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All posts tagged Web Design

The Top Elements of Effective B2B Web Design

While B2B sales are typically complicated, your website shouldn’t be (at least not to your user). Below are eight essential things every B2B website design must have:

  1. Clear Navigation

Your website’s navigation is not the time to get creative with copy or design. The navigation is a utilitarian element and you want the user to easily find exactly what they are looking for (and quickly) through your main navigation.

  1. A Homepage that Tells Your Brand Story

Always assume the user coming to your B2B website knows nothing about your company. As such, you want to take them on a journey, starting with an attractive hero image or video and a short and poignant brand statement. As the user scrolls down the page, engage them with subtle animation, short blocks of copy, and imagery to support it. Your website’s home page must give the user a reason to stay and explore further.

3. Products and/or Services Section
A section of your B2B web design must be dedicated to going into a decent amount of detail about your products and services. This can start with a product or services landing page that gives a quick overview of everything your firm has to offer.

From there, the user should have the option to go one step further and get to a page with more detail. However, when I say detail, I don’t mean a page full of long-form copy. I’m talking about concise, engaging bits of content with imagery, illustrations, photography, and/or videos to support it. You don’t need to tell the whole story, but enough of the story to educated the user so they are motivated to take action, such as filling out a form or picking up the phone.

4. Clear CTAs and Contact Page
Don’t make a prospect or client visiting your website search for how to contact you. Buttons, pop-ups, chat features, and an easy-to-find contact page are absolutely critical to any successful B2B website design.

Read more: The Top Elements of Effective B2B Web Design

The rise of the smart site: How web design is driving business growth

A new white paper from Kayo demonstrates how web design and development can drive business growth.

Kent-based technical agency, Kayo, has launched a new report, exploring how effective web design and development can drive business growth.

Entitled ‘The rise of the smart site’, the report demonstrates how your website can act as your most powerful business development manager, if harnessed and optimised correctly as part of a wider web strategy.

The report highlights how against a backdrop of ever-evolving customer expectations, a growing number of channels and routes to market and competitors on all sides, your website is a hugely powerful tool to help build brand awareness and drive business growth.

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Responsive web design: What it is, and why you need it

In fact, if you check out Quikclicks, Australia’s leading web design agency, you’ll be able to see what a well designed and captivating web page looks like! It’s important to note that the professionals are there to handle the detail for you, allowing you to focus on the business and your goals.

What Is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive web design uses the availability of data storage to allow the website to access a multitude of images and potential layouts. This results in the ability, via coding, for the web page to fit the screen it is being viewed on.

You probably know how frustrating it is to view a web page on a cell phone and have to keep scrolling to left and right. The idea behind responsive web design is to avoid this, the page will fit the screen you’re holding, regardless of what size that is.

In the past, this would only have been possible by creating multiple websites. A mobile device would have to visit a different site to the desktop one. This made creating websites more complicated and keeping all sites up to date time-consuming.

Read more: Responsive web design: What it is, and why you need it

8 Web Design Principles to Know in 2019

Your website design is more important for conversions than you think. You can implement every conversion-boosting tactic in the world, but if your web design looks like crap, it won’t do you much good.

Design is not just something designers do. Design is marketing. Design is your product and how it works. The more I’ve learned about the principles of web design, the better results I’ve gotten.

Here are 8 effective web design principles you should know and follow.

  1. Visual Hierarchy

Squeaky wheels get the grease, and prominent visuals get the attention. Visual hierarchy is one of the most important principles behind good web design. It’s the order in which the human eye perceives what it sees.

Exercise. Please rank the circles in the order of importance:

visual hierarchy circles

Without knowing anything about these circles, you were able to rank them

easily. That’s a visual hierarchy.

Certain parts of your website are more important than others (forms, calls to action, value proposition, etc.), and you want those to get more attention than the less important parts.

If you website menu has 10 items, are all of them equally important? Where do you want the user to click? Make important links more prominent.

Read more: 8 Web Design Principles to Know in 2019

How Minimalist Web Design Can Improve the Customer Experience

“Less is more” – you’ve probably heard this phrase a number of times. Like most of us, you might be thinking of it as a sort of a “minimalist mantra”.

This mantra has certainly imprinted itself into modern design, as minimalism remains one of the most popular design philosophies. From architecture to fashion, “the art of less”, has proven to be a tenacious influence on creators and trends.

When we talk about minimalism in web design, we’re referring to a design approach that seeks to simplify the user interface and website navigation. This is done by using only the elements that have a distinct purpose, whether aesthetic or functional.

We’ve grown used to clean, uncluttered interfaces without necessarily dubbing them minimalist. The principles of minimalism have taken over web design and still dictate key trends, but this is not without good reason. A minimalist design can greatly enhance the user experience, which, in the case of business websites and e-commerce stores, immediately translates to an improved customer experience.

Clarity above all

Minimalism is not about getting rid of elements for the sake of clean-cut aesthetics and a sleek-looking website. Sometimes, you might find designers taking things too far, eliminating to the point that the website either looks unfinished or navigation becomes confusing because too many elements are hidden. That’s the exact opposite of what minimalist design seeks to achieve.

The primary goal of minimalist web design is to improve usability and make navigation effortless. In a survey by Hubspot, 76% of consumers stated that the most important factor in a website’s design is how easy it makes it for them to find what they want.

Clarity is one of the crucial factors for an effortless user experience, and in order to introduce clarity to your design, you’ll first have to get rid of a lot of visual clutter. That’s where the crispy minimalist aesthetics come in.

By avoiding excess details, buttons, and other distractions, you’ll be able to guide the visitor’s focus to help them find what they need within a matter of seconds. In order to emphasize content and guide the visitor’s eye to important elements on the page such as CTA buttons, designers also rely on simplified layouts, whitespace (negative space), and contrast.

Read more: How Minimalist Web Design Can Improve the Customer Experience

5 Solid Web-Design Tips For Drawing In Clients

Creating a quality website might seem easy, especially with all the platforms available today. You can use a template for guidance and then publish what you think is most important to your brand in some very fun ways. But with all the bells and whistles out there, however, it’s easy for business owners to lose sight of the reason for their site in the first place: to attract and inform potential customers.

Your customers and clients are the roots of your business, and neglecting their needs when designing your site can be detrimental — and different audiences look for different things. Below, five members of Forbes Communications Council shared some fundamental web design tips that will help you draw in, and keep, new clients. Here’s what they said:

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The Art of Web Design

Websites have grown bland in the contemporary digital age. Template-driven and generic, homogenised by the frameworks of big-name content management systems. The internet is a place of dry technicality; portals seeking to convey information or to market a product to a specific audience, often afraid to break out of the norm.

Mammoth marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay are utilitarian in their layout and design, and countless smaller brands follow suit. Perhaps blinded by the success of those giants, maybe fearful of confusing potential customers. However, we must also keep in mind that computing technology and processing power has still been in relative infancy—something that has forced designers to adopt a ‘bare bones’ approach, simply so that the pages would not an age to load.

The advent of 4G wireless connectivity, processors associated with light-speed calculations, and network providers dishing out generous data packages has to some extent served to lift these previous constraints. Slowly, but surely, we are beginning to witness websites which mirror works of art.

A breed of disobedient designers are redefining the art of web design by bucking the visual conformity that has oversaturated our digital age—whether it is harnessing the avant garde approach of web design brutalism, the tongue-in-cheek throwbacks to the disagreeable design of the mid-1990s, or using the latest technologies to bring the progressive aesthetics of high-end fashion magazines to life, there are pioneers ready to bring a new visual language to the world wide web.

Be it culturally-engaged design brands or experimental musicians, simply creating a free web store or the birth of another personal blog, designers are taking notions of creativity to a whole new level. It is vital to create a sense of bespoke branding that will be memorable long after the visitor has left the page, to consider a human audience as opposed to a search engine. Sure, we want to provide a website that is easy to navigate, but too there should be an emotional, human connection that extends beyond homogenisation.

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Top 5 Easy Web Design Tricks for Marketers To Boost Conversion Rates

Maximizing website conversion rates remains one of the single biggest challenges for marketers today. Effective SEO and PPC can significantly increase website traffic. But raking high on search engines and driving website traffic is just the first step. Your site needs to keep visitors’ attention, convey the value of your offer and compel them to take a desired action — complete a form, download a document, or call your business.

If your website conversion rates are lacking, your landing page design may require an overhaul. The question you have to ask yourself is: how many leads or sales are you losing due to sub-par landing page design?

The good news is website conversion rates are something you can directly impact and improve. Even small landing page design changes can dramatically impact visitor engagement and conversion rates.

In the second version, a simple change produced big positive results.

By choosing a photo of a baby “looking” at the ad’s headline, users’ eyes were drawn to the text. Our eyes are naturally drawn to look where others are looking. Even if it’s a picture of a baby in an ad.

What subtle improvements could you make to your company’s landing pages to increase conversion rates? Here are our top five examples:

1. Choose an image that supports the call-to-action.

It’s easy to simply slap a header image from a stock photo site on your landing page and call it a day. But it can pay off to use an image that works in tandem with your headline and call to action. The right image isn’t just eye candy. It’s there to convey an important message to the user, and to provide important context.

Here’s an exercise to try: look at your header image without the headline, or the text to explain it. Does it still “say” anything about your product or service? If not, consider looking for something that compliments the text. Netflix does a great job of this on their signup page:

Read more: Top 5 Easy Web Design Tricks for Marketers To Boost Conversion Rates

 

4 Reasons Why Effective Writing Must Figure in Your Web Design Strategy

Digitization has caught up with us and is taking root in all parts of our lives. From businesses to individuals, all strive to carve their niche in our digital world. Both newbie web designers and some of the experienced hands who have been in the industry for decades still believe that a successful website is all about the visuals. To some degree that is true; designing aesthetics and visuals are of great importance, but another aspect that should be recognized is compelling writing.

The textual content that you write is just as significant as the images that you will use and below are the reasons why.

  1. Writing Grabs Attention

Forget the website for a minute, what do you do when you want to grab someone’s attention? You will probably shout or even scream to achieve this.

The same concept applies in the online space. So how exactly can you grab attention online through your website? Images can work magic, but they are not enough as attention-grabbing tools by themselves. It’s the content that helps your visuals attract and hold the attention of web visitors.

By using engaging content, you will be able to make a point in a precise manner effectively. You can create an element of surprise with your content, use it to shock your audience or use it to engage and pique the interest of your audience. But even as you are about to put down your words into writing, you should know that the content that you come up with must be written impeccably to grab attention.

2. Writing Helps You Demonstrate Credibility

Different kinds of sites have different expectations, but they all have a common requirement. They all have to look credible. It’s a logical requirement if you are using your website as a tool to help you sell something, promote a cause or indulge people in doing specific activities. The bottom line is, you need them to trust you and to achieve that, your website must look reliable.

The good news is it’s not rocket science to create a robust website that looks serious. Just like mentioned above, having the right visual elements and arranging them nicely is not enough to cut it. Your site still won’t appear complete and will require a cherry on top which is the added text. With good writing, not only will your website engage audiences, but it will also make your site weblink appear credible.

You can also subtly achieve this. It is unnecessary to write about the high quality of your products or brag about your high level of honesty. On the contrary, such statements could potentially have the opposite effect on your audience. When it comes to reputations of companies, it’s best when it speaks for itself.

Read more: 4 Reasons Why Effective Writing Must Figure in Your Web Design Strategy

8 RULING WEB DESIGN TRENDS FOR 2018

Web design trends have undergone an apparent change as one of the most dynamic industries in web technologies. It is 2018, the eighteenth year of the millennia, a year for exploration of the web technologies in a dynamic perspective. Web technology is unbeatable and with the ever-rising technical challenges as more products get into the market, the only choice of web designers is be innovative and put up with the changing trends. They have to ensure that their designs fit any internet device be it a desktop or a smartphone. Here is a list of 8 ruling web design trends that will shape the web industry in 2018.

Prioritizing mobile web designs

Smartphones have surpassed desktop and notebook computers in browsing. According to Statista, a renowned scientific research organization, projections hold that by 2020 over 40 percent of the population of the world will own a smartphone. Interesting facts by the same organization project an annual smartphone shipping capacity of 1.7 billion by 2021. The implication is that most people will surf the net using smartphones. 2018 resolution is to give priority to mobile web designs. This year, 2018, is a year of transformative web design as designers embrace the reality of battling with technical challenges to give their users a satisfying experience in their web products with a top priority on mobile designs. Have a look on 7 essential principles of mobile web design to get designed a good mobile site.

Read more: 8 RULING WEB DESIGN TRENDS FOR 2018