There are thousands (10,000-plus) of WordPress themes out there. So many that it would take days on end to search through them all. So how do you narrow it down to find the perfect one for your site? Choosing the right theme is obviously important – the right one should give your content pizzazz, keeping it responsive across devices, while also loading in the blink of an eye. Yet with so many themes in the pool, it can be a rather daunting task to pick the best one possible. Before buying a theme, or investing your time in customizing one, be sure to read through this list of do’s and…
-
-
Ad Blockers are breaking the Internet
Ad blockers don’t just block ads on the internet – they actually break websites such as British Airways and Vodafone, a new study has found. According to tests conducted on the UK’s 100 most popular websites, ad blockers didn’t just block pop-ups, but accidentally corrupted useful parts of a website, such as an airline check-in screens or retail order tracking pages. If you were browsing, all you would see is an error message or simply a chunk missing on screen, but no explanation for what was behind it. In the study by London ad-tech company Oriel, the researchers tested 24 common ad blockers, including Adblock, Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin,…
-
Ten reasons why YOU need video on your website
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Website Contact Page Tips
Your homepage is your website’s most important page. Your contact page is the second most important. OK, well for e-commerce/shopping cart sites it might be the third or fourth most popular page, but either way your contact page is jolly important. The ultimate purpose of many sites is to encourage potential customers to make contact with you. Think of your contact page as a lead generation form. The key to a successful contact page is simplicity and accessibility. It’s important to include clear contact details. Adding an email link is often a good way to go, but if you want to elicit further information, then you need to be sure…
-
How Can I Update My Website?
There are few indicators more off putting to someone browsing the web than a site that is not up to date. Potential clients will quickly look elsewhere if News is several weeks old or special offers have expired. After all if the organisation doesn’t care enough to maintain a current profile on its site, will it care for you? The problem can be that it is the wrong sort of website. It was only a few years ago that every website needed a Webmaster. Only he, or she, had the technical knowledge to change or update the content. He had to be given the new details and find time to…
-
How Colours Help Make Websites Successful
You might not realise how important colours are in web design. If a website is green, it might as well be blue; it doesn’t matter. And while I thought this myself for a long time, I recently came to the conclusion that the colour is actually going to make a huge difference and express something different to your audience. There are psychological effects behind each colour and tone, therefore I decided to tell you more about them. Human senses get excited about lots of stuff. One of the most effective ways to excite somebody is to project a red hue colour onto the walls of their room. It’s been done…
-
Pay Per Click Landing Pages
Pay-per-click campaign management with Google can be very complicated, especially for someone with little or no experience. There are many tricks of the trade that newcomers have to learn in order to be successful. One of those tricks is to focus your landing page in order to channel visitors and turn them into a conversion. You are paying Google to put your ads on the top of the page because you want people to visit your site and accomplish something there. You must do everything you can to make that happen. When someone clicks on your ad, you usually don’t want to send them straight to your home page. A…
-
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…