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Redesigning Your Company?s Website: Top 10 Tips

by on Sep 01, 2008 (0) Comments

A company’s web design is in constant need for improvements and enhancements. A web design company should understand the different issues that make a website effective. The importance of an effective web design for a company has increased manifold in recent years. Today a company’s website goes much beyond offering information. Web design plays a more crucial role in a company’s success today than it has done ever before.

The process of redesigning a website is quite different to designing a website for the first time. Following are some of the key issue that should be considered when redesigning a website.

Hire the right web design company

There are many web design companies that specialise in website redesign. Hiring the right web design company to redesign your website will play an important role in deciding the success of the new website. It is advised to hire a web design company that understands your needs and the market. It is better to hire a professional web design company for the task rather than the web design company with the cheapest quote. The overall quality of the service and design far outweigh the slightly higher costs involved.

Evaluate your company’s existing website

The first crucial step is to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your current website. The web design company you commission to redesign your website can assist with identifying the major weaknesses of your current website so that they can be addressed in the new design.

Focus on Search engines Marketing

There is little doubt that search engine marketing will play a crucial role in the success of any website. Search engine marketing and optimisation should be at the heart of the redesign process. Web Design Company should ensure the new design is search engine friendly. Using keyword research techniques your web design company should be able to help you identify the top keywords for your website and ensure the new design is optimised for the keywords.

Identify your visitors

Being able to study and analyse visitors to your website offers a distinct advantage when redesigning a website as opposed to designing for the first time. Using sophisticated website statistics and reporting tools such as Google analytics, you can easily identify where your users come from and what they do on the website. This can help identify the strengths and weaknesses of the website and provide a useful insight on what areas or pages need improvements. The new design should address these issues effectively and help retain users on your website.

Identify your target audience

Identifying the target audience for your website is essential to ensure their needs are addressed. You should identify and categorise your target audience into groups. Both, the new design as well as the content should address the needs and expectations of the target groups individually. Websites that are designed specifically with the needs of the target audience are more effective and tend to have higher rates of retention and conversion.

Research your competitors

There is a lot that can be learnt from your leading competitors. Analysing the competition will not only provide valuable information on website’s design but also on technology and usability concepts being applied. With the help of search engines such as Google it is easy to identify the top competitors in your industry.

A modern design

The look and feel or visual appearance of your website is a key consideration. There is nothing worse for your company’s brand than an outdated design. No matter what your company does it is essential for your website to look modern and professional. The current trend is for clean-cut and minimalist designs.

A Perfect Web design for your company: Top 5 Strategies

by on Aug 29, 2008 (0) Comments

A web design company may endeavour to design the perfect website for your business. However there is no set formula for a perfect web design. A Professional Web design company will strive to strike a perfect balance between various factors that contribute to an effective website presence for your company no matter how large or small your business. Whilst there is no formula for a perfect web design, your web design company can address key issues to ensure your website works for your business and is able to meet its objectives.

You should work closely with your web design company in order to identify the objectives that the website design should achieve. As the needs of every business are unique, a web design that may prove effective for one company may not be suitable for another. Whilst it is important for your website to look professional, it is by no means sufficient to determine its success.

In order for a website to be successful a number of issues need to be addressed in the design of the website. 5 of these strategies are discussed below:

Capture the Users attention

Visitors to your website will often decide in the first several seconds whether to stay on your website or not. The homepage of the website should be designed with this in mind as it is often the window to the rest of the website and the company.

Website usability and Accessibility

Usability is an important area that determines the success of any business website. Web Design Company should focus equally on usability of the website as they do on the design and look and feel.

The web design should be consistent across all platforms and be accessible to all users. With the recent growth in internet access on wireless and mobile devices it is a common practice to also publish a mobile version of the website design.

The 7 Top SEO Tactics You’ll Ever Learn.

by on Aug 29, 2008 (0) Comments

As a current owner of a website, I have discovered its not as easy as people make it seem. Its a common misconception to think that creating a site is easy. You need to make sure that your layout is easy to understand and friendly to the user. The interface colors and placement of items is highly important. The more important the information the farther to the top of the page it should be, the less important information should be placed lower on the sites pages. Some of these tips are no-brainers, others may be new to you. Either way, you should always keep them on your mind when developing a website.

Site Navigation:Navigation should be simple. The less Javascript and Flash, the better. Although Google is beginning to learn how to crawl flash, it’s still not as good as text. Link all your pages together. Most of the pages should be accessible from your homepage. Do not use frames under any circumstance. All frames are bad. Avoid linking with images if possible.

Meta tags: Use <Description> and <Keywords> Metatags. Metatags do not have as much effect today with Google, but other search engines still rely on them heavily and they always help your ranking. Remember that what you use for a description will often be used as the search results description so write it well. The <Keywords> Metatag allows for you to input as many keywords as you want, however, 20 is a good number to aim for. Do not use keywords that are not found on your page.

Inbound links: Although inbound links remain largely out of your control, they are a great asset to you website. Links from similar websites are some of the most valuable as well as high PR links and e.du and .gov links. Do your best to avoid links from link farms and avoid linking to such websites. If you have any control over it, have different anchor text for your inbound links.

Unique content: Content is king. Content is the most important part of your website. If you have good content, visitors will return often to see what is new. They will spread the word about your site. Search engines can recognize unique content and they highly favor sites with original information.

Domain Expiration Date: Extending your domain’s expiration date can be a great thing for your website. It’s one way of telling search engines that you plan to stick around and aren’t a fly by night site. Expiration date does not have a huge effect on SEO but between 2 similar sites, the one with the later expiration will show up first in results.

Keyword Density: Too many keywords in your text and search engines view it as spamming. It also takes away from your content if you are specifically trying to stuff it with keywords. No one wants to read an article that uses “X Brand Hot dogs” in every sentence. Then again, if you have to few keywords in your text, it is difficult for search engines to decipher what it is about and which keywords to index it as. As a general rule, try to stay between 3%-6% keyword density.

15 Features Your Site Doesn’t Need

by on Aug 28, 2008 (0) Comments

The worst mistake in internet marketing? Making things too complicated. It pumps up costs, slows site launches and keeps you offline when you could be online, selling stuff.

Who makes that mistake? You do. When you insist that that one feature is so important you can’t live without it, you’re killing yourself. If you can get 90% of the function with 10% of the effort, shouldn’t you?

So, here’s a list of features I think your site can probably do without, at least for now:

  1. Integration with your inventory management system. If you’re already selling lots online, great! Spend the fifty grand it’ll take to synchronize your store with your inventory system. Otherwise, forget it. Put it on hold.
  2. A fancy content management system (CMS). A full-featured, enterprise CMS is a great tool when you need it. But do you really need it? If you have a staff of two, you don’t. Use WordPress or Movable Type, instead.
  3. Community content. Yah, community content is trendy as heck. But you don’t need to build your own bloody city. Before you spend the time and shell out the cash to add community content, ask yourself: Do you need to build the community yourself? Couldn’t you use Facebook? Or MySpace? Or something else? Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t need to.
  4. A talking, walking spokesperson. I’m sorry, but no one needs a little video person that walks onscreen and starts babbling about how wonderful this product is. I go online to get away from that. So save the cash. Don’t add a virtual spokesperson. Plus, they’re creepy as hell.
  5. Video. I love online video. It’s super-valuable to the right business. Is that your business? If you can’t get your message across without motion or a ‘face to face’ human element, use video. Otherwise, save the money and time.

Can We Predict The Outcome of The Presidential Election With Each Candidate’s Traffic Data?

by on Aug 28, 2008 (0) Comments

Can traffic to a Presidential Candidate’s homepage be used to gauge who will win this year’s election? Hitwise has published recent data on the traffic both American presidential candidates have seen in the last month (ending 8/23), and while the results may not shed much light on the forthcoming election’s outcome, they reveal a few interesting trends.

Hitwise has ranked each state by two criteria: its contribution to each site’s total traffic, and the the overall likelihood that a user in the state will visit the candidate’s site (called the Representation index). If either metric is applicable to the election, it will be Representation Index, which indicates the candidate’s popularity on a per-state basis and isn’t affected by the state’s population.

Unsurprisingly, California represents the most traffic share for both candidates, accounting for 13% of Obama’s total traffic and 12% of McCain’s. But both candidates have also seen a similar Representation Index from the state, which means that a similar number of Californians have visited each site. Given the state’s Democratic history, this is surprising – apparently Californians are interested in learning about the opposition. Conversely, in left-leaning New York, McCain’s site has only seen about half as much traffic as Obama’s.

Close Encounters Of The Republican Kind: McCainSpace Relaunches

by on Aug 28, 2008 (0) Comments

Why is it that both political campaigns feel the need to have their own social networks. Barack Obama has my.barackobama.com and John McCain has McCainSpace, which just relaunched with a new design from KickApps after failing massively on its own. The new McCainSpace design itself is functional enough, giving McCain supporters a central place to discuss election issues via blogs, forums, videos, and photos. But I’m not sure who the site is supposed to appeal to other than lonely Young Republicans who don’t have any friends on Facebook.

The site is aimed at “Generation08,” presumably the young’uns that the campaign is having a hard time reaching. The logo and default photo image remind me of something out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (remember that scene with the alien light coming through the doorway?) And then there’s the welcome video of McCain on the homepage (embedded below), saying “Greetings my friends.” Greetings, gramps.

Creating a separate social network makes little sense in the age of MySpace and Facebook. But McCain isn’t doing so good on those sites. He has only 226,000 “supporters” on Facebook, compared to 1.4 million for Obama. But maybe that’s just because he’s more of a MySpace guy (note the similarity of the McCainSpace name). But even there, McCain only has 66,665 “friends” versus 467,814 for Obama.

It’s Great to Be Cutting-Edge… Unless You Get Cut

by on Aug 27, 2008 (0) Comments

In  a world of ‘Web 2.0’, ‘mash-ups’ and ‘blogs’, designers and clients alike are trying to push the envelope with their sites and designs. That’s a great thing unless you lose your consumers in the process.

What IS Cutting-Edge Web Design?

Admittedly, it is just as ambiguous a term as “web 2.0”, but it does have meaning. I’ve most commonly heard ‘cutting edge’ refer to new technologies that are just emerging into use, but it’s not limited to that. I’d consider some color schemes, design techniques and even new uses for existing products or services to be included. Most importantly, the term is mostly indefinable and totally discretionary.

Who Are You Designing For?

Web designers are getting creative. Really creative. Maybe too creative. Take a look at designer Bryan Veloso’s site, Avalonstar (seriously, go ahead). There are some really nice, “cutting-edge” effects here. Since Bryan describes his site as ‘his playground’, the design is exactly what it should be – whatever he wants. More often than not, however, sites are being built to connect with consumers of some kind and are not just our design ‘playgrounds’. This means that the consumers should, at least at some level,  be dictating our sites’ designs .

If the designer’s responsible for AARP.org were to use a similar design, they would absolutely be missing the mark. AARP is an “organization for people age 50 and over.” The youngest a member could possibly be in this organization (born 50 days ago, today) would have been nearly 40 when AOL 3.0 first launched on Windows 95. In addition to being more prone to vision problems that would make lower-contrast sites difficult to read, this demographic as a whole is far less familiar with the internet than most 4 year-olds today.

Providing a cutting-edge website to this demographic doesn’t mean pumping it up with a bucket of Silverlight and 3 cans of ‘web 5.0’… Simply using the internet is cutting-edge to some consumers. Keeping your consumers’ aptitudes in mind will help you keep their viewership.