Ways to improve web design outcomes

UX is a term that has been thrown around a lot in recent years but many people would have trouble describing what it is.

UX stands for user experience and generally referrs to everything that affects a user's experience with a product - it's the difference between a customer purchasing your product and abandoning their cart during a transaction.

UX plays an important role in web design because so many modern businesses connect with their customers and potential clients through their websites and apps. But UX in web development isn't just about having a beautiful website or web app with newfangled web functionalities.

More »

If you’re looking to create a new website or redesign an existing one, it’s imperative that you consider UX in the web development process. Last week we went through the basics of UX, short for User eXperience, and why you can’t afford to ignore it when you’re embarking on a new web development project.

Whether you’re doing the project in-house or outsourcing it to a third-party developer, your design brief needs to factor in UX. 

We expand on four UX questions you should ask to help you get started on your UX web development journey.

More »

When we think about web apps, we often just think about them as online sales and marketing tools, but they are much more than that. Web apps can be effective business tools that can provide significant gains in productivity and cost savings.

More »

We all know that it’s possible to get a logo “designed” offshore for next to nothing. What many don’t understand is why that’s such a bad idea!

A logo isn’t just the business name with some pretty graphics. A logo is a crucial part of developing a graphic and verbal language for a business, this in turn becomes the foundation for your online presence, website, social media, and traditional offline media use.

More »

Predicting trends in technology, or just about anything else, is always fun. Sometimes predictions can be wildly off the mark, but often there are clear trends that give some certainty to prediction.

One such trend is the growing use of HTML5 to build effective web apps that will make many native apps redundant.

More »

We don’t often talk about web design within these articles, preferring to concentrate instead on web page content, SEO and general marketing topics; we believe that’s where most of your attention should be. But web design plays an important role in your site’s effectiveness, affecting conversions and the way users interact with the website’s various elements. Web design can attract and it can certainly repel!

More »

I was asked recently to evaluate a large sports promotion website for a friend. The site features hundreds of pages, all with original content but the pages aren't optimised and accordingly the site isn't performing well in search engine rankings. Built on the Open Source CMS platform, Joomlah!, I soon discovered that the site's back-end management was a nightmare.

More »

According to online sources, today there are 298 Million web sites on the Internet. Somewhere in there your own web site enjoys its little piece of turf, and hopefully your customers enjoy coming to it! While subjects such as SEO command stronger attention, the “small stuff” often gets lost in the message. So here’s a focus on 5 essential online marketing elements to keep your little piece of turf in tip top shape and attractive enough to warrant customer attention.

More »

I’d like to break down the main elements of a website build and offer, by way of fair argument, the hourly cost and time frame to deliver a commercial-grade website. Once things are broken down you soon discover that these $500 website claims are mostly hot wind.

More »

As a web design business we're approached weekly by people who are "shopping around" for a website. Particularly in the past 5 years, web companies building template websites have sprung up on "every street corner". You can even download templates for free before paying a ridicuously small website host fee each month.

More »

According to a recent report, a new website visitor conversion rate hovers around the 4-5% mark (source: Coremetrics Benchmark™ for Retail Q2 2010). The glaring point of this statistic is why aren't the other 95% acting upon a call to action on your website or buying from your online store?

Here's a checklist to ensure that you're doing all that you can to convert new visitors to leads or sales.

More »