In a traditional client-server authentication model, a resource owner shares their credentials with the client so that the client can access its resources when necessary. The client does that by passing the resource owner’s credentials to the resource server, and the resource server validates the same before providing access to the protected resource(s). Simple, right?
Well, there are a bunch of problems associated with this model, a few of which are listed below:
An unreliable, semi-broken and unresponsive website is an excellent way to lose leads and visitors — regardless of how aesthetically pleasing or well-designed, the visual elements are.
Over the past decade, we’ve seen more initiative to deliver faster internet to regions of the world that were previously devoid of it. With online communities expanding and more people becoming receptive to online shopping, ensuring your site’s dependability is now more important than ever.
One way to achieve this is by employing uptime and downtime monitoring tools. This guide will examine the best ways to get alerts when something goes wrong and your website falters.
Downtime is bound to occur occasionally. Nonetheless, the goal is to minimize it. The longer the downtime occurs, the more traffic and potential clients you lose. A dysfunctional website is also detrimental to your credibility and reputation. People may associate your website’s unreliability with your real-world products or services.
With web developers charging an average of $200 per hour, high-quality websites can be expensive to build and maintain. Nevertheless, it’s often worth the investment. However, an unreliable website can backfire on you. Instead of attracting more customers, it could potentially repel them. This can result in lost revenue.
An uptime monitoring solution can help you prevent or reduce these losses. It verifies if your website is up and functional and notifies you if it’s not. This allows you to troubleshoot the issue and get your website back up and running as soon as you’re alerted. The most common issues behind your website’s downtime include:
Thus, you must employ a dependable tool that detects downtime or any interruptions related to your website as soon as they occur. They are must-have tools for web designers, developers, and network administrators. However, not all of them are built the same. So how do you identify the best uptime monitoring tools?
Uptime monitoring tools typically detect interruptions by running network tests such as pings and trace routes. You could practically monitor your website’s uptime by constantly running these tests yourself.
However, this isn’t an efficient way to monitor your website’s uptime. A comprehensive uptime monitoring tool will automatically monitor your website’s uptime in the background. It will then alert you through various channels as soon as it senses that your website may be down.
Furthermore, high-quality uptime monitoring solutions tend to offer additional information regarding your website’s uptime/downtime and its performance. These tools commonly feature dashboards, status pages, badges, exportable records, etc., to help you keep track of your site’s overall health.
The ideal uptime monitoring tool or service should feature:
Another optional feature to look out for is public status pages that your clients can access to determine if all your services are up and running. GetWeave is an excellent example of this. The website features a well-organized systems status page where customers can check if all of Weave’s services are functional.
Nevertheless, you can use the above information as a buying guide when assessing potential uptime monitoring tools. The rest of this guide will supply a few suggestions as to which tools you should use for your website.
Some of the best uptime monitoring tools for website downtime alerts include:
Uptrends isn’t just a downtime detection tool; it’s a complete web performance monitoring solution. It will notify you as soon as it detects any disturbance in your website’s performance. It features highly customizable checks. For instance, you can set performance check limits for load times. Uptrends will notify you instantly if your website takes too long to load.
You can also configure from which locations you want it to monitor your website. Uptrends will then point you to where your website usually suffers performance dips in the real world.
The service uses multiple communication channels to send users notifications: email, phone calls, and SMS. Alternatively, you can download one of Uptrend’s mobile applications and receive push notifications. Additionally, you can integrate Uptrends with messaging and communication applications such as PagerDuty, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.
Another impressive Uptrend feature is its ability to emulate your website’s performance on different browsers. It runs Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge on its servers. Thus, you can compare how your website runs on these web browsers without installing them on your servers or computer.
Uptrends supplies users with various charts, reports, and graphs to help identify sudden spikes or dips. Waterfall reports display the complete page-load from the initial request to the last download. This allows you to compare the history of your website’s performance element by element. It comes with three price plans whose costs depend on the number of monitors you would like. Starting at $16.21 (at the time of writing) the Starter Plan is the most affordable.
Oh Dear is a slightly cheaper option than Uptrends, with the most affordable plan starting at $12 per month (at the time of writing). However, while Uptrends offers a 30-day free trial, Oh Dear only provides a 12-day trial period. Nevertheless, Oh Dear’s interface is a lot cleaner and more minimal.
Since Oh Dear runs servers in different locations across the globe, it can track how your website performs in various regions. Oh Dear will scan through your website and index all the pages. If it detects any issues, it will alert you immediately.
Oh Dear also features a continuous certificate monitoring function. Site owners who are concerned with their website’s security may find this feature to be especially useful. It will verify your SSL certificate expiration dates and alert you of any changes.
Oh Dear’s public status page enables your clients to keep track of your website’s availability.
Oh Dear uses email and SMS text messages to alert site owners of any issues. It also features integrations with communications and social media applications such as Telegram, Discord, Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc. Oh Dear ensures that messages are as detailed and user-friendly. This makes it easier to troubleshoot and find the origin of your problem. Oh Dear is more than a worthy alternative to Uptrends.
WP Umbrella is a little different from the previous entries. It’s intended to help users manage and monitor multiple WordPress sites. Thus, it is far more particularized in its approach to website uptime monitoring. Again, as is the primary function of the uptime monitoring tool, it offers a real-time alert system that will contact you through email, SMS, Slack, etc.
WP Umbrella employs a simple minimal UI. Its main screen consists of a dashboard that allows you to view all your WordPress websites. By default, this dashboard features four columns: Site, Uptime, Speed, and Issues.
WP Umbrella will alert you of any outdated or erroneous plugins or themes. While it doesn’t offer dedicated public status pages, it does have a client report generation feature. You can automatically send these reports to your various subscribers or clients when your website is down.
WP Umbrella is the most affordable option on this list. Users are charged $1.99 per month (at the time of writing) for each website monitored. In addition, WP Umbrella offers a 14-day trial and does not require your credit card details. It’s an excellent option for anyone running a WordPress website or two.
This guide has only explored three possible uptime monitoring solutions. They won’t only assist you in detecting downtimes, they can also help you find the reason your site may be slow.
These solutions are an excellent place to start. But there are many other options coming to market all the time. You may find that this is the first step to converting more leads and reducing your bounce rate.
The post 3 Best Website Uptime Monitoring Tools first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Personalized marketing is when you attune your marketing efforts based on customer data. This data can be anything from the first and last name to purchase intent, concerns, and history.
Personalized marketing has revolutionized the way businesses market their product and service to their audience. It brings value to people’s lives, spiking the sales graph for brands and businesses. So it’s a win-win situation for both the company and the consumer.
Even big companies do this for their campaigns. They do so because it gives them great results and ROI for their marketing initiatives. If these multinational businesses do this, it’s a good idea to incorporate this strategy and learn from a top resource on digital marketing.
This article aims to explain every nook and cranny of personalized marketing. By the end of this 5-minute read, you will know the impact of personalized marketing on our lives. And how you can integrate this into your marketing strategy to benefit your business.
Have you ever encountered a business that knows what you’re going through? Or did you see an ad online that you closely relate to? Chances are, you were one of the target markets of those marketing materials. And if you could associate yourself with the ad, their marketing strategy worked.
That is what personalized marketing does to your audience, market, or particular demographic. This style of advertising leverages personalization in your marketing materials. The details of your marketing content are tailored to a specific audience and address the issues or real-time problems of a particular segment in your market.
Personalized marketing has become popular because more people demand it from businesses. Once the people have experienced what it felt like, they want to feel more of it.
To objectively see the demand for personalization, here are some statistics to back it up.
Accenture reported that 91% of consumers are likelier to shop with businesses that offer them relevant content. This shows that the right product recommendations can increase the chances of shopping with you.
Salesforce mentioned that 66% of consumers expect companies to understand their individual needs. This statement proves that a generalized way of marketing isn’t as effective as before. The consumer mindset has already developed, and they demand more personalization from businesses.
A striking piece of data from Statista showed that 90% of consumers in the US find the idea of personalization appealing. If that figure is accurate, almost all businesses should start incorporating this into their strategies. There’s no reason for them not to try this out.
Given the high positive demand for personalized marketing, it’s no secret why more and more businesses are doing this. However, not every company out there is doing this right. A wrong way of doing this can bring a loss of clients and a negative ROI.
To help you go on the right track of using personalization in your marketing, read up on the next section of this article.
You’d agree that knowing your customer’s first and last name is essential. But with the dynamically changing strategies, personalized marketing is going beyond that. It’s actually about understanding what your targeted consumers need, merging with a way to convey the message that your business is the solution.
To help you achieve this, take note of the things below:
The foundation of personalized marketing is laid on customer data. The best marketing professionals and strategists emphasize gathering relevant data if you want to scale. Excellent digital marketing courses will teach you that customer data will help you build a solid foundation for your content and campaigns.
Consumer behavior has always been the most important detail for target marketing. With every click, it has become easier to gather data about individual customers, their interests, hobbies, purchase history, buying behavior, and more.
You’ll be able to get this information if you’ve practiced data management and collecting customer data throughout the years of your operation. However, it’s not too late to begin if you haven’t started with this yet. There is a lot of marketing automation software that aids marketing teams in doing this. For example, many businesses use lead scoring software to gain insight into their clients’ needs and categorize them appropriately.
For your personalization efforts, you can use questionnaires, surveys, and feedback forms to capture personal data on the internet. A customer will happily fill out a survey form if a reward in return entices him. This reward can be in any form– a voucher, a first buy discount, free shipping, or more.
This initiative will help you get more data in a shorter time frame.
Hoarding data will be a complete waste of marketing efforts, capital, and efficiency if you do not extract consumer behavior from it. When you have access to a rich set of data, you have the privilege to understand your customers’ trending needs deeply. After gaining insights from the data, create a marketing strategy based on those findings to target your audience.
Doing this doesn’t just apply to B2C; it also works for B2B companies, which is why the demand for custom software development, tailored services, personalized packages, and B2B data providers have been on the rise in these recent years.
It is a two-way road. While you are on the lookout for your target market, at the same time, the customers expect businesses to know what they need. The market you’re currently serving expects you to know what products or services are fit for them.
So this is where it gets crucial: you have to dig deeper into your niche and find the specs of your audience’s needs. Having a general idea about the needs of your target audience and personalized marketing usually don’t go harmoniously.
Planning a better-personalized marketing strategy will not be a piece of cake but will be much more rewarding for every aspect of your business. May it be sales, return on investments, customer relationships, or personalized marketing campaigns.
The first rule of business is convincing the customer that you are their best friend. Now that you know what they want, you pledge to provide them with whatever best you can. Limiting personalization to marketing is not the solution. You have to be vigilant in meeting these individual requirements at every stage. And remember that consistency is the name of the game. That is how you bring your business into the running.
You can integrate CRM automation, email marketing tools and deploy other content marketing strategies to help make this process a lot simpler. Personalized live chat and chatbots, such as those offered by ThriveDesk, allow businesses to personalize their offerings and build their brand reputation.
As a customer, my requirement would be reading content, browsing, and experiencing products that would hit home. A personalized experience is what every consumer demands. And this is what makes them want to go back and do business with you again.
By creating helpful and relevant content, recommending the right products to them, and giving out convenient payment options, you are setting your business apart from the rest. Doing this allows you to have personalized every touchpoint that your customers do with your business.
Consider customer engagement as absolutely necessary. Having the best data set and knowing what your customers want is not enough. In the competitive space of business and marketing, everyone is trying to get the attention of one another. And this is what you are supposed to do. This helps in building consumer-brand relations.
When a consumer engages, meaningful things happen. Engaging content pushes the consumer through the funnel and hence promotes conversions. Your content should be creative and eye-catching.
Engaging content blended with personalization boosts the brand experience. Increased loyalty, trust-building, and improved customer experience enhance the conversion and sales speed.
A great way to use personalization in an engaging manner that most businesses overlook would be through exit-intent popups.
This is an element that some businesses miss out on. They have created excellent social media marketing content but only distributed it on the wrong channel. For personalized marketing to be effective, it needs to be seen by people.
Are you questioning your marketing techniques because all you see is stagnancy? You have set up an engaging online store on Shopify or Wix, collected all the relevant data, your content is engaging enough, and your marketing strategy is top-notch. But you are still unable to reach your clientele.
You start wondering what you are missing out on. Your content and your strategies will not be prolific if you are on the wrong channel. Remember: the message of your content has to reach the right people for it to be effective.
Should you be on social media? If so, which one? Do you get more traction with email campaigns? Or do you have more engagements on forums?
Find out where your market is, then spend your focus there. Now the next step is how to know where they spend most of their time?
This is where we go back in the loop. And hence we again emphasize that data collection is the foundation of any great marketing strategy.
Don’t rest on your laurels when you’ve gotten everything down to a tee and have attained your desired marketing analytics behind your personalized marketing content. Always think of ways how you can improve.
Evolving at every step will keep you in the running. Don’t be misguided into thinking that your work is done if you feel like you have reached the pinnacle. Keep looking for ways to get better. Set bigger goals and status for your business.
Always go back to the drawing board and brainstorm with your team on how you can change and strive with the dynamically changing world and mindsets. In the end, all you want is to build better relationships with your customers, new and existing.
For enhanced productivity, your marketing team should always look for new strategies. This is how fresh and great marketing ideas are made.
Irrelevant information can waste energy and time for both customers and the business. Personalized marketing hits the bull’s eye 99% of the time. It brings immeasurable value to the company as well as the customer.
Here are some of the top benefits of personalized marketing:
The first target personalized marketing aims at is grabbing an individual’s attention. And this results in better engagement eventually. If you are presenting your customer with something that wows them, needless to say, it will grab their attention.
This will help bridge the gap between your customer and your brand. Identifying customers’ needs and then giving them what they want will help improve customer interaction with your brand.
It can even be enough for them to follow your call to action. The next thing you know, they will be checking your website, signing up for a list, or even purchasing a product right then and there.
Are you there for your customer at the right time and place? One-on-one marketing provides easy solutions to customers because you hit them with just what they are looking for at the right time.
When potential customers realize that you understand what they’re going through and provide the solution, most won’t hesitate to try your business out.
Personalization isn’t just focused on content. It can also be integrated into your processes. This results in aiding the increase of higher conversion rates.
Offering personalization will significantly improve the user experience. Once you provide the products, services, and content that meet their needs, their opinion of your business automatically improves.
Considering the statistics about personalized experiences, it is evident that consumers demand personalization strategies from companies. And if you offer such an experience, you increase the chance of making them do more business with you. Personalization helps businesses in reducing cart abandonment rates, better customer journey, increased customer satisfaction, and many more.
Retaining persisting customers is equally important to your business as bringing new ones. Most businesses face low customer retention. It’s also a factor that some companies overlook. You must understand that it’s not all about converting prospects into paying customers. Your focus should also be on retaining those customers to make them loyal advocates of your brand.
One of the major benefits of consistent personalization is an improved customer retention rate. Consumers tend to stay with a business that understands their needs and provides solutions to their problems.
Once you can transfer a customer to a loyal advocate, you can also receive a ton of benefits. These are people that are going to defend your brand from critics. These are the same people who will give you free marketing via word of mouth and positive reviews.
Personalized experience leads to customer retention, eventually building better relationships with your nurtured customers. These entities are connected in a loop.
Customer relationships are an aspect of business that significantly helps with scalability and higher revenue. So connecting with your customers and building a relationship with them is as important as the product you are selling. This is why strengthening customer relationships should be a top priority for businesses.
Personalization makes you an expert on your target market trends. You get to know your audience deeper, which helps you build a foundation for creating a great customer relationship. And this requires marketing and customer experience teams to work together in a symphony.
For this, you can use team collaboration software which aids in the optimization of content and your approach toward the market. You’ll have a better strategy in getting their attention, providing what they want, and recommending things they’ll be interested in.
All of these things help in building customer rapport. When a customer feels that you treat them as more than just a paying customer, their customer loyalty goes to your business.
To inspire you to integrate this marketing strategy into your operations, below are different personalization marketing campaigns done exceptionally by various businesses. Grab inspiration, ideas, and motivation from these examples.
We all know the most basic form of personalization is addressing your customers’ names, but Coca-Cola took this simple idea into a massive global campaign. Their “Share a Coke” campaign started in 2011, wherein they printed different popular names on their Coke bottles and cans.
It seemed like a regular campaign at first, but it started getting traction as more customers wanted to get the name of their family, friends, and themselves. Coca-Cola said the campaign’s purpose was “to create a more personal relationship with consumers and inspire shared moments of happiness.”
The soft drinks giant used personalization and tied such a strategy with its mission: to bring memories and happiness to its consumers. You, too, can do the same – combine your mission and personalization strategy to create a unique campaign.
Spotify leverages user data in its marketing strategy. They have several campaigns that make users want to use their application more often because it gives out a more tailored experience.
Other than their year-end campaign( #spotifywrapped), where they show the most played songs and podcasts their users listen to (which was a viral hit), they now also have an #OnlyYou campaign that shows your unique listening taste partnered with a musical astrology reading.
Nike has consistently been recognized for authentic, personalized, and heartfelt ad campaigns. This personalization always makes them capture an audience who can relate and those who start connecting to the brand. So Nike isn’t new to personalization. Their aim is robust community engagement.
Their highly inspirational campaigns with real-life heroes induce inspiration in their audience. Nike is great at converting people because of its excellent storytelling ability while adding personalization to the mix.
Nike’s just launched a new app that offers personalized content and rewards for committed fans. They tackle challenges and issues head-on, but they always make their marketing messages relatable to their audience. That is why they “just do it.”
Personalized marketing is the secret sauce to thriving businesses in the world today. However, incorporating this marketing strategy and finding success is not as simple as you might think. You will face challenges, but with enough perseverance and brainstorming, you can surpass them and successfully create a great campaign.
Remember, this marketing approach can be a hit or a miss. The first step to making it a success is relevant data collection followed by judicious implementation. This isn’t an overnight activity that you can do. It requires months of diligence in the right direction with the proper guidance. And you can gain valuable insights into this guidance via the content marketing strategies outlined in this article. But remember, once you start rolling, there is no looking back.
The post The Complete Guide To Personalized Marketing first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Starting your own business is a process with a fair share of challenges. Even in the web design world, where you can potentially minimize costs by working from home and collaborating with freelance contractors, many expenses exist.
To run a successful web design business, you need enough money to invest in everything from skilled colleagues to resources (like fonts and themes), software subscriptions, and technology tools. Finding a way to fund your company can be the most complicated part of ensuring its success.
For most new companies, the easiest option to generate opportunities is “bootstrapping.” Learning how to bootstrap a web design business means knowing how to bring your business to life with virtually no starting capital.
Here’s how to get started.
Successful bootstrappers take an idea, such as creating a web design company and create a fantastic company without the backing of investors. It takes significant dedication, commitment, and single-mindedness to accomplish your goals, but some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs and Sam Walton, got their start this way.
The term “bootstrapping” comes from the phrase “to pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” which indicates overcoming challenges on your own without any external support.
The pros and cons of bootstrapping include:
Pros:
Cons:
Bootstrapping a web design business can be complicated, but it works for many companies if you follow the right strategy. The good news is web design companies generally don’t require as much initial capital as some other types of companies, like standard retail brands or companies with a need for brick and mortar offices.
However, there are still steps you’ll need to follow to ensure success.
While you might not work with investors when bootstrapping your web design business, you’ll still need some essential initial funds. To run a web design business, you won’t necessarily need a massive initial investment, but you will need something.
To determine how much capital you need to raise from your income, savings, a line of credit, or other common bootstrapping sources, think about:
The easiest way to ensure a bootstrapped web design business is a success is to ensure you are offering specific clients something they genuinely need. In a service-based landscape like web design, you need to know what your customers want and offer something they can’t get elsewhere.
For instance, can you differentiate yourself from other web design companies by helping with modern trends like 360-degree video and XR-ready design? Can you build apps for companies from scratch and provide ongoing maintenance for the websites you make?
An excellent way to find your USP is to examine your competitors. Find out what other companies in your area are offering their customers, and listen to consumers in your industry when they talk about what they need from a website designer.
Since you’re relying only on your cash and the money you make from your web design business to fuel its growth, choosing a model optimized for consistent cash flow is essential. Bootstrapping a business often means you place most of the profit you gain from your company back into the development of the brand.
With this in mind, consider how you’ll offer services and charge your customers. Are you going to ask for a portion of the fees up-front before starting a web design project? Can you provide your customers with subscription models to improve your revenue consistently?
For instance, you could provide help with ongoing maintenance, development, and support rather than just offering to build websites for companies. Another way to make additional income is with professional services, like consulting.
Make sure there’s a market for the services you’ll offer before launching your business by examining the surrounding environments and services your competitors provide.
Keeping costs low will be essential to ensuring your success when bootstrapping a business. Fortunately for web designers, it’s relatively easy to cut down on fees. For instance, WordPress is free to use for your development projects, making it an excellent choice for many web design strategies.
You can also look into common free and cheap alternatives to web design tools online, like GIMP. Shop around for the things you will be paying ongoing fees with. For instance, it’s best to check out multiple vendors when looking for web hosting and marketing support.
While keeping your costs low, it’s also essential to accelerate profits as much as possible. You can look for ways to boost customer retention by building stronger relationships with your clients and offering them deals on long-term subscriptions.
If you have time outside of your web design business, you can also try taking on some side hustles. Options include:
Finally, while the goal of successfully bootstrapping your web design business will be to grow as rapidly and consistently as possible, it’s important to be cautious. For instance, you’ll need to be able to afford the fees of every new designer you bring onto your team, so consider looking for freelancers and contractors rather than permanent hires.
Use organic channels for marketing your services, like blogging and content marketing which can help improve your SEO standing and attract attention among clients. Plus, encourage your customers to recommend your services to other brands.
As new clients approach your business, ensure you only take on as many customers as you can reasonably handle. Compromising on quality will damage your relationships with customers and harm your reputation.
When you’re bootstrapping a business, you get the benefit of being able to eliminate any outside influences from your growth. You’re free to focus on building relationships with companies of your choice, and you get to make decisions about your growth. However, there are downsides, too, like significant stress and limited financial opportunities.
While bootstrapping your business is tough, if you manage to complete the process successfully, the results can be fantastic.
Featured image via Unsplash.
The post How to Bootstrap a Web Design Business first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Navigating the world of web design can be difficult. There is so much conflicting and outdated advice.
How many times have you been advised to obey the 3-Click Rule? It states that users must reach the content they want in three clicks. But, according to the Nielsen Norman Group, no research supports the 3-Click Rule. It’s just a guess, the web’s equivalent of an urban myth.
There are dos and don’ts of effective web design in 2022. In this post, we’ll present the most important so that you can design websites with confidence.
Design Patterns sound like a complex technique. All it means is copying standard, well-known approaches. Jakob’s Law says that most people spend most of their time on other sites, so they will understand your site better if it is like those other sites.
You can’t make your site like every other, so your job is to pick and choose which design patterns will be most helpful to your target demographic.
Some of the most recognized design patterns include placing the logo in the top left of the viewport, underlining links, and placing essentials like shipping information in the footer.
Inclusive design holds the opinion that the web is for everybody. It hasn’t always been that way. Just a few years ago, it was common to see sites excluding some demographics to reduce development costs.
Excluding anyone from your website is wrong. In many jurisdictions, it’s so wrong it’s illegal. But, perhaps more importantly, excluding 5% of users deducts 5% from your profits.
It’s never been easier to be inclusive. The first step is to make your website responsive so that it caters to every device. Then, follow accessibility guidelines to ensure that you welcome everyone. Finally, be ready to listen to your users, and adapt to their needs.
As a website designer, you’ve undoubtedly looked in envy at some of the more original sites out there. It’s important to remember that many of the most experimental sites are usually targeting other designers. Something that works well on a portfolio site won’t translate well to a local convenience store.
99 times out of 100, the simple choice is the right choice. Most people aren’t interested in an original design. They’re interested in accomplishing a task. The less effort expended to complete the task, the better the experience.
Complexity most often creeps into navigation. Start with a logical structure, and use simple, hierarchical navigation.
Every website has goals. It might be promotion, profit, utility, or a combination. Each part of that website, every single page, should have one goal.
Hick’s Law says that the time it takes to make a decision increases when there are more choices. And the Goal-Gradient Effect says that a customer is more likely to complete a process the closer they are to the completion. Combine the two, and it means that giving users one CTA (call to action) on a page increases the chances of them taking it.
It’s OK to still have navigation, links, and secondary goals provided each page has a single clear purpose.
Consistency is often referred to as the hallmark of quality. It means that you’ve paid attention to details. But consistency isn’t just about giving a good impression. Consistency is also essential for good UX (user experience).
Users learn to navigate your website as they go. They learn your website’s ‘rules’ or the logic as they interact with it. If your UI (user interface) is consistent, they’ll learn the rules faster and feel more confident.
Areas that often fail the consistency test are the corner radius of boxes, the style of links, and the tone of writing.
Design isn’t all about usability studies and reliance on design patterns. Design should also be beautiful.
Beauty is often seen as shallow and unimportant. However, the Aesthetic-Usability Effect states that a beautiful website is more likely to be seen as usable by customers.
A pretty design is a high-converting design.
To ensure your design is pretty, pay attention to your typography hierarchy, color scheme, and the symmetry of your layout.
The worst thing you can do is make users wait. The more technology advances, the faster connections get the higher user expectations.
Your site needs to load in under a second and be interactive in under two seconds. Otherwise, you’ll lose customers who bounce back to their search engine and try one of your competitors instead.
Delays don’t only apply to the speed of your site. You need to ensure that the information or product a customer wants is easy to access. Don’t bury it multiple levels deep in your site. If users are delayed by complicated navigation or unpredictable structure, they will exit your site as surely as if it took 10 seconds to load.
Users have zero amounts of patience.
Browsing through the web, the number of designers that block users from seeing the content on a website is astounding.
The most common culprits are newsletter subscription offers. How can a customer know whether they want to sign up for your newsletter when they haven’t yet seen your products?! Let the user browse your site, and then offer them a newsletter subscription.
Another common culprit is cookie notices. Most sites require a modest cookie notice to stay on the right side of the Law. And yet they display a huge, site-blocking modal as if the cookie notice were the most critical content on the site.
Content is frequently left until last. That’s because it’s hard. Just because we learned to read and write as kids doesn’t mean we can write persuasive, engaging sales copy.
Content is vitally important for SEO (search engine optimization), but more importantly, it’s essential for CX (customer experience).
Most websites make three big mistakes with their content.
Mistake one is unbalanced copy. That means writing 25 words about your flagship product and 5,000 words about the company’s history.
Mistake two is writing for the company, not for the customer. That means organizing content around the company structure rather than customer tasks.
Mistake three is too much content at once. Walls of text are a turn-off. Instead, write short, scannable snippets that will keep customers engaged.
…Just try to be good.”
That quote is from the titan of twentieth-century design, Paul Rand.
It boils down to this: originality is about you, and quality is about the website. Great designers care more about their output than their reputation.
Featured image via Pexels.
The post 10 Dos and Don’Ts of Web Design in 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Websites haven’t always been as adaptable as they are today. For modern designers, “responsivity” is one of the most significant defining factors of a good design. After all, we’re now catering to a host of users who frequently jump between mobile and desktop devices with varying screen sizes.
However, the shift to responsive design didn’t happen overnight. For years, we’ve been tweaking the concept of “responsive web design” to eventually reach the stage we’re at today.
Today, we’re going to take a closer look at the history of responsive web design.
When the first websites were initially created, no one was worried about responsivity across a range of screens. All sites were designed to fit the same templates, and developers didn’t spend a lot of time on concepts like design, layout, and typography.
Even when the wider adoption of CSS technology began, most developers didn’t have to worry much about adapting content to different screen sizes. However, they still found a few ways to work with different monitor and browser sizes.
The main two layout options available to developers in the early days were fixed-width, or liquid layout.
With fixed-width layouts, the design was more likely to break if your monitor wasn’t the exact same resolution as the one the site was designed on. You can see an example here.
Alternatively, liquid layouts, coined by Glenn Davis, were considered one of the first revolutionary examples of responsive web design.
Liquid layouts could adapt to different monitor resolutions and browser sizes. However, content could also overflow, and text would frequently break on smaller screens.
In 2004, a blog post by Cameron Adams introduced a new method of using JavaScript to swap out stylesheets based on a browser window size. This technique became known as “resolution-dependent layouts”. Even though they required more work from developers, resolution-dependent layouts allowed for more fine-grained control over the site’s design.
The resolution-dependent layout basically functioned as an early version of CSS breakpoints, before they were a thing. The downside was developers had to create different stylesheets for each target resolution and ensure JavaScript worked across all browsers.
With so many browsers to consider at the time, jQuery became increasingly popular as a way to abstract the differences between browser options away.
The introduction of concepts like resolution-dependent designs was happening at about the same time when many mobile devices were becoming more internet-enabled. Companies were creating browsers for their smartphones, and developers suddenly needed to account for these too.
Though mobile subdomains aimed to offer users the exact same functions they’d get from a desktop site on a smartphone, they were entirely separate applications.
Having a mobile subdomain, though complex, did have some benefits, such as allowing developers to specifically target SEO to mobile devices, and drive more traffic to mobile site variations. However, at the same time, developers then needed to manage two variations of the same website.
Back at the time when Apple had only just introduced its first iPad, countless web designers were still reliant on this old-fashioned and clunky strategy for enabling access to a website on every device. In the late 2000s, developers were often reliant on a number of tricks to make mobile sites more accessible. For instance, even simple layouts used the max-width: 100% trick for flexible images.
Fortunately, everything began to change when Ethan Marcotte coined the term “Responsive Web Design” on A List Apart. This article drew attention to John Allsopp’s exploration of web design architectural principles, and paved the way for all-in-one websites, capable of performing just as well on any device.
Marcotte’s article introduced three crucial components developers would need to consider when creating a responsive website: fluid grids, media queries, and flexible images.
The concept of fluid grids introduced the idea that websites should be able to adopt a variety of flexible columns that grow or shrink depending on the current size of the screen.
On mobile devices, this meant introducing one or two flexible content columns, while desktop devices could usually show more columns (due to greater space).
Flexible images introduced the idea that, like content, images should be able to grow or shrink alongside the fluid grid they’re located in. As mentioned above, previously, developers used something called the “max-width” trick to enable this.
If you were holding an image in a container, then it could easily overflow, particularly if the container was responsive. However, if you set the “max-width” to 100%, the image just resizes with its parent container.
The idea of “media queries” referred to the CSS media queries, introduced in 2010 but not widely adopted until officially released as a W3 recommendation 2 years later. Media queries are essentially CSS rules triggered based on options like media type (print, screen, etc), and media features (height, width, etc).
Though they were simpler at the time, these queries allowed developers to essentially implement a simple kind of breakpoint – the kind of tools used in responsive design today. Breakpoints refer to when websites change their layout or style based on the browser window or device width.
Viewport Meta tags need to be used in most cases to ensure media queries work in the way today’s developers expect.
Since Marcotte’s introduction of Responsive Web Design, developers have been working on new ways to implement the idea as effectively as possible. Most developers now split into two categories, based on whether they consider the needs of the desktop device user first, or the needs of the mobile device user. The trend is increasingly accelerating towards the latter.
When designing a website from scratch in an age of mobile-first browsing, most developers believe that mobile-first is the best option. Mobile designs are often much simpler, and more minimalist, which matches a lot of the trends of current web design.
Taking the mobile first route means assessing the needs of the website from a mobile perspective first. You’d write your styles normally, using breakpoints once you start creating desktop and tablet layouts. Alternatively, if you took the desktop-first approach, you would need to constantly adapt it to smaller devices with your breakpoint choices.
Responsive web design still isn’t perfect. There are countless sites out there that still fail to deliver the same incredible experience across all devices. What’s more, new challenges continue to emerge all the time, like figuring out how to design for new devices like AR headsets and smartwatches.
However, it’s fair to say we’ve come a long way since the early days of web design.
Featured image via Pexels.
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Having the right WordPress plugins on hand can do wonders for your business or online presence. WordPress offers a vast collection to choose from.
There are so many of them. However, finding those that get the best reviews and can do the most for you can be a challenge.
A plugin can give you additional functionality. It could otherwise be difficult or overly expensive to realize with your website by itself. A glance at the 10 top WordPress plugins described below can provide a powerful case in point.
Your website’s purpose or niche will usually dictate the types of essential WordPress plugins you would do well to invest in. The right ones can make your website a genuine powerhouse and, by extension, your business as well.
Amelia is an excellent choice for beauty, healthcare, fitness, consulting, and businesses that might be saddled down with a manual or semi-manual booking system by saving them and their clients time while eliminating booking mistakes that often occur in those manual systems.
Amelia fully supports WooCommerce with PayPal, Stripe, Mollie, and RazorPay payments. Click on the banner to learn more about this time and money-saving plugin.
wpDataTables is a premier WordPress table and chart building plugin that features virtually everything you are apt to need to build any table or chart you want.
Creating a table that is by any definition complex often requires tools that may not necessarily be easy to come by. wpDataTables uses four chart-building engines, one or more of which should suit you perfectly.
They are:
For both table and chart building, wpDataTables can connect you to multiple database sources, including –
wpDataTables can process data that exists in the commonly used formats and features various sorting and filtering options that allow you to create a host of different table types.
Both tables and charts are editable and responsive and, thanks to the wpDataTables conditional formatting feature, can highlight and color-code critical information.
Click to learn more.
While your website’s performance might exceed your wildest dreams, it is more likely that there are areas that need improvement before your wishes can be met.
Determining those areas can be a challenge, but Site Kit offers a one-stop solution to deploy, manage, and get insights from critical Google tools to make your site a success by making those critical tools available to WordPress.
They provide:
Site Kit shows you how many people have found your site, how users navigate it, etc.
Click on the banner to learn more about what Site Kit could do for you.
Tablesome is a WordPress form database and form automation plugin that you can use to store entries from WordPress forms to a database. It can be integrated with popular forms – Contact Form 7 DB, WPForms entries, Forminator database, Elementor Form submissions, etc.
After saving, you can:
TheDock eliminates the need to search for just the right WordPress theme by enabling you to create your own – which can be more fun anyway.
Among TheDock’s many features, a few key ones include –
Beginners and mid-level designers can sometimes have difficulty finding ways to WOW their clients with professional-level visuals.
Slider Revolution changes all that by bridging the gap between what clients want and what you can provide with its –
More than a simple slider-builder, LayerSlider is an animation and website-building tool you can use to improve any website’s look and feel through eye-catching animations, contemporary graphics, and interactive features.
This is made possible in part through the use of –
Plus, you can count on professional one-on-one customer support.
The Download Monitor plugin helps you sell your digital products by offering a ready solution for tracking file downloads, gating content to generate leads, build your audience, and ask users for personal information in exchange for valuable content.
Download Monitor lets you –
The biggest ad manager for WordPress, Ads Pro gives you everything necessary to manage and sell ads.
Ads Pro’s admin panel makes managing ads straightforward for you and your users.
If selling content is your objective, Ultimate Membership Pro is the tool you’ll want to take your website and convert it into a powerful content selling platform.
The Ultimate Membership Pro plugin enables you to –
The WordPress plugin directory is already stuffed with almost 60,000 plugins. This guide has been published to narrow things down to 10 top WordPress plugins for your use.
We consulted with experts to create this list of excellent plugins for WordPress. It can help you with content strategy, SEO, site security, and even social media marketing.
Installing plugins and getting the functionality they provide can add immense value to your use of WordPress.
[- This is a sponsored post on behalf of BAW Media -]
The post 10 Terrific WordPress Plugins You Should Be Using in 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
WordPress has made it easy for everyone to launch a blog, but even though launching a blog isn’t a difficult task any longer, driving traffic to your blog certainly is!
In this article, I’ll share some tried and tested strategies that have worked well for my clients’ blogs. You do not have to be an expert or a marketing guru to get traffic to your WordPress website. Follow the helpful tips I share in this article and watch the visitors start pouring in.
The first thing related to your blog that a user reads in the search engine results is your article headlines. Of course, nobody wants to click on a boring article title. But a powerful headline stands out from the rest and gets you more clicks.
In most themes, your article headlines are translated into meta titles for the pages. Meta titles indicate the topic of your articles to Google and other search engines.
Consider offering your visitors a newsletter signup form through which they can subscribe and get notified about new posts on your blog. You can offer them an incentive for free to persuade them to subscribe to your blog. It can be anything from an e-book, membership, useful templates, or an e-course.
Building an email list gives access to the inboxes of your visitors. You can share your blog content with this prospective audience every time you post a new article. This will help you get consistent traffic to your WordPress blog.
Free giveaways work as an incentive for your WordPress blog visitors. To offer an entry to your blog’s free giveaway, you can ask your visitors for an email subscription, comment on your blog posts, share it on their social media channels, and ask for other such things.
The trick is to think about the actions of your visitors that will increase traffic to your blog and provide them with one or multiple giveaway entries for such actions.
All successful bloggers optimize their content for keywords. You need to perform proper keyword research to find sentences and words that your target audience is typing in Google and other top search engines.
Instead of guessing the keywords for your articles, consider using some helpful tools like SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool and Google Ads Keyword Planner. This way, you can find the terms people are genuinely interested in and the keywords that do not have too much competition.
You must ensure to choose the keywords that have some excellent traffic volume but, at the same time, have less competition. Such keywords will help in the better ranking of each of your articles.
It has been proven that loading time is a ranking factor for SEO, as Google tends to assume that fast sites are high-quality sites.
Signing up for a hosting provider specializing in WordPress guarantees you get the best optimization features for your WordPress site. However, that alone is not enough because you need a hosting provider that can also handle a high volume of visitors.
Optimizing your WordPress website will help in the faster loading of your blog pages. Images are generally the biggest culprit in slowing down your website. So you must first optimize them through an image optimization plugin like Smush, Imagify, or Optimus.
Enabling caching on your WordPress blog will considerably improve its speed. You can store your website data locally with caching, thereby reducing your server load to a large extent. Your website will, therefore, load faster on your visitors’ end, especially when they are repeat visitors.
Try building your presence on some of the top platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Post multiple times a day on these websites and share your blog articles.
You must also include social sharing buttons with your blog posts to make sharing easier for your audience. It will allow your blog visitors to share your post on different social platforms. This dramatically increases the chances of your blog post going viral.
The only key here is to link articles that are closely related to each other. Your visitors might be interested in such related content and read more of your blog posts, thereby increasing your page views. It also increases the chances of visitors sharing your blog content since they find it valuable.
Guest blogging involves creating content for other websites for mutual benefits. It helps you establish your authority in the blogging world while attracting more visitors to your WordPress website.
Becoming a guest blogger allows you to spread the word about your blog to a new set of audiences and bring in organic traffic. It expands your work portfolio and helps build or enhance your online reputation.
Consider using Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Microsoft advertising, and other top advertising platforms when paying to bring traffic to your blog. Be aware of your blog audience and use the most suitable criteria to target it.
I’d recommend setting a weekly budget for paid ads and tracking the ad performance at the end of the week.
If you are satisfied with the traffic results, use the same criteria for the next week. On the other hand, if the ad performance is not as per your expectations, try different criteria to reach your target audience.
Getting traffic to your WordPress blog is an incentive for all the hard work that you do in creating content and managing your website. It builds a name for your blog and improves its search engine ranking. All this leads to better user engagement and revenue.
Featured image via Pexels.
The post 9 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your WordPress Blog first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
The underlying theme of this month’s collection of new tools and resources is development. Almost every tool here makes dev a little easier, quicker, or plain fun. There are a few great tutorials in the mix to help you get into the spirit of trying new things and techniques.
Here’s what is new for designers this month…
Cryptofonts is a huge open-source library of icons that represent cryptocurrencies. There are more than 1,500 CSS and SVG elements in the collection. Cryptofonts includes all scalable vector icons that you can customize by size, color, shadow, or practically anything else. They work with Sketch, Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe XD, Figma, and Invision Studio, and there’s no JavaScript.
Reasonable Colors is an open-source color system for building accessible and beautiful color palettes. Colors are built using a coded chart. Each color comes in six numbered shades. The difference between their shade numbers can infer the contrast between any two shades. The differences correspond to WCAG contrast ratios to help you create an accessible palette. This is a smart project and a valuable tool if you work on projects where color contrast and accessibility are essential (which is all of them).
Chalk.ist is a fun tool to make your code snippets look amazing. Add your code (there’s a vast language selector), pick some colors and backgrounds, and then download it as a shareable image. Your code has never looked so beautiful!
WeekToDo is a free minimalist weekly planner. Improve productivity by defining and managing your week and life easily and intuitively. Plus, this tool is focused on privacy with data that is stored on your computer (in your web browser or the application). The only person who has access to it is you.
Bio.Link is a tool that collects all your links – from social media to blog posts to any other kind of link you want to share. It’s free to use, includes 15 design themes, visitor stats, and is super fast.
Spacers are a set of three-dimensional space characters that you can use in projects. Characters are in multiple poses and ultra high-def formats to play with.
11ty is a super simple, static website generator. Try it for small projects and read the documentation to see everything you can do with this tool.
Scrollex is a react library that lets you build beautiful scroll experiences using minimal code. You can create scroll animations in all kinds of combinations – vertical, horizontal, almost anything you want to try. The documentation is fun and easy to understand if you’re going to see how it works.
GetCam is an app that lets you turn your smartphone into a webcam for your computer. It works with any iPhone and a Mac or Windows computer. It works with most video conference and streaming tools as well as browser-based apps.
Flatfile is a data onboarding platform that intuitively makes sense of the jumbled data customers import and transforms it into the format you rely on. You won’t have any more messy spreadsheets or have to build a custom tool.
Loaders is a collection of free loaders and spinners for web projects. They are built with HTML, CSS, and SVG and are available for React and copypasta.
Lexical is an extensible JavaScript web text-editor framework emphasizing reliability, accessibility, and performance. It’s made for developers, so you can easily prototype and build features with confidence. Combined with a highly extensible architecture, Lexical allows developers to create unique text editing experiences that scale in size and functionality.
This tutorial is a primer on why the img element is such a powerful tool in your development box. Images are so prominent that they are part of the most important content in over 70% of pages on both mobile and desktop, according to the largest contentful paint metric. This post takes you through how to better optimize and improve core web vitals simultaneously.
Building a Combined CSS-Aspect-Ratio-Grid provides two solutions for creating the title effect. You can define an aspect ratio for the row or use Flexbox with a little flex grow magic. Learn how to try it both ways.
QIndR is a QR code generator made for events and appointments. The form is designed to capture your event information so you can quickly build and use a QR code for listings and even allow users to add it to their calendars! It’s super quick and easy to use.
On-Scroll Text Repetition Animation shows you how to create an on-scroll animation that shows repeated fragments of a big text element. This is a fun and easy lesson that you can use right away.
Eight Colors won’t do anything for your productivity, but it is a fun game that you may not be able to stop playing. It is a block-shifting game with the goal to shift circular blocks to reach the target given.
Creative Vintage is a pair of typefaces including a thin script and vintage slab serif (with rough and smooth styles). The pair is designed to work together for various uses or can be used independently.
Hardbop is a vintage-style typeface with a lot of personality. It would work great for display, and the family includes seven full-style character sets.
Kocha is a funky ligature-style typeface perfect for lighter design elements, including logos or packaging. It includes clean and rough versions.
Magnify is a large font family with 16 styles and plenty of fun alternates. You can use it straight or with the more funky styles that create less traditional character forms.
Stacker is a fun and futuristic style font with a triple outline style. Use it for display when you really want to make an impression.
The post Exciting New Tools for Designers, May 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
This article illustrates three scenarios that demonstrate how you can use IBM App Connect to build flows that integrate with apps. The three connectors that we will use for these scenarios are;
You can use App Connect to perform actions on the following objects:
