September 2018 • TotalWeb Partners

September 19, 2018

Why Retailers Need to Care About Web Development Platforms

Website Content, Website Design Practices Web Development Platforms

Brands are struggling to build and grow customer loyalty in an increasingly complex omnichannel environment. According to Wanda Cadigan, VP commerce, Sitecore, many are struggling with mobile enablement, in addition to the ultimate vision of delivering a uniform experience over every customer channel imaginable.

For example, in the UK, there might be a really cool and exciting mobile app that allows customers to shop with one click, personalises their recommendations, and allows them to organise returns easily, possibly built on a proprietary platform. But in the U.S., perhaps this same platform either doesn’t exist or a similar experience is built on a completely different platform. And when you deal with that in two markets, imagine what complexity emerges when you’re active in 30-40, or 130-140 markets around the world?

What if a brand worked differently in every market? The customer experience wouldn’t be universal and would cause many frustrations for both the brand and its customers. The more platforms that are used, the more difficult it is to provide your customers with the consistent, high-quality experience they demand across all your markets.

How does this problem emerge? Well, often siloed systems are deployed in a market to meet specific needs. You want to do something specific in France? You buy and deploy a service locally, which unfortunately may or may not talk to the system that runs the rest of the business’ operations, and may not be available in the UK, Germany, the U.S., or other markets. In many cases, the systems deployed may only support specific countries, due to limitations in currency support, language support, local tax frameworks, and more. This makes scaling a consistent brand experience difficult.

Even more challenging is the fact that often brand experiences that are tailored and owned in-market (only sometimes abiding with global brand guidelines) can be impacted by being delivered on different systems or platforms.

September 17, 2018

by TWP Publisher

5 ways to enhance your marketing images on social media

Social Media Marketing Social Media Marketing

Humans are visual creatures. Half of the human brain is designed to process visuals, more than the other senses such as touch and hearing. The brain is able to identify images in as fast as 13 milliseconds, and humans are able to remember more than 2000 pictures with at least 90% accuracy. So if someone sees a beautiful or a haunting image, they’ll won’t likely forget it.

In the age of social media, a picture is truly worth a thousand words. If you want to stand out, you must have really compelling visuals in your arsenal. Online consumers are said to retain only 10% to 20% of information, but when plain text is paired with visuals, they are able to remember 65% of the information. Another study revealed that content with photos or infographics registered a 94% increase in page views compared to non-visual content.

With billions of social media content out there, it is important that as marketers and content producers you are able to draw attention to your social media images, or people are going to forget about you.

Here are the best practices for visual content to get you started on improving the overall look and feel of your social media channels.

Use dynamic colour schemes
Using key colours that enable consumers to easily identify your brand or company is great, but that doesn’t mean you are stuck with blues or reds. Colours convey not just your logo, but also warmth and emotion. They set the mood and the atmosphere. While key colours help make branding more consistent, you don’t want to risk being too predictable.

A study on the impact of colour marketing found that 90% of snap judgements are made based on colour alone. This shows just how important colour is in social media design.

Instead of the flat colours, use light and dark gradients for a more unique feel. Evaluate whether you should go bold and bright or a little subdued. The key here is to be dynamic, allowing your brand to surprise even your most loyal fans. In order to get someone’s attention on social media, you must always keep it fresh and relevant. Keep your visual content consistent and exciting, and let your choice of colours do the trick for you.

September 12, 2018

by TWP Publisher

5 Best Online Front-End Web Development Playgrounds

Website Content, Website Design Practices Web Development Playgrounds

As much as I love offline web development editors and IDEs, I hate the inconveniences which come with having to edit code, then open a browser to test changes. Even when a browser tab with the test file is open, you constantly have to jump from editor to browser and refresh the tab before any changes will show in the output. I have the preference of working on sites where the output is shown in real-time.

As soon as the code is written, the test-ready output is delivered within seconds. Conveniently, editable code and testable output are shown side-by-side. Another joy of these online playgrounds is the huge community of web designers and developers publishing code snippets for the world to take a look at.

1. Codepen

CodePen is one of the largest communities for web designers and developers where users can test and showcase user-created HTML, CSS and JavaScript code snippets. It functions as an online code editor and open-source learning environment, where developers can create code snippets, named “pens”, and test them. Codepen’s editors come with some common functionality like normal ones, with respect to code indentation and colorful syntax highlighting. It also supports a huge array of preprocessors for HTML, CSS, and JS, including but not limited to, Pug, Slim, SCSS, TypeScript. The collaboration mode is also very helpful. You never have to lose your work, because it is automatically saved, and you can resume whenever you please. With similarities close to Github, feel free to fork and edit other user’s code as you wish.

2. JSfiddle

JSFiddle is a vibrant online community for testing and showcasing user-created and collaboration HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code snippets, most appropriately known as ‘fiddles’. It allows for simulated AJAX calls. Just like with Codepen, the clean interface puts the code and the result side by side, and results are applied immediately after clicking the run button. It features support for SCSS, as well as JavaScript libraries such as TypeScript, CoffeeScript, Vue and React. It keeps on improving, and recently rolled out a code hinting feature which will suggest some common CSS property and value names, same for JavaScript. Collaboration with other developers supported too.

September 10, 2018

by TWP Publisher

Enjoy web development success with the best UI/UX design

Website Content, Website Design Practices Web Development

Without an excellent UI or user interface, a website fails to deliver a better user experience that is crucial for the impending success of any business. However, keeping up with the latest and best UI and UX design trends as well as implementing them in web development, custom website development services face various challenges. They have to adapt according to changing realities and demands of the users. Now they have to visualize the importance and scope of UI and UX design in business websites. To obtain better results, web designers have to make significant efforts to create an entirely new and appealing website.

They have to look for best UI/UX design trends as well as layouts in mind to meet the needs of the customers. Here we present the best tops for web development with best UI/UX design.

1. Mobile friendliness

Well, you have certainly heard about responsiveness concept. It is the most significant part of offering a better user experience. As a UI and UX designer, you need to follow certain UI design principles and also consider the preferences and choices of the users. However, it isn’t necessary that all of the users can only access your site from their own desktops. They might access them on their mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. In this mobile age, the users like to access almost anything on their smartphones. Hence, when you are deciding to design a business website, you need to create mobile-friendly features. With this important addition to your own website, you can certainly see significant changes in the business results.

2. Using appealing images to attract user’s attention

We are quite aware that attractive layout, as well as content, significantly improve the user interactivity with the website. Images are another aspect which plays a vital role in achieving the user’s attention at first look. Hence, having unique images is among the best ways to get users attracted to your website. It also enhances the visual hierarchy as well as increases the users. You can easily manage it by inserting relevant text on the images that clearly mention the actual purpose and meaning of your business service.

Enjoy web development success with the best UI/UX design

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