Web Design Tips

Proper Maintenance Plan for Website

Proper Maintenance Plan for Website

Posted on by

Every things that is important to us needs to have a proper care and proper planning in order for it to maintain its stability in the world of business. Most of the people tend to do what is best but they lack of knowledge on how to implement what they planned. If you are planning to set up for a website, you better have a skill and knowledge to develop it or better ask the help of the web design company to make your business stand out.

The problem that is often encountered by the web design companies and individuals who started with this business is that they don’t have a good maintenance plan, of course if we are talking about money, most of this business people are willing to spend dollars just to have a quality change in their website. Skilled personnel must take charge of that plan that requires not only time but also the perseverance to implement what has been planned. A practical solution to this is to confirm that you have a good maintenance plan available in the agreement you made with your web designer so that changes can be easily implemented by your designer.

One of the most advisable solution is that each company should have a a flexible web design experts to work with the html editor and other related software. You must also educate them to have a better understanding of what they are doing because everybody in this field of business must have skills to design a website from nothing, if any person is capable of working with normal word processing programs than he can learn how to modify text and upload files to the server.
You will find many tasks to make website popular such as back link building, Article writing & posting and many other that normally do not comes under the responsibilities of the designer. These tasks can be search engine optimization and submissions and even link building which includes the activity of finding link partners can be contracted to companies which offers such services.

Members of your staff can learn few of these tasks by just going over the online help or e-books and newsletters. You will find that this will take some time but it gives you great flexibleness and ability to handle your task at your own time and in your budget. These are the best way to gain traffic in your business and to acquire stable back links. These things will happen only if you know how to make your plans work in your business.

The Google Website Optimizer and What It Can Do For You

The Google Website Optimizer and What It Can Do For You

Posted on by

The Google website optimizer is a program that runs multivariate and A/B split experiments on web pages. In running these experiments, these will helps determine which page elements result in the most online conversions. In its broader term it means that it is a web-based testing tool which helps website owners increase visitor conversion rates with the use of search engines. It allows the website owners the ability to serve up different pages to the different visitors, and having numbers of visitors help your business improve not only its web status but it also adds to your income.

Bringing more visitors to your website increase your ROI without throwing a bunch of cash at an expert, let you visitors tell you what they like. In terms of landing pages you must focus tightly focused on a particular product or service with the aim of getting the visitor to buy or take some form of action rapidly that will ultimately lead to a sale, this will lead directly to your site once they click on your link.

To optimize with the use of Google Website Optimizer as a tool the landing pages are the most important page of the conversion tunnel because people click the link on the landing page. Once they have gone onto the next page of the conversion tunnel, they have already shown some interest in your web design service. But be sure that your landing page has good content and informative information so that your visitors would move on to the next page of your post.

As a web designer, you may or may not use this information on your site, but Google website optimizer is a good tool to have  in your toolbox for your potential clients. You can compare a text heavy page vs. a quick and to the point page, a left layout vs. right layout and a facts vs. aspirations page. This is just few of the numerous things you can do; there are many things you can change on a page that might influence your costumers.

If you are interested in using the Google website optimizer doesn’t hesitate to join because, it is available to everyone. All you have to do is sign up for an ad words without spending more money. Just follow all the instructions provided and fill all those questions for you to start optimizing your website.

3 Quick Guides in Increasing Your Website Conversion

3 Quick Guides in Increasing Your Website Conversion

Posted on by

Every online marketers and webmasters know that traffic that doesn’t convert is dead. In an e-commerce website boosting the website conversion rate is vital. The actual website conversion rate is the ratio of the number of people who actually convert on the site versus the total number of visitors in the site for the same given period of time. Ideally, the higher your traffic the higher the conversion rate will be, since more people will be coming to the form, download page, purchase page, etc. However, there are instances that the large volume of traffic does not translate into conversion. So, here are 3 quick guides in boosting your website’s conversion rate.

Quick Guide 1: Group your target audience.

Identify who are your target audiences and create a page with layouts and contents that are suitable for the taste of the specified target audience. For example, you have both teen and professional audience, you can segment and create a page that would entice the teens and create another page dedicated for working professionals. Because, obviously, you’re teen visitors have different preferences and taste than the professionals.

This would make them feel special. It could help in getting there interested in how you can help them. By personalizing their page, you can speak to them and build a connection in order to get them to contact you.

Quick Guide 2: Offer fewer choices

Research in online shopping shows that people do not like TOO many choices. If they are given too many choices, they tend not make a choice at all. You might assume that your website layout is idiot-proof, but people who are new to your business might not feel the same.

The solution is to de-clutter your website. Do not provide too many options and too many buttons, which may cause confusion. Try to create the flow as simple as possible.

Quick Guide 2: Provide an tempting call for action

Entice your visitors. Capture their attention upon the first their glance of your website. Anyone who comes across on your website is important, some of them may not buy or fill out the form today but they might come back tomorrow or refer your site to someone they knew. It is very important and necessary to entice your website visitors, and you must do everything to get them to contact or leave their contact details for you.

5 Factors That Influence Buying Decisions Online

5 Factors That Influence Buying Decisions Online

Posted on by

In selling your product or services online is not much different than selling it on a brick-and-mortar store. That is because people who purchase product or services online are not really that different from those people who purchase offline. There are many factors that influences the buying decisions online; most of them are actually are uncontrollable. Here are top five factors that influence the buying decision of people who shop online.

  1. Security. One of the most important things to consider in ecommerce web design is the issue of security. Most of the consumers who use online for shopping are educated people. They have read up incidents on cybercrimes and very concern on cyber security matters. It is important to convince your website visitors that their information, both personal and financial, is handled with confidence and care. If you can assure your visitor that your site is safe, then you are one step closer in gaining a customer.
  2. Right attitude. Your attitude in approaching customer would greatly affect on how they react towards the product or services you are offering. In the case of online marketing, you can show positive attitude by answering questions promptly and politely. Do not be rude to customers who ask a lot of question but do not make purchase at all. Just because a person has not made a purchase in the past does not mean that she won’t make a purchase in the future. The saying “Customer is always right” might be a cliché but it is true. You can win a hesitant customer by using a positive approach towards them.
  3. Privacy. In addition to security, online consumers are concerned about privacy. Building trust in your customer takes time, but it could help to gain their trust faster if you assure your customer that you will guard their personal information with absolute care. Having a Privacy Policy page on your website is very essential. Privacy is very important to online shoppers, so if you are planning to gain their trust and confidence you should have comprehensive and clear privacy policy on your website
  4. Quality. The quality of the product or the services you offer is one of the major factors in the success of your online business. SEO and paid advertising can bring visitors to your site but you cannot force them to buy your product, if the product you’re offering doesn’t meet their standards. As they say, “you can the horse to water but you cannot force the horse to drink.” In order to get them to purchase online you have to ensure them that product or services you is of outmost quality and the money they will be spending will worth it.
  5. Appeal to emotion. This is one of the “uncontrollable” and “unexplainable” factors in buying influence. Lot of people buy for emotional reasons and defend their purchases logically. There are customers who buy in the spun of the moment because the product appeals to them in emotional level. If you could connect to customer in emotional level, then you win yourself a customer of a lifetime.

In conclusion, you have to remember that each person buy for a different reasons. Selling online doesn’t only involve technical stuffs but you have also considered the other intangible factors like emotion and trust.

Web Design Tips in Reducing Load Time

Web Design Tips in Reducing Load Time

Posted on by

One of the most critical aspects of web design is the consideration of web page load time. Load time is very essential in the success of every website, may it be a personal website, corporate website or an ecommerce site. Generally, people surf the internet to look for information, and they want it fast! If you cannot provide the information they needed within few seconds, most likely, they will hit the back button and move to another website, probably your competitors’ website. Which means a website owner lost another potential customer.

Sophisticated and dazzling website is useless if it takes forever to load. In essence, slow loading web sites turn off visitors which could be your potential customer. So, here are some tips in how to increase the load time of your website.

Trim down the Graphics

Avoid using heavy graphic. Graphic could surely liven your website but too much of it can hurt the performance of your website. Try to use fewer amounts of images while maintaining the look of the website design. If you have large images that are very important for the website, use section like “Gallery” to reduce web page load time.

Minimize the use animated GIF’s and flash. Yes, they are cute but they usually slow down the loading times so use sparingly. Wherever possible use very few animated gifs and flash files.

Optimize graphics. Optimize your graphics by using image editing software like Photoshop, GIMP or whatever editor you like. Appropriately resized and cropped images will greatly reduce the loading times of a page and at the same time maintaining their integrity.
Trim down the Codes

Optimize HTML files. Remove all unnecessary codes which usually happen when using an HTML generator, remove some extra or empty tags get inserted in the code such as breaking spaces, block quotes, unnecessary extra space, blank lines etc. Even if you manually coded your HTML files, check your website for empty and unnecessary HTML tags. Apply appropriate DOCTYPE and close all HTML markup elements. The browser will then have less work to do matching elements. Clean coding of a web page will not only reduce website load time but also increases your text-to-code ratio and search engine spiders do not have to spend time deciphering irrelevant stuff.

Compress JavaScript and CSS files. You can compress your CSS file by using shorthand external CSS. This can help make your website design code compact as well as clean and its proper usage helps reduce website loading time. You can do this by defining most common font styles, images etc. in one single external CSS, then all you have to do is insert the same tags repetitively on different pages by just calling the CSS. The other method is to compress the JavaScript and CSS files through the Minify Engine or by using a WordPress Plugin (if you are using WordPress Plaform) called WP Minify which actually grabs all your .js and .css files, sends them to the Minify Engine, compresses them and replaces the old codes with the new ones. It is safe to use but make sure to backup you file before replacing.

Other Stuffs

Avoid using multimedia files. If it’s not the “life and death” factor of your website avoid using multimedia files especially putting on background music. It’s actually irritating by the long run and it could hurt your website load time badly.

Use fewer redirects, Iframes, PhP and database queries can also help reduce website loading time. If you have a database driven website, it is faster and more secure to place your content on one server and your database on another. And if you can afford it, it is advisable to host on a high-end server with fast connectivity to decrease website loading time.

If you have implemented the suggestions above check your load time by using plugins such as Fasterfox in Firefox or with a free web page analyzer you can found on the internet.

The Power of Images in Web Design

The Power of Images in Web Design

Posted on by

I guess everyone is familiar with the line, “A picture paints a thousand words.” You can have a website filled with text and numbers, they might be very useful but your visitors can get bored on it within seconds if that’s all they could see. An image or a picture is a very powerful tool. In early civilization, kings and other nobles relied on paintings to show them what their intended looked like before signing a marriage contract, spouse unseen.

Over the years, this kind of system has been perfected with the use of advance technology. Nowadays, online marketers rely on digital image to showcase their product and the online shoppers rely on digital images to show them what an item looks like before committing to a purchase, merchandise unseen.

Several studies have shown that image posses a very powerful influence in the buying attitude. Thus, it establishes how important images are in web design. I have researched two major ways on how images can add value to your web design.

  1. Images appeals to the soul

    2. Images have a kind of unexplainable effect on the psychological side of each person. According to Dr. David Kirsh, Professor of Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California “illustrations are also used to help explain hard concepts … they save memory because they allow the viewer to look at all the facets of the situation at once rather than sequentially as in a paragraph of prose, they save the cognitive effort of visualization, and they allow for more ready understanding of the text, particularly when the correspondence between textual element and visual element is easy to map.”

    Several researches emphasized that there is a need for an image to explain technical items, and it is easier to retain facts if it is accompanied with images.

    On the book “The Psychology of Graphic Images: Seeing, Drawing Communicating” written by Manfredo Massironi, he states, “Because we can readily interpret them, drawings seem unproblematic. Because they show what we see, they appear faithful. Because they make us see what the person who drew them intended to show us, we consider them reliable.”

    To sum this up, image is an excellent way to promote your product. With the proper use of image, your website could look more credible and reliable.

  2. It can help to your SEO campaign

    3. Using images as part of SEO campaign is one of the most overlooked methods in SEO. With effective optimization image can drive considerable amount of traffic into your website. They can be used as bait because images provide site visitors instant visual stimulation.

    When using images, add keywords to the title field and add a keyword then brief description to the image description field. After uploading the image, a new screen appears with these fields above the text/picture box.

    Name your images properly. Make the image names of your files match what is actually represented in the file. Use dashes (-) between the words of images, rather than underscores (_). That way search engines pick it up better and will not class it as one word.

    Make use of the power of Alt attribute of the img tag. Search engine also gives importance to alt tag to determine the page rank of the website. In fact, Google indexes the text given in the ALT tags of images. The ALT attribute can also useful in conveying message to the user because it shows when the user pass over the image with his mouse.

    Images can be very helpful when used properly. It does not only enhance the aesthetic outlook of your website but it can also help in increasing your ranking. Not to mention, image can help you convince the potential customer to hit the BUY button.

Benefits of Website Validation

Benefits of Website Validation

Posted on by

Even a perfectly running website needs to be validated. Before we discuss the reason why we need to validate a website, we will discuss first what it means to be validated? Website validation is process of writing and designing a website in a ‘cleanest’ possible way and testing it against industry standards.

I would like to quote an excerpt from W3C website on how they view the importance of validating the website. It states: “Validation is a process of checking your documents against a formal Standard, such as those published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for HTML and XML-derived Web document types. It serves a similar purpose to spell checking and proofreading for grammar and syntax, but is much more precise and reliable than any of those processes because it is dealing with precisely-specified machine languages, not with nebulously-defined human natural language.”

Here are some benefits you could get in validating your website.

1) Compatibility

When you fully validated your website, you don’t have to worry that your website will display unpredictably in different browsers. For instance, your website may work perfectly on Internet Explorer but it would have problem displaying on Mozilla Firefox and Safari because you “coded it differently.” The validation process makes the code uniform, which also means that you will not have an unprofessional and unpredictable looking website or run the risk of losing potential customer who does not use Internet Explorer.

2) Search Engine Optimization

A website with “clean” codes are more SEO friendly than the website with many “loose coding.” Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing indexed “clean” pages faster than those who are not. The easier the search engines indexed your site the faster they can find your content. Another thing is, if your website is not validated it is more possible that search engines will place more emphasis on the wrong part of your code as a result your site could be missing out on being found for the most appropriate searches.

3) Accessibility

Validation could make your site readable. It would allow you to use many accessibility techniques such as the use of ALT tag on images.

4) Faster loading

Validating your website can help a lot in improving its load time which is very essential in creating good impression to your visitors. Commonly, conventional websites utilizes tables and use extensive amount of tags for formatting the page structures as well as the content. These could contribute in the slowing down of your load time.
However, the use of CSS separates the structure from the content and gives the browsers less code to trawl through before they can successfully render the page. Validation also aids the browser in displaying the site faster as there is no ‘loose coding’ for the browser to get tangled up in or waste time trying to ‘fix’.

Designing Web Sites For Search Visibility

Designing Web Sites For Search Visibility

Posted on by

One of the major goals of putting up a website is to make your business visible online, because there is no point in creating a website if are the only person to notice it. Your site must be visible to internet users every time they search for the keyword you are working on. Search results in the three major search engines are the biggest source of traffic to any website.

So, whether you are to create a new website for your company or just redesign the existing one, you have to take into consideration the search issue. The most important thing to consider in building a website is that search should be a key consideration at every stage of the process, whether it is choosing the domain name, selecting a provider, setting requirements, producing comps, coding or site deployment.

Here’s some idea on how to fit your web design into the process of natural search in search engines:

Position content and language that reflects the way users search

Currently, search engines are still very literal in getting results for searches and the truly effective semantic intelligence still lies far ahead. So, you have to place content and use language that reflects the way users’ search, in order to rank for those keywords. Study and research for your keyword and your target niche for better understanding of your target audience.

Ensure that your website is both crawable and indexable by search engines

Submit your websites URL to major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing to be crawled and indexed. It would also help a lot if you install Sitemap on your website and deploy a robot.txt. A website that is design without search engine in mind can instantly render a once-thriving natural search program into total obscurity.
Incorporate search as both a business and technical necessity before planning has even started.

Search should be a major consideration in building a website. If search is not a consideration and top priority early in the planning phase, then it will be 10 times harder and more expensive to try to re-engineer at the end of or after the project.

Avoid the creation of URL canonicalization issues.

If you are to re-launch a website with a different URL take the canonical issue into consideration. For instance, if you change phone numbers the phone company will leave a recorded message telling the new number to the person who called your old number. It is the same when you change your URL and you want redirect the visitors into your new URL. This is the effect a 301 permanent redirect has on a search engine. It applies the old URL and backlinks to the new URL with this method the search engine is happy, and your site is happy.

Review Your Analytics Reports and Your Log Files

Analytics reports and log files are very important in investigating what keyword is currently gaining in terms of traffic, visibility, revenue, and conversions. With the help of analytics report and log files you would have basis of which areas of your site you should be focusing on and which area you should let go.

Making Visitors Stay Longer At Your Site

Making Visitors Stay Longer At Your Site

Posted on by

Driving traffic to your website is only winning half the battle, the other half is making the visitors to perform positive responses such as buying your product or clicking through your PPC ads. In order to do that, you have to keep every visitor in your website stay longer. A one-minute browsing is enough time to convince your prospective customer to click the “buy” button. You have to provide something in your website. That something must be interesting enough that your visitors would stay on your website.

Here are few suggestions on how make the visitor stay longer in your website.

Grab Visitors’ Attention: This is the first step in making your visitor stay longer, design your site homepage that it grabs visitors’ attention as fast as possible and provides what they are looking for right away. Make your landing page looks professional and visually appealing at the same time.

Easy Navigation: Make the navigation easy for your visitor by designing your website in such a way that users find it easy to maneuver around. Organize the structure of your website in such a way that the visitors will find easily what they are looking for. Otherwise they get frustrated and move on to another website that is easy to navigate and understand.

Provide Fresh and Valuable Content: This means you have a website loaded with useful information that is relevant to your niche. Remember that the internet is all about information. Fresh and valuable contents are both valuable in the SEO and web design aspect of marketing.

Put Value To Your Visitors’ Opinion: Website visitors love to interact and want their opinion to be noticed. Allow your visitors to comment on or even criticize your articles, product, pictures or videos. This does not only make your website visitors stay longer but it could also persuade them to share their opinions. This is actually a good method of getting ideas to improve your site. It also gives thse visitors a feeling of importance. Peoples who are given the chance to interact in the virtual world are more likely to stay at a website for an extended amount of time.

Offer free products or samples: “Tease” your visitor so that they will ask for more. You can provide some free trial or demo tour of your product. You can also provide guideline or tutorial related to your product or services. Provide a page or portion of your website where your visitors can download samplers of your offered products. You can even include a link and information in the product that you offer and allow individuals who download it to advertise and sell it, or even give it away to others on their websites.

Choosing Right Domain For Your Website

Choosing Right Domain For Your Website

Posted on by

Having a quality web design for your online store is good, but having a design is just a first step in the ladder. The next step is to publish it online, and to do that you have to select first the domain name that would represent your website. A domain name is an identification label that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet, based on the Domain Name System (DNS). A domain name is also known as the website URL or uniform resource locator. It is a unique name that would represent your website in the vast cyberspace.

Selecting the right domain name for your website is one of the most important business decisions you can make. It is crucial to choose the best domain name suited for your business if you want to attract quality traffic to your website. The domain name or URL will not only be the face of your website or business on the web, it also identifies the path for web search engines to find your site. Choosing the right domain name needs the same amount of care and consideration as you do in the actual web design process itself.

Here are some tips on choosing a right domain name that would represent your website in the cyberspace.

  1. Choose a short and easy to spell domain name.
    Simplicity is the keyword here. It does no good to have a website, if no one can find you because your domain name is too difficult to spell or too long to remember. Although, you are allowed to have a domain name up to 67 characters, but you have to keep in mind that your customer need to remember your domain name. Be practical and use short and easy to remember domain name.

    Avoid using cute names as well. You may think it’s cool to have a domain name spelled “fenikz” instead of Phoenix, but your target customer may not be able to find your website because of the misspelled name.

  2. Choose the right extension for your domain name.
    There are so many different extensions you could choose from. If your website is an online business the best option is the .com extension. The “.com” is the most popular domain name extension. Most people will try .com first whenever they are searching for a website. Unless your website has a special purpose, try to register a “.com”. If you are in education, the “.edu” extension is the best suitable for your website. If your site is geared towards providing information, then “.info” could be the best choice. However, in most cases, a .com will be a good choice.

    Other available extensions are the “.org”, “.net”,”.biz”,”.tv” and a lot more. You may also use the country extensions such as “.us” for United States, “.uk” for United Kingdom and others are available on the internet.

  3. Make your domain name it relevant to your content.
    Your domain name is not necessarily had to be your company’s name, but it much better if it is. But incase that your company’s name is not available to be your domain name, choose other name that could be representative of it in some way.

    Try to keep your domain name descriptive and relevant to your content. Make it to the point that if someone reads it or hears it, they would immediately have some general idea of what is your website all about. For instance, your website is selling toys and your business is located at Los Angeles area, it is smart to have a latoystore.com domain name. It is suggestive and intuitive. This helps your potential customer easier to find you when searching for what you are offering.

  4. Avoid using hyphen ( – ), underscore ( _ ) and numbers.
    Hyphen, underscore and numbers are valid characters in naming a domain. But practicality will tell you that is not clever to use them. Imagine a domain name claremont-design.com, it is a valid domain but it has a very high possibility that your potential customer will end up typing claremontdesign.com. According to research, most people don’t type hyphen, underscore or number in the URL.

Remember that your chosen domain name for your online business will be the first impression that the customer will have. Your website will be highly dependent on your web hosting and domain registration, so do not take the selection of domain name for your online business lightly at all.