When you are building a website it is tempting to include all of these eye-catching features to make your website “cool” or memorable. But is that what is best for business?

Well, it depends, but most of the time the answer is NO!

A graphic feature of a website that may seem appealing to the business owner or person building the website may be distracting to someone visiting the website in search of important information. Highly complex sites are likely to lose visitors quickly if they cannot easily access the information they are seeking.

Perhaps most importantly, search engines such as Google are favoring more and more sites with simple, yet high quality content. Websites with lots of ads and fancy features are appearing further and further down in the search results.

Free yourself!

Pop-ups? Get rid of them. More than two or three of the most important social media “share” buttons? Get rid of those, too. Obtrusive prompt to “subscribe,” “follow,” or any other action? You get the point…

You should seek to get rid of anything that does not contribute to the very simple function of your website or to the content itself.

People are spending less and less time on websites, so make sure that when they visit yours, they are digesting the content rather than closing pop-ups and ads and navigating other distracting features.

KISS your website

Keep It Simple, Stupid!

Yes, your computer has hundreds of fancy fonts. Cursive. Calligraphy. Many others.

More important than looking unique is being readable. Make your font is simple, large, and stands out from the background.

Speaking of backgrounds, minimise the number of colours on the website, period. The majority of the page should be one colour or one non-distracting background image. Other colours should only be used to highlight important things such as your navigation bar or contact information.

Your navigation bar should be easily found and used. The most effective style and location is a horizontal bar at the top right of the page where it does not get in the way of the important content. A vertical bar on the left side of the page is also a good option.

Is the empty space on your page driving you crazy? Good!

Don’t succumb to the urge to fill all of the space on your page. Negative space actually helps direct the website visitor’s attention to the most important thing, the content. Features such as side bar images, quotes, links or other features distract the reader from the main article or information.

Give your audience the information they need in the simplest, most effective manner possible. Make sure that Google not only can find you, but also that it wants to find you. And Google likes simple.

What simpler website is there than Google itself?

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Is that how you are approaching your website? It may not be a bad strategy to use, but when will you know that your website is “broken” and when it needs to be “fixed?”

Back when it was first created, your website may have been a powerful tool with all the cutting-edge technology and techniques. However, the world of web design has changed immensely over the past few years. What was a state-of-the-art site may now be an outdated and ineffective representation of your business.

These are some of the top signals to watch for as your website ages:

1. Confusing Navigation

In any business environment, the original goal of a long-term project is rarely even recognisable after a few years. Things in today’s world change very quickly, and your business has to change with the world to have continued success.

The same idea applies to your website. The intended purpose of your website and the needs of your audience may be very different now from what they were when the site first when online. Every time you add or change a page, feature or section on your website, you are stretching the effectiveness of the original design. Eventually, you end up with a confusing and jumbled navigation that makes your viewers want to turn around and run to a competitor as quickly as possible!

2. A Dated Aesthetic

No matter how hard you try to ignore it, the reality of web design, digital graphics and the Internet in general is that they are constantly evolving. Remember when the idea of “frames” was a revolutionary concept in web design? Now, that same concept is ancient history!

It is essential to remember that your website is a representation of your entire business. If your site looks old and out-dated, your visitors are going to assume that your business is behind the times, and that can be very damaging to your bottom line. If you haven’t taken some time lately to really think about the image your website is portraying to your customers, you need to!

3. A Low Conversion Rate

Although it is true that attracting visitors is an essential part of your site’s success, all those visitors won’t do you any good if they cannot be converted. Whether you are promoting a newsletter, building an informational community or selling a product, your conversion rate is key. While the exact conversion rate you are looking for depends on the type of business you have and the goal you are trying to achieve, your website should be producing the results you need.

If your conversion rates have been steadily decreasing for a while, there may be not be a clearer signal that your site needs work. Compare your current conversion rate to both historical numbers and current industry rates. That should tell you whether or not your website needs a redesign.

You can also ask a professional web designer for his/her opinion on your current website. A designer should be able to give you an analysis on the status of your site. Then, you can make an informed decision on a redesign.

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Embracing the age of social media and using it to your benefit

Social media “sharing” is not only free advertising, but it is the best kind of free advertising—it is the digital form of word-of-mouth advertising. It has become so widely used for sharing information that it is often a significant disadvantage for a company to not integrate social media tools into their website as it makes it more difficult for existing and potential customers to share their experiences with your product or company.

When someone visits your website to learn about, say, a product or an upcoming event and they find the information they are seeking, if they were to “Like” the website on Facebook, anyone who is a friend of theirs is likely to see the “Like.” Since people trust product recommendations from their friends more than from paid advertising on television or radio, they are more likely to also visit your website to also learn about your product or service.

Twitter and Pinterest work similarly. If someone visits your page to review a product, they can then “Tweet” a link to your website along with a short message about what they learned or they can “Pin” it to their profile of interests so that all of their followers can see it.

Choosing the right platforms

With so many social media platforms available, which ones should you use? The platforms are not all born equal and the different features will benefit you in different ways.

It is worth experimenting with all of the available platforms, and deciding which two or three your company can use most effectively.

Facebook is appropriate for most companies and organisations because of how widely it is used and because of its versatility in sharing pictures, news articles, links, and company information. It is also easy for people to discuss the shared content in comment sections. However, recently there have been complaints from users about their content not reaching all of their followers unless they pay to ‘increase reach’, which is turning many companies off.

Twitter is a valuable platform for any company that either depends on or produces frequent news stories. It represents an efficient tool for sending and receiving news quickly. If your company wants to ‘join the conversation’, become an authority in the niche, or can benefit heavily from networking with other professionals, then Twitter is a good choice.

Pinterest allows your supporters to share their interest in your product and related products on a personalised profile. Your profile on Pinterest will be made up of ‘boards’ which you fill with images. This makes Pinterest a great tool for particularly visual companies, such as products brands or anything related to fashion and design.

LinkedIn is a great platform for professional networking and sharing information about events. Often B2B products and services benefit from having their content shared on Twitter.

And finally Instagram is becoming more and more popular with E-commerce stores and visual brands. You are only able to post images, and the platform is mobile based. You are able to use hashtags to get right in front of your target audience, so this platform is ideal for B2C businesses trying to build a visual identity.

Making your content shareable

In most cases, you will have the option—either through your website designer, or through your content management system—to incorporate prominently visible buttons on your webpage that allow visitors to instantly share content through one or more social media outlets.

It is essential to make these tools easy to find and use so that your loyal customers and supporters can share your products or messages with their networks.
You’ll find that in fact many people are looking for content to share to increase their own reputation and personal / company brand, so not getting the share buttons upfront and visible could turn out to be a big mistake on your part.

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Eye Movement and the “F” Pattern

Our eyes move across webpages at incredible speeds, and studies have shown that they move in a fairly consistent pattern that is very different from what most people would assume. This dominant pattern looks a lot like the letter “F.”

When a webpage first appears on a user’s screen, the user’s eyes immediately move horizontally across the top section of the content. Then, the eyes move down vertically before reading horizontally a second time. This second horizontal movement of the eyes is typically shorter than the first one. The user reads slightly less material, or spends slightly less time processing content on this second step.

Finally, the eyes move down the left side of the content. Some users spend a fair amount of time systematically scanning this portion of the content (creating a solid stripe in the eye-tracking study above), while others move quickly through it before moving on to the next page.

Every user has a slightly different scanning pattern, but in general, almost all of them roughly resemble an “F.” The most-viewed areas of the webpages in the heat map images above, highlighted in red, clearly show the “F” reading pattern.

Why Does it Matter?

Since the goal of a webpage is to communicate content as effectively as possible, the “F” pattern plays a major role in professional web design. It shows that users simply do not read all of your content word-by-word. In fact, it is extremely rare for a viewer to read all of the text on a webpage.

This dominant reading pattern also tells web designers that, to get the intended message across, all of the most important content must be included in the first two paragraphs. Some users will actually read this portion word-by-word as intended. However, most will read only a portion of the second paragraph.

The “F” pattern also proves the importance of placing essential content within bullet points and sub-headings. During the final step of reading, most users will pick up on content placed down the left side of the content, especially if it is marked to stand-out with a symbol or darker text colour. Studies show that viewers are much more likely to read the first two words of the content in the lower areas of the page than they are to read the third.

Web design is all about communicating the intended message to the target audience, so the eye-movement pattern of the audience is extremely important. Without a good understanding of the “F” pattern, your message may be only partially communicated, and the overall web design will be far less effective.

The post “F” Web Designs: Creating a Readable Layout appeared first on Graphics & Website Design Portishead.

While some industries have experienced little change over the past few decades, web design looks almost nothing like it did when it began to grow in the early 1990s. New techniques and methods are changing the web design process on a daily basis, and the old ways of design must be continually phased-out.

Overthrowing the Old

So what is so bad about the old ways of website design? Compare them to the days before the invention of the printing press. Before this powerful invention, monks recorded all documents by hand. While this was a highly-skilled method that produced some of the most beautiful artefacts we have today, it also took an astonishingly long time. When the printing press finally arrived, the creation of documents was suddenly much cheaper and available to everyone. This invention gave people the vital ability to communicate messages almost instantaneously, and eventually led to the Reformation.

During the early days of web design, the only way to create websites involved hand-crafting designs in graphics software packages and converting them into basic HTML. While it is still possible to create webpages this way, it is extremely expensive, inefficient and requires a lot of specialised skill. The old ways of web design simply do not provide the flexibility and efficiency demanded by today’s marketplace.

How Direct Marketing Changed Everything

Direct marketing generally refers to a marketer’s ability to communicate and sell directly to his/her customers. This ability to sell directly to large groups of consumers from a distance led to the development of many new marketing methods and tests to determine what techniques actually work. In the past, it took weeks to test and refine marketing messages, but the speed and efficiency of modern web design now allows marketers to perform testing in a fraction of that time.

Welcoming the New

Many web designers continue to struggle with the old ways of thinking, believing that web pages must be carefully-crafted, packed with graphics and designed over a long period of time. However, recent studies have shown that graphic design is only a small part of the successful equation. The most important goal of the design is to communicate the intended message.

The new web design process should focus much more on market research, identifying the potential traffic, analysing the competition and providing what the market actually wants. Due to the technology professional designers now have at their fingertips, all of this can be completed in a much smaller amount of time than any web design process before.

For a website to convert sales, collect leads and spread the message effectively, your web designer must welcome the new way. The professional marketers and designers who master these new technologies and skills will have a major advantage over the rest.

The post The Website Design Process: Overthrowing the Old and Welcoming the New appeared first on Graphics & Website Design Portishead.

A good landing page is similar to a perfectly-tuned sales pitch. Depending on the site’s primary objective, it can represent almost anything, but the intent of the page always remains the same. Every small detail on it should work together in an effort to convince the target audience to convert. While that may seem like a complicated task, once you break it down into each element, you can see how strategies can be implemented effectively.

Every professional designer has his own process for creating an effective design, but there are a few simple steps that anyone designing a landing page should follow. This quick checklist offers some ideas and tactics that benefit almost any landing page.

The Perfect Headline

The headline of your landing page may be the most important element of the design. For a headline to be perfect, it must combine the “Four U’s” : Usefulness, Uniqueness, Urgency and Ultra-Specificity. It is almost impossible to meet all four of these requirements completely, professional designers always shoot for at least two of the four.

For example, take a look at MailChimp’s headline: “Easy Email Newsletters.” While this headline may not be urgent or particularly unique, it is both specific and useful. Urgency and uniqueness are less important to the specific target audience of this landing page. MailChimp isn’t trying to hard sell concert tickets to its customers, its promoting a service to make life simpler. A great headline doesn’t have to offer all of the “Four U’s.” By meeting two or three of these characteristics, it can still be effective at promoting your products or services.

Highlighting Visual Hierarchy

Visual hierarchy is another extremely important piece to an effective landing page design. If you want to make a solid statement, all of your visual elements must be as coherent as your text content. Your landing page should be arranged so that the viewer’s eye moves from selling points to you call-to-action without distraction. Professional designers often turn to variations in type sizes and colours as tools for designing a compelling visual hierarchy.

Keep Your Copy Concise and Engaging

It may seem obvious that any copy on a landing page must be as appealing, clear and simple as possible. However, most don’t know how bad it can be when a landing page’s text content simply explains how great a company and its products are. All landing page content should be more engaging than these explanations. It should instead focus on describing exactly how the company’s products and services can benefit the target user.

There are many more important steps and elements involved with designing a great landing page, but the goal should always be the same. Bring your target customers in through engaging designs, an effective structure and solid content. Once you have a landing page you think might work, work with your professional designer to start testing and tweaking it until you have the best design possible.

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No matter what message you are trying to send or medium you are utilising to reach your target audience, they may choose to ignore you within less than 50 milliseconds. This clearly shows the importance of professional design and its ability to create an effective first impression.

Google’s Research

Google recently took a deeper look into first impressions regarding web design. In the study, they re-enforced the 50 millisecond timeframe for building a first impression. Although this first impression depends on a variety of different factors including spacing, symmetry, fonts, structure and content, there are two primary design factors that play the most significant role:

Visual Complexity – Refers to the complexity of the visual design as a whole
Prototypicality – Refers to how a design fits within its category, does the design look like users think it should (similar to others in the industry/category)?

Visual designs that were overly-complex and unfamiliar designs that don’t fit with their category were seen as less attractive by the individuals in the study. As a takeaway from this study, professional designers and business owners should understand that users like simple and familiar designs. Success will be far less likely with innovative and unconventional layouts.

Essential Elements

On average, it takes a little over 2.5 seconds for a consumer’s eyes to focus on a specific area of your design that has the largest impact on their first impression. Eye-movement studies have shown which elements are most important within a design. With any print design, advertisement or web application, the company logo comes first. Typical users spend over 6 seconds focusing on this one key element. On webpages, the second most important element is the main navigation menu, followed by the search box.

Other essential elements of a design include the primary image, written content and “footer.” Since first impressions make such a huge difference in engagement and viewing duration, professional designers should focus on making these key elements look amazing.

Professional Design Emphasis

Almost everyone can remember a time when their parent or professor emphasised the importance of first impressions for job interviews, but some don’t realise how strongly this same idea affects the creation of a great design.

Professional designers know how to develop a design that presents the best first impression possible, and without a good first impression, none of your amazing strategies, campaigns, products or services will matter. In the blink of an eye, your target consumers will simply turn around and ignore your powerful message.

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But Wait… What Is Bounce Rate Exactly?

So before we begin with the nitty gritty, here’s the definition: bounce rate is the percentage of single-page sessions. In other words, the % of users that only view one page on your website and then decide to leave.

And Why Does it Matter?

You want you visitors to convert. When they land on your website, you want them to click through to make a purchase, fill in the contact form, or sign up to your services. If they bounce, it means that’s not happening.

While it’s impossible to know why a user has ‘bounced’, it’s usually a negative sign. Namely, that the visitor didn’t find what he or she was expecting or looking for. Another reason could be that your website is simply difficult to use or slow to load. In any case, it’s rarely ever good. Let’s discuss how you can lower your bounce rate and convert your visitors.

Targeted Traffic

While every business owner wants droves of traffic, not every visitor is created equal. Ideally, each person that lands on your website should be interested in what you have to offer. If you specialise in selling deck chairs, for example, you don’t want someone that’s looking for information on dieting. You get the idea.

That’s why it so important that you gear your online strategies towards targeted visitors. There are various ways you can do this, such as doing SEO for researched key phrases that are closely related to your business. You can also create relevant ‘landing pages’ for each visitor type, ensuring that each gets relevant information that’s built to cater to their needs.

Improve Website Usability

Another reason visitors click the back button is usability. Having fantastic content just isn’t going to cut the mustard these days – your site should be snappy, quick, responsive, and easy to navigate. The focus should be on delivering a top-notch visitor experience from top to bottom.

In order to achieve this, think about improving site speed in particular. Slow sites are no longer acceptable. More than just few seconds will have visitors looking for an alternative in a hurry. Optimise the code, improve the server specs (hosting company), and don’t add features that aren’t necessary.

You should also enhance usability by ensuring the layout is easy on the eye, the navigation is logical and obvious, and that text is easy to digest. Break up content by using lists, white space, and images. The main thing to avoid is serving the dreaded ‘wall of text’, with little or no multimedia to speak of.

While these tips are by no means comprehensive, implementing them as part of your overall strategy will improve your chances of lowering that bounce rate. As experience conversion gurus, give us a call and we can help drive your project forward.

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Simple Description

When most people think of the word “trend,” they think of something developing or changing due to a new idea or direction. This actually works well for describing trends in web design. A trend in web design typically starts out as a specific idea or design movement. As this new direction gains steam, other websites adopt it in the masses. Trends help designers the direction that the industry is going in the future.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Web Design Trends

One of the main advantages of trends revolves around the growth of creativity and knowledge in web design. Trends help designers understand new ideas and changes in the industry. They often spark new kinds of thinking and increased creativity. Trends also provide job security for web designers and keep the web interesting and fresh. If trends did not exist, there would be a reduced need for website updating and re-designing. That reduced need would translate to fewer jobs for web designers. It would also mean that the average lifetime of webpages would increase. The web would be a dull place without trends and constant change.

On the other hand, designing a website with the goal of following a trend can be very risky. Since some trends only last for a few months, trend-focused website designs can look old and outdated within only a year or two. Some people also feel that trends cause many websites to look too similar. They believe that trends actually reduce creativity and hinder a designer’s ability to create unique work.

Current Trend Examples

Flat design, sometimes called clean design, is a very popular trend in today’s web design world. It focuses on promoting a clean and crisp feel throughout a design. Popular effects and depth tools are replaced with a “flat” simple look in flat design. Large companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft are all big on this design trend.

In the past year or so, many websites have changed their full-width headers by blurring the background image. This makes the text stand out more clearly. Although this trend is just a small design technique, it can really add individuality to a webpage.

Trends should work as a challenge to you to be different in your work, but sometimes they do act as an aid for simply following the crowd. Trends are also a great communicative tool for gaining insight into what the rest of the world thinks about an idea. Whether you love trends or despise the whole idea, they’re not going anywhere. If you’re open enough to them, they may provide just enough information to help you achieve success in future projects.

The post Web Design Trends: What do They Really Mean? appeared first on Graphics & Website Design Portishead.

Not only does this unfairly exclude a large section of the population, but if you look at it from a purely financial perspective, you’re also missing out on a chunk of existing and potential customers. To ensure your website is fully accessible, you and your creative agency should cater to the following guidelines.

Make use of Alt Tags in your Website

When you hover over a link or an image on the web, you often find that a small box of text pops up on your screen. This is called the ‘alt tag’ and is an essential part in ensuring your website is accessible. Not only that, it also helps with your SEO efforts as it tells Google what your content is about, helping you rank for relevant terms.

Don’t use alt tags as long descriptions of the image or link in question, but don’t be vague either. Try and be as accurate as possible – this allows readers and text-only versions to let users know what you’re intending.

Transcribe and Subtitle

Videos are an excellent way to reach a wider audience and engage users. However, not everyone will be able to see or hear your production. That’s where transcriptions and subtitles come in.

For the hard of hearing, ensure each video has subtitles running alongside. Transcriptions are useful for those that need the text of a website to be read out. Transcriptions also have the added benefit of injecting more content into your website, which again is good for SEO.

Use Colours Wisely

Hopefully, your designer will guide you through this process but it’s worth mentioning nonetheless. Using the right colours is important for your audience, for accessibility but also for user experience.

In particular, pay attention to text and background colour combinations. If it’s hard to read, people will move along. Those with colour blindness will struggle. Stick to your basic white background with black text and structure your design around that. While there are exceptions, it’s a good framework to build from.

Keep Improving Performance

It’s not easy to cater to every single user out there right from the get go. Try and cover all of the bases, but remember that there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. Once your site is live, track your users with Google Analytics (or a similar tool).

Using these stats you’ll be able to get a clearer idea of the technology being used and what you’re audience needs. Tweak accordingly and deliver what they’re asking for.

Format Your Copy

When placing blog entries or news articles on your website, try and avoid dumping a bunch of text without formatting. No one is going to bother reading it and those that struggle with their vision will not even be able to.

In addition to formatting, allow text size to be increased without impacting the design. It should be flexible enough to work with a font size that’s a few points higher than the intended default. Older web surfers tend to crank up the zoom on the text a few notches – if your design is constrictive, this move will break the template and make the site unusable.

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