Web Design

What Necessary Elements of a Good Website to Steal

Simply having a beautiful and functional website aren’t cutting it anymore to attract attention. The chance that your site succeeds in conversion lies in many factors, such as guaranteeing the necessary elements of a great website are considered.

As the Web gets crowded with sites of various kinds and sizes, getting noticed is a tough call. Without building a site that’s appealing and relevant to your audience, there’s no chance your brand would ever establish itself on top of your visitor’s minds.

The 5 Seconds Test

Typically, the first 3-5 seconds are crucial in making your best impression and bring your visitors to stay long enough to check out what you’ve got. So it’s essential that you don’t miss out even one vital basic website element to convert more visitors.

Five seconds, right? That is a very short time in fact to get your visitors read your content and be absorbed with your idea. But according to some studies, it is only enough for people’s emotion-based brains and perceptions to react to layout, design, color, headline and even perhaps navigation.

If you have not caught your visitor’s attention by then, you’ve lost the chance to keep them. Don’t hope they’ll ever return again.

Sticking Around with You

When you’re planning for your brand’s website structure and what basic website elements to include, don’t forget stickiness. It is a term that refers to keeping your site visitors on your page.

According to some studies, the average visitors will only stay and go to fewer than a couple pages all at 30 seconds or less. Most of them will only visit your homepage and it’s bye bye for you.

Here’s why it pays to understand stickiness. Your job is to want to bring these average visitors to spent longer time at your site to find your offers. Your homepage must not be your visitors’ end destination but a door to your video testimonials, and a lot more.

You would need to lay down a sticky trail with a plausible website architecture, strong content, calls to action, interactions with website elements, link structure, basic site SEO, what visitors can do, and articles to share to social networks.

Every click, every action must contribute to making your visitor deeply engaged and tied to your website.

Imitate These Necessary Elements of a Good Website!

Great websites offer some lessons to imitate – such as its own basic website elements and ways– and achieve online success in an ever-growing online market. Here are a couple of necessary elements of a great website:

1. Smart Information Architecture

An attractive, professional site are made with easy, focused and strategically-mapped website architecture. Ensure that your visitor’s not lost when they visit your website. A visitor need to know they’re in the right place.

In layman’s term, this could be the brand logo’s placement in the header, the navigation menu under the header, the placement of search box, calls to action buttons, video testimonials, and the likes.

Make sure basic site SEO tactics are strategically placed, from including appropriate links for SEO or PPC compliance and brand building, namely About Us page, Service, Contact, Privacy Policy, Terms of Use of Service, and the likes.

2. Original Images

What images type you use tells a lot about your brand and your integrity in the online marketplace.

Do you prefer stock over original images? Over stock images, great websites use original images because the same evokes a more professional approach.

Stock images often tend to be overused and seen a couple of times already makes for a dull and uninspired website. Plus these external images are often linked not organically to you, weighing down to your site’s performance metrics.

3. Simple, Fresh and Content that Communicate

Short and punchy straightforward, these are qualities you often get from great websites. And these are what almost everyone’s looking for.

Try to build websites that provide answers to the most frequently asked questions of your visitors. And if it is entertainment or efficiency your visitors are after, give it to them with no strings attached.

But make sure that the content are fresh, from your homepage to your landing pages. If you have up-to-date deals section or price list, it sends the message that you’re, as always, committed and relevant in their space.

No one want to see the same dull thing repeatedly. And unless you want to annoy or frustrate your visitors, you should give time to edit and proofread your messages for clarity and impact.

The ability to share your content must also be considered when making your basic site SEO. Not only sharing content by them is helpful for your SEO, you also got yourself a marketing ambassador for free!

4. Site Speed

Want to make your visitor happy? Make sure your webpage loads in less than three seconds. At three or four seconds, visitors may already be thinking of backing out from your online web space. And when your visitors stay longer than five seconds, congratulations then, you have them thinking you have something worth waiting for!

To give the best loading experience, make sure you don’t skimp on resources, like web server, that will enhance the experience of your web visitors. Tips like testing browser compatibility, correct link structure, and making your website mobile-friendly, are important and must be followed.

Additional Resources:

Page Speed Insights by Google

Website Speed Test by Pingdom

5. Smart Design

The right combination of fonts used, color, images, and everything you employ on your website can roughly be termed as design. While its value is often underestimated, there’s a recent surge in attention and interest, especially in drawing visitors to take a look.

The color must jibe with the kind or type of brand employing it in their website. Is it a tech-based or high-tech site you are building or a medium-sized shop selling interior decoration for condominium owners? If you’re selling high-end products, giving more white space will make your site look spacious and rich.

It would not hurt hiring a professional web designer who have a good grasp of branding and marketing.

Final Thoughts

Although we can discuss as much about what basic website elements you might consider when planning and building your website, you’ll never get close to delivering a perfect website if you’ll not think of your visitors.

Offer as much reasons for your visitors to return, from blogs, great promos and price discounts to irresistible contest. After considering all the necessary elements of a good website, there’s one simple rule to live by: make the five seconds truly a lasting first impression.

Top 12 Must Have Tools for Web Development

t must be tough being a web developer, say if you’re stuck in the 1980s where everything must be done manually. But these days, even with the daily bouts to beat deadlines, hurdle pressures and avoid burn out, there are essential tools that offer plenty of relief. Here are a selection of must have tools for web development to get started.

The World of Web Development

Web development is pretty all about a lot customization, editing and modifying of a website. The rate of success in building a website is determined largely by getting your task accomplished efficiently and quickly.

Yes, time is very critical in any web development work; yet it’s also about the quality,from the tidiness of your codes, ensuring they’re bug-free, to ensuring a professionally coded website was done.

And there’s like no more excuse for the passionate developers not to accomplish an outstanding work because the availability of essential tools for web developers, from coding, file sharing, hosting, to testing are offered either free or premium.

Command Line Tools

Here are a couple of useful command line tools for web developers who want to code more quickly and efficiently well without a GUI:

WP-CLI – Offers a set of command line tools that lets you run WordPress commands. It also provides an interface with the platform albeit the command line.

Drush – For Drupal web developers, this is a fantastic shell interface that makes developers automate Drupal tasks directly from the command line.

Code Editor Tools

Coding can be a little drowning when once you’re already deep in web programming. But tools let web developers focus on their coding and not mind other tasks that may come in the way of completing this task.

There are must have tools for development designed with superb UI, shortcuts and flexibility. All these features make development of a website effortless and stress-free.

Coda – For Mac users, this is an ideal all-in-one web developer suite. As well as an FTP client, Coda provides terminal access, and a whole lot more features to keep web development an efficient undertaking.

Sublime Text – Are you looking for a tool that lets you do batch edits using multiple line editing? Beside its very sophisticated interface, Sublime Text and you is a match made in coding space.

Version Control Tools

If you want a storage of your code’s current and past versions, there are version control tools that are easily available to meet your needs.

These version control tools let developers to test, compare and finally merge changes, as well as allow for backing up of codes.Web development time is the biggest benefit of using version control tools.

Some of these tools allow your team from the U.S. to collaboratively code with your teammates from Manila and let you all accomplish the same project notwithstanding the distance.

GitHub – One of the most popular tools meant for version control tasks is GitHub. Git is said to be perfect for coding collaboratively with your team because it allows you to put your codes publicly.

Git offers you and your team a lot of room to perform code review and code management as well.

BeanStalk – For code repositories, this web development tool is awesome in making collaboration possible through Git.

Multiple teams working together but remotely would find no problem getting a project done collaboratively since BeanStalk save your codes anywhere.

There are also other features that allow you to send and save your codes to your server automatically. An added benefit is letting you see an overview of your team’s active repositories and users who are associated with the project.

Virtual Dev’t Environments

When developers want to simulate the experience of operating platforms and various browsers is likewise known as virtualization. Compared with other processes, such environments let you perform experimentation locally while allowing you to store projects.

ExpanDrive–A cloud storage that acts like your USB drive. But the main difference is that this tool acts as your drive for Amazon S3 and FTP/SFTP connections.

MAMP Pro –This is a smart choice when developing locally using Mac. MAMP Pro is a suitable platform for collaboration because it is packed with MySQL, Apache and PHP that can integrate directly into your OS X.

Server Performance

Keeping servers optimally working and online are responsibilities even developers must learn how to perform. When servers go offline, tools that can readily check or monitor server performance are helpful.

For web developers, some tools help perform the best alternative course of action in cases of emergencies. There are also some that developers can use when evaluating the status of infrastructure and resources.

New Relic – Rated outstanding by not a few web developers, this tool has been said to be perfect for monitoring and analyzing performance from the browser to the database of your resources and infrastructure.

Browser Testing and Debugging

As web developers, we are accountable to bringing superior web experience to our visitors. For us, this means ensuring that our online presence load quickly and render perfectly well in almost all web and mobile screen resolutions.

A couple of tools are now getting web developers rejoice for providing them a platform to test websites on almost every browser and screen sizes.

More importantly, must have tools for web development like these are making developers’ jobs glitch-free.

Chrome Developer Tools – Google’s Chrome offers kit with plenty of web authoring and debugging tools for developers to test browser compatibility straight into Chrome.

Web Developer’s Tools for Firefox – These Firefox plugins let web developers to perform troubleshooting, debugging, and editing codes without leaving the popular Mozilla browser.

BrowserStack – The tool provides developers a more secure and comprehensive resources to perform live and browser-based test of their websites.

There’s also the added feature of letting you test with instant access to every desktop, tablet and mobile browsers.

Summing Up

Web development tools provide the programmers or coders with the best assistance in performing their job exceptionally well and on time. Thankfully today, there are lots of available tools for web developers that they can choose from.

Web developers need the right tools to code and program web pages. The motivation must always be perked up to bring out the very best they can offer to develop beautiful and functional websites that visitors will love.

Read our above list of must have tools for web development and see for yourself which of those are suited to help you accomplish your development needs.

What Kind of Website is Right for Your Business

In an increasingly competitive online marketplace, a good corporate website can spell the difference between losing and winning. Done right, you’ll get higher conversion. But done wrong, you’ll only get tarnished brand and reputation.

So what are the key things to consider when deciding what kind of website is right for your business?

Different Website Types

When deciding the right kind of site to launch your business, the primary thing to do is to understand the nature of your business. Exploring your business goals is another step that is necessary, along your with the resources you’re willing to invest for the development of your business website.

Here is a list of different types of website according to business or profession:

Static Websites

Small businesses wishing to start out immediately and in need of a basic online presence often opt for static website. As well as the easiest to set up, static sites are also suited for companies with very small resources initially.

Often dubbed as brochure ware website, this is unsurprising because static websites are very seldom updated and can remain dormant for a long period of time.

Some static websites are five-pager online presence, comprised of the Homepage, About Us, Services, Testimonies, and Contact Us.

But once a company has grown, it can forego static website when deciding the right kind of site and start investing for a dynamic website.

Dynamic Websites

Most bigger commercial businesses nowadays, which ruled that content is king and want to perpetually update their online presence using a Content Management System, use dynamic or data-driven websites.

With a software tool like CMS, company staff can update their website even without any idea about programming. Dynamic sites are also more sophisticated and complex to develop, hence, it requires more resources to complete.

E-Commerce Websites

Brands that want to extend their retail or brick-and-mortar stores online might find e-Commerce or e-tailer as a kind of website solution that will allow them to sell or offer products and services.

With an e-commerce page with shopping cart features, visitors of your page an purchase using their credit cards products online. A complex back-end system can let businesses to add or remove products, place promotions and discount offers, and analyze sales profits, and more.

Among a couple of different types of website according to business or profession, implementing an e-commerce site can be a bit expensive due to security measures that need to be adopted.

Community Websites

If you’re in the business of providing special interest services, the community website might be for you. This kind of websites lets same-minded or users with similar desired goals interact with one another on the condition that they’ll adhere to community guidelines.

Community websites may be run on its own or part of another website type like corporate or dynamic website. Examples include job search websites, online dating networking sites, discussion boards, and more of the likes.

When run on its own like discussion boards for gamers, technologists, and writers, the source of revenue may be advertising or offering different levels of memberships with different benefits.

In these websites, however, there is a need to moderate member activities on the website, such as stopping or banning users when they’re found violating house rules of the community websites.

Business Blog Websites

When exploring your business goals when deciding which types of website you need, you may ask if it is really a dedicated website that you need. Are you a small business with a limited budget or it is communicating with your customers on a more personal, intimate level you need?

A business blog may be a better choice for you. Not only most blogging platforms offer the ability to setup your own page for free, getting a premium account to WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and several others can only mean just a small investment for you.

But a business blog can also merely be part of a page that your corporate or dynamic websites maintains. Your blog can serve as your brand’s voice that will provide your market with information as to new products that you’re launching or special promotions that you’re offering at your store.

Unlike other different types of website according to business or profession, a blog is quite demanding when it comes to updates. It requires frequent new content refresh. Quality is also paramount when composing a blog post so that your customers will be satisfied and you know when you have happy customers checkout follows.

Factors to Make the Right Kind of Site Work for You

Apart from exploring your business goals and knowing the kind of website that’s right for your business, it follows that you also make the best use of your website to work for you.

Meeting the needs of your audience is one of the most important consideration when creating a website. Your selection of website type, design and development and content must all contribute to meet your customers’ needs.

Just choose a particular market you wish to market your products and services. Prioritize those who will especially look for your offered products when planning your web design and content.

It’s also important to ask which websites your customers use, what social media sites they visit and which apps they use. Use the information you’ll gather as your guide when building your website.

Design is the next stage in the process. Is your site visually-appealing? This aspect is far important before you decide the technology since visitors are initially reactive to imagery than what functionality you offer.

Identify conversions factors and determine the kind of visitors who will take the effort to visit your page and do something specific, such as get a price quote, compare your product and services, and checkout after a purchase. Make sure doing these tasks are easy and offers convenience to your users.

It is also necessary to track sales and interactions with customers through the use of measurement tools like Google Analytics. The tool is helpful in providing figures as to who is visiting your website, and which inner or underlying pages are frequently visited, where they’re located, and which pages offer the most conversion.

Finally, deciding what kind of website is right for your business depends on the nature of your business and business goals. Choose the one that share the goal of promoting your business online and engaging your customers and building long, lasting relationship with them.

Category: Web Design