Website Design

10 Web Design Improvements That Can Boost Your Website's Conversion Rate

10 Web Design Improvements That Can Boost Your Website’s Conversion Rate

There are few things more frustrating to a website owner than knowing that they have an excellent website design, but it does not convert as well as expected. Often the causes of poor conversion are not major nor require wholesale design changes (though it can happen) but rather that some elements of the web design are not being optimised as much they could be.

If you feel your website is not hitting the heights in terms of its conversion rate, here are some of the optimisations which should get it closer to those conversion targets. If you are unsure how to action any of them, speak to a professional web designer who will be happy to help implement the changes.

Optimised Content Design: Content only helps with conversion if it is formatted in a way so that it can be easily digested by the person viewing or reading it. Check all your existing content and ensure it is so by breaking down chunks of text, adding white space and optimising image quality, for example.

Effective Call To Action Copy: Conversion rates rely heavily on calls to action being clear and specific. The smallest hint of ambiguity means prospects will be confused and reticent to click anything that might take them forward in your sales funnel.

Reduce Number Of Call To Actions Per Page: As well as making your calls to action better, you also need to ensure that you do not have too many on each page as this simply dilutes the message and could even confuse those landing on those pages.

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7 KPIs To Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Website's Design

7 KPIs To Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Website’s Design

One of the core principles of any professional web design is that before the actual website creation happens, part of the planning for it must include at least one objective for the website, and preferably more than one. This can include increasing brand awareness, lead generation, product visibility and best of all, direct sales.

If we take this forward to the point that a website is live, many business owners struggle to determine how well their website is doing. Often its main objective is not immediately measurable by data. For example, brand awareness is something that does not easily have a number allocated to it, but rather is measured in other ways such as people discussing the brand or showing more trust in the company.

Having said that, there are several ways in which you can assess a website and how effective its web design or redesign has been. These are measured using specific KPIs which give a true reflection of the website and its performance. These KPIs then allow the website owner to arrange for changes and improvements in the web design, traffic sources and content, for example.

Unique / Total Visitor Sessions

This KPI tells you how much traffic is coming to your website as it measures how many sessions, or visits it has had. You need to split this KPI between total sessions and unique sessions as some visitors will return at a later date. Moving forward this indicates if any of your online marketing activities are increasing your traffic as evidenced by increasing sessions.

Visitor Return Percentage

We mentioned in the last section visitors will return and the percentage of return visits can be measured. The significance of this is that if the percentage is low, and your website is one where you want visitors to return it suggests improvements need to be made.

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7 Questions To Answer Before Redesigning Your Website

7 Questions To Answer Before Redesigning Your Website

If you want to have a redesign of your existing website before so much as one line of new code is created, there are plenty of tasks that need to be undertaken first. As with any project that is worth doing properly, and your business’s website obviously falls into that category, effective planning and preparation are essential if success is to be achieved.

There are many tools, methods and processes that can be utilised within the planning and preparation stage of designing a website, and one which we find to be one of the most effective is the asking and answering of some key questions.

These questions go deeper than simply deciding which colours and fonts are to be used (although those questions should still be answered) but instead relate to the aim of ensuring your website is designed in a way that gives it the best chance of success. Here are 7 questions that make this aim easier to achieve.

What Are The Fundamental Objectives Of Your Website?

Every website should have at least 1 or 2 goals because it allows its design to focus on achieving them. At the same time, you do not want to give your website too many objectives as this simple waters downs its ability to achieve its main objectives.

What Are The Positives And The Negatives Of Your Current Website?

Even if your existing website is regarded by you as an unmitigated flop, there are still useful lessons to be learned from it. Identify what elements did not work, and on a positive note, also identify some features which did work. This way your website redesign will avoid previous mistakes, and include successful features.

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15 Indicators That A Website Has Been Designed By Professionals

15 Indicators That A Website Has Been Designed By Professionals

Websites throughout the internet have a multitude of designs, purposes, sizes and applicable to what we will be discussing here, quality. Most business websites will vary too, and there will especially be a significant variation in the quality of their web design.

We are going to give you a means of identifying which websites have been created by professional web designers and which have not. The way this is done is using a checklist of 15 essential elements every website should have, Those that have all 15, were almost certainly created professionally. Those that have many elements missing have not.

#1: The Website Has An Overall Purpose – Great web design comes from excellent planning which includes setting a clear objective for the website, and this objective should be obvious when you visit it.

#2: Optimised For Mobile Devices All top web designers know to design their websites so that they are completely responsive and thus optimised for mobile devices of all kinds.

#3: Easy To Use When you visit a website and nothing on it, including interactive features, confuses you, or seem difficult, then it is a sign that a professional has designed it with users in mind.

#4: Content Is Appealing – Great web design is not just about visuals. It also applies to content included in a website which should be high quality and appealing to visitors.

#5: It Looks Great Not a surprise to learn that websites that look great tend to be those where a skilled website design team have created them.

#6: Images Are Placed In Optimal Positions   When you see images randomly placed on websites it suggests the designer was an amateur or simply did not care enough to position them in optimal locations within the website.

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5 Tried and Tested Strategies to Streamline Your Web Design Agency

5 Tried and Tested Strategies to Streamline Your Web Design Agency

Several types of work take place in a web design agency. Besides the actual web design process, you also have to manage sales, administration, finances, development, client collaborations, project workflows, and plenty more.

Several types of work take place in a web design agency. Besides the actual web design process, you also have to manage sales, administration, finances, development, client collaborations, project workflows, and plenty more.

Each of these processes is important, and little inefficiencies in any of them can cause massive delays in finishing your outputs and accomplishing your targets. That is why you must ensure that your operation is organized and streamlined as much as possible.

In this guide, I will share with you six tried and tested strategies that you can use to streamline your web design agency.

Let’s dive in.

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20 Amazing Illustrated Websites for Your Inspiration

20 Amazing Illustrated Websites for Your Inspiration

When you are in the web design industry, there is no limit to what you can include in your websites. Really! You don’t believe it? Well, you better do. Because when the top trends are responsive, flat designs and minimalistic effects, there are some websites developed by very creative designers that incorporate complex designs, flash videos and HTML5 snippets to enhance the look of their website and give the user a truly unforgettable experience. 

You can use these ideas as inspiration for your website. If you need to create websites that use Illustration as a factor, here is a beautiful array of websites that use some exceptional Illustrations and effects as a part of their awesome websites:

1. Complete Baltics

2. Startup Film

3. 826LA

4. Pete Nottage

5. Taco Spillet

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20 Best CSS Frameworks to help in your Web Designing needs

20 Best CSS Frameworks to help in your Web Designing needs

These frameworks can help you build completely functional web templates within a few minutes and with minimal knowledge of CSS coding. In this article, we display some of the best CSS frameworks that help web designers and developers all over the world explore their potential to build responsive and beautiful web applications. Please visit this list and share your views with us.

1. Foundation 5:

2. Gumby:

3. Twitter Bootstrap:

4. Skeleton:

5. Pure CSS:

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Super Cool Responsive Menu Designs

Super Cool Responsive Menu Designs

Responsive Design has become a necessity nowadays instead of a new way of design.  With the mobile market increasing by leaps and bounds, it has become imperative to build websites that scale properly and look beautiful on any and all devices. Hence, we need to design all aspects carefully. That includes how the menu is displayed when the site is scaled down.

Thankfully, there are many ways to shift the menu. We can use Toggle Menus, Multilevel Menus, etc. Many plugins were also developed for the same purpose. However, even with these, it is not completely easy to develop them. This is why we have displayed a list of the best tutorials and plugins for developing amazing responsive menus that scale down beautifully.

1. Trunk.js

2. Codrops – Responsive Multi-level Menu

3. Codrops – Slide and Push Menus

4. Big Menus Small Screens- Responsive Multilevel Navigation

5. Slicknav

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Blurred Background Websites for Your Inspiration

Blurred Background Websites for Your Inspiration

One of the reigning trends of 2014, apart from flat, responsive designs are blurred backgrounds. These backgrounds get the focus completely on the content of our websites. They enhance the emphasis on the objects of our site and hence, provide more impact on the user than the regular designs. Thus, these kinds of designs have become very popular. Not only are they simple, but also they provide a sleek and professional look to the site.

If you do not have an idea regarding these kinds of sites and are interested in using this concept for the design of your site, then here are a few of the most brilliantly designed blurred background sites for your inspiration. Some of them are WordPress themes, some portfolios, whereas others are for mobile websites. But all of them are awesome. Check them out:

1. Vellum

2. Identi-U

3. True Canvas

4. inCreate

5. Suspended Animations

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20 Beautiful Web Designs that emphasize Blue

20 Beautiful Web Designs that emphasize Blue

I know that creating amazing websites that are responsive, minimalistic and snazzy is an intensely creative process and needs to factor in many issues. Now imagine restricting yourself to a single colour.  Seems much harder, right? It complicates the process. It increases the complexity by at least twice as much.

You must be wondering, “So why restrict yourself? Use the complete potential of the colour palette! That is much more sensible”. That may be so. But what if you had no choice in the matter? What if you are working for a company and your client is bent upon a particular colour? They may be fixated because each colour has a significant effect on the consumer, and they want to leave no loop holes in their website. Here is a collection of websites focusing on one such colour that signifies stability, trust, depth, et cetera to the customers.

1. Lovedays

2. Eleks

3. Socialis

4. Soniaby

5. Volkswagen Think Blue

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20 Resources That Every Designer Needs

20 Resources That Every Designer Needs

Ever felt you were being bogged down by the resources that you have at your disposal? Ever felt that if you had a better or more attractive resources kit, then you would’ve met that deadline, but you weren’t able to meet or satisfy that client who rejected your design?

In this fast-paced world, where trends are made every second, let us see a few resources that are the saving grace of some and the magic tricks of others.

These resources come to the aid of all those desperate souls that search for better resources in the nick of time to complete their project. That’s almost awesome but never quite so.

Now, pay attention and feast upon the amazing resources developed by the truly ingenious developers to make our designing tasks that much easier.

1. Pixeldropr:

Allows us to create collections of our favourite icons, illustrations, etc. which can be directly dragged and dropped to a PSD file.

2. Drawspace:

Downloadable lessons to learn drawing.

3. Unheap:

Huge collection of JQuery Plugins for web enthusiasts!

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15 Excellent Designing Portfolios For Your Inspiration

15 Excellent Designing Portfolios For Your Inspiration

The internet is full of a number of awesome and inspiring portfolio designs. To make your online visibility more impressive as you expect, it is vital to create an online portfolio that will help you stand out in this challenging marketplace. It can be designed in different sizes and shapes, it’s up to you, and it doesn’t matter whether you are an illustrator, web-savvy developer or graphics designer.

Not only this, it is a way that presents your site and attracts your potential clients effectively. The portfolio gives a superstar web designer touch, and innovative thinking lets you enable to engage more clients for a long time.

There are plenty of online tools available over the web that can help users build a portfolio without having sound knowledge of coding. Check out the 15 most inspiring and incredible online design portfolios for all, whether a design agency or individual site designer.

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Webmaster tips for improving the usability of a webdesign

Webmaster tips for improving the usability of a webdesign

A good web designer will always come up with new and great ideas that will set trends. A GREAT web designer will make a balance between a new web design and the functionality of the site that he is working on.

There are many exercises for web designers that promote ease of use and functionality, an excellent maintenance rate and great user satisfaction. I will adduce some of those elements created to greatly increase the site’s usability and functionality.

Intuitive navigation technique

There is an expression roaming around web users: “If you can’t find it on the first two pages of Google search, it doesn’t exist” The point of this expression is that the end-users often redirect their search from one to three links on the site before they give up. Keep it simple and keep it clean.

The intuitive navigation offers users that they jump from site to site and find the required information quickly and easily. While designing a site, keep in mind that users do not have to jump more than three levels in their search.

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5 Fresh Templates for your Website

5 Fresh Templates for your Website

A website template is like a blueprint for the construction trades. Like the blueprint, a website template is a plan for construction, the construction of a website. It’s a design guide showing what goes where. An image goes here, text goes here, a video goes here, and a menu goes here. More importantly, the template might show the size of the image, the font of the text, the purpose of the video, and the character of the menu.

If a new home builder follows a blueprint, the end result should be a beautiful new home, and in the same way, if a website builder follows a template, the end result should be a beautiful new website. For someone who has never built a website before, a template may be indispensable, but even experienced website builders will sometimes rely on a template for inspiration and guidance.

The history of website templates essentially mirrors the history of the Internet. As the Internet came to fruition in the early 1990s, along with it came the development of templates. They were primitive, clunky, pure HTML templates in the early days, but a start was certainly born.

The development of the website template scheme continues to this day, and now even the most highly developed website might very well start with a template. In 2016, there are thousands of templates to choose from, HTML, WordPress, Joomla, and more.

Some are free, but many are for sale. Those for sale may sell for as little as just a few dollars to as much as a few thousand dollars. Generally speaking, website templates are easy to use so that even a novice can use one to build an impressive website, but some still require advanced skills and even a little bit of coding. Building a website with a template can provide a valuable learning experience and even the novice will gain skills and knowledge while building a website.

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