead.

3. Your Design Interrupts the User Experience

Even if your website is easy to navigate, annoying your visitors by constantly bombarding them with pop-up requests and ads will quickly have them running — or better yet, clicking — for the hills. In an online world filled with websites that cater to users’ wants and needs, yours needs to instantly satisfy your visitors without making them work too hard to feel that gratification. Keep the ads and requests to a minimum and you’ll do just that.

4. Your Design is Poorly Planned and Executed

With regard to planning, make sure the person you recruit to build the site is up to par. It is really step-one to your overhaul. If you’re not able to craft your own website, rely on experts who can do the job. Before you look to bring in a qualified individual or team, check yourself first. Make certain your company or organization has a clear vision and a strong reputation. This will ensure a quality hire.

Practically speaking, if you approach designing your website like an improv comedian does his or her act than chances are you’ll get more people leaving your website than he or she does laughs. Building and designing a website that serves its purpose — drives traffic and makes you money — takes time, effort, and patience. Before rushing into this project, carefully plan and prepare how you want your site to look by using a website wire frame to map it out.

With regard to planning, make sure the person you hire is on the same page. Recruiting and reigning in a top talent is really step-one to your design. If you’re not able to craft your own website, rely on experts who can do the job.

5. Your Design Doesn’t Have a Consistent Layout

An inconsistent website not only deters people from visiting it, but it makes your brand look unprofessional. When designing your (consistent) website, be sure to stay away from some of these bad design habits.

• Loud and distracting colors

• Large and bold fonts that seem to “SHOUT” and not “state”

• Small and unreadable fonts that users can’t decipher

• Visually unbalanced pages (poor text-to-image ratio)

• Spelling and grammar errors

• Inconsistent styles, color themes, and formats

• Not making sure the layout displays properly on all Internet browsers

If you pay extra attention to these points, you’ll be well on your way to designing a consistent website.

6. Your Design Includes Flash

Although animations can still have a place on your website (of course, on a very limited basis), it’s more strategic to use an HTML website because it’s properly indexed by search engines and it works on almost all modern devices. If your website visitors are accessing it on a smartphone and your website is Flash, chances are they’ll have trouble viewing it. Essentially, you want to stick to HTML websites so that you don’t waste your time and efforts designing.

If you keep some important points in mind, designing a website won’t seem as difficult as giving a heart transplant.

What are some other tips you can offer website designers looking to drive traffic? Leave a comment below.

Author’s Bio: Teddy Hunt is a freelance content writer with a focus on technology. When not behind a computer, Teddy spends the majority of his free time outdoors and resides in Tampa, Florida.

Benefits of Using a Website Builder

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By Zubin Kutar

If you want to start a new website, you have two options. You can either go through the long and frustrating process of creating code for every page, or simply use a website builder. Some of the most popular website builder tools in the market include Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, Volution, WordPress, GoDaddy, Webs, Yola, 1&1 and Homestead.

Here are some of the benefits of using website builder tools.

1. No need for technical expertise

To build a professional website, you don’t have to be a graphic designer or web designer. Even if you don’t have technical knowledge, you can use website builders to create an attractive and fully functional site. You can choose from a wide range of templates which allow you to customize the font styles and colors. In addition, you can add graphics, images and other design elements according to your needs. With just a few clicks, your site can be up and running within minutes.

2. Reduced time

One of the main disadvantages of hiring a professional designer is that it might take a long time before the site is ready. Creating a custom site requires a lot of time for writing and testing code. In addition, the web designer might also have other projects taking up his time, thus delaying your work even further. Since website builders come with inbuilt code and scripts, you can set up your site much faster. This also means that you don’t have to spend any time testing your inputs and parameters to see if they are functional.

3. Reduced cost

If you intend to use your site for business, it would be advisable to go for a custom website design. However, if you have a limited budget, a website builder can come in handy. Once your business becomes profitable, you can then hire an expert to upgrade your site. Website builders can also significantly cut down startup costs when you want to launch several websites.

4. Stock images

Photos and graphics play a very important role in enhancing the appearance of your web pages. Website builders usually come with a wide variety of free graphics and stock photos. This will save you the cost of having to hire a professional photographer or graphic designer. Since there are different kinds of stock photos, you are likely to find great images which are relevant to the theme of your site.

5. Drag and drop design

Once in a while, you might want to change the look and feel of your website. Instead of spending lots of time writing new code, you can simply use a website builder to make the desired alterations to your site. For instance, to move any of the elements in your site, all you need to do is drag it to its new position and drop it there. This means that the appearance of your site can be transformed in a matter of seconds.

6. Content management

Website builders make it easy for you to add and update content on your site. These tools offer you access to a ‘backroom’ area where you can post your text content, as well as upload images. In addition, you can edit the content just as you would with a word processing program. Website builders allow you to add as much content as you want, whenever you want.

What is your favorite website builder?

Author’s Bio: Zubin Kutar is the founder of an internet marketing blog where accomplished writers and bloggers share their tips, strategies and stories. Read some of his inspirational posts and connect with him on Google+.