These statistics represent the universal interest and the importance of business intelligence software across the world.
The worldwide market size for business intelligence and analytics software applications is forecast to reach 16.5 billion in 2023
[Source: Statista]
As a freelance web developer, how many clients do you get from your website? If you’re like most, you’re probably lucky to get one client every 2-3 months. Unfortunately, that’s very common.
These days it’s not enough just to be a web developer if you want to make really good money. You have to be able to differentiate yourself in the marketplace to get more opportunities. If you can do this successfully, I’m 100% sure that it will help you win more projects and charge higher rates.
So today I’d like to share with you a little bit of my own story. In the last 4 months, I was able to position myself as a specialist with my personal site that ultimately helped me win more projects and get better clients.
The first thing that I would invite you to do is to shift your thinking a little bit.
If you want to be a high-paid professional (especially if you’re a freelancer), you need to learn how to market and sell yourself. And the first rule of marketing is to identify your target audience and the result that you help them achieve.
I can’t over emphasize the importance of this.
You need to know exactly who you help and the outcome that you provide. That is ultimately what you get paid for. So you need to define your ideal client.
My suggestion is to pick a market segment that you would love to work with, that has the money to afford you and (ideally) those that have already done some projects for. Once you have identified your target market, you need to create your positioning statement. Your positioning statement should immediately tell who you help and what results you help them achieve.
Here is a formula that you can use to create your positioning statement:
I help __ (target audience) __ do (build/achieve/overcome) ___ (problem that you help them solve).
For example: I help startup SaaS companies build highly converting websites. You can go even narrower if you want, but this is already much better than just saying, “I’m a web developer.”
If your positioning statement is “I help startup SaaS companies build highly converting websites” it can still be narrowed down and improved. As you gain more experience and work with more clients, you can refine it to something like: “I help healthcare SaaS companies build highly converting websites.”
Now imagine if a SaaS startup founder from a healthcare niche came to your site and saw that positioning statement vs a very generic one like “I’m a web developer”. How much easier would it be for you to differentiate yourself and gain a huge advantage over your competitors in the marketplace?
“I am passionate about coding, I have 10+ years of experience, client satisfaction is my main goal…”
Have you ever seen statements like that on someone’s portfolio site? Or maybe it even says that on your own site. From my experience, statements like that don’t really help you convert site visitors into customers.
If you personally go to a company’s website, what would you like to see yourself as a visitor? Somebody saying how good they are, or to find out if they can be a good fit to solve your problem? I think that most of the time the latter is what you’re after. That’s what other people usually go to your website for; they want to know how you can help them solve their problems.
For instance, take a look at this section from Tom Hirst’s website:
As you can see, this immediately helps the visitors understand if Tom is a good fit for them or not. He doesn’t just boast about how good he is, but rather helps the client understand what problems he can solve for them. Another important part here is that Tom doesn’t use a lot of technical terms. Since a lot of his visitors may be not as tech-savvy as he is, there is no point in confusing them with technical jargon. The more you can speak their language – the easier it will be for you to build trust and connection that will later help you during the sales process.
Let me tell you a bit about the 4 parts of my site that I think have contributed significantly to having me win more projects. The 4 elements are problem, solution, proof, and call to action. Let me go over them 1 by 1 and explain why they’re important.
A good way to start your landing page sales letter is by identifying the problem of the client. If you know their pain points and you mention them, you should be able to hook them into reading your copy. And a well-written copy plays a significant role in persuading your visitors to take the next action.
Once you have mentioned their problem, you need to present them with a solution that you provide. You need to show them how working with you can solve their problems. Whatever their problems are, you have to show them that you understand them and can help solve them.
That’s what UX designer Matt Oplinski is doing on his website is doing. He knows that his clients might need help with 3 types of projects: Digital Products, Marketing Websites or Mobile Apps. For example, the clients who are seeking a redesign of their website may have an issue with their current conversion rates. And that’s exactly what Matthew lists in the middle section under “Custom Marketing Website” headline. I would even argue that he may have been a bit more specific with the solutions that he can offer.
The main takeaway here is that it’s important to be very specific with the result that you can help your clients achieve. The more accurate it is, the better it is going to convert.
Social proof plays an extremely important role in converting a lead into a customer. When someone comes to your site, they don’t know if they can trust you. If they were to spend one, two, five, ten or even more thousand dollars – they need to feel comfortable with you. They need to have at least some level of trust. That’s why they want to see as many signs as possible that you’re trustworthy.
Social proof obviously can come in many different forms. The most popular and important ones, in my opinion, are case studies with results that you’ve produced and testimonials. They will be absolutely crucial to persuade your clients and be able to differentiate yourself from others.
Here is a good example from Bill Erickson’s site:
Ideally, your testimonials should showcase a particular business goal that you’ve helped your client to achieve. But even if you don’t have those, you can use ordinary testimonials that your clients give you. That alone is better than no testimonials at all.
Last but not least you should have a single call to action on your site. Most likely it will be a button to contact you, or book a call with you.
In my opinion, it’s important to have a single call to action because if you give people too many options they will not be so focused on taking an action that you actually want them to take.
I also suggest that you have a call to action button at least 2-3 times on the page: one on the first screen where you have your positioning statement and/or your offer, and one at the very bottom of the page so that when they finish reading they don’t need to go back to the top to take action. Having another call to action in the middle of your page is also a good idea. My advice would be to add it after you’ve described the problem, your solution and presented yourself as someone who can help your leads with their problems.
I started niching down and created my own website four months ago. Being a member of multiple freelance platforms, I’ve been fortunate enough to get enough leads in my target market to test out my strategy. So far the results are pretty amazing.
It has become a lot easier for me to win projects, get clients that respect my knowledge, and my process. Besides that, I’ve been able to significantly increase my rates for my work. A great thing about working with similar projects every time is that you automate and streamline a lot of things, improve your delivery process and become much more efficient. You can even create a productized service. This is something that is very hard to achieve if you’re constantly working on custom projects that have different requirements and involve different technologies.
To be completely transparent, I’m still in the process of building my authority in the niche, polishing my offer and gaining experience. I still have a long way to go. What I can certainly say today is that it has been one of the best decisions in my professional career.
To become a high paying professional in your industry you have to do things differently. Today I tried to show you one of the ways that you can improve your career or freelancing business fast. It probably won’t happen overnight, but in a matter of a few months you can be so much ahead of your competition if you deploy some of the strategies that I’ve shared with you today.
I really hope that this article has helped you gain some perspective and you will start to consider doing a similar thing that I did to achieve amazing results.
Featured image via Unsplash.
Voice is one aspect of technology that is getting bigger and bigger, and showing little sign of relenting. In fact, 2019 data revealed that 22% of UK households owned a voice-controlled digital home assistant device such as an Amazon Echo or Google home. This is double the figure recorded in 2017 and it is predicted that over the next five years nearly 50% of all homes will have one. Smart home adoption rates are increasing, and it shows how voice control is something we are all becoming more accustomed to.
With these high figures, does it follow that voice should be something web designers build into sites? Or is it merely a gimmick that will die out and render sites with hardware and complex design issues? You only have to look at the failed introduction of Google glass to see that certain technological advancements don’t always have the outcome that might be expected.
One of the first issues with voice is establishing whether you want sites to recognise everyone’s voices, or just those who have registered. If you’re using the site in a crowded room will it pick up on snippets of conversation from others and think these are instructions? Google Home has a feature whereby you have to register your voice with its app to use more personalised features such as the shopping list. Is this the sort of thing websites would need?
The implementation of voice is complex, not only does it need to understand certain languages (such as English), but all the accents and variations too. With 160 English dialects alone, that is a lot that the technology needs to understand – not including mispronunciations, slang, and colloquialisms. Also, if a site is used all over the world (which many are) how many languages will it need to know?
if there are clips of your voice out there on the web…it can easily be imitated
If a website involves a feature such as online shopping or other functions which require sensitive details to be input, this could put people off using voice. Users need to know where this saved data is being stored, how it will be used and if it is secure. In 2018, HMRC had signed up about 6.7 million people to its voice ID service and HSBC said over 10,000 were registering each week. This shows many trust the service, but experts say that if there are clips of your voice out there on the web (such as in a podcast) it can easily be imitated. Bringing with it security and privacy issues.
According to futurologist Dr Ian Pearson, who invented the text message back in 1991, it won’t be long until we can complete a financial transaction with just a few words and a gesture. This can be a time-saver for things such as online shopping, but we need to ensure there are the correct security steps in place.
When speaking we tend to use shortened and more colloquial language as opposed to when we type. The voice function on a website will need to be able to adapt for this. One example is if you are filling in a form or comment box by voice for a website, you will need to tell it what to punctuate, letting it know where to add a comma, exclamation mark etc.
With the web as we use it now, we often browse through pages, reading other snippets of information before clicking through to the page we want. With voice recognition it will cut out these middle steps. For example, if you are looking for a recipe of something specific, you will just say the command “Show me the … recipe” and it will take you straight there. This direct access to what we are looking for could lead to a simplification of websites.
With websites as they are now, they need updates semi-regularly, depending on how they are built, how complex they are, and what features we have built into them. A voice-based site will need updating regularly, whether to add new words or processes or to keep up with the fast-adapting technology. It might end up being quite a complex process.
While there are more of us now than ever using voice control via tech such as Alexa, Google, and Siri, there is still a level of mistrust over it. It’s still not quite clear where data is being stored, if it is being stored, and how easy it could be to abuse.
If a site is built for voice, will it utilise a ready-built plugin or will it have its own software built by developers? Will this feature require a greater amount of storage and bandwidth to cope with it? These are further factors to consider when thinking of the future of implementing voice to websites.
Voice technology while working in some respects, is still a bit of a grey area when it comes to future use. Will it be the next big thing as many have predicted, or will it simply die down?
Look at Google Glass – highlighted as the big new technology, they soon died down and were eventually discontinued. Smart watches were another thing. You can see their initial downfall by reading an article published in 2017 about smartwatches – how major smartwatch makers such as Apple and Samsung rushed into the market before the technology was ready and they subsequently failed. Motorola exited the smartwatch market, Pebble and Jawbone shut down and Fitbit sold 2.3 million fewer devices than in their previous quarter. It was perceived as being a fad. However, fast forward to 2020 and more people than ever are wearing and using smartwatches. The smartwatch market was valued at shipment volumes of 47.34 million in 2019 and is expected to reach 117.51 by 2025, reaching a growth of 15.4 over the next five years.
Will voice follow a similar trend?
People enjoy browsing websites and many businesses rely on user’s impulse buying and ask their websites to be designed to reflect this. With voice taking you directly to the page’s users want to find, will they bypass these potential selling traps and just buy what they want – rather than added extras? Will it end up being a negative for businesses and see users not as satisfied for the experience?
You will also have to remember that not all devices might work with voice, or people might be browsing somewhere where voice cannot be used. This means in the design process it needs to work both for voice instruction and manual use. It needs to work just as well for both to ensure the customer journey isn’t affected.
There are many ways voice can affect how we design websites in the upcoming future. It’s important to take note of market trends and usage – seeing how people use voice and thinking of the customer journey. It’s vital we don’t forget the end goals of websites – whether it’s to inform or to sell, the implementation of voice needs to assist this process not make it harder.
Featured image via Unsplash.
When analysts for professional sports teams noticed that marketing promotions that included the team’s logo vastly outperformed similar creative assets that featured player imagery — something which, to the casual observer, this may simply sound like good analyst work — it showed something significant: creatives rarely receive an analytical assessment of their work.
More than half of creatives say they rarely…get qualitative performance data about the creative content
Those analysts didn’t just stumble upon that insight. The feedback loop — where someone is dedicated to evaluating the creative used in marketing campaigns and feeding the data back to designers — was the result of a concentrated effort to improve the creative process, workflow and by extension, organizational culture.
More than half (55%) of creatives say they “rarely” or “never” get qualitative performance data about the creative content they’ve produced. Less than one-in-five creatives (17%) receive such feedback “always” or “often.” That’s according to our research, as published in the 2020 In-House Creative Management Report, which was conducted in partnership with InSource, a professional association for in-house creatives.
The 2020 In-House Creative Management Report revealed that 89% of respondents think creative work is important to meeting business objectives. Similarly, 87% said their organization is giving them the same or more credit for the business results their work delivers for the organization.
How can a creative team improve what it does for a business if they never see how their work influences market behavior?
Those statistics are encouraging since creative teams have been asked to do more and more — with the same or fewer resources — for years. However, to sustain this positive relationship with marketing and business leaders, creative teams will need to find quantitative ways to demonstrate their value. The feedback loop strengthens the strategic relationship creatives have with their business leaders.
So how can creative value be measured? Efficiency and effectiveness are the two primary approaches.
Measures of efficiency center on output. Efficiency aims to quantify requests, project by volume, type, requestor, and per designer, completion times, cycle times, cause of delays, and rounds of revision.
Such measures are essential for making a case for the resources the creative team needs to get the work done. In our research, most in-house creative teams are at least thinking about output metrics. This is a good start but it’s just the beginning.
Measures of creative effectiveness are the next level in organizational sophistication. The creative process doesn’t end when a project has been approved. Instead, there’s a feedback loop that still needs to be completed – performance metrics must be shared with the creative team. How can a creative team improve what it does for a business if they never see how their work influences market behavior?
Importantly, the benefits of sharing performance data goes beyond process improvement. It spreads to the overall culture which strengthens the partnership between creatives and marketing.
As Brent Chiu-Watson, a product leader at Adobe, wrote, measures of efficacy lead to a “mutual interest in understanding creative effectiveness.” In turn, cross-functional collaboration improves and the whole team begins “to provide better insight through dialogue.”
When marketing organizations are interested in measuring creative, there is often more emphasis on measures of output than there is effectiveness. Sometimes, what gets measured is what’s easy to measure. There are several reasons for this:
“There is an old adage that you can choose quality, speed or cost, but not all three. Sometimes two, but never all three,” says Adam Morgan, an executive creative director for Adobe, who contributed to the 2020 In-House Creative Management Report. “So, we say the most important thing is quality creative, but then we measure on speed and efficiency.”
Fortunately, Adam and several other big thinkers in the creative space offered some ideas for approaching this business problem.
“Two thoughts come to mind when you see creative teams not getting feedback on their work. First, does that data even exist? The marketing team might not be collecting it because they haven’t defined success metrics,” wrote Ilise Benun, a speaker, author and business coach for creative professionals at Marketing Mentor.
“Second, the marketing team has data, but they aren’t providing it. In that case, the creative team has to make it easy for the marketing team to pass that data over. Define what those metrics are at the beginning of the project, and then set up the project so that you can collect that information or have direct access to it at the end of the project.”
“In general, teams that are earning their seat at the strategic table are probably also more connected to data. But I don’t think that the creative department should get swamped down in endless metrics,” says Adam.
“Use this as an opportunity to build a strategic partnership with even more departments within the organization who are already focused on measuring performance.”
“It’s important to remember that operational metrics are key to showing the impact creative work has on the business,” says our very own Molly Clark, who heads our marketing team. “Creatives will strengthen their relationship with the business by becoming analytical creatives – the best combination of data-driven and creative.”
The design team for the professional sports organization, at the beginning of this piece, were surprised by their analysts’ findings: most usually agreed that player imagery is visually more compelling. However, the organization built a feedback loop into the creative process that put combined analytics and creative to drive better business results.
Featured image via Unsplash.
In this time of global economic turmoil, it’s more important than it’s ever been that your financial decisions are based on accurate, up-to-date, market information.
In a world where stock price is a key confidence marker, the businesses that attract attention, secure investment, and grow, are the ones that can demonstrate their value in a wider market.
Up to now, displaying accurate market pricing has been prohibitively expensive, needing direct access to a huge dataset, and the code to mine it. So we’re delighted to introduce marketstack, a real-time market data API that’s reliable, simple to integrate with your site or app, is lightning fast, and includes a free-forever plan.
marketstack is a REST API that allows you to access stock data for public companies at 72 global exchanges including the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and the London Stock Exchange.
marketstack delivers real-time market data, accurate to a single minute, ensuring that the information you base your decisions on, and the information you pass on to your customers, is always up to date.
There are more than 125,000 stock tickers, from over 50 different countries; you can query stocks, or over 75 different market indices; intraday market data is included, meaning you can monitor trades that close at the end of the day; you can even retrieve data about time-zones and international currencies.
marketstack uses cutting-edge technology to deliver market data in an easy-to-integrate JSON format, which is lightweight and incredibly easy to dig into.
Requests are made via a simple HTTP GET call, and all requests are run through bank-quality 256-bit HTTPS encryption. Whatever code stack you’re using, whether it’s PHP, Python, Node, or plain old JavaScript, marketstack provides comprehensive documentation to get your team up to speed in mere minutes.
The highly reliable cloud infrastructure can handle anything from a few dozen requests per year, all the way up to millions of requests per day. Regardless of the scale of your project, marketstack is robust and flexible enough to handle it.
marketstack isn’t just about the bulls and bears of markets, in the tech sector specifically, stock price is an indicator of wider business trends and performance.
When Apple became the first US company to reach a $2 trillion valuation, not only was its stock price central to the story, but it indicated a trend in the tech giant’s dominance that went beyond cold hard cash.
When an eccentric billionaire makes outrageous, and ill-judged comments, and tanks his company’s valuation, the fluctuations in stock price are a big part of the story.
Beyond the spin of politicians, the market index of different exchanges is an indication of what analysts with in-depth knowledge really think during an election campaign.
With over 30 years of historical data, marketstack is a history of business, particularly the burgeoning tech sector, and makes that history available with a simple to use API.
marketstack’s API is built on top of apilayer technology, one of the most respected, and trusted API providers in the world, with a huge amount of experience delivering data reliably. Millions of API requests can be run through the API hourly, and it still has almost 100% uptime.
Any API is only as good as the data it supplies, and marketstack’s data is supplied by numerous high-authority providers around the globe, resulting in unprecedented accuracy.
As a result, marketstack is trusted by over 30,000 companies — including Microsoft, Amazon, Uber, and Credit Suisse — and 80+ universities.
marketstack is entirely free for up to 1000 requests per month, with access to 1 year of historical data, as well as end-of-day data. No credit card is required to get started, and you’ll never be billed. This is the perfect option for simple integrations, or developers working on proof-of-concept builds. What we really like about marketstack is that the free package is genuinely usable. It’s not just a trial version that presses you into upgrading.
For anyone who needs more comprehensive data, packages that include market indices, technical support, and commercial use permissions, start at $9.99 per month, or just $7.99 per month when billed annually.
Head over the marketstack today to claim your free API key, and get started.
[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of marketstack –]
We are moving toward a future where everything is going to be autonomous, fast, and highly efficient. To match the pace of this fast-moving ecosystem, application delivery times will have to be accelerated, but not at the cost of quality. Achieving quality at speed is imperative and therefore quality assurance gets a lot of attention. To fulfill the demands for exceptional quality and faster time to market, automation testing will assume priority. It is becoming necessary for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to automate their testing processes. But the most crucial aspect is to choose the right test automation framework. So let’s understand what a test automation framework is.
A test automation framework is the scaffolding that is laid to provide an execution environment for the automation test scripts. The framework provides the user with various benefits that help them to develop, execute, and report the automation test scripts efficiently. It is more like a system that was created specifically to automate our tests. In a very simple language, we can say that a framework is a constructive blend of various guidelines, coding standards, concepts, processes, practices, project hierarchies, modularity, reporting mechanism, test data injections, etc. to pillar automation testing. Thus, the user can follow these guidelines while automating applications to take advantage of various productive results.
In this article you will find the most appreciated web solutions of 2020.
To create this list we took into account the following considerations: The popularity of the product or the service; How many users it has; How many times it was downloaded or installed; The level of efficiency; What you get for your money.
You’ll find WordPress themes and plugins, an affordable logo design contest, logo creators, website builders, web development services, and even more. Let’s get started…
WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress, being used by all kind of merchants, both small and large companies.
WPcustomify is 100% focused on WooCommerce, having huge experience. They will help you with everything you need:
Get in touch with them and let the experts manage all the issues and errors of your WooCommerce. Make the best out of your store, and help it get more traffic and convert better, by using the experience of WPcustomify.
Design and development projects require a high degree of precision and organization. To meet desired goals on time and budget, teams should adhere to initial estimates and deadlines impeccably. Besides, to be efficient and productive, they need to manage tasks and monitor progress in a systematic way.
actiTIME can assist developers and their managers in attaining these objectives effortlessly. As a high-quality and user-friendly timesheet app, it allows users to keep a detailed record of hours spent on multiple tasks and, in this way, collect data for consequent client billing and invoicing, as well as performance and productivity analysis.
However, actiTIME is more than just another time tracker – it includes powerful project management functionality that can help you:
actiTIME’s flexibility makes it an excellent choice for both individuals and teams of any size. The tool can be configured to meet varying management needs and integrated with many other useful apps through Zapier or API. In addition, you can always use the actiTIME timer through the Chrome extension in Jira, Github and GitLab, which will allow you to track hours without any distractions from the primary work process. Sign up for a free actiTIME trial and bring your productivity to the next level.
Total is one of the most complete WordPress theme that you can buy in 2020, being filled with 80+ builder modules, 40+ premade demos that you can install with 1-click, and over 500+ styling options.
This theme has over 43k happy users and it is used by some of the best websites in the world.
This theme is developed and maintained by WordPress experts that have been a part of the WP community for over 10 years.
Webdesign Toolbox will become a web design tools encyclopedia, currently featuring 965 resources in 78 different categories. Everybody was waiting for such a place and now it is live and heavily updated each month.
I just found out about this place and I can say that it is super. Having all the tools and services in a single place, very well categorized is super helpful. Now you don’t have to lose time on search engines and on ads (who pays more will get in front), you have everything at your disposal, in front of you.
Using Webdesign Toolbox is super simple to find the right web tools and services, just browse the website.
Trusted by some of the most innovative companies in the world (Microsoft, Disney, FOX, Grammarly, and many others), and with over 8 year’s experience in this market, TestingBot is a super solution that you can use for automated and manual testing.
It supports cross browser testing, live testing, real device testing, and tons of other things.
Start a free trial and see TestingBot in action.
Codester is a huge marketplace where designers and developers will find tens of thousands of premium PHP scripts, websites templates, apps, plugins, and much more.
Always check the flash sale section where hugely discounted items are being sold.
Taskade is a super technologically advanced remote workspace (works from anywhere where there’s an internet connection) that you and your team can use for chatting, organizing, and getting things done.
You can build a workspace from scratch using the included editor, use a ready-made templates, or edit the one you want.
This collaboration platform is free to use for 10 projects.
Bonsai is a the best suite of software for freelancers, being the top choice of tens of thousands of freelancers from all over the world.
They help you with everything you need, and they even provide invoice templates for freelance professionals – designer, developer, writer, marketer, contractor, consultant, photographer, etc.
Mobirise is the most powerful offline website builder in 2020, being loaded with 3500+ awesome website templates, with sliders, galleries, forms, popups, icons, and even more.
Use it to create a unique website, no coding or design skills needed.
Goodie was created by a team of experts that have super experience in the web development world.
This service is used mostly by web designers that need a reliable web development partner, and by customers that need to amplify their online presence.
MailMunch helps you create eye-catching forms and landing pages in seconds – no coding or design skills required!
It is quick to set up, easy to learn, and packs a punch with built-in email marketing features and integrations with any email marketing service of your choice.
Boost conversions by up to 400% with this complete lead generation software.
You want to let your website visitors create awesome emails and pages directly on your website? With Unlayer it is possible and it is super simple to implement this feature on your website.
This plug and play email editor and page builder can be embedded it in 5 minutes on your website.
Every WordPress website needs a powerful SEO plugin to take care of it. There is a huge difference between these plugins, some being extremely efficient.
One such efficient SEO plugin is Rank Math. This free WordPress plugin will make your website rank higher and get more traffic from your existing content.
Get it now, after a basic configuration the plugin runs autonomously.
Schema markups will make your website rank higher and get more traffic. To quickly add them, use Schema Pro. You press 1 button, and you select all the pages on which you want the schema markups to be added. It is so simple.
Landingi is a brilliant landing page builder that will help you create awesome designs with no experience, no coding skills and no design ideas.
Create a landing page that converts and which is engaging, with Landingi is a simple task for everybody.
CollectiveRay is specialized in providing super in-depth tutorials and articles for WordPress, hosting, themes, tools, and all kind of platforms.
You should always browse it whenever you are looking for detailed and accurate information about all kinds of stuff.
ContentSnare is the smart way to collect content. Why is that? Because it is an automated service that will help you quickly gather content from your customers and partners, without losing time on this aspect of your business.
Configure it in a few minutes and right after ContentSnare will be on autopilot, collecting materials in your place.
XSTORE is the most complete WooCommerce theme that you can get in 2020. It has included over 90 shop designs, and it also includes several plugins that are worth $407.
Get it now and build a high converting store.
FixRunner is your personal WordPress support team that will take care of your website 24/7.
They offer several services:
Let the experts help you with everything you need so your WordPress website can get the best conversion rates.
Heroic Table of Contents is the easiest way to add a table of contents to your WordPress website.
Are you using tables of contents? Everybody loves them, in articles and on websites.
Get your website to the next level with Heroic Table Of Contents, it’s free.
WrapPixel is a popular name in the React templates world. They offer high-quality themes that look awesome and which are lightning fast.
Browse WrapPixel and pick what you need for your projects.
Pixpa is a professional website builder that people use to create all-in-one websites: a store, a blog, and a client gallery.
The editor is filled with tons of designs and elements, and it is super simple to use.
Astra is the fastest growing theme of all time, having almost 1 million users.
Why does everybody love Astra? Because it has pixel-perfect included designs, it is fast, SEO optimized, it is simple to use and configure, and it is optimized for conversions.
Meet a very affordable and convenient website builder uKit. It allows you to quickly kickstart your online presence. Prices start from 2.5 USD/month, you get a stable hosting, unlimited storage space, and a free technical domain. Lots of colorful up-to-date templates, responsive technical support, and the ability to connect your external domain. You can try it for free on a 14-day trial – no credit card required.
Fotor is an online photo editor that is used by tens of thousands of web designers, online entrepreneurs, marketers, and people that have an online presence. Creating graphics and pictures that are engaging and converting is simple with Fotor, no need to have any design skills.
The interface will guide you every moment.
You can use Fotor also as a background remover.
stepFORM is a first-class freemium service for building forms, quizzes, and various online surveys. The whole process becomes seamless and takes a few minutes because due to the visual intuitive interface no programming skills are needed. With stepFORM, you can add a calc to your website, enable online payments, manage your orders with built-in CRM, and more. Try it out today! Free!
OpinionStage is a brilliant quiz maker that you can use with zero experience and zero design skills to create high-engaging quizzes.
Use the included editor and the beautiful elements to start designing your own content.
SuperbWebsiteBuilders.com focuses on reviewing and comparing website builders that refer to various business niches and make it possible to cover a broad spectrum of web design tasks. This information will be of great help to users looking for a professional web building platform to adhere to their needs. The resource also contains ratings and examples of websites created with popular website builders.
pCloudy is the right service to use for mobile app testing from anywhere and anytime. It has over 100k happy users and it is used by top companies like Philips, Honeywell and Jio.
Start a free trial to see pCloudy in action.
Bonsai is offering contract templates that will help you save time and look like a huge corporation.
You will find tons of templates to choose from, you will have the possibility to e-sign the contracts, and use automated reminders. It is super simple to use Bonsai for generating the right contracts for your projects.
uSocial is an elegant, lightweight social media icon design tool. Don’t waste time on manual assembling of icons or ordering them from freelancers – now you can design them yourself with uSocial. Make them float, follow the user as they scroll, or simply make them bigger and/or styled in the theme of your website.
Controlio will help you monitor your employees’ PC activity from anywhere, being the first choice of both small companies and enterprises.
Improve your company security and productivity by using this technologically-advanced software.
Start a free 14-day trial to see Controlio in action.
Wix2WP.Pro is the all-in-one website migration platform that makes it possible to successfully transfer Wix-powered websites to WordPress. The service is a perfect solution for newbies as well as for web design pros, who lack time to handle the migration process independently. They employ qualified pros, who are ready to tackle all the special nuances of the website transfer procedure with precise attention to details.
WhatFontIs is the best font finder that you can use in 2020 to identify fonts for free, from any picture and from any website (or email).
This is the only software that has a huge database (over 620k indexed fonts) and which can identify both free and paid fonts, including Google Fonts.
Identify fonts like pros with WhatFontIs.
FoxMetrics is a super smart cloud-based web analytics platform that empowers businesses to collect, enrich, transform, and explore their mobile, web, and offline customer journey data.
It is much better than everything else.
Creative Tim creates some of the best React, Vuejs, Angular themes, UI Kits, and elements.
They offer both free and paid stuff, take a look on what they offer. Once you use a Creative Tim product, you never go elsewhere.
When it comes to moving your website from one website builder or CMS to another, hiring the best SiteBuilders.Pro specialists will surely be an advantage. The platform has rich experience in transferring websites between popular web design systems. What they offer is text and graphic content transfer, web store data import, manual design replication along with SEO, web design and copywriting services.
uCalc is a real catch for those who don’t want to splash out on a developer or web designer to build a calculator or form for their website. The service provides you a library of attractive thematic templates and basic elements that you can add, delete, modify, and duplicate. Plus, you can connect the form/calculator with CRM systems. Try it out for yourself!
UPQODE is an eCommerce development agency based in the US. The company offers cost-effective services for all types of businesses. They use Shopify, WordPress and Woocommerce platforms to design user-friendly websites.
In addition to this, the agency offers digital marketing services. These include Google Ads setup, social media advertising, conversion optimization, online store optimization and eCommerce SEO solutions.
UPQODE comprises a team of experts who offer support services for eCommerce platforms with complex functionalities.
Abstract is an online tool that will help you get the location of any IP with a word-class API serving city, region, country and lat/long data.
There are over 10,000 developers using Abstrat’s APIs because:
RumbleTalk will help you add a moderated chat on your website for free, in no time. The platform is filled with tons of features that you will love.
WordPressToWix.PRO focuses on ensuring easy, convenient and fast website transfer from WordPress to Wix. The platform also offers quality project promotion and preservation of search engine positions upon the completion of the task. The team of proficient web designers will gladly assist you with all the steps of the procedure, ensuring a top notch result.
Get your online presence started with uCoz – a time-tested website builder that already powers millions of websites worldwide. It gives you the complete control over the code, and yet simplicity of the visual editor and a solid pre-built base. It offers you full creative freedom. Create the website of your dreams now, and for free with uCoz!
When it comes to reliable, safe and professional HTML to WordPress website migration, it makes sense to contact HTMLtoWordPress.PRO experts. This is a team of professionals, who possess niche-specific knowledge and can boast years of expertise. This guarantees a safe and quick result that matches up to client requirements.
Downloading the Blabber WordPress theme, you get an all-inclusive pack of tools and designs apt for the launch of a blog, online magazine, newspaper, or any other content-rich online resource. This is an ever-growing WordPress theme. It features a collection of 20+ homepage demos, which a new design added to the collection every week. The theme is fully based on the Elementor page builder and features full compatibility with a variety of WordPress plugins. It’s easy to set up the Blabber theme even if you are not a design or coding expert. The theme offers a rich selection of ready-to-go page sand layout styles, which you may adjust according to your specific demands.
If you are looking for a ready-made WordPress theme that can become a rock-solid foundation for your sports-related website, then FC United will handle this job perfectly well. The theme is ready to be used for the launch of football and soccer clubs, as well as basketball and NFL web projects. The multi-functional layout of the theme includes all tools and features that you may need for the launch of a professional sports website. This includes match reports, league tables, team and player profiles with stats, outstanding galleries and shortcodes, and more. Whenever it’s needed, the theme can be enhanced with the eCommerce features owing to its full compatibility with WooCommerce.
If you are looking forward to launching handcraft services and goods websites, then Craftis WordPress theme will perfectly suit for this purpose. This is a multi-functional ready-made design featuring a collection of 10+ homepage demos under the hood. The theme is compatible with the Elementor page builder, which lets you apply all the necessary changes to the pre-built page in the intuitive visual mode. The theme also features a selection of ready-made pages that are suited for many different purposes. Using the Craftis theme, you may start selling online without any difficulties. The theme is also compatible with the Elegro Crypto Payment plugin that is perfectly suited for the launch of web stores.
There are lots of super-efficient and easy to use tools in this article. Make a schedule starting with today and start testing them.
Many times, simple solutions like this ai logo maker can make wonders for your website. Take your time to see these solutions in action.
[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of Mekanism –]
Whether it’s heart rate tracking or a reminder to take medicine, the Internet of Things (IoT) has brought a new revolution in the healthcare industry. IoT is bridging the gap between doctors, healthcare facilities and patients by allowing them to connect remotely.
Grand View Research revealed that the global IoT in the healthcare market is expected to reach $534.3 billion by 2025, expanding at a CAGR of 19.9% over the forecast period. From personal fitness tracking products to remote monitoring applications and surgical robots, IoT has the potential to bring innovation to the healthcare ecosystem.
While a lot of the research for web designers that’s come out this year has to do with COVID-19, we’re starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Many of these reports aren’t just looking at the effects of the pandemic on business and marketing today. They’re now looking at what consumers plan to do once the pandemic is gone.
So, I have some very interesting research for you here today. Three of the reports have to do with coronavirus side effects — pertaining to ecommerce, market research, and freelancing — and one of them is just a really great argument against using PDFs on websites.
Obviously, everyone is paying close attention to COVID-19’s impact on the world. For the purposes of the work you do as a web designer, you should be clued into what it’s doing to the business and marketing fields. Because, if those opportunities dry up or companies begin to pivot, you need to be ready to adapt.
The Digital 2020, a joint monthly report from we are social and HootSuite, brings interesting news about the state of ecommerce thanks to COVID-19.
Because the pandemic has forced consumers indoors, online shopping has increased. But, according to about half of those surveyed for this report, this isn’t some temporary solution. They plan on doing more online shopping even after the pandemic ends.
This means that web designers are sitting in an enviable position now and for the foreseeable future. If you’re not already helping businesses sell through their websites, now is the time to do so as more and more businesses are going to need reliable online stores to sell their offerings through.
When conducting research at the beginning of a design project, what kinds of sources do you turn to for quick and reliable information? Your client provides you with information on their business, industry, and the competition, of course, but what else?
You can conduct user surveys and interviews, but those take time and resources. It also usually means working with clients who have existing businesses and user bases to tap into. Unless you’re working as a UX designer where that’s a big part of the work you do, you might not have the ability to do that level of research.
As reported by Gartner (via eMarketer), leading marketers are now learning about their target audiences through the following channels:
Thanks to the surge of traffic online right now, social listening platforms have become really useful resources for learning about one’s users, with 51% of marketing leaders using them.
If you feel as though your initial research and planning phases could use a boost, I’d recommend taking advantage of one of these social listening tools now.
If you build websites for a specific niche, you can set up keywords/hashtags that are universally relevant to (most of) your clients. By listening in on these conversations regularly, you can become more attuned to what the visitors of your websites actually need and you can proactively build better experiences for them as a result.
The main focus of the Upwork 2020 Future Workforce Report is on how employers are changing their approaches to hiring now and in the near future. And the basic premise is this:
While this is certainly great news for web designers looking for new clients, the report also provides us with this data:
64% of professionals in the top of their field work independently. That statistic alone means you’re up against some tough competition. But there’s also the 50% rise in signups on freelancer marketplaces that should have you worried.
Even though business demand for freelance talent is growing, this unprecedented rise in freelance competition may pose some problems. So, if you’re not already doing everything you can to position yourself as the web designer in your niche, get going on that now so you don’t get drowned out by the rising number of competitors.
While I don’t have statistics to share with you from the Nielsen Norman Group’s post on why the PDF is “Still Unfit for Human Consumption”, I do have a ton of usability arguments against them that are worth summing up here:
And those are just the arguments that came from NNG’s researchers. Take some time to read through real user complaints about PDFs and you’ll never want to include one on a client’s website again.
Thankfully, the research for web designers and marketers is finally starting to move away from the confusion and speculation we saw a lot of earlier this year.
Just as with anything we do on the web, the more time you give it, the more data you can collect. And, luckily for us, the data suggests that there’s a pretty positive outlook for web designers if they position themselves the right way now.
Featured image via Unsplash.
In 2019, to keep pace with an interior redesign of its visitor experience, the Empire State Building decided to redesign its website. Blue Fountain Media were engaged to deliver the project. With the new site launching, we spoke to Head of Design, Tatyana Khamdamova about designing for the world’s most famous building.
Webdesigner Depot: The Empire State Building is probably the most iconic building in America, if not the world. Were there any points at which you thought, “Oh God, this is too much pressure”?
Tatyana Khamdamova: Yes, of course, it was a lot of pressure knowing that people all over the world will be looking at your work. But with the pressure, we also felt excitement and pride that we got to work on such an iconic project. Just thinking that we are doing the site for Empire State Building made us feel proud of all that other work we did during our whole life that gave us the opportunity to be a part of this project.
WD: Blue Fountain Media is a large agency. Did you utilize the whole company, or was there a smaller, dedicated team tasked with creating the site?
TK: On a project like this one, you need the expertise of the team members from all departments in the agency. You want people to work together from the beginning to ensure that their knowledge helps to shape the project and produce the best possible outcome. It’s important for designers and marketers, for example, to be a part of the strategy and UX phase to provide their input which minimizes tunnel vision and generates more ideas. You can only achieve the best results if every single detail from strategy to design to development is done right.
WD: That’s a lot of people to coordinate. Did any roles naturally come to the fore, or is design leadership a quality that varies from person to person?
TK: Some people are natural leaders in their fields. But, sometimes a certain project requires people to take responsibility and show their leadership skills within the team. So I would say that it’s a quality that varies from person to person and doesn’t depend on a role or a title at all.
WD: What were the central aims of the redesign?
TK: ESB’s previous website did not reflect the level of design to match their iconic brand, UX was not user friendly, the content was outdated, and they wanted to grow online individual and group ticket sales. In addition to competing with global and NYC based tourist attractions, ESB was also faced with growing competition in the NYC Observatory market with Top of The Rock, One World Observatory, and Edge at Hudson Yards.
While the building underwent a $165 million renovation, BFM was tasked with creating a best in class website that reclaimed their iconic brand identity while providing an intuitive, and enjoyable user experience for both domestic and international visitors looking to learn about the building, exhibits, and the many ticket experience packages that they offer to visitors.
WD: How do you approach researching a unique project like this?
TK: We went to the source! First, we spoke to visitors of the Empire State Building while they were in line. What was their experience, did they use the website, what made them choose to visit the observatory instead of or in addition to some of the other competing observatories in the city. We then looked at other key tourist towers worldwide to see how they are positioning themselves globally to draw inspiration. We did in-depth stakeholder interviews that included folks working at the building every day and the types of interaction and questions they field from visitors. We conducted surveys of international travelers to understand their motivations and concerns. Finally, we dug into the website itself by testing using various protocols and platforms to understand the visitor paths, what they were able to easily do, and what tasks they may have found challenging. Drawing from all of those insights, we planned and designed the site using an iterative process.
WD: ESB visitors come from all over the world; how did you tackle designing for an international audience?
TK: People across the globe speak different languages, have different cultures and needs. Our goal was to learn about the audience and give them a site that looks and feels like it was created for them. Luckily we were working for the iconic building that is well known internationally and capturing the design aesthetic of the building itself already made the site recognizable across the globe. When working on the project we also were making sure that all users can see the information in their local language when they land on the site and have easy access to the language selector in case they want to change it. When you translate from one language to another the number of words and characters is not always the same. It was important to make sure that the site is designed and developed with an understanding of how the content will be displayed in other languages. With the localization help of our parent company Pactera EDGE we successfully translated the site in several languages and tested it to ensure that it looks right for the local and international audience.
WD: The famous view of the ESB is the external view, but your design feels more in keeping with the experience of the building’s interior. Was that a conscious decision?
TK: It was a conscious decision to create a site that makes you feel like you are visiting the building. Our goal was to make the visitor excited to buy a ticket and see all that beauty with their own eyes. But, if someone doesn’t have an opportunity to come to NY we wanted to make that online experience as close to the real one as possible. We understand that nothing will replace the actual visit to the Empire State Building but we wanted the website to feel real and by using the great photography and amazing Art Deco design elements, we were able to do so.
WD: How did you interpolate such a complex style as Art Deco into a functional site?
TK: Fortunately for us, our office is located a couple blocks away from the building and we had the opportunity to go there and see some of the details. We also had access to the great photos of the renovated hallways, exhibits, and observatory decks, which gave us the idea of how the Art Deco elements were used in the interior design of the building. We all know that interior design and web design have different needs and goals so it was an interesting challenge to design a site that makes you feel like you are inside the building without overwhelming users and that content is easy to read and the ticket purchasing process is simple and clean. We re-created a lot of design elements used on the ceiling, walls, and floor of the building simplified those elements and made them part of the website design. A lot of those elements were used in the background, call to actions, icons, and maps, and combined with the brand colors used in both interior and web designs we were able to give the site the Art Deco look.
WD: There’s been speculation in the design community recently that Art Deco may re-emerge as a trend in the 2020s. Having worked with the style, do you think it could benefit the wider web?
TK: This was a very specific design approach for a very specific project that takes us back to the 1920’s and emphasizes that era through modern twists in web design. I do not see how it can be applied on the web in general unless the client specifically asks for it, for example, architecture website, real estate, or furniture site. Every project is unique and has its own goals and style and there is no one solution that will fit all. As of today, The ESB is Art Deco in a sense and it truly owns that style.
WD: Can you share some details on the technology stack you employed?
TK: The site was built on the Drupal CMS, integrates with Empire’s partner Gateway Ticketing System, and is hosted on Acquia.
WD: Why Drupal? Does it have qualities that suit a project of this scale, or is it simply the case that BFM had the pre-existing expertise of Drupal to facilitate the build?
TK: BFM is a dev-agnostic production team and we always ensure we’re making the best recommendation to our clients. In this case, the previous website was built on Drupal, so in order to decrease the effect of a new platform rollout that would be unfamiliar to the internal ESB teams, we decided to keep the site on the Drupal platform. Luckily, Drupal is an extremely flexible CMS and the needs of the site perfectly align with what Drupal provides.
WD: With visitors from around the world, the range of browsers and devices you had to consider was vastly larger than most projects. Did you draw a line for support? If so, where was it?
TK: BFM constantly updates our list of supported browsers and devices to stay in line with changing technology trends and device usage around the world. We’re extremely lucky that our larger organization, Pactera EDGE, has deep roots in globalization and localization, so we leveraged their team to help us with all aspects of website visitors from the many regions around the world, including translation services and testing. Since this was a complete overhaul, we ensured the baseline standard for all devices was met and will continue to enhance as the future technology needs become apparent.
WD: The Empire State Building gets millions of visits each year, what sort of server resources do you need to throw at it to guarantee uptime?
TK: BFM is a partner of Acquia, and Empire State Building is hosting their new site with them. Acquia is a wonderful ecosystem built specifically for high performing drupal websites and provide many tools for their hosted sites to be able to handle fluctuations in visitors, traffic surges, and with the 24/7 support offered, they can easily manage the changing needs of worldwide visitors.
WD: Now it’s live, how does the new ESB site relate to its real world presence?
TK: The Empire State Building defines the New York City skyline. The world’s most magnificent Art Deco skyscraper, it’s a living piece of New York history and an instantly recognizable symbol of city culture today. The old site did not reflect the amazing interior and exterior design of the building and we had a chance to showcase the redesigned interior and bring more attention to the beautiful Art Deco design elements. We wanted to create the site to make you feel like you are visiting the building. By showcasing the exhibits, renovated halls, and observatories through compelling photography and architectural details, our goal is to make the visitor excited to buy a ticket and see all that beauty with their own eyes.
We’d like to thank Tatyana for taking the time out of her day to talk to us.
