Website Design Criteria: Your Guide To Building A Great Site

You need to make sure that your site is making an excellent first impression. You should consider good website design criteria when you’re creating a design for your site. Keep these suggestions in mind, and you’ll be able to build a site that people will enjoy using.

Keep Things Simple

You don’t need a site that has a lot of bells and whistles. When you’re designing a website, you should stick with a clean design that’s easy to navigate. If you keep things relatively simple, you’ll create a better user experience.

Flashy design can look impressive, but it can also cause a lot of problems. You don’t want to create a site that looks cluttered, and you don’t want your site to cause issues for the end user. Minimalist design is on trend right now and for a good reason. It’s the ideal choice for most websites.

Choose The Right Colors

You’ll want to put plenty of thought into the colors that you select for your website. Typically, white backgrounds are best. It’s much easier to read text when it’s against a white background. You should also limit the number of colors that you use. Generally speaking, two primary colors and one accent color is best.

You should think about how the colors you’ve selected look together. Don’t pick clashing colors; find colors that compliment each other. You may want to use a color wheel so that you can see the right combination of colors for your site.

Responsive Design Is Essential

The people that are going to be visiting your website are going to be using many different browsers and devices. You will want to make sure that your site will display correctly for all of these people. That’s why responsive design is your best option. You should make sure that everyone that visits your site will be able to browse it without any issues.

Responsive design has become the standard in recent years, and it’s easy to understand why. It’s an essential component of good website design criteria. Make sure that you choose a responsive design for your site.

Always Look For Errors

You should spend some time testing your site and looking out for bugs. When people don’t conduct any bug testing, their websites are usually prone to problems. If you check your site and look for errors, you’ll be able to catch issues before anyone else has the chance to see them.

It’s inevitable that your site will have issues. However, if you test your site and watch out for errors, you’ll have the chance to fix most of those problems. These means that these bugs won’t cause any problems for your site’s users.

Content Is Still King

An attractive design is outstanding, but even the best design won’t accomplish much if you don’t have content to back it up. If you want to make your site a great place to visit, you’re going to want to put a lot of time and energy into your site’s content.

You shouldn’t underestimate the value of good content. If you focus on creating excellent content for your site, people may be able to overlook minor issue’s with your site’s design. Don’t spend all of your time working on the design of your site. Make sure that the content is up to par as well.

Make sure you keep good website design criteria at the forefront of your mind when you’re designing your site. Now that you know what you should be aware of, you’re ready to get to work on your site. You should strive to create a design that is both functional and appealing.

This guide can show you how to design a website yourself, but if you’d rather hire a professional instead of spending dozens of hours, then we recommend to use a search engine like Google to research a designer in your area. You’ll want to search for a web designer in the region, city, or state that you are in. If you want to meet that designer in person, you’ll want to modify your search with the terms “local” or “near me”. An example if you live in California is to begin by searching “web design bay area” or “california website designer”. These search results should give you a great starting place to find a professional and qualified web designer to meet your standard.

A Look At The Top 5 Online Marketing Tools

The days of ignoring online marketing are far gone, and if you want to have a successful business, you need to invest in digital marketing. Many things need to be done such as creating a web design plan, SEO, building and managing a mailing list, running ads, creating content, doing research on competitors, etc. As a result, you will need a variety of tools. So, in this article, we will look at the top 5 online marketing tools that you need for your digital marketing strategy to work.

The first tool you will need is MailChimp which will allow you to build, manage and market to your email list. Every business needs to create an email list to develop a closer relationship with their customers and potential customers. You will also need a mailing list to send possible customers information about your products, free offers, discounts, etc. A good email marketing strategy can significantly improve your business’s profits, and this is a tool you’ll want to buy.

Next, another tool that you should get is Hootsuite. This tool will help you to manage your social media pages from one platform. Through Hootsuite, you can schedule posts in advance, post to all of your pages at the same time, reply to social media comments from the main dashboard instead of having to manually go to each page, use pre-written responses and more. Social media is undoubtedly essential when running a business since many people interact with brands on their favorite social media platform first before buying from them.

Thirdly, when it comes to managing your website, you need to have Google Analytics installed on your site. This tool is critical, and you should have it installed on your site as soon as it is built. Google analytics will allow you to track every visitor that visits your site and it also monitors their actions on your site. This type of information is essential, and it will help you to better format your site for more conversions. It will also help you to see exactly where you’re getting most of your traffic from as well as the pages on your site that get the most traffic. You will see all of the keywords that you rank for as well as long tail keywords. Best of all, Google Analytics is a free tool, so make sure to use it.

The fourth tool we will look at is Buzzsumo. This tool is fantastic for market research and will show you what type of content performs the best in your niche. You can then use this information as a guide for when you’re creating your content.

Lastly, the fifth tool in our top 5 online marketing tools list that you should get is Crazy Egg. This tool will allow you to find out what’s working on your site and what’s not. It has a variety of features such as heat maps, mouse recording, targeting, and personalization.

In closing, we have just looked at some of the best online tools on the market. Make sure and check them out for yourself as they will help to improve your business.

Marketing Strategies You Need to Put into Action Right Now

Marketing Strategies You Need to Put into Action Right Now

Marketing is a given when it comes to business, but marketing requires ingenuity, research and a commitment to your brand.  Most small business either don’t have the budget nor the right strategy in place to make their marketing efforts payoff.  You need to develop a strategy as soon as possible to improve your chances of success and to keep your business afloat.  Here are some marketing strategies you need to put into action right now.

Have a strategy

This should be self-evident, unfortunately it isn’t. Many businesses first start out designing a basic website and maybe a Facebook page, but many don’t even have a business plan in place.  If you don’t have a strategy lined up then it is time to get one.  If you don’t know where to begin then you might need a marketing agency to help you.

Identify the buyer persona

First and foremost you need to identify who your ideal customer is.  Before you ever create a piece of content you need to know exactly who you’re creating that content for.  The buyer persona is your ideal customer, who needs your product or service right now.  Hint…the answer isn’t “everyone” you are not Walmart or Amazon.  Now you need to create stuff that solves their problems or that they find interesting. Here is some help identifying your ideal customer.

Create and Promote

It is not enough to just create content for marketing purposes you have to actively promote it too.  Content without promotion is not enough to drive sales by itself.  Now you need to concentrate on the promotion of that content.  Do you make a great Facebook post, why not boost it?  You can boost a post for just a few dollars and help drive traffic.

Use Multiple Platforms

Never rely on just one method of promoting your business.  Word of mouth is not enough and neither is relying solely on Facebook.  A good marketing strategy uses all kinds of different platforms to get your message across.  Some marketing methods like search engine optimization take offer a great ROI but they take months to see results.  In the meantime you can take advantage of PPC campaigns,  Facebook ads as well as offline strategies.

Measure and Tweak

No matter the combination of online marketing strategies you put into place you need to know the results they are driving.  For an online campaign you can use tools like Google  Analytics  to determine where your web traffic is coming from and how well it is converting.  Be prepared to make adjustments along the way.

Latest Trends in Video Marketing

Latest Trends in Video Marketing

We are already in the middle of 2018 and there is no doubt it has become a digital world.  Nowhere is that more prevalent than when it comes to online marketing, companies today market on the internet first before using the more traditional methods.  Video marketing is one of the go to platforms for increasing brand awareness.  Video allows consumers to learn about a product before purchasing and if gives specs better than the written word.  Using video to market your product makes sense, videos are some of the most shared content across social media.  Let’s look at the latest trends in video marketing.

DIY – Instructional Videos

YouTube is the hottest site on the web when it comes to learning how to do it yourself.  In fact a single mom built her own house based on videos she watched on YouTube.  People love learning new things, what can your business teach them?  If you want to boost subscribers and have shareable content then teach your audience how to do something.

Live Video

Live video is a huge trend more so on Facebook than it is on YouTube, but it is an incredible way to engage with you audience.  Users feel they are part of the action and they can interact directly with someone on screen.  You get live feedback that you can address right away.

Storytelling

Much of sales is now done through storytelling, a good story can invoke an emotional response and tug at your heartstrings.  What better way to do that than through the use of video.  You can quickly and fairly cheaply make your own commercials that you can air on video platforms or your own website for free.  You can create explainer videos that can help your audience connect with your products.  The right video can totally change the way customers view your products and ultimately boost your sales.

Innovative Video

Some of the most popular videos are pretty innovative, one of the most popular sets of videos are from drone videos and GoPro shot videos.  These different techniques give you a completely different perspective.  GoPro videos allow you to live stream adventure videos as they happen. It’s also very easy to upload a video to your site and have it seamlessly integrated with your website’s design.

Businesses both large and small have all embraced video and how it can help boost sales and brand awareness.  You can create a positive image of your organization and that can translate into increased sales.  Technology and different social media platforms have made video accessible to everybody.  You no longer have to just rely on YouTube, both Facebook and Instagram allow you to post live video too.  Embrace video marketing and what it can do for your organization.