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7 UX Principles to Boost SERPs

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User experience is one of the most important principles of web design. There’s no doubt that you focus on UX with every page you design on the web, whether it’s a portfolio, a profile page, or an entire website. 

Unfortunately, what many experts forget is that UX doesn’t just apply to digital pages. That means that you need to discover the right UX strategies for everything from your website homepages to your email marketing messages and even your listings on Google. 

Today, we’re going to explore ways you can apply UX principles to your client’s image on search engines. 

Why Your Search Engine Listing Matters

Let’s start with the basics…

89% of customers start their purchasing process with a search engine. 

That means that whether you’re creating a portfolio to sell your services or building a website for a client, the first connection a customer has with your design isn’t on the homepage.

Developers and designers know that first impressions count when it comes to succeeding online. However, they assume that those first impressions happen on a social media channel, a landing page, or a home page. 

The truth is that most of the time, you’re driving a specific experience for an end-user before you even realize it. Before you can wow an audience with a beautiful site design or a fantastic CTA offer, you need to convince them to click on your Google link.

Just as UX on a website is all about giving your audience what they need in an informed and strategic manner, UX in search engine results works the same way. 

How to Make Your Search Listing Stand Out with UX

So, how do you begin to apply the principles of UX to your Google Search results?

It’s much easier than you’d think. 

Step 1: Show Immediate Value 

Delivering an excellent experience on a website often means providing end-users with the information they need as quickly as possible. Imagine designing a landing page; you wouldn’t want your audience to scroll forever to find what they need. Instead, you’d make sure that the value of the page was immediately apparent. 

When creating an image for your search engine listing, you’ll need to take the same approach. This often means thinking carefully about two things:

  • Your headline
  • Your meta description

Around 8 out of 10 users say that they’ll click a title if it’s compelling. That means that before you do anything else to improve your SEO strategy, you need to make sure that the title of your web page is going to grab the audience’s attention. 

The best titles deliver instant value.

Immediately, these titles tell the audience exactly what they’re going to get when they click onto the page. The promise drives action, while clarity highlights the informed nature of the brand. 

The great thing about using an excellent title for a page is that it doesn’t matter where you’re ranked on the search results. Whether you’re number 2 or number 5, your customers will click if they find something they want. 

It’s just like using a CTA on a landing page. Make sure your titles are:

  • Informative: Show your audience value immediately
  • Optimized for mobile: Remember, your audience might not see your full title on some screens. That means that you need to make the initial words count.
  • Easy to read: Keep it short, simple, and straightforward. Speak the end-user’s language

Step 2: Build Trust with Your URLs

Trust factors are another essential part of good UX. 

When designing a website for a new brand, you know that it’s your job to make visitors feel at ease. Even in today’s digital world, many customers won’t feel comfortable giving their money or details to a new company. 

Within the website that you design, you can implement things like trust symbols, reviews, and testimonials to enhance brand credibility. In the search engines, it all starts with your URL. 

Search-friendly URLs that highlight the nature of the page will put your audience’s mind at ease. When they click on a page about “What is SEO” in the SERPs, they want to see an URL that matches, not a bunch of numbers and symbols

Use search-friendly permalink structures to make your listing seem more authoritative. This will increase the chances of your customer clicking through to a page and make them more likely to share the link with friends. 

Once you decide on a link structure, make sure that it stays consistent throughout the entire site. If a link doesn’t appear to match the rest of the URLs that your audience sees for your website, they may think they’re on the wrong page. That increases your bounce rate. 

Step 3: Be Informative with Your Meta Description

To deliver excellent UX on a website, you ensure that your visitor can find all the answers to their most pressing questions as quickly as possible. This includes providing the right information on each page and using the correct navigational structure to support a visitor’s journey. 

In the SERPs, you can deliver that same informative experience with a meta description. Although meta descriptions often get ignored, they can provide a lot of value and help you or your client make the right first impression. 

To master your meta descriptions:

  • Use the full 160 characters: Make the most of your meta description by providing as much useful information as you can within that small space. 
  • Include a CTA: Just as CTAs help guide customers through the pages on a website, they can assist with pulling in clicks on the SERPs. A call to action like “read about the” or “click here” makes sense when you’re boosting your search image. 
  • Focus on value: Concentrate on providing your customers with an insight into what’s in it for them if they click on your listing.

Don’t forget that adding keywords to your meta description is often helpful too. Keywords will boost your chances of a higher ranking, but they’ll also show your audience that they’re looking at the right result. 

Step 4: Draw the Eye with Rich Snippets

You’ve probably noticed that the search engine result pages have changed quite a bit in the last couple of years. As Google strives to make results more relevant and informative, we’ve seen the rise of things like rich snippets. Rich snippets are excellent for telling your audience where to look. 

On a website, you would use design elements, like contrasting colors and animation, to pull your audience’s attention to a specific space. In search engines, rich snippets can drive the same outcomes. The difference is that instead of telling a visitor what to do next on a page, you’re telling them to click on your site, not a competitor’s. 

When Google introduced rich snippets, it wanted to provide administrators with a way of showcasing their best content. Rich snippets are most commonly used today on product and contact pages because they can show off reviews. 

Install a rich snippet plugin into your site if you’re a WordPress user or your client is. When you enter the content that you need into the website, use the drop-down menu in your Rich snippet tool to configure the snippet.

Ideally, you’ll want to aim for the full, rich snippet if you want to stand out at the top of the search results. Most featured snippets have both text and an image. You need to access both of these by writing great content and combining it with a relevant image. 

Step 5: Provide Diversity (Take Up More of the Results)

As a website designer or developer, you’ll know that different people will often be drawn to different things. Some of your visitors might immediately see a set of bullet-points and use them to search for the answer to their question. Other visitors will want pictures or videos to guide them. So, how do you deliver that kind of diversity in the SERPS?

The easiest option is to aim to take up more of the search result pages. Google now delivers a bunch of different ways for customers to get the answers they crave. When you search for “How to use Google my Business” on Google, you’ll see links to blogs, as well as a list of YouTube Videos and the “People Also Ask” section. 

Making sure that you or a client has different content rankings for the same keywords can significantly improve any customer’s experience on the search engines. Often, the process of spreading your image out across the SERPs is as simple as creating some different kinds of content. 

To access the benefits of video, ask your client to create YouTube videos for some of their most commonly asked questions or most covered topics. If you’re helping with SEO marketing for your client, then make sure they have an FAQ page or a way of answering questions quickly and concisely on articles, so they’re more likely to appear in “People Also Ask”.

Step 6: Add Authority with Google My Business

Speaking of Google My Business, that’s another excellent tool for improving UX in the search results. It allows business owners to manage how information appears in the search results. 

With this service, you can manage a company’s position on Google maps, the Knowledge Graph, and any online reviews. Establishing a company’s location is one of the most important things you can do to help audiences find a business quickly. Remember, half of the customers that do a local search on a smartphone end up visiting the store within the same day. 

Start by setting up the Google Business listing for yourself or your client. All you need to do is hit the “Start Now” button and fill out every relevant field offered by Google. The more information you can add to Google My Business, the more your listing will stand out. Make sure you:

  • Choose a category for a business, like “Grocery store.”
  • Load up high-quality and high-resolution images
  • Ensure your information matches on every platform
  • Use a local number for contact
  • Encourage reviews to give your listing a five-star rating

Taking advantage of a Google My Business listing will ensure that your audience has all the information they need to make an informed decision about your company before they click through to the site. This means that you or your client gets more warm leads and fewer people stumbling onto your website that might not want to buy from you. 

Step 7: Use Structured Data Markup to Answer Questions

If you’re already using rich snippets in your Google listings, you should also have a plan for structured schema markup. Schema markup on Google tells the search engines what your data means. This means that you can add extra information to your listings that will more accurately guide your customers to the support they need. 

Providing additional schema markup information to your listings gives them an extra finishing touch to ensure that they stand out from the competition. For example, you might add something like a “product price” to a product page or information about the product’s availability.

Alternatively, you could provide the people who see a search result with other options. This could be an excellent option if you’re concerned that some of the people who might come across your listing might need slightly different information. 

For instance, you can ask Google to list other pages along with your search results that customers can “jump to” if they need additional insights.

Baking structured data into your design process when you’re working on a website does many positive things. First, it makes the search engine’s job easier so that you can ensure that you or your client ranks higher. Additionally, it means that your web listings will be more thorough and valuable.

Since UX is all about giving your audience the best possible experience with a brand, that starts with making sure they get the information they need in the search results. 

Constantly Improve and Experiment

Remember, as you begin to embed elements of UX into your search engine listings, it’s essential to be aware of relevant evolutions. Ultimately, the needs of any audience can change very rapidly. Paying attention to your customers and what kind of links they click on the most will provide you with lots of valuable data. You can use Google analytics to A/B test things like titles, pictures, featured snippets, and other things that may affect UX. 

At the same time, it’s worth noting that the Google search algorithms are constantly changing too. Running split tests on different pages will give you an insight into what your customers want. However, you’ll need to keep an eye on the latest documentation about Google Search if you want to avoid falling behind the competition. 

Like most aspects of exceptional UX, mastering your SERP position isn’t a “set it and forget it” strategy. Instead, you’ll need to work on constantly expanding your knowledge if you want to show clients that you can combine UX and SEO effectively. 

Make sure you have plenty of tools set up to offer reports and insights into the kind of changes that you may need to make to align with search engine expectations. 

Making the Most of UX in the SERPS

It’s easy to forget that there’s more to UX than making your buttons clickable on mobile devices or ensuring that scrolling feels smooth. For a designer or developer to deliver excellent UX for a brand, they need to consider every interaction that a company and customer has. 

This means starting with the way a website appears when it’s listed on the search engines most of the time. Getting your SEO listing right doesn’t just boost your chances of a good ranking. This strategy also improves your reputation with your audience and delivers more meaningful moments in the buyer journey. 

Don’t underestimate the power of UX in SERPs. 

 

Featured image via Pexels.

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Hybrid Multicloud Adoption: A Programmatic Approach To Get Started

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Background Context

In our first blog, we introduced the definition and evolution of hybrid multicloud, key challenges of the enterprises, and the value realized by implementing a hybrid multicloud strategy. This blog will cover how to create a holistic and business-value-driven multicloud strategy. In order to provide agility, security, reliability, and access to a large ecosystem of services, a robust transformation strategy and program are required. This strategy must align with business objectives such as revenue growth, cost reduction, risk reduction, enhancing the customer experience, and capitalization of market opportunities.

Having created many transformation strategies across many industries, we have observed critical success factors that are worth noting. For instance, successful IT organizations tightly align their cloud strategies to business objectives while developing a target architecture and operating model blueprint while quantifying the costs and benefits in a business case. Organizations that have failed to implement their cloud strategy, or failed to realize their committed benefits, typically do not complete these important elements of a holistic strategy. 

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Deploy RAPIDs on GPU-Enabled Virtual Servers on a Virtual Private Cloud

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Learn how to set up a GPU-enabled virtual server instance (VSI) on a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and deploy RAPIDS using IBM Schematics.

The GPU-enabled family of profiles provides on-demand, cost-effective access to NVIDIA GPUs. GPUs help to accelerate the processing time required for compute-intensive workloads, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, inferencing, and more. To use the GPUs, you need the appropriate toolchain – such as CUDA (an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture) – ready.

Let’s start with a simple question.

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7 Tips for Transforming CX with Live Chat

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Not so long ago, customers only had a couple of ways to interact with brands. 

If you had an issue with a product or service, you could reach out through the customer service phone number or send an email. Occasionally, sites would introduce dedicated forms on their website that allowed consumers to send support tickets straight to the service desk – but that was it.

The problem with this kind of service was all the waiting. 

Send an email or ticket, and you have no idea when the company is going to get back to you. Customers end up refreshing their inbox all day, waiting for a response. Call the company, and 9 times out of 10, you’ll be placed on hold. You can’t exactly do much when you’re stuck listening to hold music, so customers are gradually getting more frustrated as they wait for a response. 

Fortunately, the evolving digital age has introduced a new solution: live chat.

Transforming Your CX With Live Chat

Live chat is a quick and convenient way for your customers to contact your business and get a response immediately. The result is happier clients, better customer satisfaction scores, and even opportunities for bigger sales. 

More than 41% of customers say they expect to see live chat on a site. 

Even if you don’t have an agent on hand to answer a chat message immediately, you can create an automated system that notifies your customer when someone is available. That means they can go and do other things while they’re waiting for a response. Live chat solutions with bots can even allow your customers to fix problems for themselves. That’s pretty convenient!

Widgets equipped with answers to commonly asked questions can automatically deal with customer queries or help them find solutions to their problems before passing them over to an agent. This means that your customer gets a solution faster, and your agents don’t have as much pressure to deal with. It’s a win-win – as long as you get it right. 

Unfortunately, a lot of companies don’t know how to implement live chat experiences correctly. 

Kayako’s study into 400 customers found that 47% couldn’t remember the last time they’d had a positive experience through a live chat tool.  

How to Upgrade Live Chat CX

The evidence shows that customers love the idea of live chat, but the reality of how businesses implement this technology isn’t always ideal. 

However, since 86% of customers say they’re willing to spend more on a better customer experience, it’s worth figuring out what separates a good live chat interaction from a bad one. 

1. Set Expectations Instantly

Setting the right expectations is crucial if you want to generate better satisfaction for your customers at a later date. When customers know what to expect from your live chat strategy, they can also make more informed decisions about which support channels they’re going to use, and whether they want to hang around for someone to answer their messages. 

The first thing you should do is showcase your agent’s availability. In this example from Help Scout, you can see whether the team is active, online, and ready to talk. The company also sets expectations for how quickly you can get an email response if you don’t want to chat.

Other ways to set expectations include:

  • Showing your opening hours: List when team members are usually available to answer questions if you’re not currently online. 
  • Topics: Offer your customers some topics that they can ask about or use the welcome message on your chat tool to direct your customers to an FAQ page. 
  • Restrictions: If there’s anything you can’t deal with over live chat, like changing a customer’s password, let them know in advance so they don’t waste time.

2. Leverage Pre-Chat Forms

Pre-chat forms are some of the most important parts of the live chat experience. They ask your customer to explain their issue to your chatbot so that they can be directed towards the right agent. Using these forms correctly ensures that your agent has all the information they need to solve a problem fast. 

You can even set up automated systems that direct customers to different agents and teams based on their needs. For instance, the live chat app on Outgrow.co gives customers the option to fill out different forms depending on whether they want answers to a question, a demo, or something else.

The button you click on dictates which professional you’ll get through to. Although filling out a form can seem like an extra friction point for your customer at first, it helps to streamline the customer journey. After all, if you can direct the customer to the right agent the first time, there are fewer chances that they’ll need to explain their issue to various different people. 

Here are a few things you can ask for in the live chat form to make it more effective:

  • The customer’s name: This will help to personalize the conversation. It could also be an opportunity to track down any background information you have about an existing customer and the orders that they may want to speak to you about.
  • An email address: Having an email address will allow you to bring up a customer’s record on your CRM. It also means that you can send any information that the customer needs to their email inbox at the end of the conversation.
  • A brief explanation: Ask your customers to share what they’re reaching out to you about and use keywords in their message to assign the chat to the right agent or professional. You could even add a drop-down menu of topics for them to choose from. 

Remember, don’t ask for too much information straight away, or you’ll risk your clients feeling that the service experience is too complicated. 

3. Make Sure It Works Everywhere

We’ve reached the point now where every customer expects a brand’s website to be responsive on any device. Most web-building templates automatically work on mobile tablets and smartphones. Additionally, it’s becoming increasingly easy for companies to transform their website and online store experiences into dedicated apps too. 

However, while most businesses know that their site needs to be responsive, they often forget about the mobile element when it comes to live chat. If your live chat function is only available on the web browser version of your website, then this is going to end up making your mobile customers pretty unhappy. They don’t want to have to stop browsing on their phone just to connect with you. 

Ideally, you’ll want to create a separate component for your mobile app where your customers can easily access the same live chat functions they’d have on your browser-based site.

If you’re just offering live chat through a mobile version of your website, make sure that it’s easy for your customer to click into the chat section and send messages without accidentally ending up on a different tab or page. It might also be worth setting up functions that allow your chat app to send push notifications to your customer’s phone whenever they get a new message. 

Being able to put their smartphone down or switch to another app while they wait for a response will provide a much more intuitive experience for your audience. 

4. Make Sure You Support All the Right Languages

You’d think that this CX tip for live chat would be obvious, but it’s shocking how many companies fail to offer support for all the languages that their customers might use. If you’re selling your products throughout the world, and you know you have customers in China, then it doesn’t make much sense to only offer live chat in English. 

Some of the available live chat apps on the market today come with features that allow you to automatically translate languages when your agents are talking to foreign customers. For instance, LiveChat currently supports 45 languages. 

If you’re creating your own chat app from scratch, then you’re going to need to work with your developer or designer to make sure that the right languages are supported. Remember, you don’t have to cover everything, but at least make sure that you can connect with the most common groups of customers in your CRM. 

Ensure that if you are using multiple languages, your customers know how to switch to their preferred option too. Usually, the best way to do this is with a drop-down menu. You could also use little flag icons of the countries that you support. 

5. Find Ways to Reduce First Response Time

Speed is probably one of the biggest advantages of live chat, and the main reason that customers like it so much. According to the CMO council, fast response time is the number one thing that a customer looks at when measuring satisfaction. 

While you might not be able to have someone on-hand to answer your customers 24/7, you can improve the way they perceive your load times in a variety of ways. For instance, start by making it clear when your people are online to talk to your customers. Setting expectations on when you’ll be available to immediately respond should help to avoid frustration.

  • Keep all chats in the same place for agents: Having a combined contact center solution on the back-end makes responding to queries much easier for your agents. If they can see all of your brand’s live chat, social, and email conversations in one place, they don’t have to waste time jumping between different platforms and tabs. 
  • Set routing queues: Use an automated system to send every message you get to the most appropriate agent available. You can intelligently route conversations based on the issues that your customers have or the things they want to discuss. It’s also worth ensuring that your system prioritizes routing conversations to the first agent available. 
  • Send notifications: Make sure that you set your live chat system up to send push notifications to agents when a new message is waiting. It’s also with notifying your customer when they have a response, just in case they’ve switched to another tab. 

The notifications you send to your agents could come with access to a customer’s CRM file, so that your agent can go into a conversation with the context they need. Agents that instantly get context on a conversation don’t have to waste as much time tracking down the right information. Giving your agents context also means that they don’t have to ask repetitive questions, which could annoy your customer. 

6. Make the Chat Experience On-Brand

Every company wants to give their customer a slick experience with live chat. The solution you build needs to be easy to use, and responsive across every device. However, it also needs to be something that your customer associates with your brand. 

Companies generally have a lot of options for how a live chat window can look. You can adjust the appearance to suit your brand by picking specific colors, tweaking button shapes, and even changing the available fonts. 

Working the visual elements of your brand into the design of the live chat experience is the best way to make your customers feel comfortable and confident that they’re dealing with your company. For instance, Hubspot uses matching colors, rounded edges on chat bubbles, and even a fun illustration to make their chat experience more “branded.”

Remember, when you’re creating a Live Chat experience that’s “on brand”, it’s also a good idea to think about things like voice and tone. Infusing live chat with the unique personality of your brand will make the experience more memorable. 

If you usually stick with informal language and use a lot of slang, then it makes sense to continue that in live chat – even when you’re sending automated messages. To make sure your brand identity really shines through:

  • Write scripts for your automated messages in your brand’s tone of voice
  • Write guidance scripts for employees that highlight your tone for agents
  • Provide training on brand tone of voice for your support team
  • Encourage support agents to connect with customers on a personal level
  • Remember to set guidelines on how to use things like gifs, slang, and emojis too!

7. Make a Checklist For Security and Tech Issues

One of the most significant things that will affect the experience your customer has with your live chat service, is technical and security issues. Choose the right developer or designer to help with your app, and the risk of problems dwindle. You can also address the issue of having to constantly maintain, check, and update your live chat experience by using a pre-existing solution, like Intercom.

No matter how you choose to approach live chat, these are the things you’ll need to check for most:

  • Page load times: Page load times are crucial for user experience and SEO, so you should be taking them seriously already. Check your web chat software isn’t dragging down the performance of your page or causing unnecessary problems.
  • Cross-channel conversations: If your website has various subdomains, make sure that moving through these in chat won’t mean you lose the session. Customers don’t want to have to repeat themselves!
  • Functionality with browsers: Your chat app needs to work just as well on every browser and operating system – including mobile devices. 
  • Data management: Under things like GDPR, you need to ensure that you’re controlling user information safely. Ensure you have a DPA in place, and make sure that your web channel doesn’t affect any PCI-DSS compliance systems you have in place. Your chat solution may need to automatically mask credit card information, for instance.

Time to Enhance Your Live Chat Strategy

Ultimately, whether you like it or not, your customers love live chat technology, and they’re not going to stop looking for it on your website. Today’s consumers expect you to serve their interests by delivering customer support on the channels that they choose. Unfortunately, most companies just aren’t living up to expectations.

Following the tips above could help you to transform the way that you interact with your clients and improve your chances of better satisfaction overall.

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21 Exceptional Google Fonts You Probably Haven’t Discovered Yet

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Google Fonts may be the single most significant contribution Google has made to the evolution of the web — yes, more significant than search, advertising, or analytics.

Google Fonts gives every business access to a visual voice with which to distinguish itself. Fonts can be downloaded for use in design software and then embedded using best practices for a consistent experience on the web.

If there’s anything wrong with Google Fonts, it’s that its default listings are based on “Trending,” a self-fulfilling criterion that keeps Noto Sans high up the list, destined to be over-used.

But if you spend a little time lower down the listings, you’ll find some exceptional typefaces that are hardly used. Yes, some of them are highly stylized, but there are also usable sans, serifs, and display fonts worthy of your consideration.

All you have to do is scroll; here’s a selection of some of the treasures you’ll find if you do…

Piazzolla

Piazzolla features dramatic and expressive angular shapes when previewed in large sizes, but its real strength is in setting large amounts of body text.

Mulish

If you’re looking for a solid workhorse sans, look no further than Mulish. Halfway between a humanist and geometric sans, there’s even a variable font version.

Ceviche One

Reminiscent of the cool lettering of 60s advertising, Ceviche One is packed with energy, thanks to the dramatic zig-zag formed along its baseline.

Vollkorn

Released by Friedrich Althausen in 2005, Vollkorn is an excellent typeface for body copy, excelling at small sizes. It now boasts a variable font option.

Merienda

Merienda is a delightfully energetic display script. The bold weight feels more confident, but both weights have a dancing rhythm that brings the page alive.

Raleway Dots

Raleway is a hugely popular — and perhaps overused font — but this dotted version is less known. It’s a simple geometric sans that functions as a display face.

Kenia

Kenia is a wonderful, uncategorizable typeface. The stencil forms result in entirely original letter constructions, and the lowercase s is magnificent.

DM Sans

DM Sans is a low-contrast geometric sans-serif that performs wonderfully well at smaller sizes. It only has three weights, but each comes with a matching italic.

Oxygen

Designed by Vernon Adams as part of the KDE project for GNU+Linux, Oxygen is a very readable sans-serif, with a generous x-height and a hint of pen stroke.

Alice

Ksenia Erulevich’s Alice was inspired by Lewis Carrol’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It presents itself as an Edwardian serif with fanciful flourishes.

Carter One

Carter One uses bold strokes, with a medium amount of contrast, to create a sans-style script. It has dozens of beautiful details like the notch on the lowercase o.

Bodoni Moda

Bodoni Moda is a didone-style serif with strong vertical strokes and high-contrast slab-like serifs. It’s the best variable font in this genre that I’ve found.

Ultra

Ultra is a slab-serif that you won’t even consider for body text. Its sculptural shapes are almost American-western. The counter on the lowercase n is charming.

Azeret Mono

Most mono-spaced fonts fail to inspire; practical they can be, charming they are not. But Azeret Mono bucks that trend, its bold weights being particularly fantastic.

Nunito

It’s tough to find a serious sans-serif with rounded terminals, but Nunito is it. There’s also a Nunito Sans with square terminals, but I love the rounded tips.

Bungee Inline

Designed for signage, Bungee is great for display sizes and works well vertically. There are several versions, but my favorite is this classy inline version.

Oi

Oi is unapologetically loud. A slab-serif that swallows its own detail, the counters and ink traps give it a 3D quality, and the curves feel almost nautical.

Expletus Sans

One of the significant trends in typography is the angled clip of adjoining strokes, creating the effect of shadow. This effect is brilliantly achieved in Expletus Sans.

Lustria

It’s comparatively unusual to find a serif face designed to work well at display sizes. At large sizes, Lustria’s rounded terminals evoke ink spread delightfully.

Yatra One

Yatra One is a Devanagari and Latin typeface that uses the Devanagari brush angle for its strokes, giving the Latin text an unusually slanted, stand-out character.

Amiko

Amiko is a highly legible typeface and excellent at tiny font sizes. It’s perfect as a secondary font if your main font is too fancy for elements like legal notices.

Keep Scrolling

It’s always tempting to leap at the first typeface you find that meets your needs, but if you dig a little deeper into Google Fonts, you’ll find a vast range of typefaces that offer both practicality and character.

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No-Code vs. Low-Code, Turing Completeness, and Conway’s Law

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Man working on machine

No-Code

No-code facilitates the reuse of predefined components, typically using a drag and drop interface or a web form. Such platforms always include things like identity and access management, and most importantly don’t require any code to stitch components together, therefore reducing the need for engineers to spend time architecting databases, APIs, or internal workflows. They are always related to one particular task and audience, like web development, spreadsheets, analytics, market automation, etc. Airtable, Zapier, Webflow, Retool, Waylay Digital Twin solution, and similar apps can be found in this category.

Low-Code

On the other hand, low-code has a different set of goals and user personas in mind. The major misconception about low-code is that the “low” in low-code means that a person with hardly any knowledge of coding is the user of such a platform.

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Design Faster & Smarter with BeTheme’s 3 Builders & 600+ Pre-Built Sites

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The WordPress themes and plugins you choose for your clients’ sites don’t just impact how the interface looks or how well it works. They also impact your ability to build them.

The point in using WordPress themes and plugins is to make your life easier, not to create more work for yourself or limit what you’re able to do. If you’ve struggled to find WordPress tools you can rely on from job to job, BeTheme might just be the total package you’ve been looking for.

BeTheme has it all:

  • A backend builder
  • A frontend builder
  • A WooCommerce builder
  • 600+ pre-built websites

There’s nothing extra to pay with BeTheme. One fee gets you all the tools you need to easily build professional-grade websites for your clients.

Get to Know BeTheme’s All-In-One WordPress Solution

Want to see how the BeTheme powerhouse works? Check it out:

1. Build and Manage the Backend With Muffin Builder 3

Let’s be honest, WordPress page builder plugins leave something to be desired. While they all have their strengths, it’s hard to find one that offers different tools for how you want to work.

Many of them offer a visual drag-and-drop builder, leaving designers with little flexibility in how they build websites. With BeTheme, you don’t have to compromise.

Muffin Builder 3 is the intuitive backend editor that gives you full control. And if you want to code it all by hand? You can. If you’d prefer to tap into BeTheme’s wide array of templates, pre-built sections, and predefined settings? You can do that as well.

What’s more, the backend builder makes it easy to add sliders to your website, optimize your pages for search, and more.

2. Design and Perfect Your Site on the Frontend with Muffin Live Builder

One of the reasons why drag-and-drop website builders have become so popular in recent years is because they empower everyone — from the DIY business owner to the professional web designer — to build websites visually. There’s just one problem:

While it’s great that developers both inside and outside of the WordPress ecosystem are creating these intuitive builders, they sometimes come at a cost.

One thing that tends to get sacrificed is speed. Because they take the editing out of the WordPress dashboard and onto the frontend of the website, many of them can take a while to load. (Some of them are known for stalling out on occasion, too.)

Another thing that gets sacrificed is how much you’re allowed to customize. You either have to design your website with the features and settings available from your page builder plugin or you have to do all the work inside of WordPress.

Muffin Live Builder doesn’t suffer from these issues.

For starters, the visual builder is lightweight, so it won’t keep you waiting around for pages to load or changes to reflect on the frontend.

Also, you don’t have to choose which builder you want to use. If you want to primarily build sites with the backend editor and then perfect the designs on the frontend, you can. With BeTheme, you don’t have to pick-and-choose which editor you want to use.

3. Create Great Looking Monetized Sites with the Muffin Woo Builder

Many page builders are built for one purpose: To help WordPress users visually design websites so they can see their work reflected on the site in real-time.

That said, many page builder plugins haven’t accounted for the ecommerce piece.

Users can design and customize the regular pages on their websites with the visual builder, like the Home, About, and Contact pages. However, their ecommerce pages — Shop, Products, Cart, Checkout, and more — have to be managed through WooCommerce’s interface.

WooCommerce is a great ecommerce plugin. However, it’s not ideal having to design different parts of your site with different tools.

Be now has a solution for this: Muffin Woo Builder.

The Muffin Woo Builder allows designers to build their own single product and shop templates instead of just customizing the default ones provided by WooCommerce or the theme.

It also gives you design editing capabilities that no other page builder plugin can. For example:

  • Create design rules for your ecommerce pages
  • Choose from 11 product gallery styles
  • Switch between Shop and Catalogue mode
  • Set custom variation swatches
  • Show or hide the cart button
  • Add a sidebar
  • Configure settings for how product images render
  • Enable a Wishlist
  • Pick and choose which icons appear in the header

If you want this level of control over the layout and look of your ecommerce pages, you have to install other plugins or custom-code those changes into the backend. So, this is definitely a unique feature amongst page builders.

4. Instantly Design an Attractive Website With One of 600+ Pre-Built Sites

BeTheme isn’t just the fastest WordPress builder because it’s lightweight or because there are various builder options that allow you to work the way that’s best for you.

BeTheme also comes jam-packed with 600+ pre-built websites, with new ones released every week.

When you install a pre-built site, BeTheme is going to do a number of things for you:

  • Install all the specific plugins you need for the site
  • Load a fully designed and fully functioning website into your WordPress installation
  • Add placeholder content and imagery throughout so you can easily swap in your own

That’s going to save you a lot of time. Think about the cost savings, too. You get access to more than 600 pre-built websites without having to pay anything extra for them.

Is BeTheme the total design package? You bet it is!

It can’t be overstated what a game-changer BeTheme is for WordPress designers. Two page builders, one WooCommerce builder, and 600+ pre-built sites all rolled into one?

Everything you need to design high-quality websites is baked in.

That’s something you rarely see in any product or service, let alone in WordPress.

If you’re ready to say “Goodbye!” to page builder plugins and transform the way you work, get the BeTheme powerhouse now.

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8 Freelance Project Management Apps for 2021+

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In my experience, the biggest challenge that freelancers face — more than winning clients or setting prices — is project management; take on too much work, and you’ll start missing deadlines, take on too little, and you’ll start missing your rent.

Some people are naturally organized; they rock up at their desk at 08:59, fully confident in what they will spend the next 8–12 hours working on. Let’s be kind and say that I am not one of them, and leave it at that. The only way I have managed to survive the industry is by self-consciously micro-managing my schedule on a daily basis.

When I worked in an agency, I knew what I would be working on days in advance. Now, I know 90% of what I’ll be working on, weeks in advance.

That level of organization requires very, very, very careful planning. I hold team meetings at the end of the day, yes, “team” meetings of one person. To do that I use a number of tools that suit me.

How to Choose a Project Management App

The most important aspect of any project is the end. That’s when the client will assess your work, and that’s when you get paid. So when you choose a project management solution, make sure it gives you a clear path to the project conclusion.

I know one freelancer who sets himself a hard stop at 7 pm every day. At 7 pm, he downs tools switches off, and walks away. I once heard him end a client call at 7 pm because he’d reached his cut-off point. It made me wince — I would have stayed on until the call concluded — but it hasn’t affected his business.

I know another successful freelancer who works on a budget. When she has earned the money she needs for that day, she stops. She bills by the hour to make this work, so when she sits down in the morning, she knows exactly what time she’ll finish.

Personally, I prefer a task-based approach. I know what I have to get done; if I can get ahead, then great, but my main focus is ensuring I don’t fall behind. I believe that if you hit your deadlines, everything else will take care of itself. Admittedly, there have been a few late-nights (and all-nights) over the years, but thankfully they’re less common these days.

No one style of project management suits everyone. And it doesn’t matter what approach you take, provided you take an approach.

8 Best Project Management Apps for Freelancers

As a freelancer, the most important thing characteristic you can have is reliability. Cultivate a reputation for delivering on your promises, and you’ll become invaluable to your clients. The best project management app is the one that helps you keep your promises.

There are some excellent tools on the market that facilitate project management, but most are aimed at SMEs, or project managers running a team of freelancers.

The tools here are listed from least, to most useful for the average freelancer. I’ve avoided too many time-tracking apps because I find these tend to encourage billing by the hour, which is potentially damaging to your business long term. If you do need pure time-tracking, check out Harvest. I’ve also avoided solutions that are too large-scale to benefit freelancers. If you’re looking for a project management tool for teams, then Basecamp, Jira, Project.co, and Redbooth are all worth considering.

Sadly none of these apps are perfect, and there’s a good chance you’ll need to use two or three to manage your projects.

8. Todoist

Todoist is hands down the best to-do app on the market. The downside is that its feature set is minimal.

Todoist really excels at lists. You can break down tasks into sub-tasks, and sub-sub-tasks. The downside is there’s no real scheduling or comparison of multiple projects in a single view.

The mobile apps are great, and Todoist recently introduced boards, a form of kanban board that gives you a good overview of everything. If it introduces a gantt chart, I can see myself relying on it more.

Todoist has a free forever plan that is fine for most freelancers, and the paid plans start at just $3 per month.

7. Bonsai

Bonsai is an excellent service for freelancers that grew from a simple invoicing app to include proposals, contracts, time-tracking, and more.

I used Bonsai for invoicing for a couple of years, and it does everything it claims to do. However, there are a couple of significant areas where it falls down. Firstly, its invoicing is super-aggressive and cannot be customized — make sure you’re on friendly terms with any client you send a Bonsai invoice to. Secondly, while it does a good job of tracking what you have done, it doesn’t help you plan what needs to be done beyond a formal proposal.

If you’re running a few simple projects, then it’s possible Bonsai is right for you. Pricing starts at $19 per month.

6. Monday

Monday is one of the biggest players in the project management market. It offers a dizzying array of options, and if this list were aimed at project management for agencies, Monday would be further along our countdown. Monday may suit freelancers, particularly those who have migrated from agency work, but for most, it’s more than we need.

There is a free-forever plan that covers almost everything you could want. However, if you need to view your projects as a gantt chart — and I strongly suggest you do — then you’ll need to update to the standard plan, which starts at $8 per user per month, with a minimum of three seats, meaning at least $24 per month when billed annually.

5. AND.CO

AND.CO stands out as a slick, easy-to-use option for managing a freelance business. Like Bonsai, it allows you to manage proposals, invoicing, time-tracking, expenses, and more.

AND.CO also has extremely well-liked customer support. An underestimated consideration when you don’t have your own accounts team to resolve problems.

As with other solutions of this type, the task-management is lacking. It does include a simple to-do list, but in my opinion, it’s not sufficient, and you’ll need to supplement it with something that supports gantt charts.

There’s a free forever plan, but it’s barely more than a free trial. Pricing for full-featured access starts at $18 per month when billed annually.

4. ClickUp

ClickUp is a SaaS that aims to replace just about everything else you could need. Unlike some options on this list, it includes a CRM, which is a bonus because there’s nothing worse than relying on the search function in your email to track down someone’s contact details.

ClickUp also offers a genuinely free-forever account with enough features to make it usable. If you choose to upgrade to a paid plan, it’s just $5 per user per month, which is excellent value.

If anything, there’s just too much in here. If you’re someone who considers themselves a power-user who enjoys digging into every nuance of a UI, then ClickUp could be for you. But, if, like me, you favor a simple tool that does what it’s told and gets out of the way, then there are better options.

3. Asana

Asana is probably the best-known project management tool on the market. It offers a tremendous number of options and is flexible enough for any style of project management.

There’s a free forever plan that is ideal for getting started and offers you most — you may be sensing a theme here — of the features you’ll need. But Asana’s best feature is its excellent timeline implementation of the gantt chart, for which you’ll need to upgrade to a premium plan costing $10.99 per user per month, with a minimum number of 2 seats that translates to a rather expensive $21.98 per month.

2. Trello

Trello is famous for its kanban boards, and many people prefer them to gantt charts, which has helped the app grow rapidly in the last few years.

If you’re prepared to pay $10 per user per month, Trello actually offers gantt charts as well, in the form of its timeline feature.

Trello is mainly designed for teams, not freelancers. However, if you do have the budget for a premium plan, Trello gives you an enviable ability to switch project management styles on a whim.

1. Toggl

Toggl is perhaps the perfect balance of time-tracking and gantt chart that is ideal for freelance projects.

As with most tools, Toggl is designed for teams, with billing starting at $8 per user per month. However, it offers a solo plan, designed for freelancers, that is free forever.

The main thing you miss out on with Toggl’s Solo plan is team timelines, which you won’t need unless you’re outsourcing work. One other obvious omission is unlimited planning boards, which you may find yourself paying for sooner or later.

But for a mixture of simplicity and powerful features available for $0, Toggl is hard to beat.

 

Featured image via Pexels

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7 Ways to Use Gamification in Marketing Campaigns 

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We all want a little more fun and games in our lives. So, why not add some gamification to your next interactive content campaign?

By 2025, the gamification market is expected to witness a massive 30.1% growth rate, with global sales revenue reaching around $32 billion. 

That’s because gamification adds more entertainment to the website experience and gets audiences engaged. The idea behind gamification is to bring game mechanics into the design of a website or piece of content. There are many different ways to do this. 

Some companies add hidden achievements and bonuses to their blogs that customers can collect by visiting every page and reading their content. Others allow readers to collect points for leaving comments or play games to win potential prizes. 

Used correctly, gamification is a fantastic way to connect with your audience and increase engagement levels. So, how can you use gamification in interactive content?

The Evolution of Gamification 

Elements of gamification have appeared in everything from marketing campaigns to web design and even eCommerce strategies. 

In 2014, an Apple App Store review of more than 100 health apps even found that gamification elements in applications led to greater participation and higher user ratings. In other words, customers are more likely to get involved with an activity that includes gamification components. 

While gamification can take on many different forms, the aim for most companies is to create an environment where customers can feel more invested in their interactions with the website. For example, if you win a point every time you comment on a blog post, and you can trade those points in for prizes, you have more of a desire to keep commenting. 

The promise of being able to “accomplish” things with pieces of interactive content and websites also appeals to the competitive part of our psychology that pushes us to keep doing things in exchange for the promise of a kind of reward. 

Many companies have generated a lot of enthusiasm for their brands through leaderboards, time events, and similar experiences. For example, just look at how popular McDonalds becomes each year when the monopoly game rolls out as part of the purchasing experience. 

People buy more items than they usually would during McDonald’s Monopoly just for the opportunity to win. This same boost in engagement benefits your content strategy too. 

6 Ways to Add Gamification to Your Content

There’s no one right way to gamify your website or your marketing content. The method you choose will depend heavily on your audience and the kind of experience they respond best to. 

The key to success is finding a way to grab your customer’s attention and hold onto it. Here are some of the tried and tested strategies to explore:

1. Create an Actual Game Experience 

When it comes to incorporating gamification into your website design and content, you don’t necessarily need to be clever. You can be extremely straightforward and just design an actual game. For instance, to help attract more people to the American Army, the US created a war simulator that potential applicants could play on Steam. 

The game aimed to introduce young people who might consider a career in the military to what that job might be like. If the kids liked what they saw on Steam, they could visit the military website and learn more. 

For companies who can’t afford to build an entire fully-featured game, something a little smaller can be just as engaging. For instance, rather than using a standard pop-up with a discount code to entice customers to buy the rental service, Gwynnie Bee created a scratch card. People could scratch the spaces using their smartphone or computer cursor and win money off. 

The great thing about the interactive content from Gwynnie Bee is that it encouraged potential visitors to connect with the business in a lucrative way. To use the scratch card, you first had to give your email address. This meant the company could build its email list while delighting consumers. 

When designing a game experience for your marketing campaign, remember:

  • Get the right support: Designing a great game is tough, particularly if you want something more complicated than a scratch card. Don’t take the risk of creating something that doesn’t work properly; hire a developer. 
  • Promote the experience: Make sure everyone knows about your new game. Share screenshots on social media and talk about it in your email campaigns. 
  • Focus on fun: Remember, games are supposed to be fun. Measure the reactions of your audience to ensure they’re having a good time. 

2. Design a Loyalty or Reward Program

Loyalty is one of the most valuable things your audience can give you. So why not reward them for it? Loyalty programs are fantastic tools for business growth and engagement. They give you a way to turn one-off clients into repeat customers and advocates for your brand. 

How you choose to reward your customers (and when) is up to you. Some companies might give customers points every time they share a post on social media or comment on a blog. This encourages more engagement with your brand. 

On the other hand, you might just let your customers earn rewards for every purchase they make. This is a strategy that Starbucks uses with its reward program.

As customers increase their spending with Starbucks, they get the reward of extra points that they can put towards future purchases. This keeps customers coming back for more and may even entice some clients to buy Starbucks when they otherwise wouldn’t. 

The oVertone company is another excellent example of a brand using gamified rewards with its marketing strategy. The loyalty program breaks down into tiers, where users can see how much they need to spend to ascend to the next level. New rewards and perks appear with each level. 

Remember, when building a loyalty program:

  • Make your customers feel special: Ensure that your audience feels good about being one of the lucky few in your loyalty program. Give discounts and offers they can’t get elsewhere.
  • Keep them informed: Make it easy for your customers to see what they need to do to get their next reward, so they keep coming back for more. 
  • Mix things up sometimes: To stop the experience from getting boring, roll out things like “double points” days and bonuses for your most active customers. 

3. Encourage Customer Interaction

The biggest benefit of gamification is that it encourages and increases customer interaction. You can give rewards to participants that comment on your blog posts, for instance, or share your posts on social. The customer benefits from the reward, while you get the advantage of a better business presence. 

Samsung drives interaction with gamification with a function on its website that allows customers to discuss issues and watch videos. The most active participants get a badge for their efforts. 

If your business structure requires a lot of engagement from your audience, then using gamification elements can encourage them to stick with you for longer rather than losing interest. For instance, language learning software Duolingo has a four-point gamification strategy for its users.

Duolingo knows that learning a new language takes a lot of time, so it asks users to set small specific goals instead. The smaller tasks bring users back regularly, and consistent users gain rewards. There’s even a progress bar to help you track your progress compared to other customers. 

Gamification gives your customers another reason to keep coming back and connecting with your brand. That makes a lot of sense for companies that rely on long-term relationships with customers, like Duolingo and other teaching brands, for instance. Remember:

  • Make it simple: People will only want to interact with your brand if it’s easy to do so. Make it clear what you want your customer to do and what they need to do next. 
  • Reward every action: Keep people coming back for more by rewarding them for their actions, even if it’s just with a gold star or digital sticker. 
  • Nudge inactive customers: If a client gets involved in your interactive content, then stops participating, send an email reminding them why they should come back. 

4. Run Contests and Offer Prizes

Probably one of the easiest ways to use gamification in your advertising campaigns is with a competition. Contests and competitions have been around since the dawn of business. They’re a useful way for companies to collect information from customers, particularly if you ask your clients to sign up to your site with an email address to get involved. 

Competitions are also a way to push your audience into doing positive things for your company. For instance, you could run a competition where consumers share a social media post and tag a friend to enter. Or you could have a competition that asks your clients to refer a friend to get involved. 

When KIND, a healthy snack company, wanted to connect with its customers and create a new product, it didn’t just do market research. Instead, the company created the “Raise the Bar” contest to let customers cast a vote for which flavor they wanted to see next.

When 123ContactForm wanted to engage its audience, it gave people the chance to win one of three platinum subscriptions for 6 months. 

Contests are naturally exciting and fun to take part in. They’re an opportunity to get your audience excited, and you don’t need to give anything huge away either. Just make sure that the prize you offer is something that your audience will be interested in. 

A few more pro tips include:

  • Generate hype first: Don’t just launch a contest out of nowhere; get people excited about the idea with announcement blogs, social media posts, and emails. 
  • Give people a lot of ways to get involved: If people can’t take part in the competition on social media, let them do something on your website instead. 
  • Follow up after the win: When someone does win something from your website, follow up with that winner and post pictures in the form of a blog/case study. This will generate more hype for your brand and get people excited about the next event. 

5. Get Your Audience Feeling Competitive

No matter how much they might deny it, most people are at least a little competitive. So when you’re implementing a gamification campaign into your content and marketing efforts, it pays to tap into that sense of competition. All you need to do is find a way to encourage your followers to compete. 

The best example of a company that did this particularly well is Nike. Nike and the Run Club app teamed up to motivate people to get involved with healthy activities. The app allowed users to customize and build their ideal training program based on their athletic level. 

At the same time, you could also win badges and trophies to share with your running community. The more you took part in challenges on the app, the more you could potentially win. 

The Fitbit application has a similar way of keeping customers engaged. When you download Fitbit, you can access information about your exercise strategies and potentially track your progress towards your goals. However, there are also measurable achievements to earn – like a badge when you first walk 500 miles. 

Users on Fitbit can also find their friends using the same app and compete with them in various challenges. 

To successfully add a competition to your gamification strategy, remember:

  • It needs to be social: People will be more inclined to get involved if they show off their achievements. So make sure that people can showcase their accomplishments. 
  • Make people want to win: There needs to be a reason to get to the top of the leaderboard. You might offer people discounts or exclusive prizes if they accomplish certain goals. 
  • Show progress: Prompt people to keep working on reaching their targets by showing them how close they are to success. 

6. Make Boring Content Seem More Interesting

Some content is naturally more engaging than others. If you want to showcase some important information or data, you might create a whitepaper or a report. Unfortunately, the result can be a relatively bland piece of content.

With elements of gamification, you can make the experience a lot more engaging and interesting. Sites like Daytum.com allow users to turn personal stats and information into charts that showcase information in engaging ways. You can allow your users to track their progress through the report and rack up points as they go. 

Adding subtle elements to otherwise clinical and less interesting information is a wonderful way to make the experience more exciting. The more enticed your customers are by your content, the more likely it is that you’ll sell them on your business. 

Gamify Your Marketing Strategy

Gamification isn’t a new concept, but it’s one that many companies and designers can begin to take advantage of these days. Thanks to more advanced browsers and smartphones, customers can more fully enjoy the interactive elements of websites and content campaigns. 

As your audience dives deeper into the digital world, they expect more unique experiences from you. Gamification can make any website or marketing experience more memorable. It’s time to take advantage. 

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