Marketing and Web Design

Offers and promotions will come and go, but a sharp design that grabs attention will increase awareness of an offer, and it’s something many businesses will consider when they kick-start a new promotion.

Designing for offers may mean including a new banner photo on your website, perhaps a CTA that can be shared on your site, Facebook page, Twitter account and Instagram among other online portals. You may also consider designing an advertisement for other relevant websites, and there are plenty of ways to design promotions.

Most companies will allocate a certain amount of space for a promotion on their website, and if you get a decent amount of visitors, then it could make a big difference whilst you should always aim to spread the message further CTAs or graphics on social media sites.

If you’ve recently had a website designed by a professional team of web designers, then hopefully you’ve received a good product. You should be able to easily manage your products, content, and administrate your business through the CMS. What you should not do when you reach this stage, is to begin to add extraneous design elements whenever you feel like. This will disrupt the branding of the website, and make your online operations considerably less effective.

You may be surprised to find out that quite a few people who’ve had a website designed for them turn around and change a load of the features (or don’t use them at all), add other design elements to it (which distract visitors from what they’re there to see), or change structure of the website entirely. In order to avoid this, the web developers and the clients need to develop a relationship based on trust, so that the client will feel that what they have is produced to a professional standard, and then leave it alone.

It’s always been a lot easier to tell your story in a photo than in a large chunk of text and more and more people are moving toward visual storytelling. Text heavy webistes may have a particularly high bounce rate and that’s because people want to find out exactly what they’re looking for fast.

They don’t want to have to read through endless irrelevant facts to find out what your website is about; it should be clear, and making use of visuals and short, concise copy is extremely important. Of course there has been a great deal of movement towards content marketing, but this does not mean that you have to have a text heavy website. A snippet of an article can be found in a website news feed and if your visitors want to read it they will, it shouldn’t be forced on them, otherwise they’ll lose interest.

Some of the best website designs will look shabby if poor quality images are used, and that’s why every image should be carefully chosen before it’s used on your website.

Ecommerce sites in particular will need high quality images, especially if they have a product catalogue. Product photography is a unique skill and customers need high quality, high resolution, factuial images so that they’re able to make an informed decision when it comes to making a purchase.

A poor quality image can reflect badly on your business and it’s not just the product pages that require quality photos. Corporate headshots for an ‘about us’ page can reflect negatively, while the homepage should have images that entice visitors to research the website further. Calls to actions will often include photos and text to persuade visitors to go to a specific page, and an unflattering image could deter visitors from browsing your various pages further.

When you add images to your website it can give it 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 can take bland product image and transform it into a bright, lively image that really works to seel the product.

There is some quite spectacular work carried out by image retouchers today and if you don’t possess the skills then seeking a graphic designer or a retoucher can be beneficial. You may want to add graphics to current products, perhaps sales items, or removes aspects that no longer exist and image retouchers can give you the image you desire.

It means you don’t have to waste time taking corporate photos and setting up a studio and you may find an image that you’ve deemed not worthy of a place on your website can be transformed into something quite remarkable. Image retouching should come before uploading to your website and it’s a crucial stage in maintaining a website.

Sometimes in web design it can be good to take a setback, meaning not to overload the page with too many graphics icons and images, and to 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 content.

If you’re audience is particularly intellectual and they’re more likely to be grasped by your written content then that should take precedence. By giving space around your content you can actually bring more attention to it, and visitors may be more likely to skip past content if it’s on the page with countless icons, images and graphics.

Visitors do not want information overload, so there should always be limits to the amount of written content, but sometimes it can be beneficial to give your written content some focus, and this can definitely work with a clear, simple appealing font and layout.

There are certain unique tasks and projects out there for website designers, but there are certain tasks out there that are quite typical in any entry level website design job.

When you’re just starting out you may often be thrown into the deep end, and you can find yourself building prototypes including graphics, site navigation and layout, content designs. There will also be basic check-up tasks such as reviewing websites’ and making sure they’re easy to navigate whilst using website technologies that comply with lawns and international standards.

It is also usually the designers job to submit the website to search engines, and to upload final designs through FTP to make them live. Maintenance will always be required from time to time, especially if you’re starting your career in an agency, and tweaks and adjustments will need to be prioritised for various clients.

Much like the industry of fashion, web design always has different trend that come and go, but trend should never be looked at like rules. They’re not always suitable for every single type of website, and businesses websites should consider any trend transitions carefully.

If you have an ecommerce website that’s performing well, and you learn about a completely new design trend that actually seems rather appealing, think about your audience first. Ask yourself whether the trend could work with your target audience and think about the issues it could potentially cause.

Flat design was a trend that burst onto the scene last year, but not all business websites have ‘upgraded’ to a flat website design, and if it’s a design that will serve no purpose whatsoever to your target audience then it’s not a trend worth considering.