by Nick Throlson | Jan 5, 2017 | Business, Web Design
You know that your website needs content, right? But what about all the other design and UX necessities? Make sure these things are present on your site.About usYou may not think that too many people would go to the ?about us? page. They just want to see the products, right? Actually, the ?about us? page is one of the most visited pages of any website. People want to know more about your company, website, and staff, not just the products you?re selling. Check out these top about us pages from some of the best businesses on the Internet to see what sort of vibe you should be aiming for.Search barIf you?ve got text content on your website, then you should have a search function available there. Don?t rely on a user?s ability or willingness to go to Google and type in your company name and the keyword they want. That just pulls them away from your website and makes them do more work than should be necessary. You can actually get Google?s help adding a search bar, so you don?t have much of an excuse!
ScrollbarSeriously, I?ve been on too many websites that have taken the CSS scrollbar customization way too far and have made it all-but-invisible or barely clickable. If you really want to change what the scroll bar looks like to the user, don?t stray too far away from the ?classic? scroll bar look. There?s a reason it?s bold and prominent in most web browsers. Consistency in designYeah, you know that you should be using images on your website. But how can you make those images seem like consistent, harmonious choices? How can you ensure that they actually get the message across that you want to communicate? You can look into incorporating graphic templates, which can help you tick all of the above boxes. Just make sure that it doesn?t jar with the graphics of the rest of your website! 
Contact informationPeople want to know that they can contact you in some way. Even the people who aren?t actually seeking to contact you will be comforted to know that you?re displaying such information on the website just in case they do need to at some point! A lot of website owners make the mistake of closing themselves off from outside questions or comments, or relying too much on social media accounts. If you?re a business, then this is an even bigger mistake! FAQsAnother page that you might underestimate the popularity and usefulness of. Sure, there are websites out there that won?t have too much use for a frequently asked questions page. Blogs may not have much need for them, for example. But if you?re selling a product of a service, then you need to have FAQs. Consumers are going to have a bunch of questions about any such business - even if they?ve used them before, they may be things they?re still uncertain about. An FAQs page may relieve them of the need to contact customer service before making a purchase. ?(Your customer service team may be lovely, but contacting customer service is never that attractive a proposition!)
by Nick Throlson | Dec 21, 2016 | Business, Marketing, Web Design
Get your company ready for the new year by making sure it can fulfill everything you want it to. There are so many things you need to look out for and so many opportunities you have to transform the business. Making changes that will adjust the company for the new year is really important. Make 2017 the year your business ascends to the top of the tree. Here are some of the best things you can do that your business needs to succeed in 2017.
Switch to GreenYou have to look at some of the best ways of making savings and making sure your company is more sustainable. You can make your brand more attractive by switching to go green. There are a few ways you can do this, and it?s good to start off small with something like recycling and conserving power. Then you can start working up to more ambitious and wide-reaching ideas. Things like eco-friendly LED lighting and solar energy are really crucial for the future of the business. And they make you a more attractive prospect to clients as well as saving you money at the same timeUpdate Your SystemYou've got to make sure you do as much as possible to update and modernize your company. And the way to do that is to look at bringing the whole business onto a digital platform. Is there anything that isn't yet virtual that could or should be? It?s likely that there are a few extra things you can do that will make your company more contemporary. For instance, you might think about implementing Cloud computing or document conversion services for the business. These give you the chance to improve all the digital aspects of the business. Update your system and you will learn to enjoy the benefits of a well-run digital business.Revamp the WebsiteYour website is one of the most important aspects of running a company. This legitimizes the company and allows you to attract clients. A poorly designed website is going to result in failure, so you have to focus on what you can do to improve the company as much as possible. Revamping the website at the turn of a new year is always a good idea. There is nothing worse than having a website that looks tired and outdated. You have to present the best possible site for your business in order to attract customers as often as you can. Hire a web design team to make sure your website is always as good as it can possibly be.2017 is a time of change. The world is going to be hugely different so you should make changes to your company as well. There are so many things you could do, and it depends on what you want to achieve for the business. So, consider the areas that you feel need to be worked on, and you can start to implement changes here. Your company will benefit from it, and you will become a much more successful brand. ????
by Nick Throlson | Dec 15, 2016 | Business, Web Design
Behind every little facet of your marketing efforts, there?s the underlying energy of your brand. Think of any big company, and you?ll immediately associate it with a distinct personality and set of values. As the owner of your business, you probably have a pretty good idea of its brand, but do your customers? Here are some of my best tips for building up a brand through web design.Think About CharacterDoes your brand have character, or is it something of an empty husk? Injecting a little personality into your brand online can be a big help in defining what it stands for. In today?s increasingly consumerist society, more and more people are defining themselves by the products they own. You can leverage this by shaping your company?s unique character around something that your target market like to associate themselves with publicly. One method of injecting character into a brand that?s been proven to be highly effective time and time again is cutesy, cartoonish imagery. Twitter is a great example of this. Their little blue bird mascot has appeared in countless pieces of media and websites created by fans. There are a lot of variations of it, but it?s always instantly recognizable.Keep it Consistent
If you want your brand to be successful, then you need to do everything you can to make it memorable. What?s the best way to make people remember something? Repeating it of course! After pinning down the right personality for your brand and taking steps to evoke all the right emotions, your next step should be ensuring that your brand stays consistent throughout your website. Keep your colors, typography, visuals, as well as the tone of voice used in all of your written content part of the same distinct thread. All the most attractive (and in turn successful) company websites have a distinct uniform, which is instantly recognizable to any repeat customer. Flick through the portfolio for any online branding company like Flagship Digital, and you?ll see exactly what I mean. Probably the most well-known example I can give is Skype. This company is great at integrating consistent branding elements in all of their public materials. A blue-dominant color palette, 2D cartoon clouds, and distinctive, minimalist artwork around it all are their trademarks.Don?t Neglect your Value PropositionWhenever a new customer lands on your site, it?s going to take them a little while to properly orientate themselves. They?ll need to make sure they?re on the right site, whether or not they?re really interested in it, and swiftly figure out what it?s all about. To speed up this process for them, they need to provide a concise and clear proposition to the site visitor. A good value proposition, if you weren?t already aware, is a short statement in a big, visible location somewhere on the landing page. Ideally, you should keep it right next to your company logo, which will make it the natural follow-up to your customers reading your company name. It may seem like a small detail, but your value proposition is extremely important.
by Nick Throlson | Dec 14, 2016 | Social Media, Web Design
Let?s be honest for a moment: the internet is important to any business and if you don?t use it you?re losing potential customers. Whether you?re a brick and mortar store selling socks or a Michelin star restaurant, you have to use the internet for a variety of different things.In the modern age, almost everyone has a smart device of some kind and everyone looks online for news and reviews about almost everything. People can search up a review of your restaurant, on the socks you produce, or the quality of the doormat in your office. As long as someone has been to your establishment, they?re eligible to write up a review of your business.Even if you don?t have a brick and mortar store, your services are no good to anyone if someone hasn?t taken a chance to use you. Just think about it?are you more likely to use a service with 1000 reviews, or buy from a company with 0 reviews and feedback? Unless you like to take a gamble, then you?re almost always going to go for the company with more feedback and reviews for safety reasons.
Welcome to Your BusinessBe it advertising, taking bookings or delivering products across the world, your website serves as the digital front door to your business. If your entrance is filled with advertisements, shoddy writing, clashing colors and incoherent blabber, then your customers are going to turn tail and flee. However, if there?s a cozy environment, clear and concise writing, and complimentary colors that are easy on the eyes, then your consumers will remember your address and keep you on their list of competent businesses to interact with.Take great care when designing your website. Hire a professional if you need, consult an artist, or even ask your friends and family what they think?every opinion counts, even ?bad? ones. Don?t turn your nose up at a friend who says ?the site looks weird??don?t just assume that your friend doesn?t understand your website because they aren?t an art student or they haven?t studied the colour theory that you?ve painstakingly applied to your website. Don?t get annoyed when your parents think that your website is ?too colourful? or they have comments like ?I don?t know how to find x? because chances are, they?re going to be the average type of audience to browse your website. You can?t plan your website and design it like you?re engaging in professional discussion and interactions all the time. Good design is simple enough to be understood by everyone, so don?t get too carried away with creating a minimalistic or avant-garde front page to impress people.When in doubt, consult professional designers about your problems. There are specialized services such as POET Media detailed here. Just keep in mind this golden rule of simple business designs: make something that a customer would use, not an art appreciator.Me! Me! Me!We, we, we. That?s all business seem to talk about on the internet. Take a look at the following phrases:- We ensure the highest standard of quality when...
- Our team of well-trained staff are capable of?
- We have multiple awards in the field of?
- Our experts have years of experience?
These are just some of the many types of quotes that you?ll find on a typical business website. Do you notice the complete lack of care about the customer? It?s a shameful display of self-importance that turns off regular consumers. People want to hear about what your business can offer them, not the other way around.Don?t list your achievements like a trophy display on the wall of your living room. You wouldn?t invite guests over then drown them in your achievements while pointing at the items in your display case, so why would you do that to your online guests? Treat consumers with the respect that you want to be treated with. If your customers want to know about your awards and qualifications, then they?ll look that up separately. Your first reaction to a new customer shouldn?t be ?look at my amazing awards!?, it should be ?how can I help you??.So how do you go about remedying your self-important quotes and qualifications list? Remove them. A front page should be welcoming, clutter-free, and easy to read. In many industries, qualifications are required so that your customers know you?re capable of doing the job they need or that you?re able to provide high-quality products. However, you can keep these on a separate page or place them deeper in your website for when the consumer requests more information?don?t shove it down their throats straight away.Utilise images, clean color schemes, reduce the number of words on the page and get your message across using fewer syllables. Consumers are busy people and potential business clients have a lot of work to do, so you need to use clever strategies to draw in customers.
Being Social on Social MediaTake a look at any social media account for a big brand and you?ll see the same boring and useless robotic-tone messages that might as well not be there. ?Our products are the best around, try us now!? or how about ?We have a sale! Click this link for more info!?. Sure, there?s absolutely no doubt that a sale would draw in more people?but is that really the point of social media? Another advertising platform? The millions of active users on Twitter seem to think otherwise.Let?s face it, no one is going to add your business?s social media accounts to their friend list if all you do is spout advertising nonsense and boast about how great you are. People already encounter tons of marketing campaigns and commercials in their daily social media feeds, so do they really want to add to that spam by having your account pop up as well? Most likely not.So how can a business utilize social media properly? That?s easy: by being talkative and encouraging interaction between users. Let?s not forget that social media platforms were made not for advertisers and businesses, but for regular people who want to converse, make friends, keep up with old pals, and learn about interesting things that are happening around the world. They don?t care that your business is having a sale in a store on the other side of the world to them, and the fact that you recently won a minor award doesn?t interest them at all.Give your social media identity a personality. Manage it on your own or encourage your marketing team to add some personality to your posts. You want to be relatable, you want to appear human, and you want to engage consumers by interacting with your social media followers. Ask them what they want to see in your new product, encourage people to create hashtags for your services and products, offer technical support through twitter messages so that people can see your company cares about its customers and its public image. Be social?not a robot.Focus on the User ExperienceAs mentioned before, one of the best ways to ensure that your business website is suitable for consumers is to get friends and family members to test it. However, those principles extend further than just design issues and coloring. While a good website can be attractive and informative, it?s useless if there are no systems implemented to actually encourage users to purchase or even consider using your products and services.Let?s use a restaurant as an example. It?s great you have a pretty website with a lot of pictures of your food, an online menu, and even a list of awards that?s neatly tucked away from the front page. You should also have some testimonies, reviews, and of course contact information such as a phone number, email address, and most importantly your address.Sadly, that?s considered the bare minimum for a productive website. You need to make sure that those pictures are up to date and change on a regular basis. Don?t expect your customers to be happy when they see a portion of fries on your website served in a pretty basket but then they find out that you no longer serve fries in your restaurant. Keeping the menu updated with the proper pricing and ingredients is also extremely important because you need to keep customers in the loop. Remember to update your content on a regular basis, and don?t skimp on taking pictures with your mobile phone unless it?s a top-end smartphone with an amazing camera. Hire a professional photographer to take mouth-wateringly detailed images of your food and beautiful photos of your establishment.In addition to just contact information, an online web-service will also get you a big thumbs up from consumers. Allow your customers to book tables, order food online, and even talk live to your staff members. Set up eCommerce services so that your products can be sent across the entire globe. Never limit your audience to just your local area, and keep your quality of service consistent no matter what country you work with.
by Nick Throlson | Oct 26, 2016 | Business, Web Design
Marketing has always been an underestimated task when it comes to both importance and difficulty. Thankfully, the digital age has shown many newcomers to business just how much marketing affects success. We often think about types of marketing as things that can make or break a business. But it might be useful to look at what things can make or break a marketing campaign!Here are some of the biggest factors that you may not have considered thoroughly yet. Start taking notes! The design of your websiteThis seems like as good a place as any to begin! A lot of business owners definitely make mistakes when it comes to this side of things. 
They?re under the impression that the design of the website doesn?t matter that much when it comes to marketing. After all, isn?t marketing supposed to be aimed at people who haven?t seen the website yet? So what effect does the design actually have?It?s actually fairly simple. Any decent digital marketing strategy involves the heavy use of SEO. The success of an SEO campaign will depend, in a way, on how much Google ?likes? you. Search engine algorithms scan the front- and back-end of a website when rankings are being developed. This means that the design choices you make affect what Google can see during this process. Who you work withThere are businesses out there who do their marketing completely in-house. Some may immediately cry ?Fools!?. But this wouldn?t 
automatically be true, would it? If a company has hired the right people and has the right resources, then they could see great success in marketing. But it?s true that a lot of businesses who try it this way don?t quite get it right. The world of marketing is a complex one. Trying to support a department dedicated to it is time-consuming and expensive. And the results can be a very mixed bag. This is why a lot of business owners prefer to work directly with a marketing agency. Of course, you need to ensure that you?re working with a reputable one. Make sure you check out their previous work, if possible. Get in touch with them and have a good talk about your business before signing any contracts. The composition of your current marketSo who exactly buys the sort of service or product you?re looking to sell? You probably already know something about demographics. If you?re not aware of the demographics of your market, then your marketing campaign could be the equivalent of yelling into a void. And it?s possible that you don?t quite understand how many factors have to be considered here. Sure, knowing the demographics will help you target people now. But they also have great implications for the future. The average salary and the average age of the consumers in your market will determine how long they?ll remain in that market. This sort of data will show you how much growth you can expect in your market at large. This is important information if you?re going to be making any changes to your marketing campaign.
by Nick Throlson | Sep 27, 2016 | Web Design
Developing compelling visual content can often be difficult for a lot of businesses. They?ve spent much of the last half-decade or so optimizing their sites for keywords and content. And they?ve spent only a small amount of time developing tools that supercharge their visual impact. But if they want to attract visual customers, they?ve going to have to go beyond mere words. Here?s how you can use imagery to engage.Convert Ideas To Infographics
If you?re desperate to get a complicated message across, infographics are ideal. Infographics condense an enormous amount of information down into small, manageable chunks. A lot of small businesses think that infographics require an enormous amount of time and training to produce. But with infographic apps, that?s no longer the case. Taking raw data and building compelling tables and charts is now significantly easier than it was a couple of years ago.Bespoke PhotographyThere?s nothing worse than going to a site and seeing a load of stock photography. It?s uninspiring. And often it can represent a missed opportunity to get visual customers engaged with your brand. Using professional photography means that you can get hold of images that are directly relevant to your clients. You can then label these pictures and improve your SEO more than you could with stock photos.Make Your Photos IllustrativeWith the rise of photo editing apps, photos can be transformed well beyond their original state. Sites like AppAdvice list a whole bunch of smartphone apps you can use to make your photos appear more artistic. Some applications transform your photos into watercolour-effect images. Apps like Word Photo, allow you to blend written content with visuals. And other apps, including Over, enable you to build captions into your photographs.Rich AnimationOne of the biggest turn-offs for visual consumers is a dry, static page. Visual customers want to see movement and colors to get the engage with what you're doing. Most businesses get around this problem by including animations alongside text. The idea is to tell a story using pictures to help get customers engaged and entertained.Bright, Bold, Friendly ColoursVisual design developers know a thing or two about the importance of website colors. Today, the style is to be bright and bold and to stick to only a couple of tones. Professionals abandoned multi-tonal web design a long time ago. Darker, duller colors are also out of fashion. Designers prefer brighter colors because they are considered to be friendlier.Whimsical IllustrationsA lot of businesses think that illustrations are just for kids. But that?s just not true anymore. Take a look at Freshbooks website, for example. This is a company that is essentially offering people an accounting service. It?s hardly the sort of service that you?d associate with silly pictures and bright colors. And yet that?s precisely what Freshbooks? visual designers have done. There are pictures of toy dolls next to calculators. And it?s all about creating an attractive visual layout beyond the usual blocks of color. If you want to grow your visual appeal, you should learn about whimsical illustrations.
You know that your website needs content, right? But what about all the other design and UX necessities? Make sure these things are present on your site.About usYou may not think that too many people would go to the ?about us? page. They just want to see the products, right? Actually, the ?about us? page is one of the most visited pages of any website. People want to know more about your company, website, and staff, not just the products you?re selling. Check out these top about us pages from some of the best businesses on the Internet to see what sort of vibe you should be aiming for.Search barIf you?ve got text content on your website, then you should have a search function available there. Don?t rely on a user?s ability or willingness to go to Google and type in your company name and the keyword they want. That just pulls them away from your website and makes them do more work than should be necessary. You can actually get Google?s help adding a search bar, so you don?t have much of an excuse!
ScrollbarSeriously, I?ve been on too many websites that have taken the CSS scrollbar customization way too far and have made it all-but-invisible or barely clickable. If you really want to change what the scroll bar looks like to the user, don?t stray too far away from the ?classic? scroll bar look. There?s a reason it?s bold and prominent in most web browsers. Consistency in designYeah, you know that you should be using images on your website. But how can you make those images seem like consistent, harmonious choices? How can you ensure that they actually get the message across that you want to communicate? You can look into incorporating graphic templates, which can help you tick all of the above boxes. Just make sure that it doesn?t jar with the graphics of the rest of your website! 
Contact informationPeople want to know that they can contact you in some way. Even the people who aren?t actually seeking to contact you will be comforted to know that you?re displaying such information on the website just in case they do need to at some point! A lot of website owners make the mistake of closing themselves off from outside questions or comments, or relying too much on social media accounts. If you?re a business, then this is an even bigger mistake! FAQsAnother page that you might underestimate the popularity and usefulness of. Sure, there are websites out there that won?t have too much use for a frequently asked questions page. Blogs may not have much need for them, for example. But if you?re selling a product of a service, then you need to have FAQs. Consumers are going to have a bunch of questions about any such business - even if they?ve used them before, they may be things they?re still uncertain about. An FAQs page may relieve them of the need to contact customer service before making a purchase. ?(Your customer service team may be lovely, but contacting customer service is never that attractive a proposition!)
