Web Design Trends for 2015

Design trends keep changing with time to facilitate a better customer experience. Here are the website design trends for 2015 which need to be kept in mind while designing great websites.

Mobile Friendliness

Responsive websites are the need of the hour. In fact, after 21^st April 2015, the non-responsive ones are being penalized by Google in terms of their SEO rankings. It is understandable and the right step towards making the web more mobile friendly. The web users can now expect more mobile friendly experiences as more websites will take note of this development from Google.

Responsive Web Design

The problem with the many websites is that they are not optimized for the mobile and therefore serve as a turn-off, for web visitors and potential customers. It is therefore necessary to redo your website and make it more mobile friendly. This is where the responsive website comes in. A responsive site adapts itself to the display device like your smartphone, tablet or laptop and gives the user a seamlessly smooth, effortless and fast browsing experience.

White Space in Design

Give the elements in your website, some space to breathe. Let them be well spaced and easy on the eyes of the beholder. Don’t allow text to be cluttered all over your web page, just a few lines with a link saying “click here more” or a ‘more’ button  will do the job.

Minimalistic Approach to Design

Make your brand stand out, by using a minimalistic approach. Use only those elements which are necessary in your web page. Remove all the clutter and project your brand identity in a more subtle way.

Prominent Background Picture

Let your website have a nice background picture reflecting your niche or business services. The buttons or menu can appear prominently in the foreground. All elements of the web page are balanced, keeping in mind the background picture.

Parallax Scrolling

Parallax Scrolling is a new technique in web design which uses HTML5 and CSS3 technologies to create interesting effects on a website.  It involves the background moving at a slower rate than the foreground, giving us a 3D effect. However, like all the good things – it shouldn’t be overdone.

A Parallax website makes you get noticed, users can effortlessly scroll down the website and you can get a lot of traffic owing to your popularity.

‘Fix’ the Headers

Use fixed headers on your site. This enables the visitors to scroll down and still choose to navigate conveniently, thanks to the navigation bar which is fixed to the top of your website.

Make it interactive with Widgets

Make your website more interesting to the users. Add interactive widgets like ‘chat with our representative’, FM music, moving or slide show images etc. The bottom line is, engage the visitors and make them come back for more. Make it more interesting with a picture gallery relating to your business.

Single Page Scrolling

This is yet another trend where the website loads itself as a single scrolling page. You don’t have to load a new page every now and then for navigating the website.

Have a Split Screen Landing Page

A split screen landing page is another way to attract the visitor’s undivided attention. Here, the screen is vertically divided into two equal halves. The site elements are ranked in order of prominence according to the structure of the design. If there are two things of equal prominence in that website, then they are also placed side by side and prominence is given to both.

As many business websites will be built or re-designed based on the latest trends, their respective competitors will definitely take notice; therefore the following year will see a boom in design trends. For more information on affordable web design contact WebCanny.

Why Small Businesses in Australia need an Ecommerce Website

In the recent past, ‘Shopping’ meant going out to the store or supermarket, picking the things we need, get them billed at the counter and driving back. However, things are changing fast, due to the introduction of internet and ecommerce.

Thanks to the advances in technology it is now possible to go on a shopping spree, sitting right in one’s living room. The necessity for physical travel is totally eliminated. You can sit in the convenience of your home and buy anything you want. If you don’t find what you are looking for in a particular website you can always search and find the site where you get it and order it the same day without any hassles.

Business need Online Visibility

Many of the customers want to purchase online rather than be bothered with the inconvenience of physical travel. It is the right time for small businesses to capitalize on the benefits of responsive web design and get linked with the rest of the world. There is a definite advantage to being accessible in 196 countries, rather than just your city or neighborhood.

Ecommerce Websites

The selling of products and services via the internet is termed as Ecommerce. Many companies have realized the positive impact of ecommerce on their business and accordingly set up their online stores.

What Sells Online?

While you decide to get on the bandwagon, here is a list of top-selling products.

1. Hard cover and E-Books: Books are one of the most popular products sold online. They are either downloaded as softcopy or PDF, or ordered online in Hardcopy format.

2. Computers, Tablets and Laptops: Due to the internet boom, there has been an increase in demand for laptops, tablets and desktops. Thanks to the various programs and applications, our conveniences are increasing by the day and so is the demand for the related computer hardware.

3. Software: As all our office applications are getting automated, there is a demand for Enterprise Resource Management (ERM), designing, web development, billing, virtual office and other software. Thus, many web development companies are responding well to meet the demand and selling software to suit their customers’ various requirements.

4. Consumer Electronics: There is a lot of demand for consumer electronic products like, phones, cameras, TVs projectors etc. The craze for consumer electronics is like no other; people are on the constant lookout for the latest products!

 5. Men’s and Women’s Apparel: Clothing is another product which will never go out of fashion, or rather is the sole ingredient of thereof.

6. Movie, Music, Self Help DVDs: Music albums and movies are one of the all time popular products and also are in great demand online.

7. Beauty Products: Beauty products are conveniently ordered online without the hazzle of visiting the stores again and again.

8. Jewelry:  Jewelry can be purchased online, as per our specifications. There is a wide range of choice and we can find the perfect product as per our requirements.

This clearly shows us the relevance of Ecommerce Web Design and why businesses must have their ecommerce websites to maximize their earning potential. If you like to have information about affordable ecommerce websites, contact click here.

Tips for Building Mobile Friendly Websites

The number of smart phone users around the world will cross the 2 billion mark by 2016. People will make use of their smart phones not only for calling and texting, but also for browsing the web for news, information, and even shopping. It is imperative that businesses must make their websites mobile-friendly or they may lose out on potential customers.

Use Good Framework for Responsive Site

You can use bootstrap for the same. Here the website’s elements are arranged in the form of a grid. The grid shifts and adjusts itself according to the display device like tab or smartphone. Thus the website elements are spaced appropriately to look good on a desktops, laptops, tabs as well as smart phones.

One more advantage of bootstrap is that it is free, open source and properly documented. It also applies a unified approach to web development and you have the same user experience, whether you access the site from a mobile or desktop; and what’s more is that you don’t require a separate URL for the mobile website.

Navigation must be Easy

When the website design is optimized for mobile usage, it must be navigable by the thumb. One shouldn’t feel the need pinch it to make things readable. Even if the site is mobile friendly, sometimes we find that the navigation buttons are very small and the wrong button will get pressed. The average width of a finger is 15mm or 45 pixels and therefore, the button’s selection area must be created accordingly.

Simplicity in Design

When you are optimizing a website for mobile usage, you must make sure that it loads fast. The website must not contain high quality video or images. The images must be optimized to facilitate faster loading time and a better user experience. Replace the heavy Java Script libraries like mobile jQuery with standalone JavaScript.

Content must be Concise

The user may be accessing the site via a mobile phone and obviously the mobile screen is much smaller. He may not have the time to scroll down and keep reading your website content forever. So keep it short and sweet.

Use Icons

Instead of explaining it in a dozen words, say it by mobile icons. The user will find it easier to just tap the call or email icon, rather than mentioning the same in words in your contact page.

Limit the JavaScript

Do not use excess JavaScript as mobiles may behave differently. It doesn’t mean that one mustn’t use it, but utilize it cleverly enough so that the speed of the mobile site doesn’t get affected.

Access to Basic Information

Make the basic information available to the user. For E.g. if you are a restaurant chain, people will be looking for your nearest branch address, map, contact and home delivery number. So, place your information accordingly.

User Friendly Forms

The forms must not ask for extensive information. They must just ask for a person’s basic information like name and email; the rest can be obtained in future correspondences.

Extensive Testing

The website must be tested extensively on different devices and browsers for making sure that the user experience is good. SolidifyApp, delight.io are some useful tools.

For affordable website design services,  contact WebCanny.

What kind of Websites are ideal for Business?

It is a well established fact that a business needs a website to surge ahead of competition. However one must decide which kind of website is required to cater to one need.

Some people may need a static website and some may need a dynamic one! It all depends on the nature of your business and nothing else. A dynamic website may be more expensive compared to static site. In this changing world of web design, one may need to keep pace with the latest web technologies and adapt accordingly.

Fixed or static Website: This website had a fixed width and doesn’t resize when it is viewed on mobiles and tablets. This could be quite irritating. In this fast changing world, where everything is at your fingertips or in your smart phone, a static website may not be in order. We may even have to pinch and zoom out, in order to view a simple website which can get even annoying at times. Apart from that

Liquid Design: This website layout is made using columns of data which are governed by percentages; these change according to the physical dimensions of the output device. As a result, the content of this website is fluid in nature; it takes shape of the output device – therefore the name ‘liquid’.

Responsive Web Design: The responsive web design is easy to view and can be accessed in a variety of devices! Thus the user doesn’t have scroll up or down in order to view the website. Navigation is easier and the flow of information appears smooth.

How do Responsive websites work?

The websites using responsive content are designed to take the pre determined shape of a browser. In fact the content is also set accordingly. For e.g., if the content is set in three columns, then if the browser resizes, the website content will be re-adjusted to display in two columns.

The quality of images and videos uploaded into the site depends on the internet connection speed. In case of slower connections, low resolution images and video are substituted in place of the heavy files.

Which Website to choose

Companies, who want to go for a new website, or design change, must consider a few points. They must be aware of the type of phones, their target audience is using. If they are using basic phones, then a fixed website will do the job. However, if the target audience is tech savvy and owns smart phones, then you might like to go for a responsive, website.  For more information contact WebCanny.

Tools to Create Web Design Faster

Websites are very essential for companies to advertise online. Without a website, a company may miss out on a lot of business opportunities. Whether it is a small or big company, website will definitely work magic on your overall sales. You can opt for an affordable web design; many companies offer such services and the rates are very competitive.

More and more companies are coming online, and in fact the web designers are getting busier by the day. However, there are some tools designed just for the purpose. These make the job of designing a website much easier.

Adobe Kuler: This is used to find color palettes for your images. This tool helps one identify complimentary colors, by using various color rules. We can thus choose a palette we find appropriate for the project.

Mocking Bird: This tool helps us create website mockups and share them with other online users.

Oto255 : This helps us to choose different variations of a single colour. It is used for graphic and web designing.

CSS Background Maker: This is used to create gradient backgrounds in CSS. It works on Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer 10.

Closure Compiler Service: This helps you compile a bundle of java script files, which go together – at a single go. This also reduces the size of the code and may help enhance page load time.

Know Em Social Media Optimizer: This tool gives one an idea about how their website will look on social media like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

Tweak your Biz Title Generator: This is a very useful tool, given that people pay a lot of attention to a page title. A good title can in fact generate 50% more interest in your website. One just needs to enter the content in order to get appropriate title suggestions.

Photovisi : This helps us create beautiful collages and cute looking shapes. This is helpful when we may feel the need for a side-bar, or perhaps a new website background.

Is my Blog working: This tool helps you to check your server’ status. You can check if your blog is working or not. This is a very useful tool and one may no longer need to be notified by a second person regarding the same.

Yahoo! Smush.it

This is a very useful tool which cuts down the extra file size of a picture. It is a loss less tool and therefore very helpful in optimizing the picture without compromising on the quality.

Initializr

This is a very useful tool; it produces a clean HTML5 template, fully ready for customization. Thus we don’t have to worry about writing the code to start with.

Responsive Test Environment

This helps us in testing purposes; the advantage is that we can choose our own break points.

There are many tools for making low cost web design;  the ones listed above are just the tip of an iceberg. The point we are trying to make is this; creating a website is a must for improving your sales and get more clients. Get one today! For more information contact WebCanny.

How to improve Facebook likes

Social media sites such as Facebook has huge potential for brand awareness. It can help to boost SEO of a company  website. It provides opportunities to directly interact, build relationship and make connections with customers. For any business Social Media marketing has become an important part of their marketing division. In this article I have shared about how to increase Facebook likes.

1   Post good content like entertainment, fun, inspirational or educational on social media, if its good people will like and share it.

     Get more friends on your friend list, the people you have in your network, the more people will see your post and engage with it.

        Make a blog page on your own site and put social sharing buttons, It will help you to get more likes.

     Regularly share your post among your friends

     Join Facebook groups and actively participate in group posting

     Invite your friends, colleagues  and families to like your Facebook page.

    Add a like box to your website you can get the like box code on developers.facebook.com. This
     Feature  is very important as people can directly your Facebook business page.

    You can also use paid Facebook ads to increase likes for your business page. Your ads will be shown to the people whom you have targeted based upon location & Demography.

     BuildYour own community and fan base by creating a Facebook group.

      Get  he right time to post your content by doing A/B testing by posting at various time intervals.

How to use RSS & Feedburner

Why to use Feeedburner

Feedburner is a google product that is used by blogs and websites to keep tracks of people who subscribe to your blog using RSS, from which browser and country they came, and it has many tools and functionalities to help you share your blog content like email subscribe option.

What is RSS Feeds

 Before learning about Feedburner one has learn about RSS feed. It means really simple site syndication, it really simplifies the web experience it extracts news from your favourite sites and puts then together in a feed reader, so that user can access in one application. Let me explain it to you, there are many news websites on the internet, but people might not be interested in reading all the news in different categories, some might be interested in sports news, some in politics while some in entertainment news. This is where RSS comes into play, in it people can only subscribe to those categories which interests them, suppose I like technology blogs, so in this case I visit the news site and subscribe to technology news and then I start getting technology related news in my feed reader. So in this way I save a lot of time as you don’t have to visit each website regularly and only receive relevant news in our news feed related to  our interests. In RSS users can subscribe to your blog and read content via email or by using any web application like feed readers.   You know Feedburner has lots of great features that every blogger should be using in order to optimize and track their blog posts.

The presence of an orange symbol indicates that a site uses a feed reader and you can subscribe it using any feed reader like Feedly.

How to Use Feedburner for Blogs

Step1- Go to feedburner.google.com  and sign up with a gmail account

Step2- Paste your blog URL in window and click next

Step3- In next page put your title and the address URL where people can find your news feed.

Step4- Click next button and its all done you have now created a Feedburner for your blog.

Many Ecommerce website design company also have blogs which can be used with RRS and Feedburner to help you reach more people.