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Designing User Friendly Websites

Mail Icon  Posted: Monday, January 25th, 2010  Clock Icon at 2:16 pm

Whenever you start an online business, a killer website is one of the must-have things on the cards. Driving a lot of traffic to your website is definitely pretty difficult, but that’s not the only consideration that should be kept in mind.

The most important aspect of a website is its visual appeal and user-friendliness. Remember, getting repeat-visitors is all about providing seamless website user experience. Folks prefer to browse website that have unique looks, and present the needful data in a convenient manner, rather than browsing through one of the countless websites that appear to be a replica of the existing big names over the internet.

Designing user-friendly websites is all about understanding what keeps a visitor glued on to the website, and what really makes him/her leave it. It is a bitter truth that plenty of websites have tons of useful information to entice the visitors, but these websites don’t present the same in the desired manner. As a result, the only thing that the visitors do, after going through the topsy-turvy non-sense presented on these websites is a tap on the ‘back’ button of their browser.

One of the crucial things that should be on top of your list while designing a website and running a PPC campaign is the first time user-experience. As the good old saying goes – ‘first impression is indeed the last impression’ and this holds true literally in case of those visitors who arrive at a website after performing a search on a particular keyword in the search engine.

For instance, a user searches the keywords ‘book hotels in Miami’, and visits a Florida hotel booking website. Having searched for ‘hotels in Miami’ on the search engine already, if the visitor is again presented with area-wise listing in Florida and made to select ‘Miami’ in the category option one more time; there are good chances that he/she may not want to go through the hassle of doing the same thing over and again.

More so, your website’s homepage isn’t really the best landing page for a visitor who arrives through a search engine. Therefore, it is imperative that you create sufficient web pages on your website targeting different products/services that you wish to offer to your visitors and potential customers.

Furthermore, using too much of JavaScript codes on your website may again not be a wise decision, as it hurts the loading time of the website significantly. Hence, if you wish to incorporate any contextual advertisements, banners or product promotion services on your website, you should prefer usage of HTML codes, so long as you can help the cause.

It is a well known fact that visitors hate to wait for more than few seconds (max 3-5seconds on an average) for a website to load. And, if your website takes over 10seconds to load, then you’re most likely to loose 50-60% of your targeted traffic right away!

Keeping these aspects of web design in mind can help you improve your online business manifolds.

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Posted in Blog, Website Design | No Comments »

Are You Still Stuck in the Web 2.0 Era?

Mail Icon  Posted: Monday, January 25th, 2010  Clock Icon at 2:06 pm

Sure thing, Web 2.0 was the buzzword some time back; but the online world is ever evolving. Now, everybody is making a transition to the Web 3.0 era and the social media is ruling the name game.

As a result, the standard features seen on a website have changed to a significant extent. And, today even the big guns in the industry are busy with tweeting and building Facebook groups. What’s more, links to Twitter and Facebook profiles can be easily spotted even on the homepage of several corporate websites.

There was a time when the corporate websites had just plain HTML pages filled with informative text, and few links. Things soon changed over time as interactive websites came into existence. And, soon came in the RSS feeds, and a number of new concepts that marked the beginning of the Web 2.0 era.

But, just as most of the websites made a transition to the Web 2.0 era, social media started dominating the online world. To keep in pace with the latest developments, many of the big guns made a transition to the Web 3.0 era, but not everybody was ready to make another major transition so soon.

However, this time those had already suffered enough by not making the transition to Web 2.0 era, had fastened their seat belts to make a quick transition. As a matter of fact, nobody really loves to visit the boring copycat websites that don’t have a great visual appeal and anything unique.

Therefore, it is important for those who’re stuck in the Web 2.0 era to make a quick transition to the Web 3.0 era, and build up their businesses with social media, and networking concepts.

More so, those who’re on starting a new website today should take utmost care to incorporate all the latest aspects of web technology in their website, to make a strong entry in the online world. By doing so, they can even score over the existing ones who haven’t yet made the transition yet.

Lastly, when you look for a website design company, you should take a look at their portfolio and check whether they’ve been building websites compliant with the Web 3.0 standards or not. After all, paying money for getting an age old website made for your business isn’t simply a wise decision.

So, keep an eye on the latest happenings in the online world and ensure that you have that cutting edge over the rest.

Posted in Blog, Website Design | 1 Comment »

SEO and Web Design

Mail Icon  Posted: Tuesday, January 27th, 2009  Clock Icon at 4:54 pm

Having done all the hard work in designing a superb website and programming it with the most efficient techniques, you need to put in equal amount of efforts to market it effectively too. After all, the conversion rate of your website is going to reflect the kind of revenues that it generates in the longer run.

Therefore, in order to increase the popularity of your website, you need to incorporate several search engine optimization techniques. Well, gone are the good old days when you could simply rank high in Google search rankings with directory submissions, simple email campaigns and a bit of tweaking with the website’s Meta data.

Today, there are countless techniques in the world of SEO that have a deep impact on the search rankings of your website in most of the popular search engines. Apart from the usual off page optimization, you should take care of on-page elements such as the alt tag, img tag, meta tags and several components that are under-utilized.

These days, even video search optimization can drive massive traffic to your website, and build precious back-links from popular video search sites such as YouTube and the likes of it.

However, you must always keep one thing in mind; SEO is not a day’s job, and it’s going to take several months of hard work to make your way through to the top of search engines. More so, you need to target highly specific keywords early on, and rank high in search rankings before attempting to optimize for the generic ones.

For instance, trying to optimize your site to top the keyword “web design” on Google searches, and your business happens to be located in Miami, a good way to start with optimization would be to target the keyword “Miami web design company”.

Once you’ve gained high ranking for this keyword, you may then move on and target the keyword “web design company” (so long as you’re not interested in targeting only the local customers), and once you’ve enough back-links with these anchor texts, you may try your luck with the ultimate keyword “web design”. It is noteworthy that this would definitely require few months time.

Last but definitely not the least; you should not adopt short cuts (the Blackhat SEO strategies) to achieve high search rankings within a very short span of time. This is so because you may achieve great results with the Blackhat SEO tricks, but that’s not going to last too long.

The Google bots, spiders, and crawlers are smart enough to detect links from link farms, and other unscrupulous means used for attaining higher search rankings quickly. And, the worst part of the story is that once the search engine bots detect these Blackhat SEO strategies, they’ll totally ignore your website. So, this may simple put an abrupt end to your website marketing campaign and thrash off all the hard work in a moment!

So, if you’re planning to hire a SEO professional or an SEO company to market your website, beware of the SEO tactics they’re planning to use, to accomplish the task in hand.

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Posted in Website Design | 1 Comment »

Top Brochure Graphic Design Techniques

Mail Icon  Posted: Tuesday, January 27th, 2009  Clock Icon at 1:33 pm

The development in graphic design technology has paved the way to a tremendous increase in the graphic design styles and trends. Brochure design is one of the most enticing fields for the art lovers and creative minded folks, who love to get a unique design every single time. So, let us take a look at some of the best brochure graphic design techniques.

1. Attention Seeker Design – Basically, attention seeker design are those brochure patterns that have something catchy on their cover. For instance – “Are you confused” written on the cover of a brochure may be categorized under the attention seeker design pattern.

However, it is not necessary that such brochures may work well with all kinds of audience. Those who need more visual appeal or the classy look, may not be too impressed by such designs.

2. Classic Corporate Brochure – Classic corporate brochure design is ideal for designing proposals and making formal brochures for customer and public relation maintenance operations. This pattern of brochure design may not be too enticing for the general audience, who’re not moved by the usual fonts and elegant style; they demand colorful and flashy designs.

3. The Poster Brochure – It has lot of visual appeal. Poster brochures are useful in creating a deeper impact in the minds of a wider range of audience with the help of powerful graphics and pictures that speak more than words. For instance, poster brochures of protests against child labor may be quite fruitful in creating general public awareness against child labor. Such posters may display graphics of small children being forced to work against their will.

4. The Mystery Type Brochure – These are the kinds of brochures that don’t fall under any of the abovementioned categories. They entice the people to try out something new. For instance, if you wish to promote “online money making home based business”, you may create a brochure cover that reads “101 Secrets to Make Money from Home – try it today for FREE!” Such catchy slogans create a strong call to action, and most of the viewers who read these brochure covers are most likely to respond to them positively.

However, there’s a thin line between creating an effective call to action and making false promises. If you consider the same example, “101 Secrets to Make Money from Home – try it today for FREE!” makes a great cover, but “1000001 Secrets to Make Money from Home” or “Earn $10,000,000 from home!” may simply sound too unrealistic to create a positive impact.

What’s more, you can also make use of combination of all these techniques to create an ideal brochure cover. But, always make it a point not to over-do things and keep in simple, crisp and short.

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