Is Website Maintenance On Your To-Do-List?

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Trends in web design shifted throughout 2017. Don’t expect 2018 to be any different, and like surfing treacherous swells, the ever-changing trends in web design can present developers with an arduous journey. But fret not, we’re going to discuss the hottest web design tips and tricks to keep you riding the big wave thought the year.

Goodbye Flat Design

Flat web design has come and gone. That’s not to say that there isn’t a time and place for minimalistic design, but the trends are shifting away again. Beautiful and functional websites are adorning the Internet with appealing gradients, varying depths, and fantastic shadowing. That doesn’t mean that flat design shouldn’t be in your toolbox, it just shouldn’t be the only tool in there.

Don’t be a Square

Don’t put your toolbox away just yet because it is time to smooth out the edges and round some corners. Sharp corners and harsh angles are being replaced by circles, rounded corners, and softer lines. Web designers are tearing down the symmetry and angles of 2017, and constructing in its place grand architecture of organic shapes and asymmetrical grids and broken grid layouts. Don’t only focus on form fields and buttons because they aren’t the only ones getting makeovers, many other elements are softening.

Keep it Moving

Use of video in website design continued to grow last year, as it will in 2018. Although some developers shy away from video in the ecommerce segment – viewing it as a distraction – it is still a great way to convey large amounts of information to the viewer in a short period of time. Be sure to keep video (or hero images) backgrounds in your repertoire because they can convey feelings of trust, stability, and other emotions.
Subtle animations are a sly way to add depth and curb appeal to a website. They are also beacons for visitors, so use them wisely and don’t overuse them.

Scrolling through Trends

Parallax scrolling is starting to lose its luster with some developers, but that doesn’t mean you have to abandon all of your scrolling tricks. A growing number of websites are finding creative ways to take scrolling effects to the next level, like revealing static or dynamic backgrounds, video, or even advertisements.

To Stick or to Float

Sticky navigation is still in, but some developers have taken it further with floating navigation. Floating the navigation just below the top edge of the viewable area gives the element a more global feel. It also adds an element of depth to the page and helps un-static a page.
Think sticky elements are just for navigation? Sticky elements at the bottom of the page, used for ads, calls to action, and similar elements are a great way to keep information visible without bombarding the visitor.

Make it Font-tastic

As technology has improved over the last few years, the prominence of visual typography has risen. Although serif fonts may not dominate the web now, they will soon.

Along with serif fonts, we will hear and see more about variable fonts. In a nutshell, variable fonts allow designers to use fewer fonts because the font file itself will contain all the iterations – weight, width, etc. – of the font being used, so there’s no need to call the variations within the CSS.

Be Brutal if You Need to

Ready to take everything you know and throw it all out the window? Welcome to Brutalism. We’ve been seeing more Brutalism, asymmetry, and freeform design over the last few years, and the trend is still gaining traction. Not typically seen in the ecommerce space, Brutalism, and the freeform design it has inspired, are being used more as a way to direct the viewer. Shaking off the static design of mainstream and using bold, offset design elements is no longer only for the edgy advertising agencies trying to push the envelope.

Go Ahead, Say it

The web is a very visual place; text, images, animation, and video combine to overwhelm us (at times) visually. But there’s a new kid in town: voice and language searching. With the explosion of Intelligent Personal Assistants like Alexa, Echo, and Cortana, websites will soon be integrating voice and natural language searching. While it may not need to be atop your priority list, don’t forget about it and get left behind the curve.

Ride the Wave

These sizzling trends are not exclusive to 2018. Some have been around for a few years and have been steadily increasing in popularity, while some are newer, rising stars. Regardless of whether the trend is rising or falling, keeping yourself abreast of these shifting trends (as well as furthering your knowledge in each) will allow you create a more diverse array of designs that appeal to more people and more clients!

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Like any field, web design is constantly evolving and going through trends. Currently, the winds are blowing toward more user-centric approaches that optimize the experience of your target audience and customers. The success of your website and the message it’s trying to deliver rests upon these user experiences.

Here are some web design trends we’re seeing in 2017 into 2018.

Conversational UI

Conversational user interfaces and their potential for use by companies have been brewing for a while now. More and more businesses and services are coming around to ideas on how to use these natural language interfaces to engage their website visitors.

The appeal is clear – your prospects and customers want to be able to get help and answers to questions at their convenience while still feeling like they’re talking to someone sentient on the other end. Messaging platforms such as Slack and Facebook Messenger are starting to be incorporated into many websites to fulfill this growing demand.

Less and Less Becoming More

Minimalistic designs have always been considered sleek and modern, though often at the expense of user experience. Now minimalist design for websites has found a way to get the sleek and modern look while satisfying the user, namely through the use of ‘Cards’.

Users are presented with visually enticing entry points that act as gateways to more information – these are called Cards.

An excellent example of Cards in action is the Netflix interface, where multiple images of shows serve as Cards that present more information on the show when clicked on. Organizing the information on your website in this way lends itself to a de-cluttered, simplistic, and visually aesthetic design that users respond positively to.

Navigation Made Easy(ier)

No one likes a confusing and disorganized navigator, which is why designers have always aimed at making navigation simple, easy to learn, and until now, involving some kind of physical contact such as clicking, tapping, or swiping.

With the rise of digital voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Window’s Cortana, and of course, Apple’s Siri, the landscape of how users interact with digital navigation is changing on a base level. More and more designers are thinking of ways to incorporate voice recognition technology into navigation as we move toward a future of digital assistants with ever-growing linguistic capabilities. Navigation in relation to rapidly growing user interface technologies is a sector of design ripe with possibilities.

Real Images or None At All

For a while, stock photos were the way to go when wanting to relate visual imagery to the story, culture, or feel or your company/website. Certainly, stock images still have their use, however nowadays, especially among tech companies, real images inspire a more authentic feel to your website and business overall.

Real people are behind your company, show them off! Authenticity holds a lot of value in an age where real connections are harder to come by. By using personalized imagery specific to your company, you’ll inspire that connection with your target audience.

It doesn’t have to be just images of your team either – other kinds of illustrations lend themselves, as long they’re unique to your company and reflect your brand, lends to an authentic feel as well. They are an excellent way to explain ideas and get your message across.

Keep it Moving with Animations/Cinemagraphs

Since their inception, people have always been captivated by moving pictures. This is still the case in 2017 and beyond. Using GIFs, animation, and cinemagraphs is a good way to captivate your audience. This is because still pictures and words won’t always do alone.

Your cinemagraphs should always serve a purpose that ties into the larger message and goal of your site. Too many moving things for the sake of having them move can be overwhelming, but a well-placed looped video or animated graphics can go a long way in portraying the best things about your business in a pleasantly engaging way.

Big and Bold

Big, bold typography is making a splash on many web pages across the net. Typography fell by the wayside in the designer consciousness for a while, but now 2018 is saying bye to timid typefaces and hello to multicolored words taking up the majority of the screen and as a result, the majority of your audience’s attention.

Not only does this big bold typography up the ‘wow’ factor of your site, but it also serves as an effective way to communicate information on one page as well as organize sections into a hierarchy that gives priority to the things you want visitors to see first. As with many of the things on this list, design should not only serve aesthetics but function as well – typography is no different. Go big and go bold!

Enthusiastic Colors

When being boxed into the safe, comforting (and now considered corporate) designs of sites like twitter and facebook, designers started looking for ways to add personality to their designs in a way that made pages stand out while still maintaining style and functionality. Naturally, the outcome was the use of bold, gradient colors and bright natural hues that make pages and everything on them pop with a fresh, enthusiastic feeling.

These outstanding colors combined with equally bold typography is bringing forth a wave of websites bursting with personality and style. Now more than ever, designers are experimenting with colors in a way that we hope to see continuing beyond 2017.

As 2018 quickly approaches, web design keeps evolving based on user experience optimization. Fresh new ideas on how to put together a web page are constantly being put to the test, so don’t get comfortable with any single approach for too long and expect it to stay fresh. Always be on the lookout for web design trends beyond 2017 and keep those site visitors coming.

Tips to Continuously Optimize your Website

To keep up with upcoming trends, first make sure to know your audience, do your research! Once you have the base knowledge of who you’re catering to, test different strategies for your landing pages, images, forms, CTAs, etc. by doing A/B split tests. This will help highlight what works and what doesn’t, and you can use that information to rethink the structure and navigation of your site. Make sure to test your newly restructured website for insights into how it’s being received by users, and tailor the actions users can take on your site to be as effortless as possible for them. These strategies incorporated with the latest design trends will spell out success for your site, attracting visitors and spreading your message!

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If you have a WordPress website for your business, we need to have a talk.

WordPress is a fantastic platform to use, but there are caveats to using this free platform to create your website.  As a website developer, I know that many of my clients will never look at their website again once it is completed.  The only time they know there is a problem is when a customer tells them.

A WordPress website needs care and maintenance.  That’s part of the cost for the platform.  Because it is a free platform, there are hundreds of thousands of people using it for their business or blog.  This is one of the reasons that they get hacked often.  And it’s one of the reasons WordPress has so many updates.

Now I may get a little technical on you for a bit so bear with me.  Your WordPress website needs to be updated regularly.  Not just the version, but the themes, and plugins as well.  When WordPress updates, your themes and plugins should play well with the new updates.  In order for that to happen, you need to check your site at least twice a month for any needed updates.

The other option is to hire someone to maintain your site.  These days, it just makes sense to keep hackers who place malicious code on your site as far away as possible. You probably think that you are pretty safe because you have some wonderful hacker-preventing plugin that was placed on your site  back when you first had your site created.  But if you haven’t touched your site since then, you can best believe that plugin is doing more harm than good.

Let me tell you a story.  A client (who will remain unnamed) came to me saying that their business website only showed  a “Fatal Error” code.  After checking the usual suspects, we still could not find the culprit.  One thing I notice is the many plugins and the WordPress website version had not been updated since 2014.  hmm….

This client had not even bothered to check the website one time since it was built.  We had to escalate the issue to the web hosting company.  They deployed a super smart, super-powerful malicious code-cracking program (at the clients’ expense) to the website only to find 3.5 years worth of malicious code living, festering in every part of the client’s website.

Quite frankly, I have never seen anything that bad in all my years of website challenges.  The short story is, they did get it removed.  The point?  Please, check your website.  Here are a few ways to get it done:

• Pay someone to do update your website for you at least monthly.
• One of the tricks I put in place is to make my website URL my start page on my PC.  So when I turn on my computer or open a new browser, I can see how my website looks.
• Try using WordPress.com instead. WordPress.com restricts you to only approved plugins and themes, which helps you stay away from dangerous plugins from unreliable developers who don’t keep their plugins updated.  (You cannot move between WordPress.org and WordPress.com, so be sure that you want to do this).

Now that many business owners know that they should have a website, it’s time we talked about what happens afterward.  There are so many choices available to get a business website that there is really no excuse not to have one.  Cost is definitely not an issue these days.  In fact, if you have submitted your business to Google My Business (and you should if you are a local business), Google now provides a website builder for free!  Just visit this Google My Business page for more information about the website builder.

But for your safety, once you get your website up and running, keep an eye on this valuable asset or suffer the consequences.  It could have been much worse and ended with your entire site trashed.

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Professional Web Design Insights for Startup Companies on a Budget

A good website not only boosts your startup business’s visibility but also its credibility. For this reason, it makes sense to pay attention to the latest web design news and tips. With the right combination of smarts and creativity, you can build a website that works even when you’re on a tight budget.

3 Ways to Do It Cheap

1. Strike a deal. Do you have a skill set that you could trade for website design services? If you’re in marketing, for instance, you can provide content writing or broadcast email services to a design company that will build your website in exchange.

2. Interns are free. By outsourcing some web design tasks to a skilled intern, you can save a lot more money. In return, the intern is able to further hone his web design skills and grow his portfolio. It’s a win-win situation for you both.

3. Do it yourself. Some design companies sell templates that you can customize yourself. You can start with something simple but functional and wait until you have saved enough money for a more professional build. Or you may find yourself getting fond of it and ultimately take some web design courses. Be sure though to find a good hosting service provider, though, with a robust tech support team that responds to technical glitches right away.

4 Basic Elements of a Website

Now that you have an idea how to build a website for less, see to it that your website has at least these four of these basic elements that ensure marketing effectiveness.

1. User-friendly navigation. There’s nothing more off putting than a disorganized website cluttered with a cobweb of menus that lead to nowhere. Keep your navigation menu clear and simple. Steer clear of jargon or fancy-sounding titles in an attempt to impress.

2. A well-thought out main page. Never underestimate the importance of a finely crafted “About Us” page. Too often, companies give a vague description of their background and core business when they are supposed to highlight their credentials in this section.

3. Accessible contact information. Create a separate contact page or insert the details in every single page on your website. Give readers a complete list of your touch points, e.g. email, fax and postal addresses, phone numbers, homepage URL, and social media accounts.

4. Quality blog. Static websites don’t attract as many visitors as those with routinely updated blogs. People will appreciate your website better if you can share helpful information regarding your industry. If they need help more than what your posts can offer, they may even consider hiring you.

Want more web design insights? Check out top online sources like Marketing Digest.

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Web Design Tips: Design Websites for Humans, Not Search Engine Bots

Did you know that a little design psychology can go a long way towards enhancing the user experience? Basic design psychology, as opposed to what many think, is relatively easy to implement.  Here are some web design tips to make your website more engaging for a human audience.

1. Make it pleasant to use. The font type and size must be readable. The contrast between colors must also be strong enough to stand out under different lighting conditions. Moreover, buttons or tabs have to be clickable on different phone types and thumb sizes. Lastly, there should be enough white space to make the design feel open and organized. Overcrowded lettering or elements placed tightly together are eye sores whereas excessively wide spacing gives the sense that there’s something lacking. Overall, the key is to find balance.

2. Evoke emotion through visuals. Emotional connection is essential in promoting brand loyalty, and in terms of design, this is where photos and videos become relevant. The tone and mood should match your core values. For instance, if you’re selling leisure, you’d want visuals that depict enjoyment. Conversely, no matter how glum your line of service may seem (e.g. criminal law, debt financing), refrain from making things seem “heavier”. It’s all right to be factual, but try to use visuals that evoke positive feelings like hope, confidence, and even a bit of humor. Furthermore, the visuals should be of good quality; otherwise, your website may only end up looking lousy and cheap, which will certainly reflect on your brand.

3. Enhance ease of navigation. People visit websites sometimes because they want to see what you offer, but more often, because they have a product in mind that they want to know more about. If those potential customers don’t find the information they seek right away, chances are they’ll jump to the next competitor who can make life easier for them, especially in time-sensitive purchase decisions. Therefore, you should streamline your navigation design to make it as simple and as direct as possible. Minimize clutter, drop-down options, chain links, and loading time. To determine how your new navigation affects users, test it out using a prototype first.

Considering visitor psychology in your design process can significantly boost your end results. By choosing the kind of design that is pleasing to the eye, evokes the desired emotion(s), and enhances ease of use, you can make every visit to your website infinitely more satisfying. Your audience may then be more likely to stay in touch with you, if not buy your product or refer new business to you.

You can find the latest web design news and tips on websites like Marketing Digest.

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Web Design News: Don’t Forget to Improve Your Website’s Navigation

Often, many website redesign projects for companies tend to just deal with the physical aspects of the site. Too many online marketers urge their web designers to focus on the design, completely forgetting about navigation in the process. This is most likely because that part of the website is hidden away under all the design elements and content.

According to Kissmetric’s (@Kissmetrics) latest web design news article titled “Are You Making These Common Website Navigation Mistakes?”, navigation has a more significant effect on the success of a website than any other factor. Plenty of things can go wrong if you don’t pay attention to navigation. Here are a few tips to help you avoid that.

Don’t Overcrowd Your Navigation

You think having fifteen-plus navigation items is good? You might want to reconsider, as this defeats the purpose of being organized. If you have too many navigation links, you will confuse not only your customers but the search engines as well. With each extra link from the home page to the interior pages, your authority decreases, which would make search engines conclude that your website is not trustworthy.

Set Up a Custom Search Bar

If you have tons of products on your website, navigation will be a nightmare for your customers without a custom search engine. A custom search bar is useful for the users who already know what they’re looking for when they go to your site.

Get Your Content Layout Organized

In his “11 Common Web Design Mistakes (Blunder)” article, Hongkiat’s (@hongkiat) Brujo Owoh says that how your content is structured will affect its success. The first thing you should do is make sure that your navigation will not be confusing for the users. Put the navigation bar where visitors will expect to find it: at the top or vertically to the left side. Don’t forget about the headings, sub-headings, keywords, and other similar elements; make sure they are relevant to your business and are labeled accordingly.

Be Consistent with Your Design

A little creativity is good so long as you don’t overdo it. It’s important that your site maintains a sense of uniformity even with creative elements. If the layout changes on every page, it’s just going to confuse and annoy your users.

Website navigation is all about simplicity and ease of use. If you need some more helpful web design insights and tips, look to online resources like Marketing Digest.

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Web Design News: Benefits of Customer-Centric Web Design for Business

Perhaps the term “web design” is a misnomer. It’s not just about design and aesthetic appeal, as many have been led to believe, but is also about enhancing user experience. A site might look flashy, but if visitors find it hard to use, then it will fail to gain steady traffic, page views, and conversions. Consumer-centric web design aims to address these challenges.

The latest web design news from a Chron (@HoustonChron) article, entitled “Importance of Customer Centric Web Design,” states that putting you customers’ needs first could be very advantageous for your business. Listed below are some of the benefits:

Enhanced User Experience

You’ll want your customers to stay a while, browsing your website for products or services they might like. That would not happen if your site is a topsy-turvy mess. Utilizing customer-centric web design resolves navigation problems by organizing the elements by category, and putting easy-to-find links or buttons on each page. Don’t know where to start? According to the Business 2 Community (Business2Community.com) article, “What is Customer-Centric Web Design?,” you could let your customers tell you what they want through polls and surveys. This way, you will get a real sense of the challenges they encounter when using your site.

Increased Leads and Sales

Nothing gets potential customers clicking like websites that are not only visually appealing, but highly responsive as well. Think of your website as a valuable selling tool or your own virtual salesperson. By organizing the information about your products or services (including accurate descriptions, photos, videos, and other multimedia), you can boost conversions and sales.

Better Customer Service

Sure, you can take care of your customers when they show up in your store, but it’s a different story when they visit your website. Chron suggests that you add features like a “Frequently Asked Questions” section, a “Contact Us” link, or a “Support” page for your site visitors’/customers’ convenience. These features could dramatically improve your customer service. Moreover, adding feedback forms or live chat options can give you an opportunity to interact with your potential and existing customers on a deeper level.

Customer-centric web design ensures that your customers leave satisfied. If you are thinking about doing a major redesign, seek out online resources like Marketing Digest for other useful web design tips.

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Actionable eCommerce Marketing Insights for Small Business Owners  

An efficiently designed website combined with good marketing skills can help your small business make it into the big leagues. However, despite the growing sophistication of digital technology, many entrepreneurs still can’t grasp the importance of keeping up-to-date with the latest trends in online marketing and web design.

According to a Huffington Post (@HuffingtonPost) article, entitled “Three Ways to Get Your eCommerce Marketing Future Ready,” the playing field for small businesses just got a little more competitive, with companies thinking up of new ways to sell, sell, sell. If you don’t want your business to get left behind, then it’s best to start with these tips from the latest ecommerce marketing news.

Give Your Website a Facelift

A great website starts with good design. Internet users today are quite picky when it comes to where they take their business. Slow loading time, lack of attractive design elements, and even bad color schemes can send your potential buyers clicking off to a competitor’s site. Therefore, it is important to give your site a facelift from time to time just to keep things interesting for visitors, and to ensure that everything is working properly.

According to the Huffington Post article, “4 Web Design Trends Your Small Business Should Follow,” one of the hottest design trends this year is trading in boring linear layouts for trendy grid layouts. Grid layouts enhance the users’ experience because it enables them to easily view items or products on your website in an organized way.

Another popular trend you can use on your website today is using video backgrounds in place of traditional image sliders. A picture says a thousand words, but a video can do so much more. If you do decide to take this route, make sure that the video loads fast enough to avoid keeping your customers waiting.

Get Busy with Social Media

Marketers can’t stress this enough—be hands on with your social media accounts and use them to your advantage. Using social media is one of the most effective yet affordable marketing tactics you can implement today to target your audience. Use your official business accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and/or Pinterest to maintain your social media presence.

Make Shopping a Personal Experience

Customers are always after a more convenient shopping experience. What better way to do that than to personalize shopping based on individual preference? Letting your customers provide detailed information on your website makes things easier. This tactic could gain you some repeat customers, and would allow you to pamper your loyal customers as well.

There are many other ways to get your website in tip-top shape to help you become a respected brand. You can learn more ecommerce marketing insights from one-stop online sources like Marketing Digest.

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New Study from Moovweb Shows that Mobile-Friendly Sites are Dominating the Top Google Search Results

When Google released the new mobile-friendly algorithm update known as “Mobilegeddon” (or “Google Mice”) on April 21, a lot of business websites went mobile-friendly in order to comply with Google’s latest requirements. With mobile Internet browsing now exceeding desktop Internet browsing, Google encourages businesses to go mobile-friendly if they want to maintain or boost their rankings on the mobile SERPs.

But surprisingly, some websites haven’t heeded Google’s warnings and have remained non-mobile-friendly. And so today, they are facing a serious threat as a new study reveals that the Google Mice update has gone into full swing—with visibility and ranking consequences evident for non-mobile-friendly sites.

New research from San Francisco-based mobile expert company Moovweb (@Moovweb) indicates that mobile-friendly sites are clearly conquering the top Google search results: 83% of the time, the sites that appear on the first page of the SERPs were tagged “mobile-friendly”. Moreover, the top three results were mobile-friendly 81% of the time. [See Figure 1]

Figure 1 (Source: Moovweb)

The study further revealed that 77% of the results in the Google mobile SERPs are mobile-friendly. “These results appear to be stable over time. For the 6 weeks we tracked the data, the number of mobile-friendly results on the first page has hovered around the average of 7.7 out of 10 results,” Moovweb stated.

Figure 2 (Source: Moovweb)

Since the rollout of the update, Moovweb has been examining over 1,000 important e-commerce keywords in a range of industries in order to ascertain how the Mobilegeddon update has affected the rankings of sites in Google’s mobile search results.

The keywords were selected across different industries, such as transportation, retail, travel and hospitality, healthcare, insurance, and education. During the analysis, Moovweb found that some sectors appeared to be more prepared for the update than the rest. “When we separated the keywords by industry, we found that keywords in some industries had a much higher percentage of mobile-friendly webpages in their top 10 keyword positions,” the company noted.

Out of all the examined categories, the transportation industry displayed the lowest percentage of mobile-friendly pages, while the retail industry remained at the top of the list. Healthcare, insurance, as well as the travel and hospitality sectors weren’t too far behind when it comes to heeding Google’s call to go mobile-friendly. [See Figure 3]

Figure 3 (Source: Moovweb)

Many claims and debates have surfaced about the actual effect of Google’s mobile-friendly update on business sites, but if Moovweb’s research is any indication, it’s safe to say that non-mobile-friendly sites, in a general sense, are being hit by this particular update. The message is clear and simple: if you want to improve your site’s visibility on the SERPs, your site must meet the needs of searchers using their mobile devices for sourcing information.

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