USA SEO Pros provides a number of different solutions for businesses who are trying to improve their Internet marketing campaigns. The company specializes in search engine optimization, but also provides Web design, blogging, press releases, and other things that can help business gain exposure online. If you'd like to learn more about what the business can do, please visit the main USASEOPros Web site to learn more.
Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD. The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers. These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world [...]
We’re back with another great exclusive freebie for you. This one is a Photoshop pattern file (.PAT) which contains 40 beautiful textures that you can apply to your designs. A detailed step by step instruction is provided inside the file to help you use them. You can use these as textures for your websites or [...]
A St. Louis design group announced a special gathering at a local design studio for a program entitled, “Educational Night: The Business of Design.” The evening’s program was hosted by a local design studio that is making leaps and bounds in the local and national scene, so it didn’t take long for the reservations to [...]
Websites are incredibly versatile as a medium, to be used to display information and other content, and if well designed they can do this in an enjoyable way that’s easy for the reader to digest. This can be done through combining a site persona with an ongoing narrative, consistent throughout, which will all come together [...]
Despite the consumer-focused nature of the WordPress content management software, an increasing number of larger organizations and even businesses are adopting WordPress to manage their site’s content — especially corporate blogs and customer outreach programs that take advantage of social media and interaction humanize a company’s brand. These […]
The May edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, jQuery plugins, grid tools, CSS tools, WordPress resources, productivity and business tools, responsive design resources, and some really great new fonts. Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a [...]
Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of [...]
Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD. The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers. These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world [...]
Today we have another great freebie for you created exclusively for WDD by Grafpedia. This one is called the Media Black UI Kit and contains graphic elements suitable for any sort of media elements, such as video and audio players, along typical navigational items.It’s provided as a layered PSD file. If you want more items [...]
When I first saw a web site designer who had posted a laundry list of prices on his site, I gasped in horror. It created some buzz in the design circles in which I traveled. No one agreed with the concept. Then, a well-respected design firm owner announced he was going to try it. He [...]
There was a time when microsites were nothing more than flashy, push-marketing pages, usually comprised entirely of videos built in Flash. Now, however, a new generation of microsites is on the upswing. These sites help your visitors cut out the information overload of full-fledged sites while providing new opportunities and techniques for agile marketing and conversion optimization.
The new style of microsite tends to be pure HTML and usually have no Flash at all, lending them to the best practices of SEO. You can have rich and detailed content, with graphic designs that are engaging without being overwhelming. You can provide access to other pages via a simple tab navigation, with each tab focusing on a specific subtopic. The new generation of microsites can provide all these features, without any of the troubles the past microsites used to have.
Microsites can help you serve up an optimized visitor experience. Your visitors are searching for good content and instant gratification, both of which microsites can provide with their extremely targeted focus. You should have an organized collection of subtopics that can guide your visitors to the information that they want. You can deliver deeper content in bite-sized chunks using sub-topics, making it easier for your visitors to consume.
Since microsites live outside the formal framework of your main website, they often are deployed quickly. This can make it easier for you to use your favorite A/B or multivariate-testing tool to experiment with different content variations, presentations and conversion offers.
The new generation of microsites can provide conversion optimization professionals with new opportunities for targeting strategies, at the same time leveraging the practices and tools used in larger sites.
Today, many people are optimizing their websites to ensure that they reach their maximum ranking on the leading search engines. In general, this is a great idea and your website should be updated regularly. However, keep in mind that you are trying to attract consumers online, so your website should also be optimized for people and lead conversions. Optimizing your website is easy and can increase your conversion rate.
Guide Your Visitors
Before you start making any changes to your website, think about your visitors. How do your visitors view your website? You want to make sure that they are given the right information that they need to navigate through your website. Make sure that important information like contact information is visible and in front of your visitor’s face. Start making the right changes that will guide your visitors through your desired path.
Providing graphics, hyperlinks, and short forms on each of your pages can bring your visitors one step closer to where you want them to be. Make sure that any questionnaire that you place on your website is short and to the point. The less time your visitor spends providing you information, the better. Your visitors will be more likely to provide you with their name and email, than to fill out long forms that could take more than a minute.
As always, make sure that your content and imagery are interesting and compelling to your visitors. This is vital to your selling point, and it is your window of opportunity to gain your visitor’s interest long enough that they will stay longer on your website.
Compelling Landing Pages
Provide eye catching and amazing imagery that will attract your visitor. It is a proven fact that having great images and videos on websites can influence the way people feel about the website that they have just landed on.
Keep your visitors happy and entertained by providing:
Entertaining content that is short and to the point
Offering minimum choices to navigate through the website
Proper imagery that gives an idea of what you sell or provide
Most importantly, do not let your visitor get lost on your website. Think about the way you naturally navigate through a website when you are searching for a product or service. Keep in mind how you might feel if you landed on a website that provided you 30 different ways to get to the next page. Keep it simple and to the point on every page. There should be no more than 8 links to other pages, and your content should not be overwhelming. Remember, people in general do not want to spend more than 5 minutes reading and trying to figure out how to get to the next page.
Offer Trust
Most people are generally scared to purchase or provide their information online. They feel that the information that they will provide could lead to identity theft, etc. Make your visitors feel at ease when they land on your website.
Provide your visitors with visual assurances like:
Security buttons; these have been proven to increase conversion rates
Testimonials of current and past visitors
A company image or profile picture
The more your visitor feels at home, the better. Provide them with the proper security that they need and you are home free. About 1/3 of consumers will not shop online, and that is still a significant number of people. Then, you have those who only shop online at websites that they trust. Building trust for your website is a key factor to gaining more business from the people you seek.
Test Your Website
Once you make a change on your site, make sure that it works, and that it is being perceived properly. Make an A/B test and find out which changes better appeal to your targeted audience. Knowing your visitors can help you create the ideal landing page. Testing your website and its changes can be boring, but it is important, and will prove to be a worthwhile time investment.
Consciously changing and optimizing your website is very smart and an important step to make when considering maximizing your conversion rates. Having a well-optimized website for search and conversions can transform the way you do business. Get your website noticed, and create the ideal landing page with your targeted audience in mind.
There are many reasons to think designing a website is an easy process. With the amount of software programs out there and with the number of free templates, it might seem like anyone can create a website. There are, however, many guidelines in the process of web design that not all templates include.
Here’s a list of some of the key design aspects needed to make an effective, functional and appealing design. No matter what you use for a design, whether it be a free template or building from scratch, including these simple design tips can go a long way to achieving the best possible website design.
The first tip seems to be one of the most important in designing websites today: You need to make the site more usable for the people using mobile devices. The idea here is to increase the hit area on links for easier navigation on touch-screen phones. By increasing the padding of the links it’ll make it more accessible to touch the link you want to go to through your phone for better mapping.
Other web design keys to creating a quality design:
1) Make sure images and bad code do not slow down load and response time. This can cause problems with the effectiveness of your website. People are usually impatient when it comes to view websites, so slow load time is a very bad thing to have. It can also hurt in overall exposure of your website; a site with bad source code will not rank highly on search engines.
2) Bulky Flash Designs - We all know that Flash makes a site stand out and look more appealing than just plan images and text. The problem with Flash on many websites is the usefulness of the Flash. Most designers incorporate Flash design but forget to make it user compatible. This might make the site look good, but it weakens the usability.
3) Typography is a major key in design, more important than most people realize. There are three things to keep in mind.
a) The website tagline explains what the company does and what makes it unique among competitors. Your tagline should communicate your site purpose within the crucial first 10 seconds.
b) Split content and make it easy to read. First, content can not be too long on the pages. If it is not said in the first two paragraphs, then it will not be understood. Also, when writing content about whatever your business is doing, it should make sense to the common educated person. Use simple words and simple ideas.
c) Size matters. Make the font size easy for all screens and people with all eye sights. There are design tools to make the size of the text expandable, but to play it safe, text should be no smaller than 12pt in content. The optimal level should be 14-16pt. Take into consideration that your view is someone in there 40’s with the requirements of reading glasses to view things up close. This should make it easy to determine size and color of the text.
These are just a few tips for when you’re beginning to make your own websites. The rules get more complex as you dive deeper into the web design world, but don’t worry, the information is out there to help you at every part of the journey.
