by Marelise da Silva | Jan 22, 2014 | Website Content, Website Design
Great web design, with its unique look, functionality and feel is what brings any website to life. It is what makes the site’s visitors want to click around and, if you’re lucky, even bookmark the site for future visits. As any professional website designer knows there is a lot that goes into the creation of a website and even more to consider while designing the site.
For starters, you need to consider the elements of the company’s brand, the appearance and colour schemes of the site, usability considerations, functionality, image compression and screen resolution, browser compatibility and website architecture, etc. After this, other elements come into play such as search engine optimisation and content management, etc.
What are the web design best practices?
These are only a few of the things to keep in mind when designing a website. However, there are also a few important best practices that are essential to creating a fantastic website:
- A compelling layout design: By achieving an attractive layout design in your web design, your visitors’ attention will be arrested. It is really one of the main things that will keep your visitors exploring your site and delving deeper into the pages and information. A great layout design will require the use of basic design principles such as consistent header, navigation elements and logos among the web pages. It should also have a good contrast between the background and text.
- Balanced use of colours: Using too much colour is one of the best ways to ruin your website’s design. Mismatched colour combinations and too many interactive features is a big mistake to avoid. Use three to four colours to achieve a well-balanced design.
- Organised content: The look of the site will welcome your visitors but it’s the content that will keep them around. So use common fonts, using consistent font sizes, colours and hyperlink colours. Use an organised presentation of content, making content accessible with the minimal amount of clicks.
To learn more about effective and affordable website design, contact WSI OMS today.
by Marianna Muscat | Oct 13, 2011 | Website Content
The second most important page on a website after its homepage is its “About Us” page.
The “About Us” page is a business’s chance to stake its claim as a viable player. To accomplish that successfully, the business needs a powerful and succinct ‘elevator pitch’ and supporting key messages. An enormous marketing opportunity is lost when those key elements are missing from the “About Us” page—which is a logical destination for many who have become intrigued by a provider’s product or service offerings.
- A 35-word elevator pitch that tells visitors what type of business you are, what you offer, who you are targeting, what makes you special, and what value you provide
- Your most differentiating key message about your unique experience, skills, product or service, customer base, etc.
- Your second most differentiating key message about your unique experience, skills, product or service, customer base, approach or technique, etc.
- A brief company description explaining who you are, where you’re based, how long you’ve been in business, what your philosophy or business promise is, what the highlights of your experience have been, etc. Imagine that your homepage and “About Us” page are the only two pages that your visitor will see.
How to Check the Effectiveness of Your “About Us” Page
Draft print and lay it next to printouts of your competitors’ “About Us” pages. Compare each one as though you were a potential customer. Prepare a spreadsheet and display the different competitors’ copy, column by column.
- What is your main and secondary claim of differentiation? Whatever the company is hanging its hat on is its main differentiator. Call that row “Primary Differentiator” on your spreadsheet plus as many secondary claims or messages you can identify.
- Who is the target buyer or ‘persona’? Are they small business owners, large organisations, marketing, financial or IT managers? Call that row “Target Buyer” on your spreadsheet.
- What value/benefit is the competitor promising? It could be clearly defined or be poorly written as an inherent benefit that you must try and decipher?
Now that you have a nicely laid-out spreadsheet that compares the content of your “About Us” page with that of your competitors’, conduct an apples-to-apples comparison. By the end, you can determine just how well your page stacks up.
by Marelise da Silva | Oct 18, 2010 | Website Content
For every hobby, profession, music artist or sport, there are a million websites. All of these sites have content on them, but only a few are popular (and it’s always the same ones that get the top spots on search engines for a specific subject). Why? One of the reasons is because these pages have unique copy that gets updated on a frequent basis.
There are a lot of factors that Google, Yahoo and Bing look at when ranking a page (such as reciprocal links, keywords in metatitles and so forth) but these algorithms are continuously changing along with the internet. A few years ago, when Search Engine Optimization started to gain popularity, you could simply retype the same keywords over and over again (such as “electrical supplies America electrical supplies America”) and you would probably get a top spot in Google for that key phrase.
Nowadays, the smart search engine folks have a number of different ways to check if your article is actually about the search phrase (by looking at secondary keywords that would most likely be on your page) and to check if you didn’t steal somebody else’s ideas.
What happens to duplicate content?
According to Google, duplicate content shows below 100 results (who’s going to click that far to read your page?!). Not only do you make your content invisible, but you will also lose Google ranking for your website.
Search engines don’t do this to punish you for no reason – their focus is on giving customers (internet users) access to the information they are looking for. If they find your article somewhere else on the internet, they figure that the user won’t want to read the same article twice so the original page ranks well and yours does poorly. Simple as that.
Keeping it fresh
Google spiders index your page when you add new content to the site. If you do this frequently, they come back to your site on a regular basis to index your pages in the search engine. If you are struggling to get around to updating your website and adding new content, find out if you can outsource the job – having unique articles on your site is important, so make sure it gets done right!
