Posted by admin in Web Design on February 14th, 2011
In this day and age wherein consumers are flooded with so many options and distractions, engaging people to your website can be quite a challenge. As engagement is a continuing process wherein loyal customers keep coming back to your site, simply reading content or clicking an ad is never enough.
How can you then make sure you’re keeping and engaging your customers? The solution to create a loyal customer base and keeping them is having a sticky website. A sticky website is something that a first time visitor would find difficult to leave, would want to further explore its different features, and would come back to it soon.
To help you create an engaging website, here are 7 tips to boost the stickiness of your website:
1. Minimize clutter – How many times have you stumbled upon a website only to be confused and overwhelmed? Ensure your potential customers won’t get frustrated with your website because they’re lost and couldn’t find the information they need. Make your site free of clutter by keeping everything neat and organized; and highlighting information, resources, features, or actions your visitors want.
2. Make navigation intuitive – If your website is difficult or confusing to navigate, you are most likely to lose potential customers, and drive them to a much more user-friendly website. The best way to ensure easy, intuitive navigation is by designing and using sensible menus/categories/tabs as a means to guide your visitors. Also, avoid going crazy about java scripts and flashy animation, which may slow down loading time.
3. Make the initial visit relevant – First impressions count on the web. When a visitor lands on your site, you only have less than seven seconds to get him/her hooked. That’s why it’s crucial that the initial visit and interaction with your website is relevant to what people are looking for. And as soon as you’ve created relevance, you can steer them to browse deeper into your website’s content, features, resources, etc.
4. Keep your content fresh and updated – Obsolete web content is one of the quickest ways to lose audience. Ensure that you constantly post new and useful content to keep your visitors engaged and consider you an industry expert. One way to guarantee regular supply of fresh and timely content is by offering relevant news or information feed. If including static text on your web pages, consider removing specific dates. Nevertheless, if you must publish dates, be sure to update the information regularly to avoid “oh, this is old
Posted by admin in Web Design on November 9th, 2010
The biggest challenge in hiring a web design company is finding the right one who can help you mould your organization’s online image. There are many self-proclaimed web design masters out there who pretend they know what they’re doing, but in reality, they don’t.
That’s why it’s crucial to ask your prospective web designers the right questions to determine whether they can perform well or not.
Here are some questions that you can ask to help you narrow down your search when choosing a web design company:
1. What is your level of experience in web designing?
When choosing a web design company, it’s important that you only delegate your web design project to professional hands. You surely wouldn’t like it if your website is used as an experiment done by inexperienced designers. Hire only a highly knowledgeable web design company, who has a proven track record and testimonials up its sleeves. Plus, ensure that the web design company has solid years of expertise in web design, and uses cutting-edge technologies and best industry practices.
2. Do you have a portfolio that I can check?
Every craftsman should have evidence of his craftsmanship. And while your first impression of the web design firm is usually their very own website, be sure to browse deeper into their portfolio. Review carefully the company’s samples of past works to give you an idea about their quality of work, which you are most likely to get from them. Also, don’t forget to visit the actual websites online to verify if there are any inconsistencies between the portfolio and the actual website. Looking at previous projects is the fastest and most efficient way to determine if they are the right web designer capable of delivering and fulfilling your expectations and specific requirements.
3. Can I see some references?
The best form of advertising is recommendations from satisfied clients. Reputable web design companies usually have many references from happy clients willing to share their experiences. So check if they have client testimonials visible on their website, and don’t hesitate to contact at least two references. Ask them their personal opinions and feedback about how the entire web design process went. Were they pleased with the results? Was the project completed timely and within budget? Would they recommend them?
4. Have you built a similar website before?
This doesn’t have to be identical, just a site with the same industry or goals and complexities. For example, you want to sell products and or services online, and accept credit card payments, does the web designer have experience in doing that? Having relevant industry experience or similar website should lead to quicker discovery because the web design company already knows your needs and options.
5. Do you custom design or use pre-made templates?
Some web design companies only use pre-made templates, while others do custom design. Depending on your online goals and budget, both website design templates and customized website design can be effective methods in building your website. For a minimal cost, templates are great for a start up business that only needs a simple website with basic functionality. If you want a unique website or require more complex features, go for a custom web design.
6. What is your typical turnaround time and how long until my website design is up and running?
Just like any other business project, a website design also requires a realistic turnaround time. Once you submitted your comprehensive website specifications to the website design company, and after their careful review, they should be able to provide you a timeline for the completion of the work. Having a timeframe will give you an idea on the completion date so that you can as well plan other important web-related stuff like website promotion, etc. Although, sometimes completion takes longer than the agreed deadline, just be sure to discuss what happens if they missed it.
7. Are the websites you develop multi-browser and cross-platform compatible?
Multi-browser and cross-platform compatibility means the website’s ability to display correctly on multiple browsers like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera—and on both Mac and PC operating systems. A good web designer should be able to create websites that look and work the same regardless of whatever browser and operating system is used. You can confirm this yourself by opening some of the company’s previously designed websites using different computers and browsers. Make sure the layout is not broken and looks virtually the same in every browser. Although, there might be minor visual discrepancies (in a positive way) when running on more advanced browsers like Safari and Chrome.
8. How do you handle web maintenance and ongoing changes?
Professional web design companies understand that changes are necessary to keep a website constantly fresh and updated to attract search engines and visitors; therefore, improving performance and conversions. As such, it’s important to ask the web design agency how often can changes be made, and how will they be implemented. Some companies charge by the hour, while others offer maintenance contracts. If you plan on regularly updating your site, you might want to incorporate a Content Management System (CMS) into your website, so you can easily make changes as needed.
9. How will you market my site and will it be search engine friendly?
Certain web design elements like HTML and CSS techniques can favourably influence how search engines will evaluate and rank your website. Be sure to ask the web design company about these “clean-coding
Posted by admin in Latest Article, Web Design on July 20th, 2010
Selecting a web design agency can be quite difficult if you don’t know what you should look for—especially nowadays when there are a lot of companies that claim to be the best in the industry. You need to be extra careful who you hire. Remember that a poorly designed site can cost you a huge amount of money, drive away potential clients, and hurt your credibility.
To help you choose the right web design company that meets your needs, here are some useful tips to look into:
Portfolio – Ensure that the web design company has some experience to boast of. Since any agency can claim to be the best, you should check out their accomplished projects. To effectively evaluate a website, you should asses the quality of design; ease of use and navigation; and overall look. Also, they must have a broad range of past projects in a variety of industries.
Services – More than just a web design agency, the company should also offer other relevant services to meet your requirements. These can be anywhere from e-commerce, Internet marketing, to list a few of the things that can help you promote your website. To save time and effort, choose a company that can provide all your needs.
Customer Service / Technical Support – Apart from creating professional design, a good web design company should possess a reliable customer service and technical support. This means that they should be able to provide prompt responses to your queries, as well as timely assistance should you encounter any technical issues.
Pricing – While everyone wants everything cheap nowadays, unfortunately, you’ll just get what you pay for. As you know, prices vary from a few hundreds to thousands of dollars. So, assess whether you can afford them. What’s really important is that the price quoted is reasonable enough to accomplish what you’re looking for.
With the tons of web design agencies in various sizes and shapes available these days, it’s really quite tricky to choose one. So, remember these practical tips above to ensure the success of your website and your business.
Posted by admin in Web Design on June 18th, 2010
Knowing that it only takes about 10 seconds to make an impression to your visitors, it is indeed crucial to have a functional, great-looking website. Whether for business purposes or personal use, building an impressive site is very important, here are some essentials to create a great site:
User-friendly navigation – The menu navigation should be simple and easy to understand. Ensure that there is a systematic hierarchy of text links on your website. Your home page must be easily accessible on each page. Place links that would smoothly take your visitors from one page to another without any complication.
Content will always be king – Your content is the basic foundation of your website. A website with informative content never fails to end up becoming popular in the long run. Aside from having numerous visitors obtaining useful data from your site, optimised content will also rank well in various search engine results. Update your content on a regular basis to ensure the information is always fresh and current. It would also be helpful to check for spelling and grammar errors on your website copy text.
Test for usability – Be sure to test your website using different browsers. What works with Internet Explorer may not do fine with Mozilla or Safari. To guarantee a more professional appearance of your site, test your web pages using every available browser used online.
Less is actually more – Go easy with distracting flash animation or huge files that take a while to load. Music and videos are fine, as long as they are not auto-played because they can cause pages to load slower. In some circumstances, they can also crash the user’s browser. Just refer to Google’s website and you’ll understand that less bytes mean quicker loading of web pages.
See to it that there are no broken links and blank pages – Nothing is ever more frustrating for visitors than encountering the “Page cannot be displayed
Posted by admin in Web Design on June 18th, 2010
Lately, there have been positive changes here at Total Marketing Australia, and they are so good that we wanted to share them with you.
First of all, Total Marketing Australia is glad to unveil its newly revamped website — fully functional and very informative, and contains all of our latest marketing projects (link to portfolio). Feel free to browse it and we are sure you will love it as much as we do.
Along with this launching, we would like to introduce to you our newest team member, Stuart Anderson, who is in charge of Search Engine Optimisation & Hosting. Stuart’s boundless creativity will definitely be a great asset to the team.
Also, we would like to extend our warm greetings to one of our clients, Macchiato Pizza Bar and Grill, who is celebrating their 10th anniversary. Their birthday celebrations include the launch of their brand new website, mix 106.5 FM broadcasting from their restaurant every Monday of September, and a range of amazing Birthday Specials.
Some more good news! We want to you to meet our newest clients: Peta Hastings. A Famous make-up artist for movies and celebrities, Peta Hastings has styled various prominent icons, such as Susan Sarandan, Emily Blunt and Eric Bana.
Vodafone – Top mobile network phone provider which actually means Voice-Data-Fone, is geared towards further delivering innovative wireless services to Australia. TMA has been enrolled by one of their longest clients, Successful Executive, to support Vodafone in the development of one of their internal sites.
We will keep you posted for the next buzz. Meanwhile, enjoy our new website!
Posted by admin in Web Design on March 24th, 2009
Have you ever wondered:
The answers to these questions could be extremely important to your business. The rest of this post explores the myriad of reasons we have observed as to why our clients set-up websites.
Whether you’re looking to build a new website or are indeed looking to revamp an existing one, ensure you consider the above points, and identify how these fit in with your company’s short and medium strategy. Just by going through the above points will not only save you time and money but can also lead to an increase in sales and profits.
Another important point is to ensure you work with a web development team whom is committed to getting to know you and your business, and whom are more concerned with a long term relationship rather than just a quick sale.
Article by Ray Giridharan
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