More often nowadays we are seeing video clips on business websites. They shouldn’t be too long; the viewer will get turned off by 50 minutes of “why we are great” and “here’s a description of everything we sell“. Short (30 second) infomercials are the current thing. Almost everyone has, or knows someone with, a camera that takes short video clips (even cheap mobile camera phones). Uploading to YouTube is usually the first option but it looks more professional to embed video into your own pages and obviously without an advert appearing for your competitors. Here are a few reasons why you should consider a video clip on your webpages: Video proves your…
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Designing a Landing Page
The Christmas shopping has begun. People are searching for the best deals and are purchasing more than they have all year. Online advertising can be a great tool in order to get the word out about your special offers and landing pages can be a great tool to help those eager customers convert. Let’s start with the basics. A landing page is, in the most general form, a page that a visitor views after clicking on a link. This could be your home page or any other page on your site, but I would like to focus on custom pages. We previously discussed why landing pages are so valuable and how they…
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Tips for Effective Website Redesign
Thinking about giving your website an upgrade? Keeping your website fresh and modern is essential for engaging customer interest. An up-to-date website signals an active business that is on board with the latest trends. A website redesign can sometimes be tougher than creating from scratch however. There are tough decisions to be made; mixing the components that are already working well with new elements can be a tricky balance. Consider the following key points when planning a major overhaul. Re-identify your target audience. Chances are your business has changed significantly since you developed your previous website. Perhaps you have discovered your niche, or conversely have opened up new audiences and avenues…
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Pondering Clean Web Design
Clean web design is part of an overall design trend towards websites that are intuitive, user-oriented, and minimalist. It means stripping back unnecessary elements and bringing that which is most important to the fore, and arranging it in a way that is clear and concise for the viewer. Doing this while still maintaining the personality and functionality of a website can be a tricky balance, but it is a worthy aspiration. Clean websites look fresh and modern, and will help to fulfil the overall goals of the site. Clean Web Design Tips And Best Practises Clean up the content. Before you can design an efficient website, your content must be…
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Web Design For Search Engine Rankings
There are two main viewers who should be catered to in any good web design: your target audience, and search engines. The latter may seem rather strange to some, given that search engines don’t exactly have eyes or a buyer’s agenda. It’s important to realise, however, that search engines do in fact “read” your website in a very specific way. By scanning it and looking for certain criteria, they’re trying to figure out whether your website is a good result to give to people searching for a particular phrase. Knowing these criteria and how to make your site look good to search engines is a crucial part of web design.…
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Web Content Topic Ideas To Smash Writer’s Block
Having trouble thinking about what topics will engage your viewers? Great website content will never go out of style. Not only will it engage your visitors and encourage them to share what they find, it’s also hugely important for SEO. That said, it’s not always easy to hit the topic sweet spot. Here are some tips that will help to develop compelling topic ideas for your web content: 1. Write what you know. The hardest question of content is what to write. The fact is, you probably already have the answer. Your content should be related to your specific industry or business, utilising your knowledge and experience. A lot of…
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Stand Out with Google Web Fonts
Text on the Web has been boring for too long. There’s around half a dozen typefaces that most sites tend to use, so it’s about time that the online typeface world gets an upgrade. There has been a lot of recent blogging about Google Web Fonts. Google Web Fonts is a free open source collection of hundreds of fonts that you can include in your Web pages. From its launch in 2010, the collection has soared to over 400 choices. Here are some great reasons why you should use Google Web Fonts: It makes your site stand out from the crowd You can select fonts that better match your real…
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Benefits of Web Site User Testing
When it comes to creating websites, companies can often be too close to the project to think like a customer, and identify what motivates them to visit a site and buy from it. Understanding how customers navigate your website and how they interpret the information they find there is an important part of your Web design process and something that is often overlooked, or a poorly planned afterthought. Website user testing can provide important, unbiased insight into how customers really interact with your Web site, enabling you to understand their way of thinking, identify issues that you haven’t considered and discover the problems that can drive customers away from your…