Analyze your Website: Is it Modernized?

Remember: “Website represents business to the internet users!” This sentence is no more just a belief, but a reality. There are several businesses that totally depend on their website and online customers. eCommerce websites is the biggest example that proves online business website is as crucial as bricks and mortar store. The changing world aims to make internet as their prime requirement after food and shelter.

Internet users are coming across several types of websites active over World Wide Web. These websites are said to be modern not because it is packed with attractive images and creative fonts, but because they contain all the latest features and functionalities simplifying users’ requirements.

What it takes to Modern Website Design?

Enticing Appearance

You can make your website design highly attractive and this is one of the crucial must have factors for your website. Does that mean you need to consider website design trends of 2015? Of course, considering on the latest design trends will offer your website an astounding and unmatched look and feel.

Today’s website needs to be responsive by nature. This is the ultimate requirement for the world going mobile. If you’re up to making an excellently attractive website packed with reliable features and enticing visual content and if it does not fit the mobile device screen when accessed through smartphones or tablets, it would be hard for visitors to stay on the website for more time.

It is also advisable to keep the design matching the category of the website. For instance, if you own a music website, infuse the theme with dark color shades and suiting visual elements, the same way if you own a website that retails apparels for females, infusing the theme with eye-catchy colors and attractive theme elements would be the best idea. Well, appearance of the website design is equally important as its speed and performance.

Optimized Content

You might be thinking that the visitors arriving to the website will get attracted towards the website design; it is true, but this does not mean your website content should be dull. To avail great visibility, the content of the website must be optimized. This will help your website get good ranking among popular search engines.

It’s the era where even images used in the website need to be optimized for better visibility. Visual content is the latest trend igniting the website popularity. Giving creative website designer, a reason to innovate with the visual content trend, websites are adapting modernized approach.

Seamless integration

Integration is the term referring to syncing of any module or website element with the website architecture. Easy integration is the must have feature of any modern websites serving across the industry verticals. The need for new modules or features is irrespective of time. You need to develop flexible websites to match the requirement of integration.

Elements of Current Trends that your Website should Contain

Visual Content

“What you see is what you get.” Visualized content, like images with content, video and audio content is trending nowadays. Build websites having visual content and increase its popularity over internet.

Content Management System

Adding or removing content to and from the website is an easy task if the content management system used is packed with latest features and functionalities. Choose the web development platform that offers an excellent CMS solution for simplified content management.

Build a business website that impacts the visitors strongly. Feature-packed attractive website is what will change the forthcoming design trends.

Tips to Design Mobile Friendly Email Newsletter

Email marketing is the easiest and most effective way to reach out your audience. Though an old way of reaching out your prospects, it hasn’t lost its significance and popularity. In fact it has become more effective and less straining with compare to other marketing tips and strategies. Yes, it’s not new information, you are aware of this fact! But considering the current scenario of ubiquitousness of handheld device, it is imperative to make your email newsletter mobile friendly, your audience can access! This is new to understand and focus! It’s time to design your emails for mobile phones to reach wider spectrum of audience as majority of them browse email through mobile.

Crafting a mobile email takes right planning and efforts. There are certain guidelines and tips that you must consider while designing a mobile friendly email newsletter. Let’s have insight into the different factors that can help make your email design mobile friendly!

Stick to Short and Sweet

Simplicity still rules the roost! One-column format can work best for the mobile friendly email newsletter. Such format is easy to access for time-strapped audiences. It may compel you to tweak some of your standard design works. Such emails will also require a simplified header and clearer navigation. Smaller designs would work to display the start of the email message on the first screen.

Develop Customer-focused Content

Focus more on your customers and their needs rather than your company and its services. You can trigger interest of your audiences by offering solution to common problems that they might face. You can offer them tips to resolve the issues. In addition you can also focus on industry news and trends. Case studies could also be a great read stating how others have improved their functioning.

Stick to Larger Fonts

Readability is ideally one of the biggest problem audiences often face. You should use larger fonts. In addition, do not forget to turn off hyphenation. For making it a standard practice Apple’s iOS has a minimum font size of 13 points that can be automatically adjusted with anything less than that. It is important for mobile read, due to small screen size.

Make a Subtle ‘Call to Action’

Call to actions is also imperative in a mobile email. Every element should be designed in a way that user action is quite obvious. It could be either buttons or text like “Click Here, “Buy Now,” – that appears in the design.

Carefully Include Images

Not all mobile users can actually see images from a mobile email newsletter. It is only Apple’s iOS devices that can automatically display images in emails. So be careful and perform ample research before incorporating any image.

Dig deep into your analytics to understand the types of devices users are opting to view your messages. If you plan to add one, make sure of certain aspects. Just ensure the image is viewable without scrolling. Your message should be understandable even without seeing the image.

Split the Screen in Three Segments

Your mobile newsletter should be fragmented into three sections: Header and branding, introductory message and call to action. Each of the above part should have a space on the first screen of the email format to display the message in totality without the need to scroll.

Focus on Ergonomics and Touch

All the components that need to be tapped and touched with one finger should be easily distinguishable from other elements with ample space in between. It should be easy to touch. Go for the full-width calls-to-action, so it can be easily used by left or right handed audiences.

Leave ample space around the clickable button or text. Better add more texts to the link that need to be touched to make it easier to touch and restrict the number of links close to it. It will avoid the user from touching the wrong one. You must also use color and bolding for all links to make it easier for users to have an obvious visual cue that the text is meant for specific purpose.

Things to Avoid

There are a few things that you must avoid as these can ruin the otherwise awesome mobile newsletter.

1. Forget to Add Navigation: You must not forget to add navigation to your newsletter. It should have an extremely simple navigation to divert users to your website, but remember to optimize it for mobile.

2. Developing a “subtle” Color Palette: Users tend to adjust the contrast and color very frequently on their mobile devices. Do not create color palettes having soft hues or colors devoid of any contrast.

3. Using Small Type: This is a real turn off to your audiences. People scroll. Keep the type sufficiently large for your visitors to read easily. Else they will close it immediately without taking pain to zoom out to read it.

4. Buttons Overlapped by Standard UI Icons: Avoid placing buttons at the bottom of the screen; they will be hidden under the icons when users try to interact with them.

5. Clutter is a Disaster: Opt for a small single message for mobile and rely on it. Users cannot spend time or effort to filter a lot of data from a newsletter on their phones. Keep the design of your email newsletter clear and tidy without any unnecessary data!

Conclusion

Mobile email design is a unique perception with distinct considerations. There could be many a things you should consider are altogether different than with any other project.

Still it is recommended that all of your email newsletters or other related correspondence must be optimized for mobile. Develop and craft every message using the above tips and then contemplate about any smaller changes that are required for larger formats. This strategy will work as you will develop a single and unified message across all platforms with a focused vision. Your vision will be clear about what you want to achieve with the email before you go too far along and make necessary content decisions early in the process and won’t think that you are being compelled to cut down content for mobile users.

Maulik Shah lives in Ahmedabad, India and runs an IT company offering Web Design solutions to enterprises across the globe. Being a technocrat, he holds years of experience in IT sector, and acts as a mentor to his employees.

Websites are Acquiring Responsiveness. How it Impacts eCommerce Industry? – Part 1

Ever changing technology trends have always been the game changers. In the current digital scenario, portable devices like mobile phones, tablets, wearable devices etc. are the next generation technologies, which are driving revolution in the digital era. Portable devices supporting internet interface are trending nowadays. We can observe that internet lovers are shifting their preferences from desktops to mobile devices for leveraging portability.

With this change, web development companies have accepted this challenge of transforming website development process to meet the change in internet access methods. Interactive and responsive website is the crucial requirement nowadays. Even Google has recently released an algorithmic update stating websites must be responsive. Even search engines are set to crawl websites that are mobile friendly.

To align with this new updates, responsive websites performs better over internet as compared to those which are not. Not only the screen size will be affected, but aspects like clicks will be replaced by touch, monitor will be replaced by mobiles devices with smaller screen size etc.

Why Websites needs to be Responsive?

The Mobile Era

Today, digital market is filled with variety of smartphone devices. With this small device, you can perform all the tasks efficiently for which you otherwise require a computer. Accessing emails, downloading content, viewing PDFs and many more were impossible to perform with just a mobile phone. The modern smartphone are capable of offering several functionalities as well. A smartphone has made our lives simple and easy. Responsive website design allows users to access websites through their smartphones. Thus, it bridges the gap between customers and businesses.

Development Cost is Reasonably Balanced

The development cost of a responsive website is somewhat more than a traditional website. But it does not cost much, which you cannot afford it. There is no need of making separate websites for every device. Responsive website can be accessed from all the devices, thus you can reduce the development cost as one responsive website works for all the devices.

Offers Great User Experience

You might get surprised that the responsive websites does not change its visuals like icons, images, fonts etc. Whether it is viewed through desktop or through a smartphone device, it looks similar. Only change you can observe is the varied dimensions of the website design elements like textbox, buttons, links etc. Users accessing responsive website through their smartphones receives improved user experience.

Do you think, in spite of making device specific websites, adopting responsive website approach would be a smarter decision? The next generation digital market deserves a modern approach to meet challenging and changing user requirements.

Stay tuned to check its effects over eCommerce industry in the next part.

Top 5 Website Designing Platforms

What You See Is What You Get – editor is the basic requirement of any web designer to implement his innovative ideas for building alluring designs for websites. Be it a CMS, eCommerce or any other website type, its design is its first impression, which can create a brand image for businesses. The same way, dull and unattractive design may impact your business performance adversely. Let us now check the top 5 website designing platforms which convert ideas into reality.

Top 5 Website Design Platforms

CoffeeCup HTML Editor

This software is a commercial product helping designers to craft versatile and enticing website designs. Its free version is also available, which have limited tools and features. Use the complete version to leverage its best features and make the design, highly attractive. With this software, designers can create versatile website designs. Be it a responsive or a website with a flat design, this software helps building great design. Using it does not require expertise as it is very simple and easy as compared to other HTML editors.

Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is a proprietary design software served by Adobe systems. It was initially created by Macromedia, which was later acquired by Adobe systems in 2005. It is a remarkable tool for crafting HTML design, which is often used by website designers since years. It supports huge range of plugins and in-built features of HTML5 and CSS3 too. The pack of in-built website templates makes it reliable and usable.

Notepad ++

This software is a powerful editor for adding or modifying website’s source code with myriads of features. Designers can easily fix the errors in the code as this editor highlights the error. This feature even saves valuable time spent in coding. Features like code folding and auto completion helps designers to leverage its benefits like powerful search tool, bookmarking, document navigation, macro support etc. It’s simple and highly configurable user interface makes the designing process much easy.

Bluefish Editor

Bluefish is a free editor software, packed with several tools useful for web development and web / graphic designing. It supports several web development and scripting languages like ASP.NET, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, HTML etc. along with great tricks like syntax highlighting, powerful search, replace tools, code folding, auto completion etc. With the wizards present in the editor, objects like CSS, tables, forms, video and audio can easily be added to avail its features and benefits, while building enticing web designs.

Microsoft Expression Blend

This software is a user interface design tool, which was developed and retailed by Microsoft enterprise. It aimed helping the designers to create graphical interfaces containing features of web and desktop applications. Building interactive websites with this editor is an easy task.

This top 5 list might not be complete, but this list is made referring our choice and perspective. All the editors listed here are widely used due to its unique and comprehensive features. You can select any of them, given your design and development requirements. Get started by choosing a suitable editor and design eye-catchy websites effortlessly!