This article is about how you can handle AWS RDS secrets rotation without restarting your Spring Boot application.
I had this problem wherein I had to update my database connection whenever the database password was updated for my AWS RDS instance. This can be because of a monthly password rotation policy or may be the database credentials got compromised and you want all your running applications to keep running even when the database password are changed.
Suppose you have an opportunity to create a project on AI. Consider these five stages before starting. These five are learning, programming language, knowledge representation, problem solving, and hardware.
Learning means adding new knowledge to the knowledge base and improving or refining previous knowledge.
Normally when we create an HTTP REST endpoint, we add code to our server endpoint, and assume the client provides the arguments to our code. What if we could reverse this responsibility, such that the client provides the code the server executes?
Among other things, this implies we can have one endpoint doing "everything". We wouldn’t need to create dozens of endpoints to expose our API, and we could get away with creating a single endpoint, that clients invokes, regardless of what they want to do. If the client wants to create a record in our database, read records from our database, or count records in our database is irrelevant – He’d still use the same endpoint for all of these tasks. In addition, the client could become much more creative in regards to how he interacts with our API, and do things we couldn’t even imagine as we created our API. The latter of course sums up the problem, which is that clients could inject malicious code into our server.
Dark themes are everywhere these days.
As human beings continue to spend more of their time interacting with technology, dark themes provide a more relaxing way to engage with the digital world. More often than not, these themes are easier on the eyes, more attractive, and perfect for the dedicated user.
Throughout 2020, countless leading brands have debuted their own version of the dark theme. Google has a solution for your Drive, while Apple and Android have built dark theme performance right into their operating systems.
If you haven’t learned how to make the most out of dark mode yet, then you could be missing out on an excellent opportunity to differentiate your design skills, and earn more clients going forward.
Before we dive too deeply into the possibilities of creating your own dark theme, let’s examine what dark mode is, and why it’s so effective.
Ultimately, dark themes are created to reduce the amount of luminance emitted by everything from your desktop and laptop, to your smartphone and smartwatch. Dark themes help to improve the visual ergonomics of design, by reducing eye strain, adjusting brightness to suit current lighting conditions, and more. Additionally, many dark mode offerings are also fantastic at conserving battery life.
Here are some of the main benefits of adding dark themes to your design portfolio.
Designing for dark mode is easier than you’d think. Most of the time, it involves simply thinking about how you can replace some of the brighter, more overwhelming aspects of your site, with something deeper and darker.
Here are some useful tips that will get you moving in the right direction.
A big issue for a lot of web designers when it comes to developing a dark mode solution is that they get too caught up with things like pure white text against pure black backgrounds. However, this high-contrast option can be a little much after a while.
It’s often much easier to use a dark grey as your primary surface color, instead of a true black. Additionally, rather than using bright white, think about slightly off-white alternatives that will be warmer to the eye.
Experiment with surfaces and color combinations that are unlikely to cause too much eye strain. Dark grey foundations often offer a wider range of depth, too, because you can demonstrate shadows on grey.
Additionally, when you are experimenting with colors, remember that saturated colors often vibrate painfully against very dark surfaces, making them harder to read. Desaturating your colors will help to reduce the contrast and make your websites more welcoming.
Lighter tones in the 200-50 range will have better readability on dark themes. However, you can always experiment with your choices. Google Material Design recommends using a contrast level of around 15:8:1 between your background and text.
Much of the effort involved with dark mode design is figuring out how certain colors work together. It’s easy to get carried away with stark contrasts, particularly when you’re used to working with a white background. However, you need to remember that you’re designing for a user that’s primarily looking for an easier and more subdued browsing experience.
While you’re working, remember to consider the emotional aspect of the design too. The emotion in colors can make or break a buyer’s journey in any environment. However, an often overlooked-aspect of color psychology, is that people perceive shades differently when they’re on a black background.
For instance, think of the color green. On a light background, it conveys nature and even financial wealth. However, on a dark background, the same green could come across as something venomous, toxic, or even sickly. It’s important to think about the kind of impressions end users are going to get when they arrive on your site.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make when you begin designing for dark mode, is thinking that you should focus entirely on your dark themes, and nothing else. This lines you up for a problem if you interact with users who want the best of both worlds. If you’re designing for apps in particular, you’re going to need web pages that can switch naturally between light and dark themes.
Learning how to implement both a dark mode and a light mode option into the desks you create will help you to reach a wider selection of customers. Remember, you’ll need to test the performance and impact of your designs in both themes, to check that they deliver the same kind of experience, no matter how your user chooses to browse.
Although dark mode should offer a different experience to end-users, it still needs to feel as though they’re browsing on the same website. That means that you’re going to need to experiment with the most natural combination of light and dark mode options.
Remember, although the three tips above will help you to get on the right path for dark mode design, you’ll also need to consider the opportunities and limitations of the platforms that you’re designing for. The kind of dark mode experience you can deliver for Google Chrome websites is going to be very different to what you can create for something running on iOS.
Examining the documentation provided by the system that you’re designing for will help you to develop something with a close insight into what’s actually possible.
Other top tips for dark mode design include:
Preparing your web development and design portfolio for an era addicted to dark mode can be a complex experience. You need to think carefully about how people are going to browse through your websites and apps when they’re searching for something more subtle, and less visually overwhelming than the websites that we’re used to making.
The most important thing to remember is that everything on your website or application should look just as beautifully tailor-made in dark mode as it does in light mode. Simply adding a dynamic black background when people want to switch settings in an app isn’t enough. You need to go in-depth with your designs and examine how different fonts, colors, and images work together.
Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.
The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.
Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.
Hive Metastore supports various backend databases, among which MySQL is the most commonly used. However, in real-world scenarios, MySQL’s shortcoming is obvious: as metadata grows in Hive, MySQL is limited by its standalone performance and can’t deliver good performance. When individual MySQL databases form a cluster, the complexity drastically increases. In scenarios with huge amounts of metadata (for example, a single table has more than 10 million or even 100 million rows of data), MySQL is not a good choice.
We had this problem, and our migration story proves that TiDB, an open-source distributed Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) database, is a perfect solution in these scenarios.
Designing for emotion in and of itself is not a problem. Websites are bound to elicit an emotional reaction from visitors, even if it’s as simple as them feeling at ease because of the soft, pastel color palette you’ve designed the site with.
I don’t want to outright villainize emotional design. Unless there is some form of unethical manipulation at play, designing for your visitors’ emotions can actually provide them with a more positive experience.
So, here’s what I’d like to look at today:
When we look at emotional design in the context of a website, we’re focused on three types of emotional reactions:
Visceral reactions are instinctive ones. Usually, visitors experience these as their first impressions of a website or web page. For instance, a cluttered or otherwise poorly designed homepage might leave visitors feeling overwhelmed, hesitant, or wanting to flea.
A minimally designed homepage interface, on the other hand, might have visitors not feeling much of a reaction at all. In this case, no feeling is a good feeling.
Design is like a refrigerator. When it works, no one notices. When it doesn’t, it stinks!
— Irene Au (@ireneau) February 14, 2015
Behavioral reactions stem from the usability of a website. There’s a lot that can stir up negative emotions here, like:
Again, if a website is easy to get through and attractively designed, visitors aren’t likely going to “ooh” and “aah” with every step they take on the site. And that’s a good thing. If they’re focusing more on how the design looks, they’re not paying attention to the brand’s actual offer.
Reflective reactions are the third type of emotions we design for.
This is complicated because there’s a lot wrapped up in how visitors feel about a website after the fact. Sometimes the most well-designed interfaces and experiences can’t save them from a bad experience, whether they realized too late that the products were overpriced or they were treated poorly by a live chat representative.
As a web designer, all you can really do is to make sure you’re working with reputable companies and then aligning the designs of their sites with their values.
There’s already enough social pressure online; your website doesn’t need to be one of those places, too
Emotional design shouldn’t be about manipulating consumers’ emotions. In most cases, emotional design is about controlling the environment of the website so that emotions don’t go spinning wildly out of control — in either direction.
It’s when we take what we know about influencing someone’s emotional state to monetarily benefit from it that emotional design becomes problematic.
Here are some ways in which you might negatively impact the emotions of your visitors through design:
The fear-of-missing-out isn’t always a bad marketing strategy. However, when FOMO is used for the purposes of rushing consumers to take action now and without time to really think it through, it definitely can be.
Chances are good they’ll feel badly no matter what. Either because they regret the rushed (and probably unnecessary, or expensive) decision or they blame themselves for missing out on an opportunity to be like everyone else.
There’s already enough social pressure online; your website doesn’t need to be one of those places, too. So, be careful with how you present customers with limits (on time, on products, etc.) or how you frame the call-to-action (“If you don’t buy this now, expect to fail/be miserable/suffer even more”).
It doesn’t matter why people specifically seek out your website. They have a problem or a hole in their life, and they’re looking for something to fix it.
Now, you can’t help it if the website has too much to offer in the way of options or solutions. Companies have to provide every possible solution/option so their users don’t feel like they have to go somewhere else to get what they need. However, the way you design these options can lead to a negative emotional state if you’re not careful.
For instance, your visitors might experience analysis paralysis, where there are so many options that it becomes impossible to take action. Similar to FOMO, this can lead to regret either with the decision they made or the one they were incapable of making.
By simplifying how many choices are presented at once, or designing a clear and supportive pathway to the right option of many, your website will leave visitors feeling much more positively about the whole experience.
Nostalgia can be a great way to play upon the positive associations and emotions consumers feel towards an era gone by or a place they once knew. But, again, it depends on how you design with it.
For example, if you design a vintage website for an agency launched in 2019 and run by a group of 20-somethings, it might come off feeling disingenuous once customers start to catch on.
For a restaurant known as the oldest bar in the state, that would be a different story. That nostalgically designed website would be a real part of its story; not just done as a sales gimmick. As a result, customers would likely embrace those warm feelings for the “good ol’ days” they get from the website.
Also, think about how quickly nostalgia fades if it’s done to align with a trend. Unless you’re committed to redesigning a website the second that nostalgic feeling falls out of favor, you could be condemning your client to an outdated website mere months after launch.
Like I said before, there’s nothing wrong with designing for emotions. You just have to make sure your website visitors don’t feel manipulated and that they welcome the pleasant feelings the site gives them.
make sure your website visitors don’t feel manipulated
It might seem harmless at the time. After all, what are they doing on the site if they weren’t interested in the first place? And it’s not like they were bullied into spending their money, right?
But if they sense in any way that their response was driven by an emotion they wouldn’t have otherwise felt, they’re not going to be happy. While it might not be enough for them to cancel their subscription or services, or to return products they bought, it will definitely leave a bad taste in their mouth. And, ultimately, it can cost your website loyal visitors and customers.
So, if you’re going to use emotional design on a website, do it to improve their experience, not to put more money into your clients’ pockets. That means your emotional design choices need to be honest, transparent, and focused on eliciting naturally positive emotions like:
Go back to the three emotional reactions I brought up earlier. If you can design a website to give off a positive first impression, and to be pain-free and usable, you can spend the rest of your time injecting small bits of happiness and positivity into the website with color choices, friendly micro-interactions, personalized content, and more.
Featured image via Unsplash.
It’s fun to see new website design tools that reflect current times and the state of the world. That’s very true this month with new databases devoted to diversity and women in technology, as well and resources to make your design life easier.
Here’s what’s new for designers and developers this month:
Ztext.js is an easy to implement, three-dimensional typography tool for the web that works with any font you want to use. With the popularity of 3D effects and animation, this tool has a lot of practical applications. Everything you need, including documentation, is available from developer Bennett Feely on his website and GitHub. (It’s free but you can show appreciation with a donation if you like it.)
Gradient Magic is a free gallery of fun and interesting CSS gradients. You can sort through a random selection or by category of color to find just the right gradient for your project. Some of them would make really neat backgrounds or image overlays.
Impossible Checkbox is a fun little divot that you’ll want to play with and emulate. Click or tap the slider to activate and a nifty little friend pops up. Now here’s the fun part: You can’t leave it checked, and take note of the changing expression of the checkbox character.
Diversify Tech isn’t your average job board; it is a collection of resources – and opportunities – for underrepresented people in technology. It includes a weekly roundup and everything from scholarships, to events, to jobs, to speaking opportunities.
Women in Tech is a list of apps made by women. The apps are ranked and chosen based on upvotes and is a good resource if you want to help support women-owned projects. Search or submit an app for inclusion.
Devello Studio is a tool that allows you to write code in the cloud. You don’t have to install anything and no matter where you are, just can open a project in-browser, and continue development where you had left off last time. Plus, it works with GitHub support built right in.
Hustl is a premium Mac app that allows you to create time-lapse videos of your screen. Use it to show off work or projects or create a cool video for your portfolio. Plus you can use it to capture just one active app so you don’t have to do a lot of editing later.
FeedBaxley is a user feedback tool that helps you (and users) figure out what’s frustrating before it becomes a real issue. You can customize everything to match your brand and set it up with copy and paste tools. Feedback integrates with Slack, making it easy for you to analyze information with a team.
BestTime launched a major update with a new tool that makes it possible to analyze visitor peaks of public business (cafe, gym, etc) for whole areas. Using the heatmap API you can find businesses at popular times, locations, or by business type.
Pixeltrue is a new collection of free SVG illustrations and Lottie animations in a trendy style. They are available for commercial and personal use and add a bit of whimsical delight to website projects. (The error illustrations are particularly fun.)
Previewed has tons of cool and realistic mockups that you can use to create the perfect setting for digital projects. You can find mockups for a variety of devices and cool panoramas that work perfectly for elements such as app store previews.
The Alt Text Overlay Bookmarklet solves a common problem: It shows what images use alt text and what that text is. The tool was created by Christian Heilmann and he’s put it on GitHub for you to play with and test.
MergeURL allows you to merge and shorten up to five links. Enter the links and mergeurl.com/o/xxxxx, for example, will open all the URLs associated with that link. The tool is free to use and you don’t have to register to use the service.
Infinity Search is a new search engine that lets you look for things privately and efficiently. Search the web, images, or videos. Here’s a little about how it works: “While we retrieve results from other search engines like Bing and Wikipedia, we also have our own indexes of links that are displayed in our search results. We are actively working on improving these indexes and they will only get better.”
Blade UI Kit is a set of renderless components to use in Laravel Blade Views. It’s built for the tall stack and is completely open source. It includes 26 components and you can contribute as well.
Trusted News is a Google Chrome extension that uses AI to assist in evaluating the quality of the online content. In its first release, it scores the objectivity for a selected article, testing whether it is written from a neutral perspective as opposed to a subjective one.
BaseDash allows you to edit production data without coding. You can make changes to the database with the ease of a spreadsheet. This tool makes it easy to find and edit information in a hurry. It works with all major databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon Redshirt, Microsoft SQL Server, and more.
Email2Go is a service that helps you create email templates and test them on dozens of physical devices and applications. It’s free right now while it is in early release.
The Iconscout Converter allows you to convert icons and images from one file format to another for free. Convert SVG, PNG, JPG, and PDF with a single click.
Shape 2 is a massive collection of 5,000+ unique icons and illustrations with a full-blown web editor. Customize colors, stroke width, size and full variations that can export to SVG, PDF, PNG, GIF, and React. This is a premium tool and includes a discounted release price for now.
Aestetico is a beautiful sans serif that includes a massive family with 54 styles. This premium typeface is highly readable and has modern lines and curves that make it a great option for a variety of uses.
Arcades is a modern display font with a retro, 1980s-style vibe. It includes regular and italic styles.
Brimington is a handwriting style typeface with rough strokes and smooth curves. It includes a set of 227 characters and 219 glyphs in a readable design.
California Signature is a typeface duo with a slab serif and handwriting style that are perfectly paired. The thick and thin options provide a yin and yang effect.
Eastblue is a script typeface with long swashes and interesting curves. It includes a solid character set and is free for personal use only.
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.
Smart design choices can help reduce the fatigue and frustration people would otherwise feel when using the web.
There are a lot of ways web designers can minimize distractions, information overload, and analysis paralysis. For instance, designing with abundant white space, shorter snippets of text, and calming color palettes all work.
One-page websites might be another design choice worth exploring.
When done right, a single-page website could be very useful in creating a simpler and more welcoming environment for today’s overwhelmed consumers.
With its diminutive structure, it would leave a unique and memorable impression on visitors. What’s more, a well-crafted one-page website would provide visitors with a clean, narrow, and logical pathway to conversion.
For those of you who use BeTheme’s pre-built sites (or are thinking about adopting them for your next site), there’s good news. In addition to the great selection of traditionally structured sites available, Be also has single-page websites for you to work with.
So, the technical aspects you’d need to master to get the one-page formula right are already taken care of.
Let’s have a look at some of the features that make single-page websites shine and how you can design them:
The typical business websites you design include pages like Home, About, and Contact, as well as pages that explain the company’s services or sell their products. Unless you’re building really long sales landing pages, there’s usually about 400 to 600 words on each page.
That’s still a lot of content for your visitors to get through and it can make perusing a single website an overwhelming experience. Imagine how they feel about reading through all that content when they have to do it multiple times when comparing other websites and options.
In some cases, this multi-page website structure is overkill. The information you’d otherwise fill a full page with can easily be edited down to fit a single pane or block on a one-page website and still be as useful.
Like how design and development studio Pixel Lab does it:
Notice how all the key points are hit in a concise and visually attractive manner:
The BeCV pre-built site is built in a similar manner (and for a similar purpose, too):
Just remember to keep a sticky navigation bar present at all times so visitors know exactly how much content there is on the page.
Typically, the rule is that website navigation should follow one of two patterns:
There are a number of reasons why this layout is beneficial. Ultimately, it comes down to the predictability and comfort of having a navigation be right where visitors expect it, no matter where they end up on your website.
However, with a single-page website, this is one of those rules you can bend, so long as you have a way to keep the navigation ever-present and easy to use.
There are some great examples of one-page sites that have done this, usually opting for a stylized left-aligned sidebar that contains links to the various parts of the page. Purple Orange is just one of them:
And you can use a Be pre-built site like BeHairdresser to create a similar navigation for your website:
If you’re trying to make a bold brand stand out, this is a neat layout option to experiment with.
One of the problems with building a website with WordPress is that you always have to worry about how your design decisions affect speed. Even once the code is optimized, images are usually the low-hanging fruit that have to be dealt with.
But when your website only contains one page, this means images aren’t as much of a problem (so long as you compress and resize them). It’s only when you continue to add pages, products, and galleries that you have to scale back your visual content.
So, if your brand has a strong visual identity and you want the website to show that off through images, a one-page website is a great place to do it.
Just remember to keep a good balance between text and images as Vodka A does:
There’s no reason for a liquor distribution company to mince words when the elegant product photos effectively communicate to consumers what it’s all about.
In fact, this image-heavy, single-page style would work well for any vendor selling a small inventory of products: food, beverages, subscription boxes, health and beauty products, etc. And you can use the pre-built BeBistro to carefully craft it:
When a company sells a technical or complex solution to consumers, it can be a real struggle to explain what it does and why they should buy it.
But here’s the thing: Consumers don’t really care about all that technical stuff. Even if you were to explain how an app worked or how you use a software like Sketch or WordPress to design a website, their eyes would glaze over.
What matters most to them is that you have an effective and affordable solution that they can trust. So, why bog them down with page after page of technical specs and sales jargon?
A one-page website enables you to simplify even the most complex of solutions.
Take Critical TechWorks, for instance. It offers an advanced technological solution for the automobile industry…and, yet, this is all it needs to explain the technology at work:
If your website’s visitors are more concerned with the outcomes rather than the “how”, you’d do well to make the website and content as easy to digest as possible. And you can use a pre-built site like BeCourse to do that:
Notice how both of these sites take visitors through a small handful of sections (pages) before delivering them to the main attraction: the contact or sign-up form.
Some of your visitors will be brand new to the site and need more information before they pull the trigger. Others will already have a good idea of what they’re getting into and just need one small push to get them to take action.
With a single-page website, you can design each section to cater to the different kinds of leads and prospects that arrive there.
The top sections should be introductory in nature, providing new visitors with information they need to decide if this is an option worth pursuing. The sections further below should drill down into the remaining questions or concerns that interested prospects have.
Regardless of which section they’re looking at, your one-page site will have CTA buttons built in along the way that drive them to conversion the second they’re ready.
This will enable your site to always be prepared to convert leads, whether visitors read the first two sections or make their way through all of them until they reach the conversion point (e.g. a contact form, a checkout page, etc.).
You’ll find a nice example of this on the Cycle website, with CTAs strategically placed along the single-page’s design:
BePersonalTrainer is a good pre-built site option if you want to ensure that you include a CTA button at the perfect stopping points throughout your page:
You won’t find them at the bottom of every section, but that’s okay. You just need them whenever your visitors are seriously thinking about taking action.
Although a single-page website won’t work for larger websites (especially in ecommerce), it could work well for business websites that are on the smaller side to begin with.
By centralizing all of that information into a single page, you’ll create a fresh experience that wows visitors with how succinct yet powerful both the message and offering are.
Just be careful. Many single-page websites are poorly done (which is probably why they fell out of fashion for a while).
Remember: This is not your chance to throw web design rules out the window. In fact, this will be an opportunity to clear out the fluff and the clutter that’s accumulated over the years and to return to a more scaled-back and classic approach to design.
And with the help of Be’s pre-built one-page websites, it won’t require much work on your part to make that happen.
[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of BeTheme –]
