Why the Appearance of the Website is Essential?

A website has become an important part of a business to establish its presence, over the internet. A business owner expects a lot from their business website as the online marketing is becoming popular. They strive to increase leads and increase the sales through online marketing. But it is also very important to understand the expectations of a visitor to the website and to come up with something that could influence them to make a deal.

A website is not all about presenting the products and services, packing it with lot content and so on. A website should be attractive enough to hold a visitor and giving them a feeling that they are at the right place. For a website, look and feel does matter a lot. The website reflects the entire business; therefore, making the website attractive enough becomes a priority.

The first thing the owner should consider is that they are not designing the website, but they are establishing the presence of their business through the website. A website acts as a window from where the visitors peep inside to know whether they are at the right place or not. There are certain points to be kept in mind before constructing a website:

·         Choosing the best Website Design Company:

Web designing can be done by experts. Choosing the best web design company is important. By looking at the work done by a web design company and R&D, one can easily take a decision whether the web design company is up to the mark or not. It is a critical step and the decision has to be made carefully and analyse whether the company will be able to meet the expectations or not.

·         Choosing a design that appeals the business:

A business can be anything, be it restaurants, IT Company and so on. It is important to choose the best design that reflects the business. The look and feel of the website influences the visitors to explore more and giving a good impression to them.

·         Making it user friendly:

Visual appearance is not enough. The website should be user friendly, so that it becomes easy for the visitors to delve into the website completely. The visitors should not find difficulties in exploring the website.

·         Updating relevant Content:

The website should be filled with enough content in the form of information, pictures, and videos. This way, it becomes easy for the visitor to gather information. Content not only help visitors but also help to improve the presence of the website on search engines as well.

·         Colours and Typography:

The colours and typography for the website should be carefully chosen. The right colour and typography will soothes the visitor and further give them a reason to stay on the website. 

How business are benefited with SEO

Many Digital Marketing agencies provide SEO services as one of their product. SEO services are the most demanded services by many businesses as it helps in boosting online profiles by improving their search engine rankings. By availing the benefits of SEO services, people can increase the online visibility of their business on the search engines, which will further help in increasing leads, generating queries and increase sales.

No doubt SEO services works, but it has to be done in the right way, implementing various strategies, technologies and ideas involved these days. A specialised SEO company can be hired who could do the job and can considerably increase the sales. There are many Digital Marketing companies offering the SEO services offered by SEO Companies and the prices vary from one another. It is important to choose the SEO Company that is affordable and do the task effectively and efficiently.

SEO does not work overnight; it takes time, efforts and strategies so as to increase the visibility of a business on various search engines. There are different facts involved. Before hiring a SEO agency, it is important to do a keyword research, so as to get an idea on which keywords, the business profile need to be on the first page when the user enters a particular keyword into the search engine. Identifying the target audience and find out what kinds of terms they are most likely to use for the products.

Once the relevant keywords are found, it is necessary to find the density of the keyword. Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword appears on the web page compared to the total number of words on the page, but the keyword density should not be too high, as it will be listed under keyword spamming. If this is done correctly, then there is possibility of achieving higher search engine positions.

A business can easily find the best affordable SEO companies or web development companies, that offer SEO and web designing services on affordable prices and also the services are much better. As the technology is becoming advanced day by day, it is important to establish a strong online presence over the important, as the number of internet users have been increased. By availing the benefits of SEO, a business can easily achieve success in the competitive world by establishing the identity on various search engines. SEO may take time, but it is one of the important elements of the company that will not only establish the online presence, but also increase the sales of the business. 

Five Item e-Commerce Website Checklists

Running an e-commerce website is not different from other businesses. Even an e-commerce website has employees to manage, sales to make, taking orders, and payments to receive. An e-commerce website not only provides the customers online with a variety of products but also a website that guides them though the sales process from the beginning till the end. There are 5 items that should be considered while designing an e-commerce website to get closer to the path of success.

1.      Impressing the customers

An e-commerce site should resemble a store that has a variety of products, well organized, easy to navigate. The impression on the customers is very important as it develops a trust factor within them. An e-commerce site may turn on or off the customers, so it is very important not to turn of the customers and provide all the necessary items that are required by them. For this, there should be a team of professional designers who could make the grand website that gives an outstanding experience to its users.

The e-commerce website should be easy to navigate, organized, provides answers to frequent questions and gives the impression that the company who is selling the products is genuine and cars about their customers.

2.      Making the Product selection simple and easy

An e-commerce site consists of variety of products and showcases them to the best to bring awareness to their massive product selection. The e-commerce website should allow its users to quickly and easily find the items that they are searching for and reduce the number of clicks a customer has to go through to reach the check out page. A quick navigation to the pages they are looking for without going through the entire site will also be a good option. Offering tools like Google Custom Search that helps in searching for the products within the site makes the customers to have a better experience.

3.      The Product Pages

The product pages on an e-commerce website should have enough robust content by which the customers get a brief idea about the product that is being offered. A typical product page should consist of enough content, option to share the content socially, a section that consists of images, information on similar items, the product being displayed in the center of the page, additional images in different angles of the product with zooming functionality, a video pop –up, pricing, selling, shipping and payment options by which the customer get satisfied.

4.      Shopping Cart

Getting the customers on the shopping cart, there are few mistakes that many e-commerce website commits. An e-commerce site might be getting enough visitors on the website, but when the check out time comes, the visitor is probably to leave the page. This might happen due to high shipping charges that are displayed in the shopping cart page. This can be avoided by displaying the appropriate information of the product and shipping charges on the product page itself, providing variety of payment options, and avoiding such issues.

5.      After the Sale

After the completion of a particular transaction, make sure that it is not the end. Approach the customer with an email confirmation displaying a receipt as well as order number, contents of the order, an email, phone number and social media links to contact the business. Not only that, the customer care executives can also approach the customers with a follow up call. Offering the customers with promotional discount coupons and cashbacks is also another step of inviting them back again to the website. 

What’s 404 Error?

Many of us have been experiencing 404- not found error message. While the people consider it as a rubbish thing, it has a vital role in the internet. Through this article, we will discuss the importance of 404 error pages, tools for finding them and some creative solutions that will help the visitors in engaging on the website.

Importance of 404 errors

404 error messages are used primarily to inform the visitors/users that either:

·         A missing page or file that was either move or remove from the site.

·         A change to the permalink structure of the site.

·         A manual URL change to an individual post or the web page.

·         Invalid (misspelled or changed) links on an external site

·         A conflicting plugin

It is also very important to provide a solution and helping the visitor in finding the appropriate place or atleast the most relevant page. 404 pages are being utilized as an important branding opportunity to turn many troubles into a positive branding experience.

404 Reporting Tools

·         Google Webmaster Tools

404 data can be found by logging into your webmaster tools account, and then Crawl > Crawl Errors options on the left.  As quoted from Webmaster Tools

Generally, 404s error do not harm the website’s performance in the search engines, however, the user experiences can be improved.

At the centre of the screen URL Errors breakdown can be seen:

·         Server Errors – Request timed out or site is blocking Google.

·         Soft 404 – URL does not exist, but your server is not returning a 404 (file not found) error.

·         Not Found – URL points to a non-existent page.

·         Not Followed – URL has active content or there was a problem with redirects

·         404 Error Logger: This WordPress plugin logs any 404 header response that WordPress comes across.  You can access the data by navigating to Tools > 404 Error Log.

·         WP 404 Error Logger

Solving 404s

To solve the 404 errors, providing the users with sufficient details as to why the user did not arrive the desired page. From the point of view a user, it is important to provide the user with the clear links to back to the homepage or the most important/relevant pages. It is important not to show that the 404s are the dead end.

Adding Personality through a Custom 404 Page

Engaging the users with a custom 404 page by adding some characters as this comes as a prime opportunity to develop a brand personality. Using high quality images with a clean and consistent interface to communicate while the user is on the wrong page will be a good idea. 

3 Reasons why Usage of Navigation Bars should be stopped!

As the new techniques are introduced, the changes in the web design takes place and new and more advanced things are introduced. As we have experienced the life of the splash pages, the introduction headers and the scrolling bars and other many things have affected the web experience.

Off lately, it has been observed that some new changes have been introduced to some websites.

How important the navigation bars are?

The navigation bars were invented along with the internet. Every web designer places all the menu content in clear view on the page so that when a user who is visiting the website for the first time, they get a clear idea that what all is available and where to go.

Navigation bars are presented in many different ways by various designers. Recently, the sticky navbars have become very much popular. The sticky navbars are usually used in the websites with heavy parallax scrolling. The outcome may be a bit distracting, especially when it takes upside towards the horizontal area at the top of the page.

Right now, the navigation bars play a vital role in the web design. However, it can be presented in a better way that could change the entire way we think about the web design. This way, we can change web design so that the usage of navigation bars could be decreased.

There are 3 reasons why the navigation bars should be avoided:

1.      Avoiding Distractions:

If the usage of navigation bars will be avoided, it will decrease the distraction rates. Navigation bars have become a source where all the content is store that cannot be fitted on the website. Moreover, in the navigation area the designer adds every bit of details that has been imagined which might turn them junky and cluttered. Some adds telephone numbers and search boxes, some adds drop down menus and so on which is simply a wastage as it do not have any specific role to play and will further stop distracting the visitors.

2.      Focussing the customers

Every website designer should consider that customer preferences as to what the expectation of the customer would be by visiting the website. Therefore, every web designer should focus on the customers preferences like never before. It is important to figure out what they want and how they want to see a website. The navigation bars were as kind of the guided process before, since they have become a trend, every designer simply puts it on every website they get. The focus on the customer creates a greater connection with them and lends itself to experience driven designs like never seen before.

3.      Experience driven designs

By creating a smooth user experience on the website it will attract more customers on the website due to its simplicity and better user experiences. It is not required to be smoothest as possible, but the transfer of information should be smooth enough. There is a good opportunity to explore the cool new advanced HTML and CSS3 so that creating of some mind blowing things could be possible.  

Impact of Social Media over SEO

Socialmedia is a platform from where SEO can be supported a lot by various factors. Social media signals can bring a great improvement is SEO rankings. But to make it strong evidence, it is necessary to get the evidence for the same.

The social signals from Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are directly associated with the Google Rankings. Facebook Shares has a strong contribution in the rankings than the number of backlinks that a website has. Out of 10 Google SERP results, 5 results were those that were derived through social signals. If a website is engaging its audiences on the social media with its content, there is a good chance of improvement in its ranking on the Google.  

Engaging the audience on the social media platforms with strong tactics and planning can bring good results on the search engines. No doubt that both social media and SEO goes hand in hand. Social media if handled with a good planning and ideas can become a source of getting the links. It means that, if there is a good content supply on the social media platform of the website, by which the audiences generate a good engagement rate and keeps on talking about it, it can improve the SEO rankings.

Making the website more findable and shareable could be one option. It becomes more important for various brands with high competition in the market to create content that will be liked by the people and giving them likes, share, comments, retweeets and +1. With the combination of all these, it contributes towards the improvement in the Google Ranking of the websites. 

Finding the right website design partner

For every business, a website is very important to showcase their product and services and get business. For the business that doesn’t have a website or are planning to get their website revamped, need to be with a right, experienced and a designer with ideas and innovations. The website should be designed in such a way that it leaves a good impression on people and people should not only appreciate the website but the business too. There are a number of website design companies who would love to work for you, but you should make sure you choose the right one.

Every business has its own requirements and website can be built only according to those requirements. It is not all about how a website is going to look, but it is about the efforts and ideas that need to be implemented to get the business. For that, a right web design services should be opted that meets all the requirements of the business. But before that, the web designing company’s profile has to be researched well.  

The best web design company should be selected that not only provides the web design services but understands what the business requires and how to design the website that compliments the business. While choosing the best web designing company, it is necessary to find the achievements of the agency, web designers website and online portfolios should be checked, and make sure that the company provides the best. After the research, it is necessary to talk to the shortlisted agencies, evaluating the experiences and qualification of the web designer and agency, to check whether the web designers use the latest technology or not so as to move ahead with the latest technology, and most importantly, the web designing agency who fulfil all the requirements that is required by a business but at the reasonable cost. 

These things are necessary to check whether the web designing agencies provide all these services or not and get the best out of them. 

10 jQuery part that every designer should know

jQuery is the most common libraries used for web pages that are inserted into them and are used in most of the web pages. It makes DOM manipulation a snap.

Part of jQuery is popular for its simplicity and can be used for creating anything with this powerful library.

There are few parts of jQuery that are used by most designers. We are going to those 10 jQuery snippets that everyone, from a beginner to an expert use and will be using from time to time.

1.      Back to top button

// Back To Top

$('a.top').click(function(){

$(document.body).animate({scrollTop : 0},800);

return false;

});

//Create an anchor tag

<a class=”top” href=”#”>Back to top</a>

For creating a simple scroll to top animation, no plugin is required in jQuery using the animate and scrollTop functions.

It is possible to adjust the scrollbar by changing the scrollTop value. In the case above, the value used is 0, as by doing this it will be able to scroll to the very top of the page. But if an offset of 100px is required, then it could have been possible by simply inserting 100px in the function.

2.      Checking if images are loaded

$(‘img’).load(function() {

console.log(‘image load successful’);

});

Sometimes, the embedded images might not get loaded. It is necessary for the images to get fully loaded so as to continue with the scripts. The above jQuery can do that easily.

Also, it is possible to check if the images are fully loaded or not. This can be done by replacing the img tag with an ID or class.

$('img').error(function(){

$(this).attr('src', ‘img/broken.png’);

});

It is found mostly found that there is a broken image links on the website. It is not very easy to replace them one by one. By the simple code above, the issue can be avoided and can save lot of time. Even there is no broken links, by adding the code it will not create any harm or error. 

3.      Toggle class on hover

$(‘.btn').hover(function(){

$(this).addClass(‘hover’);

}, function(){

$(this).removeClass(‘hover’);

}

4.      ); Fixing the broken images automatically

This jQuery snippet changes the visuals of a clickable item in a web page when the user hovers over an item. It adds to the class element when the user is hovering and when the user stops doing it, it removes the class. So all you need to do is add the necessary styles in your CSS file.

We usually want to change the visual of a clickable element on our page when the user hovers over and this jQuery snippet does just that, it adds a class to your element when the user is hovering and when the user stops it removes the class, so all you need to do is add the necessary styles in your CSS file.

5.      Disabling the input fields

$('input[type="submit"]').attr("disabled", true);

Sometimes in a form, the submit button or the input fields are disabled and remain diabled until the user performs or fulfils a particular action (checking the “I’ve read the terms” checkbox for example) and when the user fulfils such condition, the disabled attribute gts enabled.

To do that all you need to do is run the removeAttr function on the input with disabled as the parameter:

$('input[type="submit"]').removeAttr("disabled”);

6.      To stop loading of the links

$(‘a.no-link').click(function(e){

e.preventDefault();

});

The situation when it is not preferred that the links go to a certain page or even reload it, and is preferred that it does something else such as trigger some other script. In such case, this code will help in executing the trick of preventing the default action.

7.      Toggle fade/slide

// Fade

$( “.btn" ).click(function() {

$( “.element" ).fadeToggle("slow");

});

// Toggle

$( “.btn" ).click(function() {

$( “.element" ).slideToggle("slow");

});

Slides and Fades are used a lot in the animations using jQuery to enhance the effects. However, if a particular element to appear on the first click and then disappear on the second this code will work perfectly.

8.      Simple accordion

// Close all Panels

$('#accordion').find(‘.content').hide();

// Accordion

$('#accordion').find(‘.accordion-header').click(function(){

var next = $(this).next();

next.slideToggle('fast’);

$(‘.content’).not(next).slideUp('fast’);

return false;

});

By adding this script all you really need to on your page is the necessary HTML go get this working.

9.      Making two divs the same height

$(‘.div').css('min-height', $(‘.main-div').height());

Sometimes, when it is needed to have two divs of the same height, no matter what content is there, this snippet allows the two divs of the same height.

10.      Zebra stripped unordered list

$('li:odd').css('background', '#E8E8E8’);

With the help of this script, it is an easy task to create zebra stripped unordered lists. This script can be used with any type of markup, from tables to plain divs. 

How Social Media Marketing agency promote a business

Nowadays, every business and brands want to spread its identity to as many people to promote the business and increase the sales. One of the tool that helps a business or a brand go viral is Social Media Marketing, which spreads the identity of the brand to a large amount of audiences through the social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, GooglePLUS, Tumblr and so on. Many traditional way of marketing such as yellow pages and similar mediums have been replaced by the SMO Companies. Socially interactive sites now promote well a brand and are effective too. One should get in touch with web designing companies offering social friendly websites.

If a business needs to promote themselves on such social media platforms, they need to hire a good Social Media Marketing Agency, to implement different effective and efficient strategies so that fruitful results to be seen. Social media platforms are the best place where a business can make a brand or a business go viral but only with innovative ideas and strategies. Posting news or updates on social interactive sites is not social media strategies, but influencing people to come, see and start conversation about the same is what that matters, therefore it requires proper skills and ability to handle a business on such platforms.

Advertisement campaigns has to be carefully placed on a social networking sites, it should influence enough to make people interact with the business. If an efficient ad campaign will not be placed, a company may suffer loss in the revenue and even negative publicity, therefore a reputed Social Media Company will be required to handle such duties on a company’s behalf. A company may not have much time to handle the social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as these social networks require constant updates. Also, such social networking sites makes different changes to the sites and metrics, therefore, an experienced professional who is well versed in this area will be required to deal with it.

Employing dedicated staffs to handle social media will be a costly affair for a business. Nowadays, there are so many SMO companies to whom the social media tasks could be outsourced. It is a smart move to lesser down the expenditure on the dedicated social media staffs and to get the effective results from a reputed Social media agency with efficient experts.

Benefits of an E-commerce website

The demand of buying and selling of products and services is increasing day by day. There are millions of users who shop online every day, therefore, the e-commerce sites are being developed day by day by companies offering website development services. There are so many advantages of e-commerce website, and user experience is excellent.

An e-commerce website does not have the advantage of geographical limitations, no matter where you are, it makes possible for an individual to buy or selling the product whenever it is convenient. For an e-commerce website owner, it is beneficial to attract customers in a wide range. It is possible to attract customers across the globe, giving them a number of choices and offers.

An e-commerce set up is comparatively a low price set up as compared to the traditional business set ups. Advertising and marketing is done mostly over the internet which itself is a low cost criteria. Manpower requirement is low as billing, inventory management and other operational services are managed through softwares integrated, though manpower requirement is there, but not much as it is required for a traditional business set up. Most importantly, an e-commerce website itself is a virtual body and does not require a physical location to showcase the products or services.

For customers, by few simple clicks and verification, it saves travel and time cost by not personally visiting to a shop or a store. It provides a huge variety of products and make is possible for the customers to make comparison. It enables for a customer to avail the deals and offers and shop at discounted rates. E-commerce websites are 24x7 open, therefore, the customers can do shopping anytime they wish like.

For development of an e-commerce website, it is necessary to evaluate the performance of the website without any hindrances. The user experience should be excellent so that the feedback should be positive, which further attracts the customers to such sites and do shopping. 

Few Characteristics of A Good Web Designing Company

Choosing the best web designing company for a business that meets all the requirements is a tough task. There are many choices in the market and one gets into dilemma which one is the best and which web design company goes along with the customer’s budget. It depends on the requirements of a business and the way they want to get established over the internet.

In the market, two types of web designing experts are found, an individual with less experience working with a web development company but is inexpensive, on the other hand, a web design company who is good at what they do and are very well experienced since years but are expensive. It depends on what type of website an organization wants, a static website or the dynamic mega-site. If it is a dynamic site, then always a company that provides seo services along side is preferred.

However, the focus should be the quality of the website and not cost. At the end of the day, the results matter the most. Selecting a good website development company is all about doing a good research and understanding whether the products offered by the solution provider will work for the brand or not.