Category: Web design

Which Should You Prioritize? Design or Content?

July 31, 2015

Social media accounts, belonging to companies, have given rise to a whole new phenomenon in which companies try to design their social media pages in sync with their brands. Most companies still have not begun to make use of this important branding strategy. Social profiles of companies are, usually, the first point of contact for customers and clients. If your social profile is designed well and is attractive enough, people will spend more time on it and read through what you have shared. It is becoming increasingly important to get custom Twitter backgrounds and Facebook pages. While more people discuss designing social profiles, the focus on content seems to be falling back. It is important to focus on content as well as that is as important as design, when it comes to social profiles. Companies often ask if they need to focus more on design or content when it comes to launching their social profiles. In this article, we would evaluate the importance of both content and design, in order to understand which one is better and on which you need to spend more money. Why focus on design? Design has always been one of the primary focus areas of branding. Whether it is the color scheme or formatting or typography, design has begun to take precedence over other aspects of IT and branding. This is a good sign, as psychological research shows that people often judge a website based on its design. Similarly, it need not be an extrapolation of facts, if we assume that people will judge your social profile based on its design. Likewise, many companies have begun to invest in customization of their social profiles. Facebook pages and Twitter accounts can already be customized to suit your branding strategies. What remains important is the way we make use of these various design tools to reflect our core marketing philosophies. At the end of the day, our social profiles need to resemble our main websites and branding strategies, if not an exact replica of the main website. You can probably speak to design specialists and branding professionals to get your social profiles customized to suit your core branding strategies. Steve Jobs famously said “Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.” His argument was quite clear and it worked for Apple. IT is all about how things work. Your social profile has to work. It has to fulfill its functions and be the face of your company to an online audience. On the other hand, Paul Rand stated that “Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions; there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated”. Paul Rand brings the importance of content to the foreground. In the next section, let us take a look at the importance of content. Why focus on content? Content always needs to be the primary focus of any social marketing initiative. If you do not have valuable content that people can use, your social profile is simply not worthy enough for people to visit time and again. Moreover, social profiles are not used only for customer relationship management or crisis management. They are increasingly being used to share information, educate and inform customers & clients. It is also a great way to attract prospects and convert them into customers. Whether you share a blog post on Twitter or an entire photo album on Facebook, depicting your recent event, social profiles are an important platform to build your content strategy. Content, on the other hand, is crucial for ensuring that you remain relevant in an ever-changing world. If your content evolves along with the world, you will remain relevant and useful to your audience. This is one of the reasons why people tell you that content is more important than design. You can probably have the best-designed social profiles out there. However, if your content is not up to the mark, people will simply stop visiting your profile. When Howard Gardner said “I believe that the brain has evolved over millions of years to be responsive to different kinds of content in the world. Language content, musical content, spatial content, numerical content, etc”, he couldn’t have been closer to truth. There are far too many kinds of content and all these different types of content need to be available on your social media profiles. The only way it can be made possible is by ensuring that you have a consistent content marketing strategy, which focuses not just on  textual content but also on images, numerical data and other forms of media. All these are important to ensure that there is a cohesion within the content marketing strategy. Content or design? This is a rather difficult question to answer. One cannot replace the other and it would be foolhardy to say that content is more important than design. It is equally foolhardy to say that design is more important than content. Any social marketing venture we undertake needs to involve focus areas of both content and design. In fact, professionals know that content and design are inseparable & you need to try to intertwine both of them as much as possible. When you have your design and content strategies in place, it will become a more holistic way of approaching things & that is what will help you achieve success. Content marketing invariably includes design as well and when it comes to social profiles, both content and design go hand in hand. If you are confused about which one to focus on, you need to really stop where you are and decide to focus on both. One cannot avoid either the design aspect of social profiles or the importance of actual content. Both the factors go hand in hand and help you

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How to Optimize Landing Pages for SEO

July 29, 2015

Landing pages are very important tools in marketing your products or services or calling your prospects to take action. In fact, most landing pages ask a visitor to take some kind of action. It could be subscribing to a newsletter, reading a message, sharing a link or even going ahead and making a purchase. Landing pages gained popularity simply because they are akin to main websites but have a specific function – call to action. Thus, the importance of landing pages is only growing across the world. With their increasing importance, there also comes the need to design them in a better and more accessible manner. This involves building landing pages according to the changing needs of SEO. As we all know, SEO is something that continuously changes over a period of time. In this article, let us take a look at how you can optimize your landing pages for better SEO and ultimately, get more people to respond to your call to action. 1. Focus on your URL When it comes to landing pages, we often think it is not important to focus on the URL. The idea is, the URL of a landing page is unimportant because one just has to link it from an external website where no one will actually see the actual URL. They would either click on a banner, an image or some sort of textual matter. However, it is very important to have a unique URL for your landing page. It is important to have a custom tail end, which is not only descriptive but also specific. Of course, you need not be stuffing your landing page’s URL with keywords though it helps to keep it descriptive. If it is a Twitter campaign, you could have a /twitter-campaign as your custom tail end. If you have a number of such landing pages, it makes sense to organize all your landing pages with custom URLs so that you can identify your landing pages in a clearer way. It is important to install Google Analytics script on every landing page so that you can measure and track your progress as it happens. A number of people overlook the importance of custom URLs in landing pages but now it is quite clear that they are important. 2. Maintain brand uniformity There are a number of companies, which fail to realize the importance of brand uniformity. They have landing pages designed by someone else in a completely different manner because they fancied a new design. They are making a fatal error. A landing page is a subsidiary of the main page, even if it is able to stand on its own. Thus, you need to ensure that your landing page has the same design, color scheme, font and format as your main page or any other online property. In fact, you can use your landing page to get people to visit your main website. When your website looks completely different from your landing page, the visitor might find it jarring. Even psychologically, it creates a sense of disconnect, which you don’t want to let happen. A landing page needs to, thus, have your core message and core branding factors inscribed into it. Always ensure that you keep your landing page’s design in sync with your regular branding. This helps to keep your landing pages, your website, your blogs and just about anything else in a cohesive fashion, tying everything to the company you are eventually trying to promote. 3. Focus on your content Your copy need not be verbose and professorial. Nobody has the time to read through a lot of statistics and figures when they visit your landing page. Your landing page’s copy is either persuasive or it is not. If it is not, people will simply not spend more time on your landing page, leave alone responding to your call to action. The trick is to write copy that is simple, minimalist and effective. It need not be concise and you need to hire experienced copywriters in order to achieve the intended result. You need not ever stuff your content with keywords and you need not use complex jargons. In fact, we can say that your landing page copy need to be similar to your web copy, albeit much more minimalist and simpler. Do not copy and paste all your landing page content from some other page of yours. This will affect not only your visitor’s perception but also a search engine’s idea of how unique your website is. Write copy in a persuasive way, which answers the questions you probably had asked when a prospect had clicked on the link. Ensure that your landing page answers the questions for which the prospects arrived on the page to begin with. 4. Keep the design minimalist While it is true that your landing page needs to look similar to your main website, it need not also have the same amount of images, texts and other content, which might distract the visitor from the main purpose – call to action. It is very important to keep the landing page plain and simple. This helps to keep the attention of visitors focused. Your landing page need not end up becoming a platform for you to brag, boast or promote aspects of your company that is not related with the actual purpose of the landing page. The design needs to be similar to the main website but it needs to be a stripped down version of it. Also, make sure that you do not ask too many questions to the prospect. Just asking them to fill out their first name, last name and email address would be sufficient. If you ask for too many pieces of information, they will simply close the page and move on to the next website. It is very important to not distract the visitor and ensure that they respond to your call to action. For this, you will need to keep the design as minimalistic and simplistic

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Indus Net Technologies(INT.) – Proud Digital Partner for ICC Website Revamping

July 21, 2015

Yet another feather in our hat! Indian Chamber of Commerce, the premier business and industry body in Eastern & North-Eastern India, launched its refurbished website yesterday; and team Indus Net Technologies(INT.) was the digital partner for this website revamp. ICC and Indus Net joined hands to give a facelift to the old website of ICC, with a brand new mobile-friendly design. This redesigning of the website was done keeping in mind the benefit of its members and staff & the Indian Entrepreneurs’ community at large. ICC partnered with Indus Net(INT.) for the full-scale redesign of their website, which has well-catered to people for the past six years, with a brand new design that includes contemporary responsive design trends. INT was chosen for this website revamp project because of its extensive experience in working with the Government and Public bodies. It has recently helped the District Administration of Bardhaman in designing and developing a mobile application known as ‘Smart Bardhaman’ for the citizens of the district. The citizen governance app was launched by Hon’ble Chief Minister of West Bengal, Smt. Mamata Banerjee. We have even been a part of Hon’ble Prime Minister’s visionary project ‘Digital India’. Team Indus Net Technologies has designed and developed the citizen governance mobile app ‘MyGov’, which was launched by the Prime Minister himself during the opening ceremony of ‘Digital India Week’. Aimed specifically at increasing the ease with which any member can interact with the Chamber, ICC decided to give its old website a refreshed and simplified look, combined with enhanced content & improved search functionality allowing members and even non-members to interact with the Chamber online very easily & in a better manner. Keeping this user experience firmly in mind and to make the website compatible with modernized browsers and mobile devices, team Indus Net(INT.) has redesigned the ICC website using HTML5. The restyled website boasts a modern, colourful design with easy navigation. It now showcases the happenings at different states separately and one can check them from the main website itself. New additions are event booking section with payment gateway integration and media section; and all of these newly added features enable members to submit event registrations, give access to newsletters and publications, help to check events calendar & much more directly from their own offices. To add onto this, members would be able to book auditoriums and reception rooms for business meetings & events at the chambers directly through this website shortly. Also, on the way is the mobile version of the same website for more accessibility. While giving the old ICC website the desired look, we have worked closely with Indian Chamber of Commerce. To quote Mr. Abhishek Rungta, Founder and CEO of INT, “It was really a great opportunity for team Indus Net to work in close association with ICC and help them achieve their goal of creating a website addressing the needs of the Chamber staff and members as well as the entire entrepreneur community in India.”

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How to A/B Test the Home Page of Your Media and Publishing Site?

June 29, 2015

With the onset of digital era, the most important challenge for the Media, Publishing and Entertainment (MPE) industry is to go digital. This newly evolved age has not just brought in a number of new challenges but has even changed the way this industry used to work. Presently, you as a part of this industry have to cope up with a completely new set of user behaviour and meet highly competitive industry standard; and the first thing that you need to do to capitalize new opportunities in this consumer-driven, fast-paced industry is to have a properly functioning home page, if not a easily navigable website. Now, how to know whether you have the perfectly running homepage for your website? It’s easy! All you need to do is A/B test the home page before launching it. Here are some excellent ideas that can help you A/B test your media, publishing and entertainment site’s home page: Testing a Home Page Being the point of entry to your website, the home page gives visitors an idea about your brand value and products & services offerings. Hence, it’s highly important to have a proper home page that can encourage return visits. Here is how to test the homepage of your website: Content that Encourages Return Visits It is said that “Content is the King”. So, the first thing that you need to ensure is that your home page has got content interactive enough to not just attract and engage visitors but even to force them to come back to your site again and again. It’s always better to use short content modules in media and publishing sites as the separate headings attract more attention. Once you become sure that your home page has got interactive content, check whether it is able to increase the number of return visits and page views of your website. Page Navigation Make sure that your home page allows visitors to navigate around the website by category, without having to click on any particular category. This helps visitors consider content that they otherwise wouldn’t have checked. Hover states are even quite effective for attracting visitors’ attention to sections, which they might not explicitly look at. Hence, before testing the hover state, ensure that it includes sub-categories, top stories and imagery. However, too many categories and sub-categories might have a negative effect. Once done with the categorization, check if it has increased your page views or decreased the bounce rate of your home page. Though the test might sound a little difficult, however, you can simplify it by deploying the following methods: Choosing top five clicked sections Selecting top sub-categories in each section Hover displaying of those sub-categories Value Propositions Value prop is another essential aspect to be considered while A/B testing your home page. After all, it is highly important to make the visitors realize what value they would get, if they subscribe to any of your online publications. However, make sure that the content of the main value propositions are descriptive and clear. Once you have promoted the value props of your home page, test the page with and without value props & check which one has an increased subscription conversion rate. Now that you know how to A/B test your home page to get a better customer attention, it is no longer difficult for you to take your publishing business to a new height by going digital. All you need to do is follow all the aforementioned steps carefully.`

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So, You Think You Can Be an Art Director?

June 5, 2015

The job title of an art director is very tempting, even for those who are in no way connected to creative departments. The title is, usually, associated with independence, respect, creativity and being “above-us-all”. However, the reality is not such. An art director, usually, has a lot of responsibilities but the title is not the glamorized job profile it is made out to be. It takes a lot of creativity, effort, leadership skills and qualities of being able to innovate and inspire creativity in others. Art directors, usually, lead a team of creative people in film & TV, publishing, web design, marketing, advertising, product design and a number of other fields. An art director helps creative employees to remain true to the company’s ideals and also inspires talent, when he or she finds it. It is, usually, associated with managing a team of designers but it is a lot more than just that. To be an art director, special skills are required, which others might not have. So, when we think we can be art directors, we need to understand that the job profile is not what we want it to be and it can actually be quite a lot of tough work. In this article, let us take a look at what an art director needs to have, apart from the obvious creative skills. The job of an art director is not about hierarchy A lot of people think that an art director has the supreme position within a creative department. This is a fallacy that needs to be addressed. If you want to be an art director and you believe in exercising your hierarchical power or authority, you are sadly not fit for this job. A real art director does not believe in hierarchy and instead, exists to recognize talent, where it stands and nurtures it. An art director needs to act as a mentor or a supporter of the creative team. He or she does not have the job to boss over a team of extremely talented and creative people. Creativity goes against the principles of corporate hierarchy and authority. It values democracy, chaos and sometimes even anarchy. Your job as an art director is to respect this need for independence and creativity & promote a culture of mentoring, which helps to channelize this creative energy into something that works well for the company. If you are a web design company, your job as an art director is to encourage web designers to think out of the box, innovate and find inspiration in places they wouldn’t look for. Do you have people skills and the ability to network? An art director also doubles up as a manager of the creative team. Yet, he does not manage the creative team but instead, helps the team to connect with other external entities. This means, an art director needs to have good people skills, the power of persuasive skills and the ability to make new connections. All this requires a pleasing behavior and the ability to not come across as a creative airhead. If the art director has streaks of snobbery, it will not work well for the company. There needs to be an element of humility and quest for knowledge, which is what sets the creative department apart from the others. An art director, thus, has to know how to network, publicize and engage the team in various networking activities. Creative people are, usually, good at networking with other creative people but when it comes to non-creative teams like administration, management and development, they often feel peeved. An art director’s job is to ensure that the creative team’s message is communicated to external agencies in a coherent and understandable manner. Analyze yourself before applying for the position of an art director If you think you are creative, that is not the end of it all. You also need to have mentoring skills, the ability to network, the quality of engaging external entities and a clear non-hierarchical attitude. You need to be able to recognize talent, where it exists and be able to nurture it. It is not a job that allows you to sit in a cabin but will require you to work hard. If you think you have all these qualities, go ahead and lead a team of extremely creative & talented people.

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How to Build the Perfect Landing Page which Won’t Let Your Visitors Go

May 27, 2015

Landing page is the first page seen by your visitors on your website or blog. Landing page needs to be built in such a manner that it stimulates the visitors to take an action as expected by you. Suitable landing page enhances user experience and your marketing goals are very likely to get accomplished. If your traffic goes to unsuitable landing page, visitors will abandon you and you will hardly get any conversion. Marketers need to be wary of committing such a mistake. Before we discuss how to build a perfect landing page, you need to know what goes into planning a perfect landing page. Clarity of goals What do you expect visitors to do when they land on your webpage? Is it subscription to newsletter? Download an e-book? Submit their basic information? Buy? Follow your social media profile? Whatever it is, it needs to be directed through your landing page. If your landing page is irrelevant, customers will get confused. Having clarity of goals is must and they will further help you to track conversion rate of your marketing campaign. Know your competition Which kind of landing pages are being used by your competitors? You have to build upon that. Anything less is unsatisfactory. Are they offering better experience for the visitors? If they do something new, try to imitate that. Customers are flooded with choices today, knowing your competition, their strategy and campaign is crucial to take a lead. Also, follow your industry leaders and see what they are doing. This will inspire you to think big. Know your audience The reason for you to be in business is your target audience. Once the segmentation part is over, how do you position your company, product and brand in front of the audience? For that, you need to understand a lot more. As a marketer, you should know that most of the decisions made by consumers are driven by emotions. Do you empathize with their expectations and aspirations? Understand the variation required in landing page Your target audience could be spread across the globe. Traffic could come to you through social media networks, ads, emails or blogs. Try experimenting with the message depending upon the source of the user to offer a unique experience. Businesses with different landing pages often get more results than others. In the beginning, try to find out the sources from where majority of your traffic comes. Make a variation on those sources first before moving ahead. How to build a perfect landing page? 1. Collect contact information on landing page itself People always think twice before giving their contact information online. You will augment their dilemma by forcing them to navigate. The result is that you lose out on customers. So, when you are directing them to a page to get their contact information, always use a strong headline stating the benefits to be offered by you. For instance, is it a subscription to newsletter, eBook download or anything else? Use a strong call-to-action. While offering a free download, it is advisable to use an image to enhance visual appeal of your digital product. The opt-in form needs to be short and simple & seek minimum personal details. 2. Content-specific landing page If you are creating a lot of interesting content with a large shelf life, it is a great idea to create content-specific landing page. Delivering the information sought-after by customers on landing page itself will save their time in navigation. Take a call on which topics you want to be featured on landing page and then create one for each topic. Including a short introduction to each post gives it more attention. The landing page, thence, can be promoted on social media networks and emails. 3. Landing page for first-time visitors A first-time visitor might not be sure which part to navigate first on your website or blog. It is quite possible that they land on a page where they don’t find anything interesting. By creating a custom landing page driving them to information necessary for first-time visitors, a lasting impression will be created. Even if a new visitor lands on an unsuitable landing page, include an option of “start here” in the navigation. The introduction page can share about your product USP and how you’ve managed to keep your customers happy. Direct your visitors thereafter to a page where they can seek more information relevant to them. 4. Landing page for visitors on guest post It is always good to write guest posts to tap the audience on popular blogs. Most marketers send that traffic to their home page, which is not a very good thing to do. To maintain the relevance of the guest post, visitors need to be directed to suitable landing page that provides them additional information. This helps in maintaining consistency of the information being shared. It intrigues the visitors to take further action depending upon your call-to-action. 5. Short, sweet and conversion-friendly An ideal landing page is the one that contains just enough information for the visitors. Don’t expose too much information on the landing page that it just shoo the visitors away. The goal of the landing page should be to convert the visitors. Your desired conversion goal could be anything. Visitors need to feel encouraged to go ahead with it through visual appeal, sound design and relevant links. 6. Videos and images A landing page loaded with bright and easy to load images creates more attraction for the visitors. Many times simple links don’t work. Images embedded with links prompt the visitors to take action. Similarly, if a nice self-explanatory video is uploaded on the landing page, it will help the visitors to understand your product and its features. Videos can also be used in place of text to state a point as they carry more weight when it comes to convincing. 7. It needs to be in line with your ad text The keywords used on your landing page should match with

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How Does Responsive Checkout Play a Significant Role in E-commerce?

May 22, 2015

The mobile space has gradually begun to dominate the online space and this is true of e-commerce websites as well. In an effort to capitalize on the mobile traffic, many e-commerce websites began to design mobile websites. Of course, this is a redundant exercise now, considering the changes within the design community. As devices became increasingly diverse and the screen sizes began to vary, developers began to adopt responsive design. Based on the philosophy of flexibility and intuitiveness, responsive web design rapidly became popular not only among the design & web developer community but also among clients. Today most well-designed websites are responsive in nature. E-commerce websites, which usually cater to an active audience, which is mostly interested in shopping or cataloging, started to toy with responsive design much later. This was because it was harder for e-commerce websites to come up with ways to make websites that worked well on both computers and mobile devices. This was, especially, true when it came to the checkout process. E-commerce websites today have begun to adopt responsive checkout, which helps in a mobile-first paradigm. This helps e-commerce website owners to concentrate on building businesses, instead of running after incomplete purchases made from tawdry mobile websites of the past. In this article, let us understand the need for responsive checkouts and how they help e-commerce websites. Responsive Checkout by Shopify Exceeding number of people have begun to use their smartphones to make purchases. Shopify, the Canadian e-commerce company launched its version of Responsive Checkout in October 2014 and the popularity of the tool has only grown ever since. This points toward a phenomenon that is increasingly mobile in nature. More than 50% of traffic to e-commerce sites today comes from smartphones and tablets. It is very important to ensure that your online stores use responsive design practices as discussed above. Responsive Checkout is a tool that helps customers to view layouts that automatically adjust to the screen size of their mobile devices. This avoid scrolling endlessly, entering a lot of information and other discomforts all of which add up to the risk of a customer not making a purchase. Whether a person uses a laptop, smartphone or a tablet, Responsive Checkout ensures that there are no abandoned shopping carts. With all the A/B tests, improving and iterating in order, Responsive Checkout by Shopify is one of the better solutions today. How does responsive design help e-commerce websites? As the usage of cellphones increases, the rate of abandoned shopping carts increases too. Smartphones and tablets have a greater chance of distracting the customer. A message could pop-up, a call might just arrive or the customer might feel like taking a selfie. Without being crude, it is important to state that we need to make sure the customer makes the purchase as quickly as possible, without unnecessary distractions. Responsive design ensures that the customer does not have to scroll down, navigate or enter information on a screen that is already small. Responsive design also ensures that companies are able to hasten the process of checkout so that more sales arrive from mobile devices, which are today’s primary source of traffic. Responsive design will eliminate the need for frantic calls and emails that one, usually, makes when there is an abandoned shopping cart. By ensuring that sales happen more often, Responsive Checkout helps e-commerce websites to tap into mobile market, instead of being unnerved by it. What is the future of responsive design with respect to e-commerce stores? The current trends indicate that people will continue to purchase on mobile phones and tablets, driving a growth for responsive design. E-commerce websites will find it increasingly important to withhold the attention of their customers. Thus, to avoid abandoned shopping carts, it will become necessary to employ responsive design within the checkout process. Shopify’s Responsive Checkout already exists but you could also speak to professional designers and developers who can help you arrive at custom solutions to create responsive checkout pages. This will help you to reduce lost opportunities and thereby, increase your profits in both short and long terms. Certainly, responsive design will be an important focus area for designing checkout pages on e-commerce stores.

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The Designing Ingredients to Build Mobile E-Commerce

The Designing Ingredients to Build Mobile E-Commerce

March 30, 2015

Approximately 7 out of 10 consumers prefer to use mobile website over mobile application. There has been a splurge in the number of mobile shoppers in the last three years. With a number of avenues of online shopping including laptop/PC, mobile and tablets; it is interesting to find that maximum sale conversions in a local purchase occur via mobile. Marketers must explore new ways of marketing their products through mobile. Using mobile coupons, promo code and offering discounts will attract more users to visit your website through mobile. It will reduce load on your servers and minimize your server capacity and server maintenance cost. Clearly, marketers can’t ignore mobile e-commerce if they want to succeed in e-retailing. You must have a mobile e-commerce website to cater to mobile shoppers. The design ingredients of a mobile are different from that of a laptop. You have to make sure that consumers have a smooth experience on your mobile website starting from loading a page, searching a product and placing an order. This article will highlight the crucial elements to build a mobile e-commerce website. 1. Is your search box clearly visible? Usability factor has a major role to play in mobile. Consumers expect a much simpler interface for mobile unlike desktops. Mobile is so handy and convenient to use on-the-go that consumers don’t even need to give entire attention towards mobile while shopping. Most often, mobile shoppers are indulged in multi-tasking. Whether they are travelling, reading a book, working in the office or chatting with their friends, mobile shopping can transpire simultaneously. In such a scenario, you can’t expect your customer to locate the search box hidden in a cluttered page. Use a magnified search box so that they don’t have to magnify the mobile page every time they visit it. It is a big turn off. Furthermore, search box should be present on every mobile page to allow the visitors to enter a search query from whichever page they land. 2. Let your happy customers engulf social media space Majority of the consumers today are active on Facebook, Twitter etc 24×7. They get real-time updates and notifications about anything happening on their social media profile. There is nothing better than a satisfied customer talking about his mobile shopping experience on their social media profile. After they complete their transaction, you can always request them to share their experience on their Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc. Ask them to like and follow on different social media websites. Don’t leave any opportunity unused to expand your social media presence. Consumers love to listen and follow first-hand experience as it testifies your authenticity and mobile-friendly approach by your company. It says that you care about mobile shoppers. If their friends are satisfied with your mobile shopping experience, they will definitely give it a check. To hear about good shopping experience is convincing and generates a lot of traffic to your mobile store. Though conversion may not happen on first visit, you have opened a line of communication and exposed yourself. 3. Mobile is synonymous to speed Consumers have always been impatient when it comes to page loading. Mobile shoppers are even more impatient. Their primary reason for shifting to mobile shopping is that it is convenient, fast and accessible on-the-go. Speed becomes the deciding factor here. Getting your PC shoppers to mobile is not going to work for you, if your mobile page takes a long time to load. It is even disastrous if the page closes automatically during navigation due to a large size. Customers could be in the middle of a transaction. So, you have to be careful what you are promising. The response time of a mobile webpage has to be quick. Don’t clutter your page with a huge number of search results. Spread your results across pages. Remove unnecessary elements that reduce the speed. Also, remember to add a filter criterion. Due to space constraint, mobile users are stickler about what they see when they enter a search query. Limited information will help you to maintain desired response time. 4. Is your webpage responsive? Mobile today is available on different operating platforms including Blackberry, Windows OS, iOS, Android etc. Is it designed to operate on all the leading platforms? Can your page adapt to different screen sizes, screen resolution and visual quality? Test your mobile page on all the frameworks before you release it. Customers are scattered across all platforms. You don’t want to lose any Android user. Do you? A responsive design arranges the text in a fashion that viewing is comfortable irrespective of the amount of text on the page. Customers don’t have to scroll from left to right and right to left to read the text. It should be the first thing that comes into your mind while designing a mobile webpage. 5. Finger-friendly design It is touch screen everywhere. Smartphone users are used to using their fingers for tapping, browsing and performing other functions on mobile. Make sure ergonomics is taken into account. There is no mouse in case of mobiles. So, the fingers should be able to operate the page smoothly. All the links on the mobile webpage should be easily clicked through the finger. Fat fingers should be easily able to access the links. Understand the difference between tapping and clicking. The experience of using your mobile webpage should be at least equivalent to that of desktop. Additional tools like drop down and auto-fill should be incorporated into design so that users don’t have to type too much for searching a product. 6. Incorporate instant customer service support into design Consider your mobile customers as standalone. Consider that they have no laptop or desktop. Mobile is their only source to access your website. In such a case, you have to make sure that customers get instant customer support during their stay on your page. Use a clickable phone number or request for a phone call. Use live chat and instant feedback reply to answer

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How to Achieve a User-Centered Website

March 16, 2015

If you are designing a website, do not just look at the business objections, design, technology or fancy features. A website should primarily be user-centric. Users need to find it easy to use a website and needs to feel like coming back to the website. All the stated elements do not take user-centric design into focus. Just great design does not make it usable enough. Great design needs to also have usability embedded into it. In fact, usability is all about designing it for the user experience. User-centered web design ensures that websites are useful and usable. There are major differences between the two. What might seem like a useful feature for you might not correlate with actual usability, from a user’s point of view. With this in mind, you need to ensure that websites are not only useful but also usable. Efficient information retrieval, navigability and good typography – all contribute towards user-centered design. Most importantly, user-centered websites place emphasis on the users, which helps you to build a better rapport with them, ultimately leading to more bookmarks and increased visits. In this article, let us take a look at how we can improve usability of a website. 1. Is the website’s visibility good? Make sure that your visitors can see information correctly. This involves taking care of the layout, typography and menu bars. Navigational bars need to be accessible and the search button needs to be visible. Moreover, typography needs to be carefully chosen so that there is no difficulty when it comes to reading text. Typography needs to be simple and user-centric. Always ensure that the navigation bar is omnipresent. This ensures that no matter where the user goes, he can always find his way back to the homepage. 2. Focus on generating feedback Users need to be able to give you feedback instantaneously. They need not find it difficult to look for a telephone number or an e-mail address. There are a number of websites, which make it difficult to find contact information. Do not do that. A good website always has contact information that is easily accessible. This is very important if you have an e-commerce website. During all stages of the purchase, until the checkout process is completed, you need to ensure that you are available and that users can reach you if they need something. 3. Make your website look pleasing Nothing is worse than having to browse through a website that looks ugly. Websites that are not visually attractive or that which look cluttered lose their appeal quickly. Users begin to move on to more aesthetically pleasing websites. Make sure that you use the right color combinations and do not make your website look garish. It is important to understand the psychology of colors before choosing a particular color combination. In order to ensure that this does not happen to your website, make sure that you focus on the aesthetics of the website as well. This will help you in the long term. 4. Fix glitches Usability involves the quality of a website to be browsed well. This means, a user need not feel that he is waiting for the website to load for a long time, that there are always broken links and that there are bugs, which make the experience of using the website an unpleasant experience. Make sure that fix all the glitches including error pages, broken links, slow loading pages and wrong titles and descriptions. This will ensure that users find your website useful and attractive. Nothing is more attractive than a website that seems to be well-designed but has a number of software and other problems, causing the user to close the tab in desperation. 5. Engage your users Once you design the website, make sure that it can engage your users with valuable content and communication. You can use content marketing and social media strategies to engage them in good content and conversations. After all, usability also involves retaining people who will use your website. This is why, we believe that user-centered websites also have a strong social media and content marketing strategies. If you are unable to improve the usability of your website, seek the advice or consult our professional web designers and developers who are into user-centered design.

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Web Layouts and 2015: What You Can Expect

February 18, 2015

A web layout helps the reader to locate information on a screen in a way that is cognitively helpful. A web layout should be chosen in such a manner that the desired content is available to be read in an easy and intuitive manner. In fact, much of web design layouts focus on how to make information visible in a way that is not only aesthetically pleasing but intuitive for the web user to find. Intuitive design is an important part of web layouts and that is something that one needs to consider while choosing a layout for a website. Back in the 2000s, there were very few web layouts available and every website looked quite similar. However, with the advent of different screen sizes and different devices, the need for different kinds of web layouts only grew in importance. Today, most of the people use web layouts that are responsive in nature. These layouts automatically adjust to the kind of screen size and device that a user is using without having to prompt the reader to choose a “mobile-friendly” website or a full “desktop-version”. In this article, let us take a look at what we might foresee in the future when it comes to web layouts and their application. Layouts are going to get more flexible This year, we shall see many changes within the various formats of web layouts. Most importantly, they are likely to grow flexible. There are several more devices and screen sizes than there were last year. This means, there will need to be even more flexibility within the layouts. Flexibility will not be restricted to just the structure of the layout but also the functionality of a layout. We are likely to see layouts that have different functions within themselves and those which can easily be customized or changed, depending on our changing business requirements. Layouts will be more intuitive Intuitive design is going to get a lot more important. Though originally assumed to be Apple’s domain, most device manufacturers are focusing on intuitive design. With that in mind, we need to design web layouts that are intuitive too. Depending on the kind of content and the device from which a person is browsing, the layout must be able to adapt. This intuitiveness will prove to be an important factor in judging the value of a web layout. Most responsive layouts today are already intuitive but they will begin to get more amenable to the idea of being more visceral. Layouts will become more design-oriented Layouts had always focused on functionality. They focused on how best information could be placed so that content could be found easily while browsing. Now, we are moving towards a more intuitive aspect of web layouts. Even so, design is going to find more prominence in the coming months. Just having an intuitive interface will not suffice. A design must stand apart from its competitors and be able to grab the kind of attention that makes it possible to attract more leads. Being design-oriented along with being intuitive and flexible will help websites to consolidate their position and relevance through 2015 and beyond. Moving away from templates yet quite not We are going to see more number of web designers moving away from rehashing existing templates and choosing to design original layouts from the scratch. While this may help some people, it may also be unnecessary at times. There is already a number of layouts that are based on existing templates. These templates are future-proof and there is no reason why everyone must start designing layouts and templates from the scratch. Thus, for some people, using existing layouts may work and for others, starting from the beginning may help. It depends on what the client is looking for. Final thoughts Web designers must incline towards the idea of intuitiveness and intelligent design. Moreover, layouts that are flexible will likely dominate the year because of the number of devices that are around in the market. Additionally, using pre-existing templates is not a bad idea as long as it satisfies the requirements. Changes can be made to existing templates and a new design can be built over the skeletal layout. On the other hand, building a template using a layout that is quite radical and disruptive can be an option as well.

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