Internet Marketing Blog » About Web Design

Does The Best Web Design Depend On Inspiration?

James — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:52:17 +0000

The web designer who never runs out of inspiration probably does not exist, so how do creative individuals come up with ideas for successful websites time after time? There is a popular myth that people with creative talent live their lives in a continual artistic frenzy, constantly bursting with ideas and staying up until three in the morning pursuing brilliant projects while lesser mortals are snoring away.

Any professional involved in web development will be able to state that this is not the reality. Designers take their work just as seriously as other professionals, and they do not approach projects haphazardly. Although coming up with fresh and apt concepts for each client is definitely required, a designer’s core ideas for a particular brief may have come to them months or sometimes years before.

The secret of having a seemingly continual flow of useful material is to constantly take notes, jot down ideas and save scraps of colours or images, whether these have any practical use at the time or not. In this way a database of rich and varied raw inspiration is built up over a long period of time, ready to be called upon in order to answer a client’s needs. Maybe some tweaking will be required in order to meet those requirements exactly, but the advantage is that there is no need to wait around for inspiration to strike.

At internet marketing agency Click Consult, we know that building a successful site comes from planning, rather than waiting for inspiration.

Know How To Say Something Important

Gareth — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 08:02:47 +0000

If there was nothing on the television all day but commercials, or if magazines were filled with nothing but advertisements from cover to cover, not only would it quickly become tedious and repetitive to either watch or read, it would not be particularly inspiring for the audience to keep on watching, or keep on reading.

A website by its very nature must surely exist to provide something more useful than just advertising, even if that advertising is serving to make money. Style really does matter a great deal and so too does presentation, but content must also be taken into serious consideration during web development.

A site might appear to have the most brilliant web design but if there is nothing to be seen but advertisements and there is no interesting or informative content for a company to demonstrate genuinely important intent, then it runs the risk of being boring, uninspiring and useless.

In order to show any potential market exactly what a company has to offer, a website must impart all the most important and relevant information. From many other things to consider there are product descriptions and accompanying photographs, lists of services and some relevant examples, as well as related articles, contact details, feedback forms, testimonials from existing customers and up to date news and information.

Here at Click Consult our web design is tailored to individual client needs and specifications so that saying something important can be achieved with style without losing substance.

What Are The Considerations In Redesigning Your Website?

Gareth — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 08:00:34 +0000

Before you set about redesigning your website, you should make sure that you are going about it the right way. All too often companies make changes to their websites without taking into consideration some of the more technical aspects of web design, which can prove very costly in the long run.

Firstly, whenever you make changes to your website from a web design perspective, you need to make sure that the location of your pages isn’t changed, and if they are then you need to ensure that your old pages are redirected to your new ones. Failure to do so could see your website’s rankings drop drastically, which will cost you money in lost business.

Another consideration is how you intend to improve your website from a usability and conversion perspective. In order to do this you should have detailed statistics showing where your visitors are coming from, what pages of your site they are landing on and how they are travelling down funnels to convert. Without this information, you could end up removing a vital part of your website that offers you conversions, which will also end up costing you money in lost business.

At Click Consult, we’re experts in web design and know how to design an effective website that doesn’t lose any of the successful aspects of the existing website. We’ll ensure that we know what parts of your website work, and what parts do not work, so that your new website offers you more business and more sales.

Optimising Images For Web Design

Gareth — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 08:04:39 +0000

One aspect of web design that many web designers fail to grasp is optimising images for the web. When you use images on your website they need to be optimised for the Internet before they are uploaded. If they are not optimised it could have serious repercussions for your website.

For example, when adding photographic quality images to your website you need to make sure that they are 72dpi (dots per inch). This is very different to print quality photographs, which are usually a minimum of 300dpi. If you were to use a high quality image such as this on your website it would be too large, would take up more space than necessary on your web server and would take longer for your website visitors to download. This would affect your traffic, and thus your conversions. It could also cost you more in unnecessary bandwidth on your server.

Images for the web should also be resized to their correct size, in pixels, as uploading large images and resizing them using the HTML code would again cause them to be too large and adversely affect your website.

Photographic images should also be in the JPG format. Formats such as TIF or BMP, which are often used in print, should not be uploaded to your website as they are too large.

At Click Consult, our web design experts know the correct image formats to use for your website in order for your website to run smoothly, quickly and effectively.

What Is A ‘Call To Action’ On A Website?

Gareth — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 08:03:42 +0000

The main purpose of a website is for it to work. If it’s an eCommerce website it needs to sell products and be successful at doing so. If it’s a brochure website it needs to gain enquiries for your business, tempt users into filling in forms and sending you emails, or convince people to pick up the phone.

What a commercial website is not is a piece of art that looks good and serves no other purpose. For this reason you need to be sure that you have a clear ‘call to action’ on your website so that visitors know what they need to do in order to contact you or purchase items.

Sometimes with web design, designers don’t like things to be obvious. Some web designers like to be abstract and create designs that make the user think. This isn’t going to help you to gain enquires or make money from your website, though it might win the designer some kudos with his peers.

A website that doesn’t feature a clear call to action such as a telephone number with clear instructions to call, or a contact form that is easily accessible from your website, won’t receive as many conversions as it should. If your website isn’t converting, it isn’t working for you.

At Click Consult we know how to design a website that not only looks great but also receives a higher conversion rate due to the clear call to action methods we use.

Web Design With SEO In Mind

Gareth — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:02:29 +0000

To many people it may seem that web designers and SEO consultants are at odds with each other in the way that they work. Many web design professionals like to design websites for their aesthetical beauty, with attractive images, animations, colours, photographs and above all else, minimal text.

SEO consultants on the other hand know that Google won’t think much of your beautiful website if it’s nothing more than a collection of images and colours. Google needs text to read in order to rank your website effectively.

This is why you should have your website designed by professional web design experts who understand the complexities of SEO. At Click Consult, our web designers and our SEO consultants work together to create an attractive looking website that is also great for Google. Our web designs are designed to be both attractive and perfect for search engines from the start, which means you won’t have to adapt your website at a later stage for SEO.

Many web designs that haven’t been built with SEO in mind have to be adapted to allow for the addition of important search engine friendly features, such as page text, text-based navigation, cleaner source code and a higher text-to-code ratio. With a web design from Click Consult, all of this is considered at the very first design stage. This means that your website is ready to go from a usability point of view, and from an SEO point of view, right from the start.

Utilising Video With Your Website Design

Gareth — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:03:06 +0000

One of the main differences between print design and web design is that print design is flat. When a print design has been finished and printed, it exists on the page and does not allow interaction with the end user. A web design, by contrast, is fully interactive and can engage the user on every level. Web design moves, grows and evolves over time.

One of the best ways of engaging a user of a website is with the use of video. As video encryption technologies have become better, allowing for smaller file sizes, faster downloading and sharper picture quality, video within web design has become more common. In addition to this, the surge in popularity of websites such as YouTube has enabled web designers and web developers to use these websites to host video files and use them in their web designs.

For example, instead of uploading a video to a website and playing it from the server, web designers can now use YouTube to host a video file which saves in bandwidth and server space. YouTube also acts as a marketing tactic and attracts traffic to your website.

Web designers can also use Flash to house video, allowing it to be played on demand, or when the visitor accesses the website; further enhancing the interactive nature of the web design. At Click Consult, we know how to create interactive websites that engage your visitors and ensure that they come back again and again.

Featuring A Blog On Your Website

Gareth — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 08:01:28 +0000

Once you have your finished web design and your website has gone live you’ll need to make sure that your website receives as much traffic as possible in order to get a decent ROI (return on investment). One of the best ways of doing this is to add content to your website on a regular basis.

This can be done in the form of a blog, but rather than using a free hosted blog such as those found on Wordpress.com or Blogger.com, you can incorporate a blog into your website and have it designed so that users don’t realise it’s any different from the rest of your website.

Blogging software such as Wordpress can easily be installed on your website and can be skinned to use the same web design as your website. You can then add regular articles to your site quickly and easily, without needing the services of a web developer or someone with advanced HTML knowledge.

Another great aspect of using Wordpress is that your blogs can be pulled through onto your homepage so that your homepage is constantly updated and users can see your latest posts easily when they access your website.

At Click Consult our web design experts are experienced at using Wordpress and other blogging applications and installing them on our clients’ websites. We know how to get the best out of applications such as this to make the most of your website, both from a user perspective and from an SEO point of view.

What Screen Resolution Should My Website Be Designed For?

Gareth — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:03:05 +0000

The different screen resolutions used on different people's computers is a constant problem for web design professionals and web developers. When you create a web design you need to ensure that it looks OK on the smallest of resolutions as well as the largest of resolutions, and this can be really challenging.

At Click Consult we know about different screen resolutions used by internet users and we know what resolutions are the most common. Therefore, we can design your website to look good on the majority of resolutions and still be scalable so that larger and smaller screen resolutions can also see your website.

One important point is that as a client you shouldn’t necessarily insist that your website fills your computer screen because your resolution may not be the most common, or the one used by your customers. You will want your web design to look best for the majority of your customers as it is they who will be buying from your website or sending you enquiries.

For example, the most common screen resolution used to be 800×600, which means that websites over 800 pixels wide would be ‘cut off’ on the user’s screen, forcing them to have to scroll horizontally. Now the most common resolution is 1024×768, meaning that websites designed for 800×600 look small on that resolution.

A useful tip is to have your web design crafted to fit the most common resolution, but to have it expand using a fluid design for users on larger resolutions.

Incorporating Social Networking Into Your Web Design

Gareth — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 08:02:12 +0000

One of the most powerful forms of Internet marketing these days is social networking. With social networking, your website and your website’s content can ‘go viral’ online and be seen by hundreds of thousands of people in the matter of a few hours. This level of coverage is invaluable and of course impossible to buy, therefore you need to make sure that your website is set up to cater for it from the initial web design stage right through to the web development.

In order to make the most of social networking you should have Facebook, Twitter and other social networking websites included in your web design. You should have links to your official Twitter page for your website and to a Facebook Fan Page. You should also allow visitors to your website to share content with their friends online on the social networking and social bookmarking websites of their choice. This can be done through special icons that accompany your content.

All of this should be factored into your original web design and it is something that we at Click Consult understand. We know that social networking and social bookmarking are very powerful, vital forms of Internet marketing and that our clients’ websites need to harness their powers in order to be successful. That’s why our web design experts consider aspects such as social networking websites before we begin any design process.

If your website hasn’t harnessed the power of social networking, perhaps you should speak to someone who understands its power. Contact Click Consult today.