You've Only Got Millisecons To Impress

There is plenty of advice around on how to create a brilliant web design but top of the list has to be that very first impression.

An Ecommerce web design London based company like any other site builders around the world cannot over-stress the importance of the first impression. People surfing the net have an extremely short interest span so getting them curious means some great first impression pictures.

Tips: Choosing the Right Ecommerce Platform for Your Business

The internet is one of the most, if not the most, lucrative opportunity for making sales. If your business has yet to set up an ecommerce storefront (i.e. a website that allows you to sell your products), or if its ecommerce storefront is outdated, then you are missing out on an extremely large source of revenue. Here, we have provided you with some top tips to help you to choose the best ecommerce platform for your needs and budget.

Making Twitter Work For Your Business

Social media can do wonders for a business whether you are one person trying to sell a great idea or a multinational corporation who wants to try and connect on a more personal level with potential customers. As with anything, there are good ways to utilise social media and there are poor ways to utilise social media and Twitter definitely falls into a category which contains more pitfalls than perhaps any other platform.

140 characters is not a lot to work with; not when you want to entice and engage with customers, connect with them and built up a potential rapport which could result in new business for you and your company.

Internet Use: You Might Be Surprised By These Lesser Known Facts

When you think of the people that use the internet, what do you think? I usually think of the average user as being aged 20-30, male, young, and pretty cool. I don’t know why, because I’m none of those things…except maybe the cool part? (please?). Anyway, here, we’ve collected together a few facts that might surprise you about the internet. it turns out that things aren’t quite as they might appear to be at first glance.

1.Not all university students use their phones or tablets to access the internet on a day-to-day basis: now, this might be a prejudice of an older person here, buy I thought that all students, with maybe the exception of one or two extreme outliers, would use their phone/tablet every day. These are the millennials. I thought they couldn’t go an hour without internet access, let alone an entire day. But, according to Domo, 3% of uni students don’t use their phones/tablets every day. This was a poll of 2000 students, so that means 60 students! That’s a lot more than the one or two hipsters I had in mind.

2.Budding writers can make it online; they just have to do what they know they can do. There are so many people that want to write, and then there are so many other people telling them not to do it. It’s complete nonsense. If you know you can write, if you know you have something that people will want to read, then do it. Don’t let the naysayers pull you down. They’ve been doing that since time immemorial. The trick is to find your heroes, imitate them for a while, and then create your own voice. If you’re interested, check out Brendan Kelly’s Twitter account, Nihilists Arby’s, he’s racked up a huge following in the past few months.

You'll see how being unique can set you apart from the rest. Just believe in yourself and try. If you fail, so what? At least you tried. Writing is one of those professions where everyone will have an opinion. Some will tell you you're great, others will tell you you're rubbish. Sometimes they tell you you're rubbish because they’re jealous. Other times it’s because they think they’re so great that all they can do is critique others work. Sometimes it is because you're rubbish. You have to get used to rejection because it happens all the time! Just think about this, JK Rowling was rejected 12 times before someone went with the Harry Potter books. How dumb were those 12 publishing houses, eh?

3.If you haven’t heard of Periscope, you soon will do. This is a new social media ap, owned by Twitter. For me, someone who grew up without the internet, it’s a bit scary. Well, for someone that comes from humble beginnings at a digital agency in London, it appears this way. It’s a little bit Big Brother, and English Literature 101 taught me to be scared of that. Anyway, Periscope is a live-streaming ap. You can travel (albeit virtually) anywhere in the world where a live stream is running and just watch: people's houses, statues, monuments, inside offices, the edge of the world, etc. I suppose it could be boring at times, but at other times, fun as you like. Anyway, it must be less boring that watching paint dry, because it has increase in popularity exponentially. Since its launch, it’s had more than 10million users. Not bad.

Commonly Held Assumptions that are Problematic for SEO

SEO has received somewhat of a bad press recently, with many ‘experts’ claiming that it’s no longer needed. Unfortunately, many people have jumped on this bandwagon and let their SEO practices go to waste…to the detriment of their website.

In response to this trend, we’ve seen a counter trend: an increasing number of SEO seminars and workshops. For instance, BrightonSEO 2015 has seen one of the largest turnouts in the UK to date, for a seminar of its kind.

When people talk about SEO being dead, they mean the old-fashioned SEO techniques. These were techniques that ‘tricked’ the search engines into ranking the website as better than it was, techniques that included keyword stuffing, white text, nefarious link building, and such. Yeah, if you did this today, your website would be dead quite quickly.

Assumption 1: Because SEO is about keywords, and keywords are less important than they used to be, and so this means SEO is dead.

In the past, SEO was about putting as many keywords on the page as possible. Today, keyword stuffing, as the practice is known, is largely outlawed by the search engines. Your site will be penalised if you do this.

Instead, you need good content. This means that the copywriters’ work has become more important than ever before. However, that does not mean that SEO is dead. Once the content is on the page and in place, it still needs optimising. The careful use of one or two keywords is essential to increasing organic search results.

The copywriter writes, but the SEO specialist optimises. Both are of equal importance.

Assumption 2: Link building doesn’t work anymore, and because a large part of SEO is link building, SEO is dead.

Google has gone all out to penalisemanipulative link building strategies. And therein lays the reason that SEO is not dead. We still require link building; it is the manipulative version that we can no longer practice. This is good news for any SEO agency in London worth their salt, because it means removing the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. The poor SEO companies can no longer get ahead. Now, is the time for logical link building that aims to improve the internet for everybody, and not simply for business.

Assumption 3: Online visibility is all about providing value to the user. SEO is all about business promotion.Those two aims clash. Therefore, SEO is dead.

It is clear that SEO needs to change, and it is doing so. SEO simply means ‘search engine optimisation’, and no matter which algorithms the search engines come out with, websites will always need to optimise to these new rules. Whether that’s providing greater user experience, providing precise content, or being extremely niche, it is still optimisation and for that, you will always need an SEO specialist. Any SEO agency in London, New York, Paris, and Tokyo understand this, and they're evolving appropriately.

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What Changes Are We Going To See in Web Design: Five Predictions

Web design is an area of technology consistently experiences rapid changes. It’s important that businesses keep up with these developments, or they risk falling behind. Below, we’ve outlined our five predictions for web design in 2016.

1.The end for scrolling Banners and Images on the front page:

We live in a world where people are rushed. They don’t have time to spend 30 seconds to a minute while your banner scrolls through its various headings. People rarely watch landing page banners. Sure, when they first came out, they looked flashy and leant the site an air of professionalism, but it was just a novelty. People weren’t reading them.

Now, they just slow things down. Websites load more slowly, leading to a high bounce rates and poor user experience. This is compounded by the fact that they’re difficult to see on mobiles and tablets.

This trend’s on its way out.

2.More text less imagery:

Partly as a response to the greater access by mobile phones and tablets, and partly because they don’t serve much function, lager image headers are on their way out. Today, web designers are replacing this with premium copy. The message is clear: we’re making the message clear. OK, so that wasn’t very clear at all, but what we mean is that rather than using images to convey meaning, web designers are becoming more direct, and using words. For instance, you're going to see a big increase in ‘call to action’ type language. We can see this trend happening in the web design company London and around the world, with their emphasis on high-end writers and a move away from content farming. If you have an English Degree, now is your time to shine!

3.Minimalism continues to rule the roost:

We are constantly bombarded with information in the 21st century. People have neither the time, nor the inclination, to care much about it. They want to know what they need to know and they want to find it as easily as possible. The search engine algorithms are starting to favour sites that have a clear and concise purpose.

Simple content: Your customer/reader reaches the website, they easily find what they’re looking for, they stay around a while, the search engines love them.

Complex and repetitive content: Your customer/reader reaches the website, struggles to find what they’re looking for, and goes off in search of your competitor’s site.

4.Professional images:

We’ll be seeing far fewer images than we saw in the past; but of those we do see we’ll expect to see quality. People are starting to turn away from stock imagery and themes. If you’re serious about making your website work, then professional photography and design is will set you ahead of the competition.

5.Hidden off-screen menus:

People access the internet in so many different ways, that we need to establish design techniques that work across the board, rather than focussing on a single type of device. Once way we’ll see this happen is in the use of off-screen menus. Large icons will direct users’ attention to the fact that there’s a menu lurking off to the side, and with the click of a button, it will fly back out. This will make navigation much more intuitive.

5 Possible Ecommerce Blunders

Ecommerce is still relatively new despite its huge success and it’s also something that doesn’t stand still but rather is evolving like a fast growing bush with millions of branches.

An entrepreneur may have an inspirational idea in which to sell goods or service online but taking the idea and making it look good in a website and then continuing with the perhaps greater challenge of successful marketing is the real hard part.

There are many ecommerce design mistakes but here are just FIVE of the most common. Many could have been avoided if more time had been spent testing a site before full launch. Once a site is thrown into the public domain it’s not so easy to retrieve it without losing valuable time, money and face.

NO CLEAR VALUE PROPOSITION

This is the most important aspect to the site and it simply means why should the person dwell upon your page let alone buy anything? No amount of ingenious SEO graft will mean anything at all if the prospective customer lands on your page but is unimpressed with it.

There is plenty of good tested ecommerce software UK to help build an online shop that displays your product clearly and explains why people should buy from you and not Amazon. Images and easy navigation along with special offers such as free delivery can all help.

POOR PRODUCT DESCRIPTION

Text and images have different degrees of importance depending very much on the product. A cuddly toy definitely needs an excellent image but the latest TV needs more technical information as one TV looks much like another.

POOR QUALITY IMAGE

Find the best photographer with the fanciest camera you possibly can. Image for many items is crucial to get right with an absolute clarity that makes the customer want to touch it. The hovering mouse that increases image size is also known to boost sales.

UNCLEAR VISUAL IMPORTANCE

It should be clear from colours or typeface used means click here for more detail or whether it’s just plain text.

IS THE SITE TO BE TRUSTED

If the site looks good and you have full belief in a good product you’re half way there with this problem