1. Podbean

The post 15 Best Podcast Hosting Platforms first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

2 novembre 2022/par Service comm.

3 Essential Design Trends, November 2022

Color and depth are key themes this month as we look at what design trends are happening across websites. Red is the primary color of choice, and you can see it almost everywhere; the new thing is that it’s being used in backgrounds and as more than an accent color. Additionally, 3D elements and depth of field are making significant impressions.

Here’s what’s trending in design this month.

1. Red Backgrounds

Red is the color of power, passion, and attention, but until recently, it wasn’t the go-to choice for website backgrounds. Now trending is red as a background color.

These designs are bold and in-your-face with bright color, an almost brash feel in some cases, and a lot of impact.

But it works.

In the projects below, red is a powerful tool to help convey the message of the website design. The color demands that you engage with the design to see what’s happening and the content therein, and in the case of Pentel, it’s part of the brand color.

Arze uses a bold red background with a smaller inset of contrasting color to show items on the site. It’s an interesting and quite bold choice. The red background carries through the scroll as well. This is a use of color that verges on off-putting but still gets the point across and helps show products thanks to a lot of contrast.

Russia Invaded Ukraine is a perfect use of red as a color that invokes feelings of passion with content to explain the conflict. Red can be a charged color; here, that’s precisely the intent.

Pentel uses a red background that’s a little softer than the previous examples. Here, red is a brand color, and they use the background to help draw attention to items and elements on the site. The red carries below the scroll as well to keep the theme moving.

2. 3D Icons and Graphics

Three-dimensional elements seem to keep ebbing and flowing with designers. We see a lot of 3D in projects, and then it seems to vanish again. It’s like we haven’t really figured out how to use it well or in a way that works with the content of various designs.

Admittedly, 3D icons, graphics, and illustrations can be difficult to create and use. Often they look a bit light and don’t go with all kinds of content. Therefore, they don’t get used that often.

Each of these projects takes a different approach:
Admilk goes all in with a series of 3D animations featuring the brand name. They are fun, light, and a bit unexpected. The graphics include objects that look like balloons, milk and cereal, and grass with flowers. (Click through to see each one.)

Refokus uses three-dimensional objects that move on a scroll to create directional flow and visual interest in a space where there’s not much else in terms of art. The objects stick with the aesthetic on the scroll and create an interesting element that carries you through the design without overwhelming you with tricks.

Junni is one of those website designs that goes all in with 3D. This illustrated bubble style of graphics is beginning to be a 3D trend in itself as a style that’s being used more and more with icons and even emojis. It has a light feel, and the animation almost makes it seem silly and somewhat childish.

3. Long Focal Depth

It’s been a while since a true photography or videography trend made this roundup, but there are so many instance of this image/video style in projects it can’t be ignored. Long focal depth is almost everywhere, from travel sites to architecture to e-commerce.

Long focal depth or depth of field allows the image to show a lot of space in an image in a way that’s sharp and viewable. Depth of field, in photography terms, is the distance between the closest and farthest objects in an image that are acceptably sharp.

In this trend, each website features a strong image with plenty of depth of field. The image can be still or moving, and the image is the thing that really draws you into the design.

What’s great about this trend is that you can see a lot of a scene and even feel like you are part of it. It’s an engaging visual concept that can work for a variety of purposes.

Interest Media uses a video reel that slowly zooms even further out. The image is lovely, and with the text overlay is easy to read and understand. It almost feels like you are walking backward on the bridge in the video.

Bloomingdales uses an immersive video with plenty of depth and virtual reality elements to create an immersive shopping experience. It makes you feel like you are in the store via the website and encourages shopping. It’s a fun way for the retailer to showcase its 150th anniversary.

Arredamento Design uses a photo with a wide focal area to provide interior design inspiration. Note the crisp lines and ease of which you find yourself engaging with the image, or even imagining a room like the one pictured. The effect used in the design, with a zoom on scroll, pulls the user into the image even more. Depth here keeps the motion and zoom from being too much and almost allows you to see more and feel even closer to objects that are further away in the image.

Conclusion

There are two trends here that tend to cross over into one another: The color red is everywhere and having a major emergence this fall as a dominant hue and depth, and three-dimensional focus is everywhere.

Both are highly usable design elements that can be incorporated easily, making them even more likely to continue to gain prominence in projects.

The post 3 Essential Design Trends, November 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Source de l’article sur sap.com

31 octobre 2022/par Service comm.

Obtenir des résultats commerciaux clés grâce à la durabilité sociale

Actualités, ERP & Applications, SAP

Il ne fait aucun doute que la durabilité transforme l’économie mondiale. La diminution des ressources planétaires, le changement climatique, la division sociale et économique, l’évolution des préférences des consommateurs, l’activisme des employés, l’augmentation des réglementations et la baisse de la confiance institutionnelle conduisent tous à ce que les organisations soient de plus en plus mesurées en fonction de leur objectif ainsi que du profit. Et c’est bon pour les affaires.

Agir de manière socialement responsable renforce la réputation de la marque d’une organisation. Les demandeurs d’emploi et les consommateurs veulent aujourd’hui soutenir les organisations qui défendent quelque chose d’important et qui ont un impact positif sur la société dans son ensemble. Les investisseurs mettentdavantage l’accent sur les objectifs de développement durable en mettant davantage l’accent sur l’impact social. Les droits de l’homme et les réglementations environnementales se multiplient rapidement. Tout cela exige une approche plus durable de la part des PDG et des chefs d’entreprise.

Les gens, la planète et la prospérité

Lorsque vous entendez le mot durabilité, la première chose à laquelle vous pensez peut-être est le recyclage ou la durabilité environnementale, mais la durabilité va bien au-delà de l’élimination des bouteilles d’eau à usage unique et de la réduction de la consommation de combustibles fossiles. Une approche holistique de la durabilité intègre la durabilité sociale, environnementale et économique – ou les personnes, la planète et la prospérité.

Les organisations reconnaissent de plus en plus la nécessité de se concentrer autant sur la durabilité sociale, ou sur les personnes, qu’elles l’ont été sur la durabilité économique et environnementale – les trois ensemble soutiennent et stimulent la durabilité de l’entreprise. Les gens constituent la société, ont un impact sur l’environnement et alimentent l’économie. Les gens sont au cœur de toute stratégie visant à progresser vers les objectifs de développement durable. Dans le milieu de travail d’aujourd’hui, les RH ont à la fois la possibilité et la responsabilité de veiller à ce que les employées soient au centre du travail en créant un environnement dans lequel la main-d’œuvre et l’organisation peuvent s’épanouir.

People Sustainability Is Emerging as a New Strategic Business Imperative

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People Sustainability Is Emerging as a New Strategic Business Imperative

Définir la durabilité sociale

La durabilité sociale se concentre sur le traitement de ces dernières – celles qui font partie de la main-d’œuvre d’une organisation, à travers leurs chaînes d’approvisionnement et dans les communautés dans lesquelles elles opèrent – de manière éthique et équitable.

Tout comme la durabilité environnementale et économique qui nécessitent une préservation et une utilisation prudentes des ressources naturelles et financières, la durabilité sociale nécessite de traiter les personnes et le potentiel humain comme des ressources précieuses qui doivent être soutenues et valorisées pour favoriser la résilience, l’agilité et la réalisation des objectifs de durabilité.

Les entreprises qui accordent la priorité à la durabilité sociale, en créant un impact social et en créant une culture plus diversifiée et inclusive, sont en mesure de stimuler l’engagement et la productivité des employés. Ils sont également mieux placés pour attirer et retenir les talents. Penny Stoker, leader mondial des talents chez EY, explique comment la durabilité sociale est au cœur de la construction d’un monde du travail meilleur.

Déballer les six piliers de la durabilité sociale

L’équipe SAP SuccessFactors HR Research a identifié six domaines distincts, ou piliers, qui comprennent la durabilité sociale. Bien que les domaines soient distincts, il est également clair qu’il existe un chevauchement entre ces piliers. Au centre de tout cela, bien sûr, se trouve la culture – car elle dicte tant de comportements à la fois à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur d’une organisation. Découvrons un peu ces domaines dans le contexte des processus RH et des ressources humaines.

Santé et sécurité

Au minimum, vous devez vous assurer que la main-d’œuvre est à l’abri des risques physiques pour la santé et la sécurité et a accès aux nécessités de base. Votre processus d’intégration offre-t-il aux nouvelles recrues une formation et un équipement de sécurité appropriés dès le premier jour ? Avez-vous une visibilité sur l’ensemble de vos effectifs, y compris leurs emplacements ? Savoir qui et où se trouve votre personnel à tout moment vous permet de réagir rapidement en temps de crise et de fournir un soutien en cas de besoin.

Diversité, équité et inclusion

Ici, l’accent est mis sur le traitement juste et équitable de chaque individu, quel que soit son groupe d’identité sociale ou son système de croyances, et sur la garantie qu’il ressent un véritable sentiment d’appartenance. Êtes-vous en mesure d’attirer et d’engager des demandeurs d’emploi d’horizons divers ? Avez-vous un processus de sélection et d’entretien standardisé ? Offrez-vous une transparence salariale ? Mesurez-vous et suivez-vous les objectifs de diversité, d’équité et d’inclusion ?

Bien-être et équilibre

Au-delà de la santé et de la sécurité de base, ce domaine vise à garantir que le bien-être holistique des employés – psychologique, social, financier et professionnel – est prioritaire et soutenu avec les outils et les ressources nécessaires. Offrez-vous un ensemble complet d’avantages sociaux avec des options intéressantes ? Vos employés se sentent-ils à l’aise de se mettre entièrement au travail ? Avez-vous favorisé une culture de dialogue continu entre les managers et leurs subordonnés ?

Confiance et transparence

Ici, l’accent est mis sur le fait que les employés ont une voix, comprennent comment les décisions clés qui les affectent sont prises et font confiance à leur organisation pour agir de manière éthique. Écoutez-vous régulièrement vos employés et agissez-vous en fonction des commentaires qu’ils fournissent ? Avez-vous établi des politiques et des processus pour l’utilisation éthique des technologies intelligentes et la confidentialité et la protection des données ? Publiez-vous publiquement des indicateurs de diversité ?

Autonomisation et croissance

Ici, les employés reçoivent la clarté, le soutien et les outils nécessaires pour développer leurs compétences et sont habilités à influencer leur trajectoire de carrière. Offrez-vous des options d’apprentissage inclusif pour répondre aux besoins et aux préférences d’apprentissage d’une main-d’œuvre diversifiée ? Assurez-vous que les managers fournissent des commentaires équitables et exploitables à leurs équipes ? Offrez-vous un accès équitable aux opportunités de développement ?

Objectif organisationnel et RSE

Dans ce dernier pilier, l’organisation travaille activement à redonner et à avoir un impact positif sur le monde ; les employés sont encouragés à participer et se sentent dynamisés par la mission et les valeurs de l’organisation. Assurez-vous que les objectifs individuels sont alignés sur les objectifs de l’entreprise pour accroître le sens du but et le sens du travail ? Offrez-vous à votre personnel l’espace nécessaire pour poursuivre ses passions ?

Que peuvent faire les organisations pour favoriser la durabilité sociale ?

Dans la plupart des organisations aujourd’hui, différentes parties de l’entreprise dirigent ces efforts avec une connaissance ou une collaboration minimale des stratégies des autres. Cependant, nous devons commencer quelque part. La première étape la plus logique est de comprendre où vous en êtes aujourd’hui. Avez-vous une stratégie unifiée – au moins sur certains de ces piliers ? Commencez les conversations et commencez à briser les silos organisationnels.

Donnez la priorité aux gens, et la planète et la prospérité suivront. C’est ce que signifie être une organisation résiliente, axée sur les résultats et axée sur les personnes. Une organisation non seulement équipé pour répondre aux besoins commerciaux d’aujourd’hui, mais qui s’adapte aux besoins commerciaux de demain.

Pour en savoir plus, regardez une rediffusion du discours d’ouverture de SuccessConnect, Libérez le pouvoir du potentiel humain et changez le travail pour de bon.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kim Lessley est global director of Solution Marketing chez SAP SuccessFactors.

Mots-clés: Ressources Humaines,

The post Obtenir des résultats commerciaux clés grâce à la durabilité sociale appeared first on SAP France News.

31 octobre 2022/par Service comm.

10 Best Website Builders for 2023

When you need a website, you have two options, you can hire someone who’s an expert in website building to design it for you, or you can make it yourself.

Hiring someone with experience building a website means you’ll get a more professional result, and you should achieve a good return on your investment. However, hiring a freelancer or a design agency has plenty of pitfalls. Budgets can spiral, timescales get stretched, and the end result might not meet your expectations.

The answer might be to build your own website using a website builder. And the best site builders are designed to help you do just that — most don’t require any design or coding knowledge.

Creating a website with a website builder is usually cheaper than outsourcing the job, and the results can be almost as good as a bespoke website. There are even some free website builders out there.

The key is to choose the right website builder that ticks all your boxes and delivers what you want without paying through the nose for bells and whistles you don’t need.

We’ve tested the best website builders on the market. We’ve quizzed professionals and first-time users. We’ve poked around in the dark corners of UIs. All to bring you this guide to the top website builders on the web. This comprehensive guide to the best website builders for 2023 contains everything you need to know when selecting a site builder.

What To Look For in a Website Builder

The most significant obstacle people face when using website builders is you don’t know what you don’t know. There’s so much information online that it’s hard to know where to start.

That’s why we put together this guide to the best website builders, so small businesses everywhere can make an informed decision about website building.

Choose a Site Builder With High-Quality Code

The first thing you need to look for is production-ready code. That means source code that is modern, robust, and hack-free. (All of the website builders on this list meet those criteria.)

Identify What A Successful Website Looks Like To You

Professional designers start by identifying a website’s purpose. Websites perform best when they have a clear purpose.

If you’re a wedding photographer, you will want to showcase your portfolio and generate new leads. You’ll want to sell products online if you own a clothing store. If you’re a community group, you want to raise awareness and encourage public interest.

Whatever your goal, a website builder listed below will help you achieve it. And choosing the best option for you will be a more straightforward process if you’re clear about that goal to start with.

Think About Design Flexibility

One of the defining characteristics of any website builder is how flexible its designs are. Some of the best website builders give you complete control over every detail of your design. Other website builders limit you to choosing from a selection of pre-designed blocks.

If you’re prepared to compromise on your design, you will have more options. On the other hand, if you want to achieve a specific look, you may need to opt for a more flexible website builder.

Be Honest With Yourself

Next, consider your own level of experience and the amount of time you have to invest in learning to use a tool and build a website. Some website builders will get you online fast, but even some of the best website builders take a little time to learn.

Some people can spare 3–4 hours every weeknight to learn how to leverage a complex website builder — that helps a lot when building a complex site like an online store. Other people have family commitments or social engagements and just need to get something done fast.

There’s no right or wrong answer. You don’t need prior experience, and you don’t need to commit to an evening course to get online. If you want to put a website online in 15 minutes and then forget about it, that’s fine. Make sure you choose a website builder that can help you do that.

Check Out the Support Options

Speaking of your experience, we don’t want to put a damper on things, but what will you do if something goes wrong?

Websites experience problems from which website builders are not exempt. Most of the best website builders use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for web hosting. But CDNs aren’t infallible.

Some site builders offer a free domain, and all of the best website builders allow you to use a custom domain name and free SSL certificate. What happens if there’s a problem with it? Does the site builder’s support extend to domains?

Happily, most website builders offer an excellent level of customer support. So before you start, check what help you’re entitled to and how to get assistance should a problem arise.

Make Full Use of Any Free Trial

Most of the best website builders offer a free trial or even a free-forever package. The free trial is your opportunity to try out the UI (User Interface) and get a feel for the product.

All the website builders we’ve listed below specialize in a particular type of site. Most cater to small business owners. Each has pros and cons and can help you achieve your online goals. However, in the end, the success of your site comes down to you; you can use a free web builder and still succeed if you’re willing to put in the work.

Trust your instincts: if you find a particular site builder intuitive, then the chances are you’ll be able to create a great website with it.

Wix: Best Website Builder for Small Business Owners

Wix is widely considered to be one of the best website builders of 2022, and a quick glance at its extensive list of features will tell you why we expect it to still be the top website builder platform in 2023.

First up is a vast number of templates giving you more selection than almost any rival. There’s so much choice that you’ll probably spend longer choosing your template than actually building your site!

Wix’s editor uses an intuitive drag-and-drop editor that enables anyone to create just about any design. It’s not the most straightforward editor on the market. Still, Wix has extensive documentation, so if you have the time to tackle a modest learning curve, you should quickly get to grips with the UI.

Of course, Wix also includes core features like custom domain names and free SSL certificates.

On top of these features, Wix provides various marketing tools to help your site grow toward profitability.

Finally, for freelancers and web design agencies, Wix provides Editor X, a professional solution for creating multiple websites for clients. Editor X is an excellent addition to Wix’s lineup. However, it’s not the best option for design agencies (keep reading to find out which tool we think tops Editor X).

Wix Features

Wix is the biggest website builder in the world and includes hundreds of features that make building a website simple. Here are just some of the highlights.

Huge Range of Templates

Wix boasts a huge range of 800+ customizable templates for every kind of business, from online stores to simple marketing sites.

Intuitive Drag and Drop Editor

Wix’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor makes it a simple task to achieve almost any design with little to no design experience.

There are a couple of downsides to this approach. Firstly, many small business owners opt for a website builder because they need a guided design process — unlimited options can actually make things harder. Secondly, the highly flexible design system Wix offers can introduce unexpected bugs at different device sizes.

Editor X

Editor X is Wix’s solution for freelance designers and web design agencies. It allows you to build client sites with dedicated tools for professionals.

App Market

Wix’s AppMarket is a dedicated app store with hundreds of plugins that enable you to expand your website’s capabilities quickly and easily. You’ll find everything from table reservation apps for restaurants to social media integrations.

Velo

Velo is Wix’s open development platform for building web applications. This is an ambitious project that aims to move web builders into areas in which they typically cannot compete: complex web apps.

For most businesses, Velo is far beyond what you need; for most app developers, it isn’t enough yet. But it’s great to know this opportunity is on the horizon.

Ecommerce

Wix has a range of tools to help your ecommerce business grow. There are coupons, discounts, bookings, and shipping tools.

Ascend

Ascend is Wix’s built-in marketing suite. It includes a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) which is excellent for fostering long-term business relationships and eliminates the need for a third-party app.

Email Marketing Tools

Email is still the most effective way of staying in touch with your customers. Wix’s built-in email marketing tools make it easier to manage email campaigns, all from your Wix dashboard.

Free Domain

Wix will even give you a free domain for a year on everything except its basic package.

Pros

Relatively intuitive design process
Excellent documentation and quick-start guides
Reliable and secure system
Huge range of tools
Extensive plugin market

Cons

Sites are less responsive than some rivals
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) options are limited
Difficult to change templates once you’ve selected one
Image and video-heavy sites perform poorly on mobile devices
Design flexibility can introduce unexpected bugs

Pricing

Wix has multiple tiers of pricing depending on the features you require.

Note that the availability of some Wix plans varies depending on your location.

Website Plans

Website Plans are aimed at those users creating an individual site.

Combo: $16 per month — 2 Gb bandwidth and 3 Gb of storage, plus 30 minutes of video streaming.

Unlimited: $22 per month — Unlimited bandwidth, 5Gb storage, 1 hour of video streaming, and access to marketing tools.

Pro: $27 per month — Unlimited bandwidth, 50Gb storage, 2 hours of video, marketing tools, social media tools and priority support,

VIP: $45 per month — Unlimited bandwidth, 100Gb storage, 5 hours of video, marketing tools, social media tools, and priority support.

Business & Ecommerce Plans

If you want to accept payments online with Wix, you’ll need a business plan.

Business Basic: $27 per month — 20Gb storage space, 5 hours of video, online payments

Business Unlimited: $32 per month — 35 Gb of storage, 10 hours of video, multiple currencies, multi-channel selling, dropshipping, product reviews

Business VIP: $59 per month — 50Gb of storage, unlimited video, marketing, and sales tools, dropshipping, product reviews, and a loyalty program

Enterprise Plans

Wix provides custom solutions for enterprise customers. If you have a large site with complex needs, then Wix can design a complete solution for your brand. Contact Wix directly for pricing.

Bottom Line

Wix is one of the best website builders available for creating your own website. Its flexibility, massive range of features, and ability to scale are ideal for many new and established businesses. But, if anything, Wix’s vast range of options can be a hindrance and make its learning curve a little steeper than necessary.

Wix is a great allrounder, but it’s not the easiest, cheapest, or fastest website builder. So keep reading to discover the best alternatives to Wix.

Squarespace: Best Website Builder for Creatives

Squarespace is the ideal website builder for anyone for whom aesthetics are a primary concern; it boasts the most beautiful templates of any website builder.

On its higher tier packages, Squarespace allows ecommerce sites to host their own checkout. This is radically different from some website builders further down this list and ensures a consistent customer experience while maintaining a secure checkout.

For professional designers, Squarespace offers Circle, an invite-only program for professionals creating multiple sites in Squarespace. To qualify, you must build at least three websites on the Squarespace platform.

Squarespace Features

Beautiful Templates

Squarespace has hundreds of templates, widely considered to be amongst the most beautiful designs of any website builder.

Additionally, you can purchase Squarespace templates at a number of different design marketplaces, giving you even more options.

Powerful Ecommerce Features

Squarespace has everything you need to power an online store, from selling an individual item to a huge product range. You can even sell online classes.

Integrated Marketing Tools

Squarespace includes integrated marketing tools like email campaigns that carry your branding from your site to your customers’ inboxes.

Squarespace also includes a very capable blogging app with all the features you need to start publishing content that will engage your users and boost your position on SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages).

Circle

Circle is Squarespace’s partner program for professional web designers. You will need to build at least three Squarespace websites to qualify.

Members of Circle get free educational content to keep their skills up to date and access to product betas.

Pros

Award-winning templates
Incredible customer support
Seamless integrations
Simple but powerful ecommerce features
Create a stunning site in 15 minutes

Cons

Steeper learning curve
Limitations on navigation
Slower than average page speed
Premium-priced plugins
No free domain
Custom CSS restricted to the business plans

Pricing

Squarespace offers four simple pricing plans. Additionally, you can save up to 30% by opting to pay annually instead of monthly.

Personal: $23 per month — 2 contributors, curated templates, simple analytics, mobile version of sites

Business: $33 per month — unlimited contributors, business tools, advanced analytics, ecommerce with 3% transaction fees

Basic Commerce: $36 per month — unlimited contributors, business tools, ecommerce analytics, merchandising tools, 0% transaction fees.

Advanced Commerce: $65 per month — Everything in the basic commerce package plus abandoned cart recovery, subscriptions, advanced shipping options, and discounts, as well as APIs for third-party integrations.

Bottom Line

Squarespace offers undeniably beautiful sites. Its editing experience takes a little getting used to but is far from complex. Its simple, transparent pricing means your costs are predictable, and there is genuine value in its 30% discount for paying annually.

Due to its shallower navigation, it’s best suited to smaller online stores with dozens rather than hundreds of products. However, artists and craftspeople will love selling their work on Squarespace.

Shopify: Best Website Builder for Online Stores

Shopify is the best-known website builder for creating an online store, and for a good reason. Few website builders manage to handle online sales with the grace of Shopify’s ecommerce features.

That does not mean it’s without its failings. The biggest issue for most Shopify users is the restriction on the number of product variants, which is capped at 100, and always seems to be reached too quickly. Another common gripe is the styling restrictions placed on the cart in the name of security, which prevent anything but basic styling from being applied to your checkout process.

Shopify is one of the best online website builders, but it eschews the usual drag-and-drop interface approach and instead uses templates and editable code.

Templates typically come with styling options, and there is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) style editor for adding content. However, you’ll need to hire a developer or learn basic coding to customize your template significantly.

The upside of this approach is that there’s a vast Shopify ecosystem, with thousands of templates and plugins available in the dedicated store and on third-party marketplaces.

Shopify Features

Vast Number of Templates to Choose From

Shopify has a huge number of templates, there are hundreds of native templates, and there are thousands more available from third-party marketplaces.

Extensive Plugin Store

Shopify has an extensive plugin store with 6500+ add-ons, from apps to improve your UX to helpers to simplify third-party integrations with SaaS (Software as a Service) like Mailchimp and AliExpress.

Social Media Integration

Shopify isn’t just an online store; it makes selling products across multiple channels, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even email, a simple process.

Industry-Leading Education

Shopify has a plethora of resources to help you create an online store and maximize your sales. It provides online courses and community resources and a dedicated and knowledgeable customer support team.

Pros

Highly optimized checkout
Recognized and trusted platform
Sell across multiple channels like Etsy and Facebook
Huge app store
Manage large inventories easily
Fast customer support

Cons

Checkout has limited styling options
Coding knowledge is needed to fully extend Shopify
No simple drag-and-drop editor
Additional costs if buying a template or plugins
Steep learning curve compared to other website builders
Limits on the number of variations per product

Pricing

Shopify offers three website plans. You can save 50% if you pay annually instead of monthly.

Note: in addition to your plan, Shopify charges a per-sale percentage plus $0.30 for online transactions.

Basic: $29 per month — Basic reports, 2 staff accounts, 4 inventory locations, up to 77% shipping discount, 2.9% + $0.30 fee per transaction

Shopify: $79 per month — Professional reports, 5 staff accounts, 5 inventory locations, up to 88% shipping discount, 2.6% + $0.30 fee per transaction

Advanced: $299 per month — Custom reports, 15 staff accounts, 8 inventory locations, up to 88% shipping discount, 2.4% + $0.30 fee per transaction

Shopify is aimed at small businesses but also provides ShopifyPlus, an enterprise-grade solution for high-volume businesses that starts at $2,000 per month.

Bottom Line

Shopify sets the bar for ecommerce solutions. When it comes to selling online, it’s the first choice for many businesses.

Shopify occupies the middle ground between website builders and custom solutions. As such, making changes is difficult. Once you’ve chosen your template and exhausted the built-in features of the template, your only recourse for further changes is to hire a developer (or learn to code).

Shopify is laser-focused on ecommerce, so it’s a poor choice for anything but ecommerce. However, if you’re aiming to quickly establish an online store with scope to grow, Shopify is impossible to beat.

Webflow: Best Website Builder for Design Agencies

Webflow is a website builder geared solidly towards freelancers and design agencies concerned with building a website for their clients.

For professional website designers who possess at least a passing understanding of HTML & CSS, Webflow is an ideal way to create a website.

With its white labeling and a complete CMS (Content Management System), Webflow allows you to serve sites to clients as custom builds. Clients can then edit content in a simplified dashboard called Editor; this lessens the learning curve for clients and avoids the risk of them fiddling with site-breaking settings.

Webflow Features

Full CMS

Webflow employs a full CMS (Content Management System) to separate design and content and allow you to use data to create a website rapidly. In this respect it’s like a the best elements of Wix and WordPress combined.

Powerful Design Process

With Webflow you have the option to fully customize almost every aspect of your design, without code.

Start with a blank canvas, or a template, then use the drag-and-drop editor to add HTML elements onto your page. Create reusable symbols to speed up your site creation.

White Labeling

White labeling means teams can create client sites in Webflow without the client knowing how the site is built — design agencies don’t have to worry about clients cutting out the middleman and going straight to Webflow to save money.

Webflow Enterprise

Most website builders are out of their depth when it comes to enterprise-grade sites with high volumes of traffic. Not so Webflow, which delivers advanced security, traffic scaling, and guaranteed uptime for its enterprise customers.

Pros

Comprehensive SEO tools
Extensive customization options
Industry-leading documentation
Excellent for client work
Fast customer support
Awesome free plan

Cons

Not beginner-friendly
No plugin store
HTML & CSS knowledge advisable
Membership sites are only in beta
Complicated pricing
Eye-wateringly expensive

Pricing

Webflow offers a multitude of pricing options depending on whether you’re an individual, a reseller, or an online store.

If you’re running an individual site you’ll need either a website plan or an ecommerce plan. If you’re an agency planning to resell Webflow to your clients you’ll need a workspace plan for your team in addition to a website or ecommerce plan for every client site you publish.

Website Plans

If you’re an individual, Webflow provides three plans to choose from. You can save up to 22% by opting to pay annually instead of monthly.

Basic: $18 per month — 0 CMS items, 500 form submissions per month, 50Gb bandwidth.

CMS: $29 per month — 2,000 CMS items, 1,000 for submissions per month, 200Gb bandwidth, and up to 3 guest editors

Business: $49 per month — 10,000 CMS items, 2,500 form submissions per month, 400Gb bandwidth, up to 10 guest editors

Ecommerce Plans

To unlock features specifically designed for online selling, you need to opt for one of Webflow’s ecommerce plans. You can save up to 30% by opting to pay annually instead of monthly.

Standard: $42 per month — includes everything in the individual CMS plan, plus 500 products, 2% transaction fee, and a maximum of $50,000 in annual sales

Plus: $84 per month — includes everything in the individual business plan, plus 1,000 products, 0% transaction fee and a maximum of $200,000 in annual sales

Advanced: $235 per month — includes everything in the individual business plan, plus 3,000 products, 0% transaction fee, and unlimited annual sales

Team Plans

For teams, Webflow offers workspace plans in addition to website and ecommerce plans. There is a free plan while you learn Webflow, and you can save up to 33% by paying annually.

Note that team plans are charged per seat, so for example, the cost for four designers of the Growth package is $240 per month (not $60 per month).

Core: $28 / seat per month — for small in-house teams, up to 3 seats, a maximum of 10 unhosted sites, custom code and code export.

Growth: $60 / seat per month — for growing in-house teams, up to 9 seats, unlimited hosted sites, custom code, custom export.

Freelancer: $24 / seat per month — for freelancers or small agencies, up to 3 seats, full CMS access on unhosted sites

Agency: $42 / seat per month — for agencies, up to 9 seats, full CMS access on unhosted sites

Large teams with more than 9 team members will need to contact Webflow for its enterprise plan, which promises unlimited seats.

Bottom Line

Webflow is aimed at design agencies and freelancers who need a web host for client work and is one of the best website builders for managing multiple sites.

Due to its advanced feature set, Webflow is relatively complex to use. However, it is far simpler than a bespoke site, and anyone with a cursory understanding of web technologies should master it in a short space of time. Additionally, its Editor feature simplifies it for clients.

Unfortunately, Webflow’s ecommerce plans are expensive and ecommerce features are limited. Anyone looking to sell online might want to consider other site builders instead.

If you’re a design agency building multiple client sites, Webflow is an excellent platform to adopt…if you can afford the team plans.

Duda: Best Website Builder for SEO

Duda website builder has been outperforming its rivals since 2021, when Google introduced Core Web Vitals and, in the process, made SEO all about speed.

Duda produces blazing-fast, reliable sites and, in doing so, ticks all of Google’s boxes for a quality site that it wants to rank highly.

On top of this, Duda provides a white-label option, allowing design agencies to build sites for clients on the platform. In fact, this is what Duda was initially created for.

Duda offers beautiful design in a simple-to-use package. As such, it produces some of the best no-code websites.

Duda Features

Simple Editor

Duda offers a Simple Editor option that allows you to provide your clients with a simple website builder of their own. Predesign elements that work together, then let your clients combine them in whatever way they please.

Clients will feel empowered, and you get a website project out the door with less work and fewer revisions.

White Labeling

Duda is aimed squarely at freelancers and design agencies that want to foster an ongoing relationship with their clients.

Team Libraries

Build your own library of widgets, templates, and sections. Share across your entire team, so client projects are created with your in-house approach.

Omni-Channel Ecommerce

Duda enables ecommerce sales across the web and social media, with your inventory synced everywhere you sell, from Facebook to eBay and Amazon.

Managing a store is simple with store management apps for iOS and Android.

Pros

Extremely fast page speed
Beautiful templates
Award-winning customer support
Intuitive drag-n-drop interface

Cons

Relatively expensive
Limited plugin store

Pricing

Website Plans

Duda offers three pricing plans for websites, and you can save up to 33% by paying annually instead of monthly.

Basic: $19 per month — 1 website, email customer support only, no team or client collaboration

Team: $29 per month — 1 website, email chat and phone customer support, up to four team members, white label client access

Agency: $59 per month — 4 websites, priority email chat and phone customer support, up to ten team members, white label client access, widget builder, export control

Duda also offers custom plans for clients with enterprise-grade sites; contact them directly for pricing.

Ecommerce Plans

Duda provides ecommerce features as an add-on, which means if you want to use Duda to create an online store, you need to sign up for one of their website plans as well as one of their ecommerce plans.

Note: you can pair any of the ecommerce plans with any of the website plans; they don’t need to scale together.

You can save up to 25% on Duda’s ecommerce plans by paying annually instead of monthly.

Standard: $8 per month — Up to 100 products

Advanced: $22 per month — Up to 2,500 products, sell subscriptions

Unlimited: $49 per month — Unlimited products, sell subscriptions, Square PoS integration

Bottom Line

SEO is a complex subject, and many factors feed your ranking on Google, Bing, and other search engines.

What is universally accepted is that fast pages translate into a better ranking.

If you’re looking for a blazing-fast website builder to help you establish a strong online presence, Duda must be near the top of your shortlist.

WordPress.com: Best WordPress Website Builder

WordPress is a juggernaut of an app; its rise has been unstoppable, and 43% of the web is made up of WordPress sites. Furthermore, WordPress.com — not to be confused with WordPress.org — is a WordPress site builder. That means all you need to do is log in and have all the power and flexibility of WordPress at your fingertips.

The downside to all this power is that WordPress.com is a big step up in complexity from most of the site builders on this list. It’s not as complex as its self-hosted sibling, but you’ll still need to spend some time getting acquainted with the advanced features.

You’ve probably heard that WordPress is insecure. We’re sorry to say that’s true. WordPress’ main vulnerability is its third-party themes and plugins — the commonality of a WordPress site means criminals consider it worth exploiting. WordPress.com web hosting is considerably more secure than self-hosted WordPress.org, but hey, it’s still WordPress.

But if you decide the security risk is acceptable, WordPress.com offers an ecosystem of themes and plugins unparalleled for its range and variety.

WordPress.com Features

Huge Ecosystem

WordPress has a vast ecosystem, perhaps the largest of any design software. There are thousands of professionally designed themes, and over 50,000 plugins, providing enormous scope for customization.

When vulnerabilities are found, more often than not, it’s the result of a flaw in a plugin update. So if you install a lot of plugins, you are exposing yourself to increasing security risks.

Unfortunately, in order to take advantage of the WordPress ecosystem, you need to be on one of WordPress.com’s higher-priced plans.

Secure Web Hosting Service

WordPress sites are notoriously insecure, but WordPress.com solves most of the issues thanks to a dedicated security team.

Drag-and-Drop Editor

The whole WordPress community has been working on evolving the design process from coded templates to a drag-and-drop editor called Gutenberg. Gutenberg started out small, but it gets better all the time and now offers a good level of design control without overwhelming beginners with too many options.

Pros

Generous free plan
Intuitive drag-and-drop editor
No installation required
Great live chat support
Ideal for blogging
50,000+ plugins
Vast number of templates
Secure web hosting service

Cons

Unintuitive
Slow page-load times
Persistent security concerns
Premium templates and plugins are restricted to more expensive plans.
SEO locked behind more expensive plans

Pricing

There is a generous free plan that is ideal for getting started. Beyond that WordPress.com offer four price tiers. You can save up to 50% by paying annually instead of monthly.

Note: many of WordPress.com’s best plugins are not free; make sure you budget for the cost of any plugins you intend to use.

Personal: $4 per month — Remove WordPress.com ads, collect payments

Premium: $8 per month — Remove WordPress.com ads, collect payments, earn ad revenue, install premium themes, Google Analytics integration

Business: $25 per month — Remove WordPress.com ads, collect payments, earn ad revenue, Google Analytics integration, install plugins, automated site backups.

eCommerce: $45 per month — Remove WordPress.com ads, collect payments, earn ad revenue, Google Analytics integration, install plugins, automated site backups, accept payments in 60+ countries, top shipping carrier integration, premium design options.

WordPress.com also provides WordPress VIP, an enterprise-grade package that starts at $25,000 per year.

Bottom Line

Opting to use WordPress.com boils down to one thing: building a website with the WordPress ecosystem. That means you must select at least the Premium price tier (to install premium themes) or the Business price tier (to install plugins). As a result, WordPress.com, on the lower packages, has limited appeal.

WordPress.com is one of the better choices on this list for blogging. If you hope to attract a lot of organic traffic from search engines, then WordPress.com’s blogging heritage will serve you well.

GoDaddy: Best Website Builder for Marketing

GoDaddy is best known for website hosting but does not have the best reputation regarding reliable software; however, its web builder dispels that myth by producing good quality code and decent page speed.

Unfortunately, it achieves its performance by limiting your design options. For example, you can’t add individual elements to your site; you must add whole sections and customize them. However, suppose you don’t feel particularly confident with design. In that case, having someone else make those decisions for you can be a real bonus.

A big flaw with GoDaddy’s ecommerce features is that the checkout isn’t hosted under your domain name; it’s hosted on a third-party website. Consumers are increasingly concerned about scams, and the site URL changing this way can feel like a real red flag.

GoDaddy website builder has a version control system built in. This helpful feature allows you to revert back to an older version of your site. So if you make a change, undoing it is just a couple of clicks. That’s great for websites that want to make temporary, seasonal changes to their website and then revert back to the everyday design.

GoDaddy Features

AI-Powered Advice

GoDaddy uses a surprisingly effective AI to offer advice, helping you to establish an online presence and boost your business.

Integrated Marketing Features

GoDaddy has some of the most comprehensive marketing tools of any website builder. SEO, social media, and email marketing can all be employed to connect with and retain customers.

Hundreds of Themes

GoDaddy offers hundreds of customizable themes that you can edit with no technical skill or experience.

Free Image Library

Lots of businesses struggle with images when they first start out. GoDaddy has a built-in library of professional images that you can use until you have your own.

Pros

Award-winning 24/7 support
Very simple to use
Quick build process
Add-on tools

Cons

No plugin store
Limited SEO, especially on lower plans
Limited styling options
Ecommerce checkout hosted elsewhere

Pricing

GoDaddy offers four simple pricing tiers. You can save up to 37% by paying annually instead of monthly.

Note: The availability of GoDaddy Plans varies depending on your territory.

Basic: $9.99 per month — 1 social media platform, 5 social posts per month, 100 email marketing sends per month

Premium: $14.99 per month — Unlimited social media, 25,000 email marketing sends per month, SEO tools, group events, paid appointments

Ecommerce: $16.99 per month — Unlimited social media, 25,000 email marketing sends per month, SEO tools, group events, paid appointments, product listings, flexible payments, promotional features

Bottom Line

GoDaddy isn’t the best overall website builder, and neither is it the cheapest website builder. But it is a good, solid, middle-of-the-road choice for small businesses.

Where GoDaddy website builder does excel is in the business tools that come with its site builder platform. Its marketing tools are excellent, and its new AI-powered hints are a great way of guiding you toward a profitable site.

Wrap all of this up at a competitive price, and GoDaddy is worth a look if you want to do all your web design and promotion in one place.

Carrd: Best Website Builder for One-Pagers

Carrd is website builder software for anyone building a one-page site. One-page sites are ideal for product microsites, event sites, small companies, time-limited promotions, contact forms, and many other websites.

One of the most complicated tasks when a software company sets out to create a website builder is navigation. Carrd circumvents that problem by eliminating the need for navigation, which results in a more straightforward UI, compact code, and faster page speeds.

There is a bit of a learning curve with Carrd. For example, it helps if you understand the basic principles of CSS. But if you don’t, the documentation will help. And getting to the nuts and bolts under the hood of your site can give you a real sense of ownership.

Carrd allows you to build and publish three sites for free. But if you want to publish more than three and use pro features like custom domains, it will charge you $19 per year — that’s just $1.58 per month.

Carrd Features

Sensational Value

Carrd is one of the cheapest website builders around. At just $19 for an entire year, you normally struggle to find plain web hosting this cheaply.

The price reflects the limited feature set — Carrd lacks the marketing and SEO tools that the top website builders have — but for many small businesses who just want to establish an online presence quickly, a one-page site is exactly what they need.

Custom Code

Unlike many of the premium website builders on this list, Carrd allows you to use custom code on its sites.

Custom code requires a little more knowledge than the average site builder, and many people prefer a drag-and-drop interface. However, adding custom code to Carrd is far easier than adding it to Shopify, for example.

Widgets

Carrd refers to its plugins as widgets. It doesn’t have a full app market or ecommerce features, but you can add widgets from services like Stripe and PayPal to expand the capabilities of your Carrd site.

Pros

Very low cost
Perfect for one-page sites

Cons

Steeper than expected learning curve
Limited to one-page sites
No free domain or free SSL certificate

Pricing

Carrd allows you to publish three branded sites for free. It only has one paid plan, which is billed per year. Carrd also provides a free seven-day trial.

Note: Carrd’s Pro plan allows you to build multiple sites.

Carrd Pro: $1.58 per month (billed annually at $19) — build more than three sites, custom domains, signup forms, payment forms, Google Analytics, widgets, custom code

Bottom Line

Carrd is an excellent website builder that outputs solid production code. If you need to get a one-page site online fast, then Carrd is a perfect choice.

At just $19 for a whole year, Carrd is one of the best-value website builders on this list.

Unfortunately, one-page sites typically have a limited lifespan, and sooner or later, you’ll want to expand. At this point, Carrd will cease to be a viable option and you’ll have to look at other website builders.

But at this price, you could have a one-pager up in the next 15 minutes. That’s hard to knock.

Square Online: Best Website Builder for IRL Businesses

Square Online is part of the Square product range that includes one of the most popular PoS (Point of Sale) solutions. Square Online is an excellent option for brick-and-mortar businesses that exist IRL (In Real Life). It’s also one of the few entries on this list that qualifies as a free website builder.

Square acquired the Weebly website builder in 2018 and redeployed staff to develop Square Online. Although Weebly continues to exist, all development seems channeled into making Square Online’s ecommerce features the best option for building an online store.

Square Online is more straightforward than Shopify for building an online store and offers a range of tools to integrate online and offline business.

Square Online is perfect for businesses that need an online store but feel website building is too technical. Its broader ecosystem of business tools means you can do everything digital in one place, with a consistent set of UIs and workflows, which makes things easier.

Square Online Features

POS Migration

If you’re already a customer of Square’s PoS (Point of Sale) products, then you can export your inventory from your PoS device and import it into your online store, saving yourself hours while ensuring that your products are synced.

Multichannel Sales

Square Online is just part of the Square group of products. Consequently, your sales aren’t limited to your website. As well as the obvious PoS option, Google, Instagram, and Facebook integrations are available.

Restaurant Tools

Square is particularly well-suited to restaurants, bars, and cafes. It provides scheduling software, team management, and loyalty cards, all of which make running a service business online a cinch.

Pros

Simple e-commerce features
Intuitive UI
Integration with the Square ecosystem
Generous free plan

Cons

Limited design options
Lengthy website building process

Pricing

Square Online offers three price plans, all of which are priced monthly but billed annually. Its lowest-priced tier is free, except for card processing fees.

Note: different pricing plans are available in different territories.

Free: $0 per month — Unlimited products, sell on social media, SEO tools

Plus: $?? per month (billed annually) — Free tier features, Advanced item settings, Accept PayPal

Premium: $?? per month (billed annually) — Plus tier features, reduced processing rate, real-time shipping rates

In addition, Square Online offers an enterprise solution for high-volume, multi-location businesses. Contact Square directly for pricing.

Bottom Line

With the financial backing of its parent company Square Online has the resources to evolve into a world-leading website builder; it just hasn’t gotten there yet.

Like a couple of other website builders on this list, Square Online is aimed directly at anyone who wants to build an online store — or, in fact, commerce in general. So you should look elsewhere if selling online isn’t central to your site.

But suppose you’re already invested in the Square ecosystem with PoS devices in physical locations. In that case, using Square Online is a no-brainer.

And if you’re willing to look past some of the design restrictions in favor of good customer service and the potential of a growing platform, then Square Online is a solid choice too.

Zyro: Best Budget Website Builder

Zyro is exceptionally cheap, especially for building an online store. But don’t let that fool you into thinking Zyro website builder is low on quality. On the contrary, hidden behind the low-ball sales pitch is a competent website builder with many features.

Zyro gives you complete control over the placement of your content, something that only Wix can rival.

Zyro offers an outstanding balance of powerful customization but not too many tools, so you won’t be overwhelmed by all the options.

Zyro doesn’t have a built-in app store like some rivals, which means you have limited options to expand the functionality of your site. However, it does offer some third-party integrations to services, so you’re not entirely without options.

Zyro Features

Intuitive Editor

Zyro does a tremendous job of getting new businesses online because you don’t need any experience to use this very simple site builder.

Unlimited Storage & Bandwidth

Many website builders usually scrimp on the extras and claw back a little money by charging extra for hosting. Not so Zyro, which provides unlimited storage and bandwidth.

Branding Tools

Zyro includes a logo maker, so if you’re starting from scratch, you can get give yourself some professional gloss with a shiny new logo.

Pros

Affordable
Great value ecommerce
Responsive templates
High-level control of design elements
Live chat support
Drag-and-drop editor

Cons

Basic blog options
Only basic SEO tools
No built-in app market

Pricing

Zyro offers two price plans, one for simple small business websites and one for ecommerce.

Note: Zyro offers regular discounts of up to 75% off its packages. These discounts are time-limited, but once they expire, they reset. So you won’t miss out if you decide to think it over.

Website: $2.99 / month — free domain, free email for 3 months, marketing integration, logo maker

Business: $3.99 / month — All of the features of the Website tier, plus sell up to 500 products

Bottom Line

With its AI-powered logo maker, fast build times, and simple options, Zyro is committed to getting you online fast.

We really didn’t like the deception of placing a fake countdown on the price discount. And hiding the increased renewal price in small print isn’t a good look for Zyro either. That type of blackhat UX doesn’t have a place on the modern web.

However, the prices beat almost everything except free website builder plans. In addition, Zyro’s ecommerce package is one of the most affordable options on the market, with an equally generous 1% transaction processing fee.

If you want to set up a side business over a weekend or even over your lunch hour, then Zyro is an excellent choice.

Website Builder FAQs

What is a website builder?

A website builder, or site builder, is a service for creating a website without any design or coding skills. The most popular website builders are designed to democratize the web by helping anyone build a website quickly and easily.

It sometimes helps to have some design ideas, and some website builders will allow you to add custom code if you want to, but neither is required.

With a website builder, all you need is the desire to create a website.

Are websites built with website builders as good as professionally built bespoke websites?

Because website builders are created with many potential uses in mind, they use generic source code. Unfortunately, this means that their code is typically less streamlined than a bespoke site.

However, over the past few years, the code quality that website builders generate has improved enormously. Now, many professional design agencies use website builders instead of coding their own websites.

If you have a very specialized site in mind, like a SaaS (Software as a Service, then even the best website builder won’t be able to create it. But for marketing websites and online stores, website builders are an ideal way to build a website.

How much do website builders cost?

The cost of a website builder varies from product to product. There are free website builders available, but many of the top website builders charge a monthly fee.

For one of the best website builders, you can expect to pay a subscription based on the features you require. Expect to pay more for e-commerce features, marketing features, and a flexible drag-and-drop interface.

There are sometimes hidden costs, such as a card processing fee for online sales.

If you opt for a website builder that uses templates or plugins, you may need to pay for those in addition to the subscription.

You don’t need to pay for web hosting services; web hosting should be included.

Most website builders offer a limited free plan or a free trial, so you can test out features before opening your wallet.

Is a website builder suitable for a small business?

It depends on the nature of your business. For example, suppose you’re setting up an online store or a professional service like plumbing or landscaping. In that case, a website builder or perhaps a specialist e-commerce website builder could be ideal for you.

On the other hand, if you’re running a business like a car dealership or a travel agency — where you need lots of individual listings — that is a little beyond what website builders can do. In that case, you’ll probably need a complete CMS (Content Management System).

If you are building a complex app or SaaS, then sorry, but website builders can’t manage that; you’ll need to hire a professional developer or improve your coding knowledge.

How hard is it to use a website builder?

You don’t need web design experience to use a website builder; they are designed to get new businesses online without professional assistance.

Some website builders are more complicated than others. Typically, the more features there are, the more time you’ll need to familiarize yourself with the user interface. A website can be created quickly with a drag-and-drop editor, but you may find you need to put in a little more work if you’re creating an online store.

As a guide, if you can use email, a web browser, or a document processor like Word or Pages, you’ll be able to use a website builder to build a website.

Can you use a custom domain name with a website builder?

Custom domains, like myawesomewebsite.com, can usually be used with website builders.

Be aware that some website builders charge more for this option. But equally, you may be offered free domain name registration, at least for the first year.

Do I need web hosting services to use a website builder?

You don’t need to worry about a web host; that’s part of what you’re paying the website builder to provide.

Many website builders even host your site on CDNs (Content Delivery Networks), making your site faster for a global audience.

Depending on your package, most website builders restrict the storage space you can use (the total size of all of your files combined). Some website builders also limit the bandwidth you can use (the total size of all the files users access on your site combined).

Do website builders perform well on search engines?

Getting your site to page one on Google is the primary aim for most businesses.

Many professional techniques boost your site up search engine rankings, but they all boil down to publishing good content and fast page load times.

You’ll find plenty of blog posts online claiming that website builders output low-quality and slow code. This used to be true, but in recent years the code website builders’ output has improved significantly.

A good website builder (like the ones on this list) won’t guarantee good search engine ranking, but the top website builders include marketing features that will help.

How long does it take to build a website with a website builder?

Some website builders can get you online in under five minutes. Others require hours of build time.

Typically, the more complex a site is, the longer it will take. Ecommerce, for example, will take longer than a simple résumé webpage.

Additionally, websites are not a once-and-done task. You will need to update your site, change information, and add features throughout its life.

But you’ll find that most website builders make this easy by taking away the hard work. As a result, most first-time website builders discover that they enjoy making websites, and some even decide to become professional website designers!

What is a drag-and-drop editor?

A drag-and-drop editor is exactly what it sounds like. You drag an element into position by clicking on it, and you drop it into place by releasing the mouse button when it’s positioned as you want it.

A drag-and-drop editor is considered a premium feature of the best website builders, but some people do prefer to make changes with code or via a simple form interface.

Which is the best website builder?

There isn’t a catch-all approach to building a website. The right website builder for you might not be the right website builder for someone else.

As you can see from the list above, Wix is a solid all-rounder, whereas Shopify is excellent for creating an online store. However, there are many occasions when other website builders would be a better choice.

Sometimes it comes down to something as simple as feeling an affinity with the website builder’s philosophy. If you find a website builder intuitive and it provides all the features you need, it’s the right website builder for you.

Featured image by upklyak on Freepik

The post 10 Best Website Builders for 2023 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

24 octobre 2022/par Service comm.

Why Do WordPress Theme Backends Have to Suck? (Hint: They Don’t!)

Whether you’ve worked with a few WordPress themes to design websites or worked with many of them, you’ll no doubt agree that plenty of WordPress themes that are visually gorgeous on the front end can be terribly unattractive and extremely awkward to use on the backend.

Working with a WordPress theme can sometimes be difficult, but it can be different.

Want proof? Look no further than with BeTheme.

BeTheme, with 260,000+ sales and counting and a 4.83-star user rating, is one of the top 5 best-selling WordPress themes of all time.

In this article, we’ll show you one of the many reasons why this is the case by focusing on how BeTheme’s backend is designed to make web design tasks more manageable.

Enhance your workflow experience with a WordPress theme backend that won’t stress you out

Once you install BeTheme, you’ll almost immediately notice it’s different. Instead of a drab and often unintuitive WordPress backend, you’ll suddenly be confronted with a clean, well-organized dashboard and toolset.

You haven’t actually lost anything. WordPress, with its impressive assortment of content management tools, is still there. Be’s backend is a visually appealing space in which you will take pleasure to work.

If only the rest of WordPress could follow suit.

If you haven’t worked with BeTheme recently (or at all), why not let us walk you through several of its most helpful backend features.

Starting with:

1. Dashboard Design

BeTheme’s dashboard is conveniently located directly beneath the main WordPress Dashboard link. So you won’t waste time sifting through the sidebar trying to find your theme’s settings, and everything displayed in the dashboard is designed to help you get the most out of your WordPress theme.

Clicking on the BeTheme or the Dashboard link gives you immediate access to the following:

Theme registration information
BeTheme’s step-by-step website creator
A Navigation bar that directs you to BeTheme’s frequently used tools
Plugin status and updates and new features announcements
The latest additions to BeTheme’s ever-growing library of pre-built websites
Beloved BeTheme integrations

It takes a minute to fully appreciate how helpful this dashboard will be.

2. Dark/Light Mode

Research on dark mode benefits is inconclusive. But since so many people seem to like it, it is offered as an option in many popular apps and devices.

Dark mode users will tell you that they experience less eye strain, they sleep better, and their device’s batteries last longer than is the case with light mode.

BeTheme’s backend offers a dark mode option, and you are encouraged to try it.

If you feel it beneficial, so much the better, and you needn’t concern yourself with what the research indicated, or didn’t indicate.

3. Step-by-Step Website Creator

When you first install a WordPress theme, it’s not uncommon to spend some time trying to figure out what to do next. The theme’s advertisements may highlight a selection of impressive demos, but where are they more exactly?

Of course, you’ll eventually find them, but is whatever difficulty you may have encountered necessary?

BeTheme removes that impediment.

You will notice the Setup Wizard under BeTheme (and in the dashboard as well.) Click on the wizard, and with its step-by-step website, you can:

Give your website a name.
Select the page builder you want to work with and choose your preferred editing mode.
Pick an ideal pre-built website based on your new website’s industry or niche.
Easily replace existing content with your own.

The entire process of loading your brand-new site and page builder into WordPress takes a minute (or more like 30 seconds once you are used to it).

4. Pre-Built Site Previews

With BeTheme, you can choose from more than 650 pre-built websites. New ones are being added as we speak, and they’re delightfully easy to find. Just look under the dashboard’s Websites link or Pre-built Websites in BeTheme’s sidebar menu, and there they are!

You’ll be familiarized with the available design aids and options in no time, and you’ll find it easy to incorporate the latest design trends into your websites. BeTheme has even placed previews of its newest pre-built websites in your dashboard to help you along.

You may choose one of the latest pre-built websites to work with, or you might find one or more others you particularly like. Pre-built sites you do not plan to work with can still be sources of inspiration.

Whatever your choices, you’ll find it easy to incorporate the latest trends into website designs.

5. Plugin Manager

BeTheme’s Plugins area differs from what you see in the WordPress plugins area. You’ll find several of these differences to be particularly helpful in that BeTheme’s plugins manager enables you to:

View the active plugins you’ve installed.
Update plugins when necessary.
Install and activate plugins only when it’s required.

The last item is essential in that plugins do not appear in the WordPress plugin manager until you have installed them. Not having to install plugins you will not need will help keep your website operating at a high level of performance.

6. BeTheme Support

WordPress is a powerful content management system and an extremely popular one. It may, in fact, be the most powerful and popular system of its type.

WordPress is also community-driven to a considerable extent, which can sometimes create user inconvenience. As a user, you might sometimes have to dig to find answers to your questions or get help when needed.

You don’t have to experience that inconvenience to get support from BeTheme.

To gain access to BeTheme’s support center, you need go no further than BeTheme’s sidebar or dashboard to access self-support options or open a ticket for direct assistance.

7. Theme Options

Plenty of well-known WordPress themes have theme settings customization capabilities. With BeTheme, it’s easy to set brand colors, choose custom fonts, and establish global layouts. The same holds for configuring responsiveness, performance, and accessibility, all of which are essential for optimizing UX and search engine functionalities.

The problem with most theme options is that they can only be modified from the main WordPress dashboard. So if, while designing on a page, you suddenly realize a portion of its design hasn’t been configured correctly, or you’re dissatisfied with any design segment, you’ll have to save your changes and go to your theme’s backend to make the necessary fixes.

From the BeTheme dashboard inside the BeBuilder BeTheme, you can modify your Theme Options without having to interrupt your workflow.

8. White-Label Mode

A final feature of the BeTheme WordPress theme’s backend you should become familiar with is BeCustom. This critical feature is located under BeTheme in the sidebar.

BeCustom enables you to access some white-label regions in BeTheme.

You can use BeCustom to:

Substitute Be’s branding with your business’s branding to reinforce your name with your clients.
Disable any features your clients have no use for and deny access to any features you do not want them to modify while at the same time making the WordPress theme’s backend easier to work with.
Create an extra user-friendly and secure WordPress login.
Customize the dashboard’s “Welcome” message.

Make Your WordPress Design Projects Simple to Handle With BeTheme

Is there anything BeTheme doesn’t do?

Most likely, but nothing that would adversely impact your design effort.

This multipurpose WordPress theme’s hundreds of pre-built websites will help you get virtually any website project off to a rapid start and headed in the right direction.

BeTheme features the fastest and most powerful page builder for WordPress.

You will have total control over every feature and facet of your website’s UI.

In short, BeTheme offers the finest way to manage any web design project within WordPress.

[- This is a sponsored post on behalf of BeTheme -]

The post Why Do WordPress Theme Backends Have to Suck? (Hint: They Don’t!) first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

18 octobre 2022/par Service comm.

Main Benefits of a Technical Blog

This blog is a special edition because it is my 100th blog! I will explain what this blog has given me in the past five years. If you are planning to start a blog of yourself, you may use this list of benefits in order to get you motivated to get started.

1. Introduction

In the beginning of September, I already celebrated the fifth anniversary of my blog. Now I publish my 100th blog and I am pretty proud of it. It seems not so long ago that I started my blog, but on the other hand, it also feels like I am doing this for a long time. At least, I cannot imagine a life without my blog anymore. In the beginning, I really suffered of the imposter syndrome: I posted blogs, but did not let anyone in my direct environment know that I had a blog. After a few months, I let this feeling behind myself and let the world know that I write technical content. In those five years, I only had one or two negative comments, but many positive comments and I really do not bother about the negative ones. In the next section, I will try to list some of the benefits of a technical blog and if you would like to start with a blog yourself, do read Why Start a Technical Blog. Enjoy this post and up to the next five years!

Source de l’article sur DZONE

15 octobre 2022/par Service comm.

12 Best Email Marketing Services for 2022 (Ranked)

A robust email marketing strategy is a great way to reach your target audience directly.

But your email marketing campaign success rests on whether you used the best email marketing services.

No two email marketing services are equal. So you must choose carefully. We created this guide and ranked the 12 best email marketing services for you.

How to Choose the Best Email Marketing Services

Although we ranked these best email marketing services in this list from number one to eleven, we also understand that everyone’s need is unique. So we identified where each email marketing tool performs best.

Here’s what to keep in mind to find a good email marketing service:

Your business goals
Growth stage of the business
The audience your business targets

Please read on for the best email marketing services in the market today.

1. ActiveCampaign: Best Advanced Email Automation

If your goal is to deliver timely, personalized, and unique email experiences to your customers, try ActiveCampaign. As the best email marketing service for putting your marketing on autopilot, this tool offers a built-in email automation system, a campaign tracker, and a CRM.

Unique Feature: Customer experience automation (CXA)
Target Users: eCommerce, B2B, B2C, SMEs, bloggers, and influencers
Pricing: $29 per month.

Features

ActiveCampaign offers users loads of beginner-friendly advanced automation features. Here are a few:

1. Automated Marketing

You can focus on other important business pursuits and let ActiveCampaign’s marketing automation send welcome emails, track contact tags, monitor sales analytics, and fetch performance reports.

This feature empowers users to launch automatic email marketing campaigns or follow up on customers who abandoned their carts or disengaged from their content.

2. Site and Event Tracking

ActiveCampaign records your site visitors’ consumer behavior and demographic information in real-time. So you can segment your email list better and target your audience with messages that resonate with them.

Gathering visitor data can help you engage with them emotionally or during memorable events like anniversaries, birthdays, and other milestones.

3. Free Migration

ActiveCampaign offers a seamless move from your previous automated marketing service provider.

Best part? Migrating to ActiveCampaign comes at no cost to you.

Simply request for migration by filling out a quick form. And you’re on your way to a better email marketing experience.

4. Segmentation

Image Credit: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign groups your email contacts into different categories to enable you to make sense of the data.

You can segment a contact list by name, date, location, subscription status, tags, and other metadata.

Segmented data helps you target the most conversion-ready audience for the particular campaign.

5. Third-Party Integrations

You’re free to link your favorite apps with ActiveCampaign if it enhances your business growth.

So you can integrate your account with third-party apps like

Facebook to pull ad or public user data
Shopify to pull sales and shop data
Google Sheets for spreadsheet operations
WooCommerce for eCommerce performance data

You don’t need to move contacts across email marketing platforms to access or manage your data. ActiveCampaign lets you keep your data on the platform you wish to use and then use integrations to extract the benefits of having those contacts.

6. Performance Reporting

Get real-time reports on your deals and sales activities using ActiveCampaign. The reports feature lets you know your campaign’s performance across these indicators:

Subscriptions
Subscriber engagement
Automation reports
Sales rep deal pipelines
Revenue generation
Customer attribution reports

ActiveCampaign lets you track your competitors by providing reports of users who switched to competitors.

You also get a funnel report to see how well your email marketing effort converts engaged audiences to buyers.

7. One-on-one Messaging

ActiveCampaign lets you start and manage conversations with current and prospective customers across multiple channels.

Send and receive instant direct messages, which you can also automate in full.

Customers will quickly reach you with questions and orders without losing their messages in your email pile.

More Features

Automation templates
Email Templates
Email drag-and-drop builder
Branded Forms
Tags
Split Automations

Pros

ActiveCampaign is feature rich. You can fully integrate other applications on the platform without losing vital leads and data.

This email marketing software positions itself (and rightly so) as a leading email marketing solution that encompasses other parts of marketing and your CRM needs.

You can enjoy its free email marketing service offering for 14 days.

Cons

Although ActiveCampaign promises many features, most of them are exclusive to users who subscribe to paid plans. Sadly, this email marketing tool doesn’t offer a free plan.

Also, the workflows and features are sophisticated. So this email service provider will demand a learning curve.

Pricing

ActiveCampaign offers four paid plans—Lite, Plus, Professional and Enterprise. The enterprise plan is customizable to meet the peculiar needs of big businesses.

Each plan is billed monthly at:

Lite: $29 per month

Plus: $49 per month

Professional: $149 per month

Enterprise: Customized rate

2. Sendinblue: Best Free Plan and Instant Messaging

Sendinblue provides users with instant messaging features, sales enablement software, and email marketing tools to grow their businesses.

If you’re looking to engage users more instantly through SMS and chats along with your email campaigns, then Sendinblue is the solution. As the best email marketing software for instant messaging, Sendinblue has personalization features to help you engage better with your target audience.

Unique Feature: Email and SMS marketing
Target Users: Retailers and CPG, SaaS, media, publishing, public sector, NGOs, and hospitality industry
Pricing: Starts at $25 per month

Features

1. Email Templates

Sendinblue offers over 40 responsive and professional pre-made email templates from which to choose.

If those are not enough, you can create bespoke email templates. Again, you’ll find the platform intuitive. In addition, you can use templates on multiple devices for the best results.

2. Drag and Drop Email Editor

Modify emails to your taste by simply dragging and dropping items on the campaign template.

Sendinblue is one of the most advanced email marketing services today. For example, it takes personalization seriously. So you can craft the content of your emails to appeal to your target audience better.

3. Email Tracking

If you wish to measure campaign performance rate or monitor engagement on certain emails, Sendinblue provides the option of turning on your Google Analytics tracker.

Google Analytics generates insights by drawing your customer information from all over the internet, including their behavior on social media.

4. Live Chat

Sendinblue lets you initiate instant communication with your site visitors through chat. Live chat is a handy email for engaging your leads at critical moments.

You can install this feature in seconds, assign conversations to your team, and customize the chat feature for your brand.

5. Contact Segmentation

Every contact is different and often has unique preferences.

Target the right audience with the most suitable message by exploring Sendinblue’s segmentation; this categorizes contacts and helps you determine, create and push a tailor-made campaign to a ready market.

6. SMS and Whatsapp Marketing

Sendinblue allows you to send your desired SMS volume to any chosen destination for a token.

You can also reach numerous contacts on your Whatsapp with customized messages about your business.

A recent report says that 69% of internet users use Whatsapp. So, you want to get your message to this audience.

7. Shared Inbox

Does managing all your conversations from a single place appeal to you?

With Sendinblue inbox, you can navigate smoothly between chats from your linked Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook accounts.

Keep your team and customers updated simultaneously with a simple inbox setup.

This Shared Inbox feature enhances organization.

More Features

Schedule send
CRM automation
Editable signup form
Push notifications

Pros

Sendinblue’s free email marketing software offers advanced features for startups and supports unlimited contacts. Except you need to do more, you can function solely on the free plan.

As the best email marketing software for initiating instant communication with leads, this email marketing tool promises a simple user interface and instant account setup.

Also, Sendinblue is relatively cheaper compared to similar email marketing providers.

Cons

You can only send 300 emails daily on the free version of Sendinblue. A paid subscription is required to remove the Sendinblue logo from your emails.

Pricing

Apart from the free plan, Sendinblue offers three other monthly plans—Starter Plan at $25, Business Plan at $65 per month, and Enterprise Plan at $1000 per month.

3. Drip: Best for Pre-Built Email Workflows

Drip is a personalized email, SMS, and automation service provider trusted by thousands of brands globally. It provides a seamless email workflow for businesses of all sizes.

- Unique Feature: pre-built email and SMS workflows

Target Users: eCommerce industry
Pricing: starts at $39 per month

Features

1. Pre-built Playbooks

Handling every marketing operation by yourself is overwhelming.

Save precious business time by using any pre-designed Drip templates.

The playbooks with heart-melting welcome series and abandoned cart reminders are ideal for growing your revenue.

Choose a suitable visual workflow and automate it fully.

2. Email Builder

If you like your emails deeply personalized and right on target, you’ll find Drip’s HTML builder useful.

Create 100 percent original content from scratch.

Personalized emails prove to your customers that you go the extra length and they’re special to you.

3. Drag and Drop Editor

Customize emails to capture your brand image using its ultra-easy drag-and-drop email editor.

People and businesses exchange over 306 billion email messages daily. Your audience is already getting tons of messages. Stand out with branded emails.

The visual interface is vibrant and can help boost your creativity.

4. Pop-up Notifications

Get access to form templates that your on and off-site visitors can easily fill out on Drip.

You can redirect, engage, sponsor specific actions, offer discounts to customers and grow your audience with targeted pop-up notifications and forms.

Pop-ups and signup forms convert about 3.09% of site visitors.

5. Real-Time Business Insights

Gain insights on your growth, audience, revenue, and overall campaign performance with Drip analytics and benchmark.

That’s not all.

Drip supports users with personalized guides to help them make informed decisions using these data that lead to business growth.

6. Marketing Automation

Your emails and SMS can run on autopilot without taking on the stress of maintaining correspondence with new and existing customers.

Simply set up revenue-targeted workflows and relax.

Since Drip comes with pre-built workflows, you don’t have to start your automation process from scratch.

7. Single Click Integration

Are you a new or an existing business owner? Drip supports your business on multiple channels.

Fully merge or connect your online store like Shopify, Magento, and other eCommerce tools to your Drip account with just one click. Easy breezy.

You can start conversations on your e-store and finish in your inbox.

More Features

Segmentation
Email support
A/B testing

Pros

Apart from unlimited email sends, Drip lets you access its advanced features and all the tools on its platform during your 14 days free trial.

Users get tailored assistance and live support when they need them. In addition, Drip simplifies the scaling process for businesses.

Cons

Although you get unlimited emails, this plan doesn’t support unlimited contacts and doesn’t offer a free plan. However, you have unlimited features access. But Drip limits usage by the number of contacts.

Pricing

More than ten paid plans starting at $39 up to more than $1,899 and billed monthly. Email contacts vary by plan, but you can send unlimited emails and email support for all paid plans.

4. Constant Contact: Best for Educators, Small Businesses, and Event Organizers

Constant Contact simplifies email marketing for event marketers and small businesses as one of the best email marketing providers. This email marketing solution helps users benefit from their email marketing effort without the typical steep learning curve of complicated email marketing software.

Unique Feature: Event management tools
Target Users: Small businesses and event organizers
Pricing: Starts at $9.99 per month

Features

1. Marketing Automation

Constant Contact empowers small businesses to put their email marketing on autopilot. You can segment your lists automatically and initiate campaigns without manual effort. You can also set drip campaigns and automation to trigger based on your audience behavior, data, or events.

You can resend messages under different subject lines to contacts who didn’t open them the first time.

2. List Building and Management tools

You can access a range of list-building tools on Constant Contact to help you attract and keep leads. In addition, you can access a landing page builder, form builder, text message signup FTW, and a contact management system.

3. Event Management

One of this email marketing service’s biggest selling points is its event management tools. Users can create signup forms for their events, build unlimited landing pages, create email follow-ups, and collect payments using tools available on Constant Contact.

4. Email Templates

Users can find more than 100 mobile-friendly, drag-and-drop email templates on Constant Contact that match different business types and brands. So you will find the appropriate template for the occasion regardless of industry, market, design preference, holiday, event, or other needs.

5. Surveys and Feedback Tools

Constant Contact understands that customer feedback and extra data can improve your marketing performance. You can consider Constant Contact the best email marketing service for getting feedback through surveys and polls.

You can customize these surveys with your branding and logo on your Constant Contact dashboard.

6. Responsive Email Editor

Constant Contact makes email editing a breeze for users with smart columns, undo-redo, an image library, color customizations, fonts, backgrounds, and more. In addition, its preview function lets you see what your email would look like across devices, so you can adjust your design or message to your heart’s content before sending it out.

7. Marketing Calendar

Unlike most email service providers, Constant Contact offers marketing calendars. The feature helps plan your marketing. Marketers can create their messages, schedule them, send, and track them with the help of a marketing planner.

More Features

Error Checker
A/B testing
Landing page builder
Reporting
Agency tools
Signup Forms

Pros

Constant Contact’s focus on small businesses means they’ve designed this email marketing platform with simplicity in mind. And they haven’t limited users’ who need more advanced email marketing automation features.

Its error checker is a good feature to catch bad links and fix issues that might lower conversion. Constant Contact is a great email marketing software for educators, event organizers, and small businesses.

Cons

Constant Contact doesn’t offer a free plan. Although it has simple pricing, this email marketing tool overcompensates higher-paying Plus users and leaves its Core plan users with limited functionalities.

Pricing

Constant Contact offers two paid plans to accommodate two audiences:

Getting started — $9.99 per month
Advanced features— $45 per month

However, for more advanced automation features, you’ll need the $449 per month marketing automation offer.

These paid plans come with 30-day money-back guarantees so that any small business can test-drive the tool without commitments.

5. MailChimp: Best Email Design and Marketing AI

Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing software available online. It integrates email marketing automation features and creative tools to deliver result-oriented email marketing.

Unique Feature: Email marketing automation features
Target Users: Freelancers, agencies, and developers
Pricing: Starts at $11 per month

Features

1. AI-Powered Design

Mailchimp is an artificial intelligence-enabled creative assistant to automate and personalize your email and newsletter design for your businesses.

The creative assistant uses AI to study your brand and create beautiful, professional designs tailored to your needs.

These AI-powered designs are useful across multiple channels.

2. Subject Line Assistant

Your email subject lines are crucial to your campaign’s success. Barilliance reported that 64% of email recipients open messages based on the subject line.

Thinking and drafting the perfect email subject line to drive customer engagement is often difficult. But not anymore.

Mailchimp’s subject line helper provides real-time feedback and suggestions to guide you.

3. Audience Segmentation

Is your email marketing effort not yielding the desired results? You might be targeting the right audience with the wrong campaign.

Mailchimp helps to categorize your email list according to shared characteristics.

This ensures you send the right message to the right audience for better results.

4. Pre-built Templates

Create professional-looking emails and landing pages in minutes using any of over 100 template designs on Mailchimp.

Campaign templates incorporate content blocks and exciting design elements for your exploration.

5. Smart Predictions

Save yourself the cost of hiring a data analyst using available insight predictions on Mailchimp to analyze data.

Get demographic information about your past, present and prospective customers at your fingertips. These predictions help you make better decisions that affect your brand.

6. Marketing Automation Features

Automate your brand marketing workflows and drip campaigns to get the work done in just a few clicks. Set up the processes new email subscribers will go through before conversion.

Send automated welcome notes, product notifications, abandoned cart reminders, and other vital information about your brand.

7. Image and File Editor

Alter, sync, and save your images or files with Mailchimp’s robust content studio.

8. Website Builder

Create a unique search-engine optimized website with Mailchimp’s free website builder.

No special coding or website design experience is needed. Instead, get right into it with your domain name and a clear idea of what you hope to achieve.

More Features

Pop-up form
Marketing CRM
A/B testing
Analytics
Integrations
Appointment scheduler

Pros

Mailchimp is easy to use, and its creative assistant takes away the mental hassle of creating original content regularly. Apart from its free plan, this email marketing service offers unlimited contacts on its Premium plan.

Cons

The free version only allows 500 contacts, and Mailchimp’s monthly email sends are limited across all paid plans.

Pricing

Apart from MailChimp’s free plan, paid plans start from $11 per month, and the Premium plan starts is $299 per month.

6. Klaviyo: Best eCommerce Marketing Automation

Klaviyo is an eCommerce-centered email marketing platform that pools data to create workflows and enhance business growth.

Klaviyo promises users an experience, a unified database, and a learning platform guaranteed to launch their businesses to new heights.

Unique Feature: Personalized benchmarks
Target Users: eCommerce
Pricing: Starts at $45 per month

Features

1. Email Marketing

Develop, personalize and automate your emails to portray your brand essence with Klaviyo.

This email marketing platform promises to help users maximize revenue, improve repeat sales, and increase customer retention using well-timed personalized email messages.

Klaviyo uses customer behaviors like these to target your messages better:

Abandoning carts
Items they ordered
Recently viewed products

And also incorporates group behaviors like these:

Bestsellers
Newest products
Most viewed products

So, whether customers appreciate group behavior or tend to repeat a behavior, Klaviyo picks up on that signal to improve your sales.

2. Precise Segmentation

Klaviyo automatically syncs customers’ data from their first interaction with your brand. Segmentation is swift, specific, and happens in real-time.

Categorize customers in similar demographics or those with shared traits together. This will ensure they get appropriate email messages guaranteed to trigger recipients.

3. In-built Signup Forms

Get to know your customers better and build your email subscriber list with pre-built forms. Klaviyo forms can be embedded in the content or pop up when visitors land on your page.

4. Professional Templates

Klaviyo provides over 100 SMS marketing and email templates to suit your brand. You don’t have to rack your brain trying to come up with authentic messages all the time. Pick expertly crafted

5. Integrations

Klaviyo lets you move data across apps without a hitch.

This email marketing solution supports over 220 platforms that cater to eCommerce functions like payments and order management.

6. Benchmarks

The eCommerce sector is highly competitive. So stay ahead of your peers. Catch market, industry, and emerging trends on time. And compare your growth with businesses selling similar products.

Benchmark helps you know where you stand in the grand scheme and what others are doing differently to achieve better results in your field.

7. SMS Chats

Scale your business with direct SMS messages to old and prospective customers.

SMS makes communication easier, faster, and less formal. So you can talk to customers around the globe on the go.

8. Broadcast Newsletter

Create the perfect newsletters about your brand and distribute them to your audience through their most preferred channel (email or SMS).

Broadcasts are one-off messages you can easily design without professional help. Klaviyo makes the process faster with send time automation.

More Features

Drag and drop email editor
A/B Testing
Multichannel attribution
Custom reporting

Pros

Klaviyo targets eCommerce brands squarely. This targeting helps users of this email marketing platform optimize for result-driven marketing automation. Users can get a free plan on this email software.

Klaviyo is feature packed and specializes in increasing revenues for businesses.

Cons

The free version has limitations. And Klaviyo allows only a few integrations compared to other email marketing service providers. So, this email marketing solution is only good if you won’t be heavy on integrations.

Pricing

Klaviyo offers a free plan for starters. After that, the email plan starts at $45 per month, and you pay $60 per month to access all the tools in the email and SMS marketing plans.

7. Campaign Monitor: Best for Transactional Emails and Autoresponders

Campaign Monitor prioritizes ease and efficiency in delivering email marketing services to businesses.

The platform assures users of helping them to create memorable emails that convert and drive engagement.

Unique Feature: Expert email marketing
Target Users: Tech brands, media agencies, marketers, and charities
Pricing: starts at $9 per month

Features

1. Email Templates

As a business owner who is always on the go, creating an email from scratch is time-consuming. This email platform offers free brandable email templates.

Freely choose from the stash of professional templates and save yourself the stress and time it takes to design.

2. Custom Emails

This email platform harnesses customers’ data from your website, apps, and eCommerce tools to enable you to craft and deliver personalized emails to them.

A Campaign Monitor report shows marketers record a 20% sales increase and 26% more open rates when they send personalized campaigns.

As the best email marketing software for transactional messages and autoresponder, this tool lets you deliver personalized experiences to your customers for as low as $9.

3. Transactional Emails

Sending messages that trigger specific actions from recipients has never been easier.

This email software allows you to create, modify and enhance your communication with customers using bespoke transactional emails.

4. Actionable Analytics

As one of the best email marketing platforms, this popular email marketing service offers actionable email analytics you can access in just a few clicks. So you can rest assured of practical insights into your business performance.

Popular email marketing services like this email software gives you access to an interactive dashboard to measure results across metrics like these:

Email campaigns
Automated journeys
Transactional emails

And others.

As one of the best email marketing platforms, this email software provides actionable insights from your top-performing campaigns that you can deploy across other campaigns.

5. Email Experts

Enjoy round-the-clock professional support services from one of the best email service providers.

If you run into technical problems, you can count on Campaign Monitor’s expert team at any time. From funnel to deliverability experts, you can get all the helps you need for your email marketing campaign with this feature.

6. Email broken link review

As one of the best email marketing providers, this tool helps you find and fix broken links that might hurt your campaign efforts. The Link Review tools work in this capacity.

This tool scans your messages, flags any missing or broken links, and validates them.

Image Credit: Campaign Monitor

7. Customizable Signup Forms

A signup form is a helpful tool that persuades customers to take the extra step into your business.

Direct the ideal audience to the right section of your business with editable signup forms.

You can also add a subscribe icon on your website’s landing pages.

More Features

SMS marketing
Segmentation tools
A/B testing
Image Gallery
Campaign tags
Email broken link review
Integrations

Pros

Campaign Monitor is easy to use and offers affordable feature-loaded paid plans for all business sizes.

Cons

The SMS feature on Campaign Monitor is only available to contracted customers sending texts to the USA, and it doesn’t offer a free plan.

Pricing

Three paid plans are billed monthly with prices starting as follows:

Basic: $9 per month
Unlimited: $29 per month
Premier: $149 per month

This email service provider’s prices changes per plan as your list grows, but you can send unlimited emails on the Unlimited and Premier plans.

8. Moosend: Best Value for Unlimited Emails

If you’re looking for pocket-friendly email marketing services that deliver results, try Moosend.

Moosend is designed for small and big businesses seeking impressive emails that resonate with their audience.

You can send a limitless amount of emails to suit your business needs.

Unique Feature: Weather-based personalization and evergreen campaigns
Target Users: Saas, publishers, eCommerce, non-profit, travel, and agencies
Pricing: Starts at $9 per month

Features

1. Drag and Drop Email Editor

Whatever inspiration you have when recreating an email campaign, simply drag and drop it with Moosend’s powerful email builder.

You can also design your email campaigns with HTLM—you have full control over how MooSend works for you.

2. CRM Automation Features

Build lasting and rewarding relationships with customers by automating basic CRM functions.

Handling every customer’s need is tedious and time-consuming. But you must make each customer feel special to ensure continuous patronage.

Automate basic CRM operations and focus on bigger tasks.

3. Landing Pages

Your website landing pages help you convert visitors better—MooSend lets you create responsive and catchy landing pages to increase your site’s conversions.

4. Ready-to-use Templates

MooSend lets you save time with pre-built subscription forms, landing pages, and newsletter templates.

Simply flip, personalize and use your most preferred template from this email marketing service provider.

5. AI-Powered eCommerce

Moosend provides eCommerce email marketing solutions to users, from abandoned cart reminders to product recommendations.

Like other best email marketing services on this list, MooSend uses artificial intelligence to help your business make more sales with email.

6. Forms

Design lead-generating subscription forms for onsite visitors.

When your landing pages receive visitors, they receive your pop-up or embedded forms immediately. Information from these forms goes to segment, retarget, and drive customer engagements.

7. Integrations

You don’t have to let go of your best CRM, CMS, and eCommerce tools when moving to MooSend.

Bring your marketing tools or apps and integrate them into your MooSend account. This email service provider lets you connect your integrations without a developer’s help.

More Features

Custom reports
Site tracking
Segmentation
Product recommendation
Transactional emails

Pros

Moosend affords you access to powerful email marketing tools at a relatively cheaper rate.

Cons

The basic paid plan excludes account managers who provide expert support to users. Moosend also limits the number of email subscribers by payment plan.

Transactional emails are available to pro and enterprise subscribers, and no free plan exists.

Pricing

MooSend offers a 30-day free trial. But its pricing starts from $9 per month.

9. Omnisend: Best Email Marketing Service for Shopify

Omnisend is the best email marketing tool with eCommerce optimizations and pre-designed workflows.

This email marketing service reduces the work involved in running a thriving eCommerce business by relying on automation.

Unique Feature: eCommerce email and SMS automation
Target Users: eCommerce, startups, and SMEs
Pricing: Starts at $16 per month

Features

1. Drag and Drop Editor for Content Creation

Your emails and campaigns must be consistent with your brand identity and message. The drag-and-drop email content editor lets you modify in-built templates to suit you.

2. Automated Push Notifications

Attract, retarget and convert web visitors with personalized push notifications. Set automated reminders for cart or browse abandonment and transactional emails beyond just offering a basic email marketing service.

3. Audience Synchronization

Integrate contacts into your Facebook and Google for better and on-target ads. Omnisend harmonizes your contact every 5-15 minutes, keeping you up-to-date. It also supports cookie-less advertising, which is good for when Google deactivates cookies on Chrome.

4. SMS Marketing

You want to handle all your SMS and emails on a single email marketing service to keep you abreast of customer conversations.

Also, you can automate SMS by including it in your marketing workflow, so customers get timely and thoughtful messages.

Onmisend boasts a 47.7% higher conversion rate in users who combine SMS and email marketing.

5. Migration

Omnisend makes the switch to their email marketing service easy and seamless for users, specifically eCommerce brands.

As a popular email marketing service, Omnisend integrates with eCommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce.

6. Hyper Segmentation

Omnisend’s intuitive segmentation helps you understand your audience better to serve them better.

Increase your sales and campaign by targeting an audience based on purchase behavior and their unique journeys on your website.

Also, monitor customer lifecycle phases to develop and execute a better retention strategy.

7. Multichannel eCommerce Marketing

Omnisend engages your eCommerce customers from different channels in one place. All your marketing activities, email campaigns, ads, and sales happen on the Omnisend platform.

You can finally keep an eye on all your important data and audience.

More Features

Live support
Forms
Campaign builder
Sales report
MMS

Pros

Omnisend is purpose-built for eCommerce businesses and integrated with 100+ eCommerce stores like Shopify and wooCommerce. So, you only need one click to start your eCommerce journey.

Plus, you can start exploring this email marketing software on a free plan.

Cons

Omnisend targets eCommerce users and offers limited features for other industries. But you can use the free plan to test drive it.

Pricing

The free plan is available for 250 contacts, but you can upgrade to paid plan starting at $16 per month to enjoy premium offerings.

10. Mailerlite: Best for Email Campaign Tracking

Mailerlite is an affordable email marketing service that offers growth-focused email solutions to customers.

It integrates your e-store with most email marketing tools to increase conversion. Mailerlite also incorporates ultra-tracking technology to deliver the most accurate insights on your marketing campaigns.

Unique Feature: Auto resend campaign
Target Users: Marketers, writers, publishers, eCommerce
Pricing: Starts at $9 per month

Features

1. Newsletter Editor

Newsletters are a great way to keep customers informed and updated about your product and services. Create outstanding newsletters from scratch or touch up existing beautiful designs.

2. Website Designer

Every business needs a responsive and attractive website where prospective customers can interact with their brands—most email signups happen on your website anyway.

Utilize Mailerlite’s drag-and-drop website builder to design your business’s lively and engaging website layout.

3. Email Automation Features

Image Credit: Mailerlite

Monitor email clicks, customer behavior, and response to your emails to enable you to strategize. Automated emails handle follow-ups, email resends, and action prompts based on analyzed data.

4. Email Verifier

Mailerlite performs routine checks and deep cleaning on your email list to weed out inactive subscribers, dormant accounts, and spammy contacts.

Enjoy a fully optimized email list 24/7.

5. Blog Creator

Use its drag-and-drop builder to craft attention-grabbing blog posts to build your audience and share your unique ideas with your community.

Blogs are an important marketing strategy to adopt for your business. According to statistics, 77% of internet users read blogs.

Leverage the power of blogs and increase your site clicks.

6. Landing Page Gallery

Your prospective customers need an online location to interact with your business. This could be a landing page.

Choose from a range of templates for a mobile-friendly landing page. So you have one less thing to worry about in building your email marketing campaign.

7. Digital Products Marketing

Mailerlite offers an avenue for users to sell virtual products like ebooks, online courses, or other digital services.

Set up websites and include a payment gateway for easy patronage.

You can equally promote your digital products on Mailerlite.

More Features

Signup forms
Email automation
Newsletter subscription
Analytics and tracking
Facebook integrations

Pros

Mailerlite is simplified for even beginners to understand. Also, the email marketing service integrates with Shopify.

Pricing is fair, and you can enjoy up to 30 days free trial period for all paid plans to decide if you want to continue or not.

Cons

The free version is only open to one user and has limited functions and features.

Pricing

Free for up to 1000 subscribers. Monthly billing based on their annual plan:

Growing Business: $9 per month
Advanced: $19 per month
Enterprise: Custom pricing

11. ConvertKit: Best for Creators

ConvertKit targets creators and builds its features around their needs to attract, engage and monetize their audience. As a result, users can build, manage, and earn a living from your audience on a single platform.

Unique Feature: Creator pro
Target Users: Creators (authors, musicians, coaches)
Pricing: Starts at $9 per month

Features

1. Automated Email Marketing

ConvertKit lets you breeze through the email writing process by automating every stage. For example, schedule email sends, deliver welcome messages, and group subscribers automatically.

2. Advanced Creator

ConvertKit’s creator pro takes the creator business a notch higher. This feature allows subscriber scoring, newsletter referrals, timely support, and teamwork and provides deliverability reports.

This is the best email marketing tool for mainstream creators.

3. Email Design

Create, edit, and optimize your emails to convert faster. ConvertKit makes email designing easy and more fun.

You can choose from previous templates and flawlessly modify the font, color, or body of your emails.

4. Email Opt-In Forms

Whether you want to choose from numerous form templates or create a customized form yourself, ConvertKit got you covered.

Access free signup forms to retarget your audience.

5. Commerce

Turn your passion into a source of income with ConvertKit’s eCommerce channel, which enables you to sell or buy digital products easily.

Package and monetize your knowledge as ebooks, online courses, newsletters, music, or presets and sell to a willing audience.

6. Third-party Integrations

Integrate your ConvertKit to your most preferred third-party apps. You can access eCommerce, lead capture, ads, CRM, and many other third-party integrations.

7. Paid Newsletter

If you have rich content and a list of loyal readers who enjoy them, ConvertKit can help you earn from newsletters.

Create customized newsletters targeted at the right audience and put a price on your knowledge.

Mailerlite provides free newsletter templates.

More Features

Audience tag
Advanced Reporting
Community support
Broadcasts
Automation builder

Pros

ConvertKit promotes the creator business and is positioned to help creatives sell their products.

The free plan supports 300 subscribers with unlimited emails, forms, landing pages, and other email marketing features.

What’s more?

You get two months of free email marketing services when you opt for annual billing.

Cons

Features on ConvertKit are purpose-built specifically for creatives making the email marketing service a poor choice for other industries.

Migration to ConvertKit from any other email marketing tool is unavailable on the free version. Also, the creator plan only allows for a single team member addition.

Pricing

Free for up to 300 subscribers. Monthly billing begins at $9 per month for Creator and $25 per month for Creator Pro.

12. Sendy: Best Low Budget and Self-Hosted Solution

Sendy uses Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) to deliver the best email marketing software for users who would like a solution that’s 100x cheaper than competitors.

Sendy is one of the most affordable email marketing services in the market.

Users don’t need to pay monthly subscriptions as this self-hosted email marketing service bills only the number of emails sent. However, you’ll need to buy, install, and update the Sendy email marketing software.

Unique Feature: Low-budget email sends
Target Users: eCommerce, SMEs
Pricing: Pay as you use

Features

1. Cheap Email Sends

Sendy offers the lowest low-price email send rate in the market. For example, you pay only $1 for every 10,000 email messages.

The affordability doesn’t affect deliverability and speed as it uses the widely trusted Amazon SES. So, you can achieve your email marketing goals on a low budget.

2. Email Campaign Reports

Get timely reports on your campaign performance and other marketing activities on the platform.

Reports give updated insights on your site activities to help you focus your energy on marketing efforts that produce the most results.

Reports are organized into beautiful visual representations like charts to simplify data.

3. Autoresponders

You can’t determine when customers will visit your site or indicate interest in your product.

But with auto response in place, you can rest assured that you’ll miss nothing.

Follow up on email subscribers without being present around the clock. Set marketing automation to answer inquiries, provide feedback, and engage customers while you’re away.

4. Email Clean Up

Sendy’s Housekeeping ensures your email list stays clean and relevant so you can channel your marketing efforts to the right audience.

Prune out redundant contacts, uninterested subscribers, and wrong email addresses, clogging your sales progress wheel.

5. Integrations and Zapier

Image Credit: Sendy

Explore many third-party apps like WordPress and thousands of marketing tools on Zapier by integrating Sendy with them.

The integration process is easy, but if you need expert support, the Sendy community is there to assist you at no cost. However, Sendy may charge a fee if you need them to help you install their email marketing software on your hosting server

6. Personalized Domains and Brands

Create your branded domain to increase brand awareness and customer trust. Let your URL capture your brand.

7. Personalized Fields

Save information about your subscribers on your created custom field. Stored data ranges from names to emails and demography.

Information from Sendy’s custom fields is useful in segmentation and audience tags when designing newsletters.

More Features

Subscription forms
Subscriber segmentation
Webhooks
Google Analytics integration
Personalized tags

Pros

Sendy is feature-rich for a low-budget email marketing platform.

Users only pay for emails sent. And the one-time fee required to use Sendy is refundable if you don’t get desired results—but this is case-by-case.

You can install Sendy on one domain but host emails for multiple domain names.

Cons

Sendy runs on your web server and requires a license to set up. Requires updating to newer versions from time to time. Unfortunately, this tool doesn’t support a free plan.

Pricing

No monthly payment plan.

One-off $69 is to buy this email marketing software
Pay $1 for every 10,000 emails sent.

FAQs

What is the best email marketing software to choose?

Choosing an email marketing platform is tough. But you can make it slightly easier with a checklist.

Use this checklist to make your decision easier:

Understand the nature and purpose of the emails you intend to send.
Decide on the most important features your ideal email marketing software must possess.
Prepare your testing team
Develop a shortlist of productive apps.
Carefully assess each shortlisted app with your team.
Start exploring any free email marketing service you can access.

What are the categories of marketing emails?

Email Newsletters: they’re newsletters that contain vital brand information.
Transactional Emails: facilitates or updates commercial transactions, e.g., order confirmation email.
Behavioral Emails: on-target messages based on user behavior to previous messages on your site or third-party tracking sources.

What is B2B email marketing service?

B2B email marketing involves sending messages and email campaigns to businesses rather than individuals.

In a B2B marketing scenario, the communication link is between your business and another business.

Your targeting, product, and marketing activities are channeled toward converting other businesses to loyal customers.

How often should you send out marketing emails?

Frequent emails can turn customers off and make them unsubscribe from your list quickly. Ideally, you should drastically increase emails from twice monthly to once weekly.

Research shows that 33.3% of businesses send out emails weekly.

Whatever you decide, ensure to analyze progress reports and use insight to determine whether to increase or reduce the number of emails sent.

What is the importance of email marketing?

Email marketing helps businesses gather, manage and engage new site visitors. You can also keep existing customers updated on your latest offerings.

It costs 500% more to gain new customers than to retain an existing one. So, use email marketing to keep your loyal customers engaged.

What is the average ROI for email marketing?

Email marketing gives a significantly higher return than other types of marketing, like digital or traditional marketing.

You gain $42 per $1 invested in email marketing campaigns. This makes email marketing the most preferred digital marketing strategy for businesses.

Does email marketing increase sales?

Email marketing is an efficient and cost-effective approach to marketing across different industries.

Consumers who receive email offers are 138% more likely to patronize a business because of email marketing campaigns than those who don’t.

Hence, email marketing increases sales, lead generation, and overall brand engagement.

Summary

The email marketing space is rife with email marketing services built to meet different user needs.

So, choosing the right email marketing service from the pool of options can be tasking.

But we’ve highlighted the top email marketing services and features you should consider when migrating your email service to a different platform. Of course, Active Campaign would be the best email marketing service on this list if we must choose one.

Explore any of the best email marketing software mentioned above, and let us know if you need help.

Featured image by storyset on Freepik

The post 12 Best Email Marketing Services for 2022 (Ranked) first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

12 octobre 2022/par Service comm.

How To Build A Design Portfolio With Zero Clients

A design portfolio is an excellent way to demonstrate your skills as a freelancer. As a web designer, you compete with millions of other web designers. Therefore, you must have a strong portfolio to land a high-paying web designing job in such a competitive space. A strong portfolio sets you apart from others. Having no clients, however, can make it challenging to get your portfolio noticed and build up any momentum.

People typically build portfolios from projects they do for clients. Hence, it seems unlikely for a new web designer without clients to have a strong portfolio. However, it’s attainable. You can build a design portfolio with no clients, and you’ll find out how in this post.

What Makes A Good Design Portfolio?

A good portfolio should display your best work, as most clients want to see your best. However, your best work may not be client work. In addition, what’s more, important than displaying your best work is showing your versatility.

Being a versatile web designer will land you more jobs than being an expert in just one type of web design. Notably, you don’t need to have many clients to be versatile in web design. Instead, you become versatile by taking on different projects.

A good design portfolio should include professional recommendations. Testimonials from previous clients are valuable here, but anyone can recommend you. It could be a web designer friend, collaborator, or even your tutor.

Furthermore, a good portfolio should feature non-client work; even if you have thousands of past clients, featuring personal projects is still ideal. It shows your growth as a web designer isn’t limited to what clients ask you to do.

Many other factors constitute a good portfolio, but these points are the most important regarding showing your skill. You can build a portfolio that includes them even if you have no clients.

How To Build A Design Portfolio With Zero Clients

You can try all or some of these methods to build a design portfolio if you have no clients.

1. Take On Design Challenges

A simple way to build a strong web design portfolio is by competing in challenges. It’s helpful whether you have clients or not.

Winning a design challenge is like finishing at the top of the class. It demonstrates that you’re the best web designer in the room and the type of web designer clients want to hire. Generally, taking on design challenges will help sharpen your skills.

You can partake in competitions arranged by renowned web design communities. You can find such competitions on websites like 99designs and Design Crowd. More often than not, winning a web design challenge will land you a job.

2. Carry Out Personal Projects

Carrying out personal projects is similar to competing in challenges. However, in this case, you’re challenging yourself.

Have you ever had a unique idea for a website? Don’t wait until a client asks you to build such a website. Instead, you can begin the project on your own. Then, if you succeed, you can proudly display the project in your portfolio.

When you get clients, you wouldn’t need to convince them that you can handle such tasks; the personal project is a testament to it.

You can carry out as many personal projects as you envisage, no matter how simple or complex. Furthermore, you don’t always have to complete them. Even failed personal projects can be part of your portfolio.

3. Clone Websites

When most clients contact you, they’ll want you to create a website similar to some existing website. You can give yourself a head start by cloning some popular websites and featuring the projects in a portfolio.

Your ability to build a replica of a professional website from scratch shows expertise. In addition, you most likely won’t get a 100% match with the original version. Your version may have improvements that subsequent clients would appreciate.

Furthermore, some website designers specialize in cloning. Suppose you plan to provide such services to clients. In that case, displaying your previously cloned website projects is all you need to create a strong portfolio.

4. Create Websites for Family and Friends

Your family and friends are potential clients. Hence, you can offer to build websites for them, even if it is for free. Afterward, you should include the work in your portfolio.

If your friend or relative has an offline business, for example, you could offer to build a website to give them an online presence.

Even if they eventually don’t use the website, you can include it as a demo project in your portfolio.

5. Get Inspiration From Others

You’re not the only web designer with no clients who wants to build a strong portfolio. Therefore, you can draw inspiration from others.

Dribbble, the social networking platform for designers, is among the best options you have. Dribbble allows you to find thousands of new and veteran web designers with varying portfolios.

You can scan the portfolios, examine the content, and try to replicate what you can in yours. Furthermore, you can even build a portfolio directly on Dribbble.

Bottom Line

Not having clients shouldn’t discourage you as a new web designer. You can still build a strong design portfolio with the methods discussed in this article.

After creating your portfolio, you can then use it to secure jobs. Subsequently, you can update the portfolio with your best client work.

Featured image by storyset on Freepik.

The post How To Build A Design Portfolio With Zero Clients first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

5 octobre 2022/par Service comm.

How To Make Your Designs Scannable (And Why You Should)

Jakob Nielsen’s How Users Read on the Web is 25 years old this week, and one glance at an eye-tracking study will tell you its key observations are still relevant today.

Simply put, users don’t read a web page; they scan it for individual words and sentences.

A typical pattern shown in eye-tracking reports is that users will rapidly scan a page, scrolling down to do so. Then either hit the back button and pump your bounce rate, or scroll to the top and re-engage with the content.

Even when content, volume, and quality tick all the user’s boxes, and they choose to stay on your site, they still don’t read; they scan; a slightly deeper scan, but still a scan.

As a result, it’s vital to design websites to be easily scannable, both in a split-second scan to decide if your page is worth the reader’s time and on a second or third pass.

Clarify the Page’s Purpose Immediately

Every page should have a primary goal. The majority of the time, that goal is embodied in a CTA (Call to Action).

The good news is, if your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) has gone to plan, your goal (i.e., to sell something) and your user’s goal (i.e., to buy something) will align. By clarifying the page’s purpose, you can show the user that your goals align.

You can be experimental if you’re an established company and the user knows what to expect. But if you’re new to the market or have a lower profile, you need to conform to established design patterns. This means that a SaaS should look like a SaaS, a store should look like a store, and a blog should look like a blog.

Including your CTA above the fold — which in the context of the web, means the user doesn’t have to interact to see it. Doing so makes it easier for the user to progress and clearly tells the user what you are offering.

The landing page for next month’s Webflow Conf 2022 clarifies the page’s content, with a clear CTA above the fold.

Employ a Visual Hierarchy

The Von Restorff effect states that the more something stands out, the more likely we are to notice and remember it.

Visual hierarchies are excellent for guiding a user through content. HTML has the h1–h7 heading levels — although, in reality, only h1–h4 are much use — which gives you several levels of heading that can be scanned by different readers scanning at different rates.

For example, we know that subheadings have little impact if a user diligently reads the page from top to bottom, but they are excellent for catching the eye of skim readers.

Amnesty uses very a very simple hierarchy, the only change for its subheading being increased weight. But it is enough to catch the user’s eye.

You can also create visual hierarchies with other forms of contrast; weight and color are often employed in addition to size. For accessibility and inclusive design, it’s wise to combine visual indicators when creating a hierarchy; for example, headings are usually larger, bolder, and colored.

Use Negative Space

Imagine a person standing in a crowd. Let’s say they’re wearing a red and white striped jumper and a red and white bobble hat — pretty distinctive. But if there are hundreds of other characters around them, they might be hard to spot.

Now imagine the same person dressed the same, standing on their own. How long will it take you to spot them? Even without the stripy outfit, it’s not much of a challenge.

Elements in isolation are not only easier to spot, but they pull the eye because the negative space (sometimes referred to as white space) around them creates contrast.

When using negative space, the key is to give elements enough room to breathe and attract the eye without giving them so much room that they are disassociated from the rest of your content.

Across its site, Moheim uses negative space to highlight UI elements while grouping associated content.

Use F Patterns

Users scan a page using either an F-pattern or a Z-pattern.

Because users scan your page in predictable ways, we can employ layouts that cater to this tendency.

Designers have been aware of F and Z patterns for some time, and because they’ve been used for so long, they may be self-fulfilling, with users being trained to scan a page in this fashion. However, both patterns are similar to how eyes travel from line to line in horizontal writing systems.

Whatever the cause, by placing key content along these paths, you increase the chance of capturing a user’s attention.

Kamil Barczentewicz uses a beautiful, natural layout that also conforms to a classic F pattern.

Include Images with Faces

Images are a great way of conveying brand values and making a site engaging. But when it comes to catching the eye of a user scanning your design, the best images include faces.

For example, a testimonial with an image of the customer will catch the eye more than a text-only testimonial.

The Awwwards Conference uses an animated computer with a face to capture attention. And large images of speakers making eye contact.

This is almost certainly due to social conditioning; we see a face, and we engage with it to see if it is a threat or not. Most of us naturally look to expressions of emotion to understand situations, and the distinction between a real-life person and an image hasn’t made its way into our mental programming yet.

You don’t need to use photos. Illustrations are fine. The key is to ensure there is a face in the image. That’s why illustrations of characters perform so well.

Copy Print Design

Print design is centuries older than the web, and many print applications, from newspapers to advertising, developed design elements to catch the eye of readers scanning the design.

Subheadings, lists, blockquotes, and pull quotes all catch the eye. Introductory paragraphs in a larger size or even italics draw users into the text. Shorter paragraphs encourage users to keep reading.

Horizontal rules used to delineate sections of text act as a break on eyes traveling over content with momentum. They are a good way of catching a scan-reader who is losing interest.

You can use a horizontal rule or break up your layout with bands of color that divide content sections.

Omono uses horizontal bands to highlight different sections of content.

Mass, Not Weight

We often discuss design elements as having weight; font-weight is the thickness of strokes.

But it is more helpful to think of design elements as having mass; mass creates gravity, pulling a user’s eye towards them.

The trick is to design elements with enough mass to attract the user‘s eye when scanning at speed without forcing the user to change how they engage with your content.

Featured image via Pexels.

The post How To Make Your Designs Scannable (And Why You Should) first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

28 septembre 2022/par Service comm.

20 Best New Websites, October 2022

The design world fluctuates back and forth, swerving between love and hate for different design trends. Sometimes we see a wide range of approaches, and sometimes designers all hop on the same idea.

This month, the web is dominated by animation. Designers are cramming in motion in unexpected ways. And it’s fun to explore. Here are 20 of the best new sites on the web this month. Enjoy!

Bannach

Bannach is a German furniture brand. Its products are colorful and geometric, so it makes sense that when you scroll down to the collection, the thumbnails begin as pixel blocks and animate into product photography.

Fornasetti Profumi

Fornasetti Profumi takes a different approach to motion. It uses video to emphasize stillness to promote the calming qualities of its candle products.

The Other Side of Truth

The Other Side of Truth is a superb exercise in utilizing the web for a cause. It presents facts on the Russia-Ukraine war, but the standout feature is the toggle switch that, instead of light mode-dark mode, toggles facts and Russian state propaganda.

Glasfurd & Walker

Glasfurd & Walker is a portfolio site for a design agency. So far, so standard. However, it sets itself apart because it’s slightly bigger than the browser and swerves left and right with your mouse movement.

Sirup 5th Anniversary

Sirup is a Japanese singer-songwriter, and to celebrate the fifth anniversary of his first hit single, his record company has put together this awesome maximalist micro-site that uses type, motion, and art direction to capture his style.

Fitzjohn’s

Fitzjohn’s is a slick site for a new apartment complex in the Hampstead area of London. It uses a refreshing modern color palette and calming animation to take the edge off the frankly ludicrous price tag.

Persepolis Reimagined

Persepolis Reimagined is an awe-inspiring WebGL tour through one of the most important cities in ancient Iran. Make sure you tour it on a large screen. It’s hard not to be wide-eyed with wonder.

JaM Cellars

JaM Cellars is a Californian wine brand that’s pitching to bachelorette parties. With names like Butter, and Sugar, it’s not the most sophisticated tipple, but yellow, we love a yellow site.

Danielle Levitt

This portfolio site for film director and photographer Danielle Levitt features samples of her best work scrolling past the viewport. There’s a clever switch of thumbnail and background color when you scroll down to the contact details.

Propel

From total color energy to Apple-levels of minimalism: Propel is a slick, animate-on-scroll site for a marine motor brand selling an outboard and inboard motor. The animated masks on the images are a nice subtle touch.

Standards

Standards is a site for a SaaS that helps organizations create, maintain, and share brand guidelines. It uses subtle animation, video of its UI, and compelling copy to sell its approach.

Chris Carruthers

The portfolio site for Chris Carruthers is deliberately self-indulgent with scrolling text, clipped images, and scroll-jacking, but it’s also delightful to peruse.

Theodore Ellison Designs

We don’t often see colored glass in real life, but the play of light on stained glass is beautiful. This site for Theodore Ellison Designs uses video to bring the effect to the web.

Owomaniya!

The Owomaniya report for 2022 uncovers the state of gender diversity in the Indian entertainment industry. Presented in the style of infographics, the information is brought to life by animation.

Meetings

Meetings is a French events company. Its site uses an animated collage approach to showcase its services, and animated text to pull you into its content.

Blakeney

Blakeney invests in African companies on behalf of institutional investors. Its site is typical of the financial industry, but it uses animation to lift it to a higher level of interest.

Becklyn

Becklyn is a digital design agency. Its portfolio site uses animated text, expanding image masks, and video to guide us through its site and app design approach.

Cabi

Cabi is a brand of Japanese condiments with a typically Japanese feeling site. Bright colors, a slowly scrolling slideshow of dishes, and editorial to pack shot hover effects are a great introduction to the brand.

Slantis

Slantis provides building information modeling to architecture and infrastructure providers. Its site uses animation to showcase the types of content it produces for clients.

July Fund

July Fund is a venture capital project. It takes an entirely different approach than its competitors by adopting a chaotic but enjoyable card-based design.

The post 20 Best New Websites, October 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.