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3 Quick Tricks to Boost Customer Retention

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Acquiring a new customer is difficult, but retaining an existing one is even more challenging. Yet, statistics show that efforts focused on retention bring way more value. 

For instance, according to SmallBizGenius, 82% of companies agree that customer retention is cheaper than acquisition. Apart from that, 65% of a company’s revenue comes from existing clients, and increasing the investment in retention by only 5% already gives you a boost in profits by 25% to 95%. Impressive, right?

So what should you do to reach such results? 

One component that impacts brand-client relationships is website design. This article will give you three design tricks that will encourage your customers to come back to your site more and more. 

1. Rethink Your Website Structure

It is hard to imagine a website visitor who would spend more than five minutes (usually it’s way less) trying to figure out the navigation system on your website. If you have a loaded, complex site structure, you will not retain a customer. 

Take Craigslist, for instance. Its navigation is not user-friendly, not to mention that it took over 30 seconds to load when the acceptable average load time should be no more than 1.7 seconds:

Here’s what proper website navigation presupposes:

  • Subordination should not go deeper than three levels.
  • A website should include eight horizontal categories max. 
  • The structure should be symmetrical. 
  • The menu should not be overstuffed with too many locations. 

Since we mentioned Craigslist, let’s take a look at its competitor AdPost, which has a better website structure:

Instead of listing all the product categories on the front page, like Craigslist, AdPost added them to the search menu, thus making the design more user-friendly and making the navigation cleaner. 

2. Make Your Site Multilingual

If you have visitors coming to your website from around the world, you should not assume they know English. A survey by Weglot found some interesting results regarding the attitude of buyers to shopping on international websites:

  • 52% of websites are in English, but English reaches only 25% of global users.
  • 56% of visitors say the website information in their language is more important than the price.
  • 73% of customers say they prefer to shop on sites in their own language. 

So, there is no doubt that having your website localized to several languages can increase customer retention, especially considering the last stat. 

To understand the proper practices of making a website multilingual, look at the examples of the best language learning apps. For instance, Preply has a drop-down menu where you can choose from multiple language options, including Polish, Ukrainian, German, and many more:

Translating your website to different languages will help the visitor understand the value of your product better. However, before you invest in localization, make sure you study the data on customer behaviors to understand which languages your audience speaks. 

3. Invest in Custom Illustrations

Some companies don’t bother much with designing their websites, especially when it comes to custom elements, such as visuals. However, research has shown that the focus on branding in website design increases customer commitment and e-loyalty, as a result. 

Moreover, in the world of billions of websites, you need something that would help your business stand out. And custom illustrations are among those features that contribute to your site’s uniqueness. 

Just take a quick look at the Emiozaki Web site. It includes personalized illustrations and animation created in the form of a tablet that substitutes the navigation menu:

This website reflects the brand’s tone and style, and animation adds emotion to UX. Apart from that, it’s also an excellent example of structuring a website. 

Or, if you would like an example of a less loaded design, take a look at this personal portfolio by Victoire Douy. It also includes animations that add interactivity to the design. For instance, you can play with the shadow of the girl’s hand:

So, if you want your website to attract more customers and encourage them to hang out for longer, take the creative approach. Hiring an illustrator is, of course, costly, but it will help your site stand out. 

Wrapping Up

As you can see, you’ll have to put in a lot of work to bring forward website design that increases online customer retention. You just have to employ our three best practices. Let’s quickly recap them:

  • Rethink your website structure; it should make the navigation easier. 
  • Consider making your site multilingual; you’ll retain more international visitors. 
  • Invest in custom illustrations to help consumers differentiate your brand from your competitors. 

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Side Hustles for Web Design Professionals: How to Make Some Extra Cash

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A career as a web designer can be extremely lucrative. The average web designer in the US makes around $50-55,000 per year, equating to an hourly rate of around $25. Of course, not every designer will automatically get a full-time, high-paying job as soon as they earn their web design credentials.

Sometimes, you might need to generate a little extra cash, perhaps to supplement your part-time income or keep the lights on while you’re taking some new courses. You can even use your web design skills to earn some extra money on the side while working a standard 9-to-5.

Today, we will be looking at some of the most effective ways to make extra cash on your web design skills.

1. Freelance

Starting with the simplest option, working as a freelancer is one of the best ways to start making cash with your design skills. There are dozens of websites out there to help freelancers find clients these days. Some of the best options include:

  • Toptal: For web developers, designers, and software experts;
  • Upwork: For all kinds of design freelancing;
  • 99Designs: Excellent for selling your designs whenever you like;
  • Dribbble: Display your work and find new clients;
  • Behance: Sell everything from animations to videos;
  • Envato Studio: Sell packages for web design.

As a freelancer, you’ll be able to choose which hours you want to work, and which projects to work on. You can make money from all kinds of design skills this way, from making pages for a website to designing widgets and applications.

However, you’ll also be responsible for tracking down potential leads, building your portfolio, and managing your own taxes, so keep this in mind.

2. Sell Design Assets

As a web design professional, you’ll end up with a lot of assets over the years. Whether you’re working freelance or full-time, not every asset you create is going to be picked up by your customers. Sometimes, you’ll end up with unused content sitting on your computer.

Fortunately, you can leverage these assets for some extra cash. You can sell things like icons, backgrounds, UI assets, and more. You can even sell themes on sites like ThemeForest if you’ve built something your clients weren’t happy with.

There’s a market out there for just about every asset, from icons and PSD templates to documents, fonts, UI assets, backgrounds, and brushes. You might even build your own website where you can sell assets in the future.

3. Design and Sell NFTs

Feel like getting in on the cutting-edge of a new marketplace? NFTs are probably one of the hottest topics in the digital world today. As concepts like Web 3.0 and the metaverse gain traction, NFTs will only become more valuable.

Countless companies and innovators are looking for people to design their NFTs for them these days. If you don’t mind dedicating some of your free time to creating digital graphics, you’re in for a significant amount of earning potential.

If you learn enough about the NFT landscape and blockchain, you could even create your own NFTs. However, this would probably require a lot of time and research. You can learn more about the NFT design and art landscape here.

4. Become a Consultant

Don’t have time to build endless new websites right now? No problem, just help other people build their sites instead. Consultants are people in any industry with expertise and insights they can share to support other people. As a web design consultant, you can offer your expertise to other upcoming freelance designers or business leaders.

You’ll need to invest some time into building your personal brand as a consultant. This means developing your social media pages (like LinkedIn) and creating a portfolio. It also helps to have an air of thought leadership. This usually means you’ll need to share at least some content online.

Consulting can be an excellent way to share your skills with other people without having to do all the work of building a design course.

5. Teach Web Design

On the other hand, if you like the idea of being a teacher, you can make money almost passively with web design courses and webinars these days. While you do have the option of selling one-on-one education to students, this will usually take up a lot of your time.

If your focus right now is on a side hustle to increase your earnings, it’s often much easier to use a site like Udemy or Skillshare. The great thing about teaching web design these days, it’s much easier than you might expect. The majority of solutions on the web allow you to drip content to your clients automatically. This means you only have to create the content once.

You can create a handful of videos, quizzes, and downloadable assets, and make money off your educational resources while you sleep.

6. Create a Web Design Blog

Blogging is still a surprisingly lucrative way to make money. If you have a creative streak and you know how to write about web design in a way other people can understand, you can turn this into an excellent side hustle.

Start by building your own website using your design skills, then start publishing regular blogs with the content you know your customers would be interested in. It’s a good idea to cover a range of topics, from Photoshop, to how to design widgets and more. You can even share reviews of various web design tools and add affiliate links to earn money that way.

Make sure you use SEO strategies to improve your chances of customers actually seeing your blog and promote your content as often as you can across social media. Once you have your blog, you can make money from it by:

  • Working as an affiliate and promoting design products;
  • Showing banner ads or sponsored posts on your website;
  • Selling digital products through your blog (like themes).

If you decide to take the affiliate route, here are some excellent programs to consider.

7. Contribute to other Websites

If you don’t have time to launch your own website and build a following for your blog, you can still make money from writing in other ways. Becoming a freelance web design writer means you can sell your blogs and content to other leading publications.

Many popular websites are constantly looking for new content to add to their blog. If you develop a strong relationship with some of these site owners, you could get yourself a regular gig.

Contributing to other sites as a writer helps you to develop your thought leadership. Many companies will even allow you to link back to your social media pages or profile.

At the same time, you get to earn some extra money writing about things you enjoy.

8. Sell Themes and Templates

A lot of web designers today rely on other themes and templates created for WordPress to help them build their websites. Access to themes and templates can make building a new website a much easier, straightforward process.

If you’ve got some excellent coding prowess, you can develop and sell a host of website themes and templates, and sell them wherever you choose. As mentioned above, there are a number of websites available for selling web design assets. Alternatively, you can sell your own packages and templates on your website, depending on your needs.

If you create a particularly valuable theme, you can actually earn a full-time passive income over time. Placing your themes and templates on marketplace sites will also get you a lot of attention from potential clients in the future.

9. Flip Websites

If you’ve ever seen one of those shows where someone buys a house, makes it look great, and then sells it for a higher price, you’ll understand the basic premise of flipping websites. The idea is to purchase an existing website for a low price (preferably with a good domain name), then fix it up to sell on a website selling directory.

If you want to earn a decent amount of money for your website, you’ll need to dedicate a decent amount of time to building traffic, improving the appearance of the site, and so on. However, it can be fun to take on these projects in your free time if you’re looking for a way to hone your skills.

You might learn some important lessons about how to make websites more profitable while you’re flipping your various sites, which could make you more appealing to customers in the long term.

10. Write a Book

Similar to flipping websites or producing an income from a high-traffic blog, writing a book isn’t something that’s going to give you a lot of extra income overnight. However, it can be an excellent source of passive income in time if you know how to use this strategy correctly.

If you have a specialist skill in web design, or you serve a specific niche, you can generate a lot of attention for an eBook or physical book sharing plenty of accurate and specific information. Remember, writing about web design, in general, will usually make it harder to earn money because there’s already a lot of competition out there.

Writing a book is a fantastic way to create a possible extra source of income as a side hustle, and it can also make you more credible if you decide to go full-time with your web design skills in the future. It’s definitely more impressive to present yourself to clients as a published author.

Remember to advertise your book whenever you can to improve your chances of additional sales.

Find Your Side Hustle

Web design skills are highly sought after in various parts of the digital world. If you’re willing to devote a little time and creativity to exploring the various avenues above, they can all deliver an excellent source of income to you and your potential business. All you need to do is figure out which side hustle makes the most sense for you.

Remember, there’s no one-size-fits-all. In some cases, you might even be able to run multiple side hustles at the same time, particularly if you’re using strategies for passive income, like writing your own book or selling your own course.

 

Featured image via Unsplash.

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Data Analysis Using Google Cloud Data Studio

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Introduction

Google Cloud Data Studio is a tool for transforming data into useful reports and data dashboards. As of now, Google Data Studio has 22 inbuilt Google Connectors and 571 different Partner connectors which help in connecting data from BigQuery, Google Ads, Google Sheets, Cloud Spanner, Facebook Ads Data, Adobe Analytics, and many more. 

Once the data is imported, reports and dashboards can be created by a simple drag and drop and using various filter options. Google Cloud Data Studio is out of the Google Cloud Platform, which is why it is completely free. 

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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20 Best New Sites, May 2022

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Sometimes it’s easy to feel like the world is going to pieces all around us, especially when we’re doom scrolling Twitter between news alerts every few minutes. But if we step back a little, things may not seem so bad.

On the web, we see companies and individuals taking a positive stand, making changes, and carrying on despite challenging circumstances. So in this month’s collection, we celebrate confidence and accentuate the positive, as the song says. Enjoy!

Plastic Bionic

The ‘change view’ option is well used in this portfolio site for Plasticbionic design studio. The grid view is especially pleasing.

Fabricca

Creative agency Fabricca has gone for a simple look, with some appealing illustrations and custom icons.

Normand

The color scheme and display font choice (Knockout) make a strong statement here for law firm Normand.

Dumpling Delivery

We all need some bored-on-a-slow-friday-afternoon distraction from time to time, and Mailchimp delivers the goods here.

OTR

OTR is a mental health service for young people aged 11-25. The site does a great job of feeling approachable and friendly to younger users while not being condescending, cutesy, or childish.

neueMeta

Good use of block color adds extra depth to this otherwise brutalist portfolio site for neueMeta design studio.

Vitra Chair Finder

This interactive questionnaire helps the customer identify the best chair for their needs. The animation is done well here, and a page of swirling Vitra chairs is a lovely thing to see.

Chia Studios

A good balance here of serious and fun in Chia Studio’s portfolio site, professional but friendly.

Sagmeister 123

The concept behind this limited clothing range designed by Stefan Sagmeister is that, taking the long-term view, the world is actually getting better. As such, the Sagmeister 123 site has an overall feeling of quiet positivity. And a koala.

RecPak

RecPak is a meal replacement shake designed for taking during outdoor activities. The site has an active, dynamic feel that works well to convey a sense of rugged outdoor adventure.

Alicia Moore

This site for Alicia Moore clothing brand oozes style and sophistication with soft colors and beautiful fashion photography.

Think Packaging

Think Packaging’s website has a bright, bold, fun feel. Case studies are well presented visually but keep text to a minimum.

BP&O

Brand design and packaging blog BP&O has added extended content for subscribers, and their new site is a pleasure to browse.

The Future Factory

The Future Factory is a business lead generation agency, which doesn’t sound, well, a bit dull. But, some funky animation and slightly quirky type certainly do not convey dullness.

Polybion

Polybion’s new website has a spacious feel with a rich color scheme adding a sense of confidence and brand maturity.

The Empathy Experiment

The Empathy Experiment is an interactive ‘game’ from digital agency media.monks that examines empathy and inclusivity in the workplace while at the same time showcasing some technical skills.

Belle Epoque

The opening scroll on Belle Epoque’s site is really pleasing, and the random floating shapes are intriguing.

Richard Ekwonye

Richard Ekwonye’s portfolio site is clean and straightforward. Skills are on display, but without intruding on the content.

SND

SND has created UI sound kits. The site is as simple as it could possibly be, and yet it is impossible not to investigate all the sounds and start imagining where you could use them.

KMZ Industries

Regular readers will know how much we like technical/industrial-made-interesting sites, and this one for KMZ grain storage systems is a perfect example.

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Debugging jsoup Java Code in Production Using Lightrun

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Scraping websites built for modern browsers is far more challenging than it was a decade ago. jsoup is a convenient API that makes scraping websites trivial via DOM traversal, CSS Selectors, JQuery-Like methods, and more. But it isn’t without its caveat. Every scraping API is a ticking time bomb.

Real-world HTML is flaky. It changes without notice since it isn’t a documented API. When our Java program fails in scraping, we’re suddenly stuck with a ticking time bomb. In some cases, this is a simple issue that we can reproduce locally and deploy. But some nuanced changes in the DOM tree might be harder to observe in a local test case. In those cases, we need to understand the problem in the parse tree before pushing an update. Otherwise, we might have a broken product in production.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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APIs Outside, Events Inside

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This is an article from DZone’s 2022 Enterprise Application Integration Trend Report.

For more:

Read the Report

In the echo chambers of application development, we constantly hear the mantra « API-first, » but this slogan has a fundamental flaw: APIs should typically be the last choice when building a distributed application. The correct war cry ought to instead be: « APIs outside, events inside. »

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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How to Use Shipa to Make Kubernetes Adoption Easier for Developers

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Kubernetes offers developers tremendous advantages… if they can overcome the platform’s inherent complexities. It can be a big « if. » Without additional tooling, developers aren’t able to simply develop their applications on Kubernetes, but must also become experts in writing complex YAML templates to define Kubernetes resources. A relatively new tool called Shipa provides an application management framework that largely relieves developers of this burden, enabling dev teams to ship applications with no Kubernetes expertise required.

Having recently put the tool to the test, this article will demonstrate how to install and utilize Shipa to simplify Kubernetes and ease some common developer frustrations.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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When UX Goes Bad (and How to Fix It)

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Designing for user experiences is what all designers do. UX is often thought of as the preserve of app or web designers; however, even a print designer laying out a magazine anticipates reader reaction to the scale of type, the placement of adverts, and the art direction of successive stories.

Because all designers design user experiences, the role of UX Designer has come to mean someone focused on creating a product or service utilizing research and testing to guide decision-making.

To research and test anything, you need metrics: a baseline and a target against which to measure. No one set of metrics is suitable for all projects, but because UX tends to be for financial profit, the Pirate Metrics Framework — Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue — is a good starting place.

You might seek out very different metrics in some cases. For instance, a museum might measure the success of its education program based on how many students go on to study paleontology. However, those types of metrics are notoriously difficult to quantify. Excepting a few niche cases, successful UX increases user productivity, decreases errors, reduces the cost of support, and increases sales.

So if it’s as easy as counting dollars, why does UX go bad?

UX vs. Design Principles

To understand what UX is, you need to understand what UX is not.

One of the most straightforward design principles to understand is hierarchy: bigger is more important, i.e., a heading is visually stronger than a sub-heading, a sub-heading is visually stronger than the body text.

Design principles stem from one thing: human-centered design. At the most basic level, bigger is more important because the bigger a saber-toothed tiger appears, the more likely it intends to eat me.

The evolution of human beings is so slow that had a smartphone existed at the time, a neanderthal would have been able to tap a button with the same level of precision as me. Prehistoric man shares the same minimum button size as modern man: 48 x 48px. Design principles don’t change, don’t require research, and don’t need verifying with tests.

On the other hand, a neanderthal would not have understood a smartphone, let alone an app. You only need to step back by a single generation to find perfectly intelligent people baffled by a commonly employed design pattern.

Unlike design principles, user experience is a house built on sand. When the sand shifts, the walls crack. The bricks are still solid, but the rain gets in.

Because effective UX is temporary, so is the ROI.

Technology Breaks UX

Technology unfolds at a rapid pace. As technology develops, the user experience defined by that technology changes.

The classic example is the mobile revolution, but technological change does not necessarily mean hardware. One of the most significant shifts in UXD (User Experience Design) in my career has been the popularisation of AJAX — the process of using JavaScript to load new data without refreshing the page. This seamlessness has been around since the early 2000s, but it’s only in the last ten years, as the code to achieve it has simplified, that it’s been widely used.

Jakob’s Law states that users spend most of their time on other sites and, as a result, prefer your site to function like other sites by following familiar design patterns.

Even if your UX is rigorously tested and optimized, when other sites and services carry out their own research, they are testing against the background of younger technology, and the “other sites” Jakob Nielsen refers to begin to change. As a result, the UX of your site is gradually eroded.

The consequence of continual technological change is that user research is constantly invalidated. The UX of an app, site, or service begins to degrade as soon as it is created.

User-Experience Lifecycle

Human beings have two deep-seated motivations: survival and procreation. The most important, survival, depends on discovery — new food sources, new routes through dangerous territory, new ways to skin a mammoth. We are biologically programmed to seek out the new.

A typical user passes through three phases of a relationship with a site, app, or service: discovery > comfort > boredom. Churn, or drop-off, tends to occur in the discovery phase (if the comfort phase is too slow in developing) or the boredom phase. The sweet spot is the comfort phase. That’s the part of the business-customer relationship in which the customer requires minimal support and is least likely to drop off.

The most effective form of UX — meaning the one that satisfies most metrics — rapidly moves a user from discovery to comfort and then continually eases the user back to the start of the comfort phase without tipping back into discovery.

This can be achieved with numerous micro-discoveries, tiny chunks of new experience, from simple functionality tweaks to style revisions.

Summary

All UXD, regardless of the quality, level of investment, and skill of the practitioner, begins to degrade the moment it is created.

Design principles like simplicity are good indicators of successful UID (User Interface Design) and are timeless; comprehensive design systems, brand assets, and content offer good ROI.

The most effective UX is broadly familiar and continually refreshed in small ways, allowing users to enjoy the comfort of the familiar while also experiencing the excitement of discovery again and again.

 

Featured image uses photos by Wolfgang Hasselmann & Shainee Fernando.

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