We all know by now that websites are designed to increase business growth and generate more customers, and not just irrelevant traffic. But how can one ensure a website design that produces not just traffic but higher conversions also? Simply focusing on the bigger picture and the larger aspects won’t do the trick; because web design is not about “BIG” things, rather it’s about making small things look bigger on your web pages.

We have accumulated a list of to-do. When combined together, the following things can produce conversions beyond imagination. Check out the list and don’t overlook these little wonders when designing your website.

Appearance and User Experience

Develop a critical eye and then analyze your website from the user’s perspective. No doubt we all love our belongings, but you never know the others love the same. Moreover, be very specific about your industry audience requirements. If you want to give a good user experience, layout your website design that meets their needs and truly makes them explore further.

Be Innovative, But Stick to the Established Practices

Being innovative is great only if you don’t choke usability in the process. Make your website stand out by doing something other than the conventional, but don’t forget to keep your roots aligned with the established policies within the industry, or you may hold the risk of losing reliability and user trust in overdoing the innovative aspect.

In The Online World, “Simplicity Is the Best Policy”

Having a good design certainly doesn’t mean you have to be loud, colorful and cluttered. Website simplicity is highly important if you want your visitors to interact with you and not become lost while finding their desired item through the unnecessary designing elements.

Make Things Easy To Find, How?

ALWAYS give your users a search box to find what they’re looking for. Online users are in haste, and they indeed have no time to sit and explore your website in detail like your mom would. So better give them a shortcut and cut out their misery of going through every link to reach the wanted one. You can also improve your website’s search-ability by organizing your entire site’s information in a clear structure.

Use Appropriate Link Descriptions

Anchor linking, by inserting more descriptive text within the link text is a good practice. Also, adding link titles and alt attributes within each link can be effective to gain user interest and access.

How to Get In Touch With You?

Suppose you’re fortunate enough for a visitor to like your products or services, what next? The visitor will instantly look out for your contact information. Make this info easily accessible on your website and all the other web pages, and don’t forget to build an about us and contact us page for the interested prospects.

Website Fonts

Without getting into much detail about font importance, here are the three things to remember regarding your website fonts:

• Font size: Must not be less than 10 points as smaller font is difficult to read.
• Font face: Verdana, specifically built for web use must be used. Also avoid using many fonts and stick to two at the most.
• Font scalability: Instead of using fixed width fonts, permit users to adjust font size by making it scalable.

Be Calm with Using Colors

Online world is different than offline world. You may feel attracted towards loud and funky colors, but you’d hate websites with such eye-hurting colors. Therefore, be careful when selecting contrasting colors for your website and give your website color a mild and harmonized look. To ensure easy web scanning, dark text on a light background is preferred.

Graphics

Graphics should be considered something more than just eye-candy. Each graphic you use must enhance user experience rather than being distracting and irritating.

Call for Action!

Your website may contain elements requiring action from the visitor. Such elements such as linked text or image should be made obvious than the rest of the non-linked stuff by changing its color or making it bold – however method you prefer. Standard link formatting (blue and underlined) should be used for textual links and should change in color when it has been visited. The rest of the text should be in one same color.

Is Your Web Content Readable?

In order to make the words on your site appear readable and interesting for the visitor, try reviving it up a bit. It’s not necessary to insert long text paragraphs to prove your products or services, but simply organizing the already existing content by using short paragraphs and bulleted list may want a reader to scan the information easily.

Using Breadcrumbs

Are you familiar with the “Hackle and Jackle” story where breadcrumbs were used to track their way back home? Imply the same technique on your website for the visitors so they can easily know what their location is on your website and how can they trace their way back.

What about White Space?

What about it? White space is the most important user-friendly aspect you can add to your website. Adding considerable white space will relieve the crammed affect from a website, making the information more visible and easy to understand.

Follow these simple but important website designing tips, and you’ll witness your website’s traffic converting into long term customers in no time!

It’s useless to have the best designed website which no one can find! Many web designers often ignore search engine optimization to improve their website’s search engine results page rankings. In this article, we’ve shared some quick and easy SEO tips all designers should be using in their layouts.

Tip 1: Employ SEO techniques right from the start of web design and development.

Tip 2: Designs must be given more importance, but it’s basically the back-end code that provides proper support. Therefore, try optimizing the code and checking for W3C compliance from the very beginning.

Tip 3: Don’t forget the basics including title tags, Meta tags, Meta descriptions, Header tags etc.

Tip 4: Don’t forget to optimize your website images using alt tags. Also make sure to optimize the image size and loading time to the minimum.

Tip 5: Search engines simply adore text and content, particularly the unique one. So make sure your pages have relevant content to boost your search rankings. Try not to overload your web design with so many graphic, but have appropriate text too.

Tip 6: Flash is cool and interactive feature to engage users, but it doesn’t work with flash. If you really want to put some flash on your website, use flash banners and slideshows, and keep alternative text versions for websites in full flash.

Tip 7: Competitive analysis is also crucial to know your competitor’s status. This way you can not only improve your own rankings, but also defeat them in areas where they are showing poor results.

Tip 8: Optimize your website URL’S with your relevant keywords. Assign a different title name to each page, and don’t repeat the same title throughout the entire site. Moreover, the page title must not exceed 65 characters.

Tip 9: Replace JavaScript sin navigation menu with CSS based navigation. Using JavaScript can make your menu less search engine friendly but you can some use of its features in a CSS menu and retain the fanciness of the navigational menu.

Tip 10: Use a SEO friendly design that does not block or hamper the indexing of important areas on your site. Also, to ensure both search engine and user friendliness keep your keyword rich content above the fold.

These 10 tips will help you design a website that works equally well on search engines and give your design the exposure and traffic it needs to survive in the online marketplace.

Socialization and man go hand in hand. Just like you can’t survive in this world without meeting people and socializing yourself, similarly your website can’t survive online without public. Websites are meant to draw traffic, but if your website is not attracting a decent amount of traffic you really need to focus on its socialization. Here’s how you can do this.

Search engine optimization

Around 80% of the internet users rely on search engines to find any probable product or service they are looking for. If your website design is not suitable and friendly for search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing then you are simply non-existence to your online customers.

Submit to directories

Similar to search engines, you need to find relevant directories and submit your site there. Once you submit it, people will be able to reach you conveniently. Users love directories because they can find the right info, organized under the right category immediately.

Utilize social media

Socializing your website is all about getting your message out to social networks, blogs, and forums where your target audience is spending maximum amount of time. If you have a Facebook fan page or twitter feed, let your visitors know by putting their icons on your website.

Produce sharable content

Having attractive web design and valuable original content on your website is great. But do the people know about it? To make your websites content popular, you need to socialize it. If you have helpful information for users, write it for your website and place it in a widget with passable option. This way your content will work as a means of socializing your website.

Create discussion places

It’s important for companies to create a place where visitors and customers can communicate with each other and about the company’s products and services. If you don’t give them a platform, they’ll do so at some other place thus disrupting your entire image.

Spread the word

Share your expertise with the users through writing for blogs, video demos, etc. Availability of such credible information will make your website more reliable and popular among your customers and potentials.

Follow these points and make your website as socially active as you are. This will help you attract traffic, get yourself and your company acknowledged and earn high revenues.

Search engine optimization has become a rising trend in the online world. Web development companies need to have a complete grasp over SEO techniques, because no matter how stunning website design is created, it will be of no use if users can’t reach it.

Many times it is thought that SEO is quite a different field and only individual SEO companies are responsible for making a website search engine optimized, where the truth is that website owners are now looking for experts that build their site keeping SEO in mind. Because implying step by step changes to a website with respect to SEO is way easier than getting your site built and then optimizing it. Though, you can experiment off-page optimization once a site is built, but to avail on-page optimization you need to know the SEO concept in the earlier stages when the site is being designed and developed.

Why Should A Web Development Company Should Go Along SEO?

• SEO isn’t only for online marketers. As the on-site SEO largely depends on the web designer and a web developer.
• People don’t know your site and they will not enter the exact address in the form of www.your-website-name.com to find your site, instead they will use search engines. So if your site is not search engine friendly, you might risk losing a lot of traffic that you’re not even aware of.
• SEO will spice up your company’s services. If you provide designing and developing services along with SEO, you will be likely to gain more clients and won’t fear your clients will shift to some other company.

Today, web development company should have a complete know-how of how they to develop websites that can be easily found by search engines, as only then they will be able to produce websites that can actually earn!

This is the arena of getting social and having an identity over web. A quality website design can bring you image globally but it will not be visible to a big share of audience until and unless it is renown or branded well enough. Usually, your website design sails your identity and traits in different platforms. These days the most common and effective platform is the social media and networks just like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Youtube, etc. There are numerous social networks for various purpose and niches which can be highly effective to promote your business globally and can build your reputation.

Social media exits in different varieties specific to different domains and cateogies such as for networking, blogging, booking marking, wikis, videos etc.

However, following is the list of  social media platforms which are categorized to help your web design and development business promotion by means of appropriate planning and selection of suitable niche in that particular social platform.

These social platforms can help your web design and development business for promotion and marketing alongside building a brand name and reputation for your own self too. However, it is necessary to hit a suitable platform or the niche in each of the social stream and then setting up your goals and business plan accordingly. Such as promoting your web design portfolio and building an identity as a web design or graphic design company via social and business networks. Having your readers/clients being informed of your latest offers, news and getting them in constant collaboration using social networks for news and blogs etc.

In short, social media can really be a good start for your website promotion and this is not the all since there are tremendous opportunities for getting business, keeping your clients informed and sticky, brand awareness, building reputation and so on. So, get social and take an edge of social media.