What are your key messages?

When you’re planning on upgrading your website or designing a new one, it’s important to consider you key messages. You need to ask yourself the following questions:

  • What do I want my visitors to know?
  • What do I want from my visitors?
  • What will people be looking for on my website?
  • What type of people will visit my site?

When you know who’s visiting your site, you can start thinking about what you need to offer them to grab their interest. You also need to think about the navigation of the site so they can find the information, products or services they need quickly. And, as with all websites, it’s important to make sure the contact areas are easy to use and easy to find. People should be able to get to this kinds of information fast, and it will help you in the long run.

Designing your Google+ page

Okay so whilst you are not able to create a Google+ design from scratch, you can customise the page and make it look nice and professional. To do this, you will need to populate your Google+ page with professional photos and high quality logos and graphics. Having a nice clean logo as the profile picture and a hero banner as the cover photo is a good way to start, and you can then continue to add lots of content to the page over time. Adding videos, images, reviews, infographics and other forms of content can keep the Google+ page looking nice and fresh, and you should always keep your brand colours in mind when posting in updates. Getting that consistency across is key, and you should make sure your updates are consistently branded across all of your social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn among others.

Five Mobile Website Design Trends In 2016

Web design trends keep on changing every year with new trends gaining traction all the time. The current web trends have however seen an increase in the shift of attention in design trends from desktop to mobile website design. More and more individuals access the internet for basic information and their digital entertainment using mobile devices. The number of individuals who access the internet from mobile devices is slowly surpassing those who access the internet through desktop computers. It therefore makes sense for web developers to be abreast with the current mobile design trends. Below are mobile web design trends in 2016.

Increased Animations

One of the most notable mobile website design trends in 2016 is that there has been an increase in the incorporation of animations in all manner of websites and web apps. Animating almost all kinds of elements across websites for both mobile and desktop has become all the range this year. This is due to the fact that animations increase a website’s interactivity. Animations can even draw users to a certain section of the website or mobile app. Animations are increasingly being used to provide a richer user experience as they coincide with human interaction.

Increased scrolling

Although this is a trend that had started picking up in 2015, in 2016 it is definitely going to be cemented as a hallmark of mobile website design. In 2016, horizontal scrolling will be completely be done away with when it comes to mobile web designs. Instead, vertical scrolling will be given precedence over any horizontal scrolling. Vertical scrolling provides a more comfortable user experience and is the most suitable way of designing mobile apps. Parallax scrolling is going to be the most popular scrolling trend in 2016, together with parallax scrolling, modular scrolling and infinite scrolling. The later are also going to gain more popularity this year; these different scrolling methods will be used to provide a richer user experience.

Story Telling

Thanks to interactive scrolling and animations, mobile design will incorporate story telling in their design so as to make the user the centre of the narrative. The designs will incorporate the use of bold imagery and videos that will on most occasions be in the form of cards to make the user the main “character” of these stories. The use of animations and parallax scrolling will further add to this richer user experience in storytelling.

Blurred backgrounds

This year will see the increase in the use of blurred background for various reasons. For one, the blurred background effect will be used to add style to a website. It will also be used to draw attention to specific elements in the foreground which will have conveniently been left un-blurred.

Incorporation of subtle colour palettes

Although design of the mobile web has been largely been influenced by the desktop, the trend this year will break from normal desktop tradition where desktop websites are designed in bright bold colours. Instead, the mobile websites will incorporate the use of softer colours, ones that easily mix together and draw a lot of attention to particular elements of the application.

Why you should edit your images

Adding images to your website is pretty simple, especially if you have a easy to use CMS. The only problem is, if you’re not editing your photos in any way, they may lack colour, consistency and they may take a long time to load, slowing your website down. With some editing, you can give your images a really fresh feel, but only if the images themselves are appealing. This is where image retouching can help, especially for product photos. Image retouching is essentially the art of making bland product images better, transforming them into bright, lively images that help to really sell your product(s). If you’re not familiar with Photoshop or similar software, we recommend you hire a graphic designer or an image retoucher, they’ll be able to help you add images to your site of the right size whilst making them 10 times more atractive. 

Pin your way to Success

Pinterest is a great tool for small and medium sized businesses. If you have a number of attractive products to show to the world, whether that be furniture, clothes, food, cars, houses or art, Pinterest could be one of your most effective social media channels. With Pinterest, people are able to discover your photos and products, perhaps pinning them to use as a reference later down the line. Many people pin things to consider, recommend or even buy several months later, so you never really know how important one single pin could be on your Pinterest page. The more photos your get onto Pinterest, the more interest you will generate in your products or services, so make sure you spend a bit of time doing this. You won’t regret it.

3 Things you need on your contact page

A contact page may not be the most attractive in terms of design, but it’s there for a reason and you have to make sure your contact page gives customers all of the information they need to get in touch with you. In order of the most important, we start with:

Contact Form

A contact form should be short and sweet, giving customers an easy way to send you a message; this should be near the top of the page.

Other details

You should also list other ways to contact you and list your phone number, email address and physical address. They then have all the details they need to contact you.

Map

A Google map is also a nice option and it gives customers the opportunity to see exactly where you’re based. If they want to pay you a visit they can  quickly check the fastest possible route to your address.

Become a Content King

Gone are the days when a flashy website was enough. You have to have both nowadays and as you’ll see with some websites that content is more important. Google needs fresh relevant content from your website to be able to rank it highly, and sometimes in terms of web design it can be good to slow down a little and get the basics right first. Let the written content do the talking. Of course, some images are going to be beneficial otherwise the website would like a plain text document, but you can combine colours and nice images to accommodate the engaging words. You have to remember, your audience is likely to be particularly intellectual and if they’re more likely to be grasped by your written content then it has to take precedence. Once your content is in place, you can then start to think more about the visual impact that you’d like to make.

The Trend of Content and Design Customisation

As the technology involved in website design has continued to develop since they first started popping up over the last two decades, we take a look at the trend. A big part of the development has taken place in the areas of dynamic website design. While static website design has remained… static, dynamic content management has continued to become more advanced. Even when you look at the open sourced platforms, the amount of content and design elements that you can dynamically manage continues to expand.

A big part of this expansion in dynamic capabilities is taking place in the world of open-sourced CMS. Content management systems that are freely available have the intrinsic advantage of having more people depending upon the system, which means more testing and more refining. Despite this, much of the evolution in the website technological playing field continues to take place in bespoke CMS design, as bigger websites are able to push forward development in more niche areas.