Posts tagged web designing
“Would You Like a Cup of Tea?” 4 Usability Steps to Keeping Your SEO Traffic Around
Jan 20th
It’s difficult to persuade people to do things (and even to remember things that you say) when you aren’t directly looking at them. This fact has been confirmed by neuroscientific studies across the world, but in SEO we are intimately familiar with it. Most visitors to websites leave within 8 seconds if they don’t see what they are looking for, or if the site seems like hard work, or if it doesn’t match their expectations. Today we are exploring the top 4 usability steps you can take with your website to keep all that traffic so hard-won through SEO, on your site long enough to see how great you are!
A clear visual hierarchy
Step 1: Make use of visual hierarchy rules
Things that are more important on your page should be made obvious with a combination of the following web design aspects:
- Being larger
- Being bolder
- Being more colourful
- Being closer to the top of the page
- Being surrounded by more white space
Step 2: Be conventional
This isn’t business or general marketing advice, but it makes good sense for web design. Take advantage of conventions like putting a search box in the top right of the page, naming certain parts of your site ‘About Us’ and ‘Contact’, etc. This makes you effortless to understand.
Step 3: Segment your pages
If you run Adsense, it’s tempting to make the ads look like content in order to get people to click on them. Design-wise, it isn’t optimal … it simply makes the site harder to understand, and likely to have a higher bounce rate.
Step 4: Link appearance
Make it obvious when something is clickable, either by making it blue and underlining it, or creating 3D effects on it. At the very least, put a single underline on your links. As a side note, you should always make both the picture and text related to a link clickable. If your users can’t figure out how to get round their site, they’ll click off … wasting all that precious web marketing time!
Webmaster is Outdated
May 28th
Just recently, I noticed that programming artists and web developers or web designers are making noise in the internet. Their concern was about the “webmaster” as a professional title or job title.
Webmaster is outdated. That is what everyone is shouting today. The word webmaster came about as a website administrative contact in the early days. The tasks that were used to do by a webmaster included updating the site pages by adding content or adding pages, answers webmaster@yourdomain.com, maintains the server and other related tasks. Only one person did all these tasks before because the tasks were not as huge and difficult as today. The reason would be the fact that websites did not get any good returns on investment for several companies.
As time went by, the World Wide Web is getting more intricate. The tasks are getting more difficult and even bigger. One person cannot do tasks such as markup, programming, graphic or web designing, content writing and editing, internet marketing, information layout and many others. Each of the mentioned tasks is complicated that there should be one person to specialize each task.
Today, we use webmaster when we actually refer to someone who updates the technical part of a website. Most often, they are called web developer or web designer. Webmaster can no longer exist because the tasks that should be assigned to him or her are impossible to be accomplished.
~oOo~
Contact Web Marketing Experts, an Australian SEO Company for more useful SEO tips and other relevant points of view.
Principles of Basic Web Designing
Mar 26th
Internet marketing professionals were able to define and enumerate the basic web design principles so that anyone who would like to venture on web designing can, at least, have ideas how to plan and how to start web designing the right way.
Homepage: Since homepage is representative of what your website is all about, you have to clearly present your goals so that the visitors would know what to do. Top level navigation on the first page should be indicated as well as the logo. By telling the visitors what they can find in your website is the most important thing. Calling the visitors’ attention through information is the best way of making them stay aside from the visual appeal of the page. It is on the homepage that visitors would decide what to do such as clicking some links or leave it. If you want to put flash on your homepage, put “Skip Into” option and should be outside the flash. Or else, you are forcing the web visitors to wait until flash is loaded. This is a big turn off on the part of the internet users. Flash can be visually appealing depending on what it presents, but generally it is distracting.
Structure of Navigation: The navigation structure should be place on the specific area of the page where the internet users can easily find it. Navigational structure’s location on the page is standard and should be experimented just to give uniqueness on your website. Let your layout and design be responsible for the uniqueness of your site. So, it is better to keep your navigation system same on all pages to avoid confusion on the part of the web visitors. Just like what you do in writing, be consistent in all aspects such as in putting up your site navigation.
More principles of basic web designing is tackled here: “Web Designing Principles“