Tag: Website Design
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Responsive Website Design: How to Build a Multi-Platform Website
Q: Can I build a single website that works on a computer, a tablet and a smartphone? A: For the most part, yes. And with your customers increasingly viewing your website from a number of mobile devices (iOS, Android) and on various browsers (Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox), it’s an important goal to achieve.…
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WalkMe Website Tutorials Help Keep Visitors on Your Website
A business’ website should have a clear message and should be easy for visitors to navigate. For Eyal Choen’s mother, figuring out how to use her bank’s website was anything but simple, and that’s what lead Choen, along with Rafi Sweary, to launch WalkMe — a Tel Aviv-based startup that developed a tool that website…
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A New Study Reveals the Power of First Impressions Online
If you think any old website will do for your business, read this. It takes less than two-tenths of a second for an online visitor to form a first opinion of your brand once they’ve perused your company’s website, according to researchers at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. And it takes just another…
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Is Your Website Lost in Translation?
The “language of business” is based around the common denominator of currency. Business decisions are made on whether that currency will make you more currency, cover your expenses and leave enough for expansion. But in today’s atmosphere of global trade, the language of business has become a literal term. As more non-English speakers find themselves…
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Five Reasons Why Websites Still Matter
You know you must leverage Facebook, Twitter and word-of-mouth marketing to increase awareness of your brand. But the fact is, websites remain infinitely more popular with consumers than all of the business pages on social media sites combined. Only 22 percent of those of us online in the U.S. visit a branded social networking page…
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Five New Tools to Help You Add a Game to Your Website
Few activities are more engaging than a well-designed game. By their nature, games encourage and facilitate exploration of virtual space and reward players when they perform tasks, achieve goals or acquire skills. When you think about it, this is precisely what your business needs to do for your customers. By encouraging your website visitors to…
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The Quest for Balance: Offering an optimal blend of text, graphics and white space will keep your visitors clicking
For centuries, artists and writers have struggled to marry form and function. Click around online for a while and it becomes clear that web designers still grapple with the challenge. Achieving the optimum blend of text, graphics and white space eludes most companies. Too much text is likely to overwhelm, while too little leaves users guessing…
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A New Model to Help Improve Website Usability
Offering an optimal blend of text, graphics and white space will keep your visitors clicking. For centuries, artists and writers have struggled to marry form and function. Click around online for a while and it becomes clear that web designers still grapple with the challenge. Achieving the optimum blend of text, graphics and white space…
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How to Look Like a Pro on Facebook: Facebook Expands Preferred Developer Consultant Program
There’s a lot more to creating an enticing Business Page or application on Facebook than just slapping your logo on it, adding a fewcoupons and hoping customers and potential clients will stumble across it. Justlike your company website requires a dedicated programmer or designer, entrepreneursconsidering a Facebook storefront should also retain qualified professionalhelp. Brands, corporations…
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How to Hire a Webmaster
How to size up and select a webmaster who can keep your site one step ahead. In the web’s early days, knowledge of HTML and an eye for graphics were all a webmaster needed to succeed. Now, a top-notch webmaster must be a jack-of-all-trades, excelling in server and application programming, graphics design, e-mail marketing, media…
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Home Away From Home: Treat every page of your website as if it’s the homepage
Everybody knows the importance of making a positive first impression, but if you assume prospective customers first encounter your website through its homepage, think again. Natural search results drive users to individual pages that best match each user’s search query, and often that page is not your site’s homepage. On the more than 25 websites…
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A New Twist on Offering Savings Through Social Media
Over the weekend, I made a purchase online from a site called Abe’s Market. I was looking for a hard-to-find product and Google pointed me in Abe’s direction. It’s a great-looking site, focusing exclusively on “Green, Natural, and Eco-Friendly” products. It’s easy to navigate, has an exceptional blog with lots of helpful information — and…
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Tips for Interior Pages of Your Website
Everybody knows the importance of making a positive first impression, but if you assume prospective customers first encounter your website through its homepage, think again. Natural search results drive users to individual pages that best match each user’s search query, and often that page is not your site’s homepage. On the more than 25 websites…
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Tips for Creating Website Terms and Conditions
On a scale of one to 10 — with 10 being excruciatingly boring — I’d rank website terms and conditions of use agreements as maybe a twenty. Dry as dust. The only thing less spellbinding than T&Cs might be the privacy policies that often accompany such gray type. Why do companies insist on including them…
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Game Theory and Gaming Mechanics for Your Website
This is the time of year when business strategists are asked to give their take on the future of the web and online entrepreneurship in general. I’ve been asked no less than a dozen times between October and the end of December to prognosticate in writing about trends and predictions for the upcoming year. And…
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Career Objective: Don’t overlook the importance of a comprehensive jobs page on your company’s website
If it’s true that a company is only as good as the people it keeps, you’d think more business owners would realize the importance of the career section on their website. With most companies, however, I find the career section–if it exists at all–the most neglected. Avoid repeating this mistake. Spend some time and effort…
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Five Questions to Answer When Launching a Website
Before you hire a web programmer, graphic designer or agency to build your website, assume the persona of an investigative journalist and gather information critical to the success of your project. The best reporters know that the most important building block of any factual news story is the use of the five Ws. Taking time…
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The Inside Scoop: Save time and money on your next website by first answering the who, what, when, where and why of your project
Before you hire a web programmer, graphic designer or agency to build your website, assume the persona of an investigative journalist and gather information critical to the success of your project. The best reporters know that the most important building block of any factual news story is the use of the five Ws. Taking time…
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The Benefits of Framing Out Your Website
Suppose you’re sitting at Starbucks with your corporate architect to discuss plans for an office renovation. You grab a napkin and start sketching desktops and conference areas with your pen. Some of the lines don’t show up, and the napkin bunches up and tears, but you’re quite pleased with your rendering–until you catch sight of…
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Frame it Out: Developing a website prototype with a wireframe tool will get you and your designer closer to what you envision.
Suppose you’re sitting at Starbucks with your corporate architect to discuss plans for an office renovation. You grab a napkin and start sketching desktops and conference areas with your pen. Some of the lines don’t show up, and the napkin bunches up and tears, but you’re quite pleased with your rendering–until you catch sight of…
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4 Common Website Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Ask your target demographic what it thinks about your website’s usability, programming and design, and you’re bound to receive a variety of responses. These can range from “looks good to me,” to “I didn’t find what I was looking for,” or “I think it sucks.” Everyone has an opinion. A more likely scenario is that…
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The Usability Factor: Whether your website is delivering the expected user experience lies in the perceptions of those who use it. Here’s how to measure them
The internet continues to evolve and advance, and so do users’ expectations. Every time one of your customers or prospects visits Facebook.com, ESPN.com or any other well-conceived, navigable website, the pressure increases for your company to offer a similarly engaging and easy-to-use site. Fail to deliver the expected user experience and you may lose customers.…
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Is Your Website a Turnoff?
The internet continues to evolve and advance, and so do users’ expectations. Every time one of your customers or prospects visits Facebook.com, ESPN.com or any other well-conceived, navigable website, the pressure increases for your company to offer a similarly engaging and easy-to-use site. Fail to deliver the expected user experience and you may lose customers.…
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New App Clues You in on What People Think of Your Website
You want to know what I think of your new website. You got a sec? The folks over at Zurb have created an ingenious little web application that allows anyone to conduct a free test of what visitors remember about a website. And those visitors get exactly five seconds to form a first impression. Called…
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Websites in Motion: When you’re designing your site for the mobile web, the secret is simplicity
Juniper Research estimates that the number of mobile web users will grow from 1.2 billion this year to more than 2.4 billion in 2014. While many of these users will be able to surf the mobile web just as they do on their desktop and laptop computers, hundreds of millions of others will still be…
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The Cost of a Quality Website
Off-the-shelf content management systems and design templates have made building and managing a website easy and affordable for small-business owners with modest needs. Not counting your sweat equity, you can build and maintain a small website for less than $250. But, honestly, do you really want to bank your company’s online presence and messaging on…
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The Cost of Quality: Sidestep sticker shock by creating a detailed budget for designing, building and launching your website
Off-the-shelf content management systems and design templates have made building and managing a website easy and affordable for small-business owners with modest needs. Not counting your sweat equity, you can build and maintain a small website for less than $250. But, honestly, do you really want to bank your company’s online presence and messaging on…
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Here’s Looking at You
Search for just about any topic using any search engine and you are likely to see a hodgepodge of links for information, news, video, images and even blog posts. That’s because search engines strive to provide blended search results. To ensure that images are included in the results, search engines give them preferential treatment. Because…
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Coolness Has its Price
There’s no doubt about it: Websites designed in Flash are cool. They’re animated, interactive, multimedia eye candy. You see it, and you want it. Unfortunately, coolness has a price, and if a web designer sells you on Flash, you will be paying that price from Day One and for every second your site is live.…
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Understanding HTML5 and Why it Matters
In the year 2000, HTML4 was christened the official language for web page development. A decade later, an eternity on the web, we are just beginning to hear about the next generation of HTML – HTML5. Someday soon, HTML5 will dominate the web and completely change the way you develop your website and web-based applications.…
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Avoid being held hostage by your Web designer
Recently, I received an e-mail message from a reader of my Entrepreneur magazine column inquiring whether I could help her company gain access to source code that a third-party programmer had created on their behalf and is being used to run certain areas of her company’s website. Her company had hired a Web design and…
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Go Right to the Source (Code)
When I consult with a business about its website, I start by asking if it has ever viewed its site’s source code. For the uninitiated, source code–which can be generated by many different computer programming/scripting languages and is accessible under the “View” menu of most web browsers–is what makes your website operational. Comprised mostly of…
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Go Right to the Source (Code): Ensure a bug-free website by following the best practices of programming and design set by W3C
When I consult with a business about its website, I start by asking if it has ever viewed its site’s source code. For the uninitiated, source code–which can be generated by many different computer programming/scripting languages and is accessible under the “View” menu of most web browsers–is what makes your website operational. Comprised mostly of…
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Analyzing the Analytics How to make sense of your website’s performance data
In the world of website promotion, only three things matter: proper positioning, traffic volume and conversions. The number of people visiting your website–and how many of those people are ultimately doing what you want them to do, such as placing an order or contacting you for more information–is absolutely critical. To maximize your return on…
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A Matter of Online Trust: Give customers a reason to trust you over the other guy
Brick-and-mortar sells. Your customers can see it, touch it and drive to it. Upon entering, they can look around and then look you and your colleagues in the eye and gauge your trustworthiness. On the web, however, most companies–especially startups with no track record–are suspect until they prove themselves dependable. Rather than take a chance…
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You Are What They Click: Picking the right website designer is the first step to defining your business online
Choosing the right web-design firm or partner for your startup requires you to carefully balance several factors, including price, talent, technical expertise, availability and even personality. Making the right choice is key to establishing a clear vision for your website, fully implementing that vision, and keeping your startup on track and within budget. It all…
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The Purpose-Driven Website: Assuming your website is successful, what will it have accomplished?
I recently met an entrepreneur who told me her startup needed a website. When I asked why, she said, “Because every company has a website, so why should mine be any different?” When I pressed further and asked what end the website would serve, she paused, looking a little puzzled, and said, “Well, I don’t…
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Start a Blog For Your Business: Make sure you examine your business goals before jumping on the blogging bandwagon
Business blogs attract search engines, display your startup’s personality and encourage customer participation–a form of marketing that startups crave and money alone can’t buy. But before you jump on the business blogging bandwagon, get familiar with the basics and choose a blogging solution that’s right for you and your startup’s goals. Every blog needs a…