Web Design Strategies to Create Interest in Your Services

The design of websites are important as they say a lot about your business, how professional it is and they will often determine whether a visitor wants to stick around or leave straight away (which is not good for your business.) It is not just about how attractive the website is, although this plays a significant part of it, it is also about the functionality. If your website is difficult to navigate around, keeps freezing or any of the other problems which drive visitors crazy, it won’t do anything to help you achieve success for your business. There are various strategies you may implement with your web design and it is worth using a specialised web design agency to do this.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design consists of creating web designs which are suitable for the format of any piece of technology, without losing any of their format or style, for instance mobile phones and iPads. In this day and age it is imperative that your web design stays up to speed with technological advances and in a society where everyone is constantly glued to their mobiles and iPads, it is important to take this into consideration. Responsive web design allows users to navigate around your website smoothly and it gives users the chance to access your website on the go and without any fuss.

Complex Web Development

If you have a small business, you may just be happy with a standard website with text, but as a large operation, you may require something a bit more in-depth. For example, you may just be happy for your website to inform visitors about your services, with perhaps a section for them to leave comments or to contact you. In other cases, you may require complex web development, such as a booking function and your web design will have to be developed with this in mind.

Attractive Web Design

Whether you want your website to have all the trimmings or just be a standard website, you still need to make it attractive to visitors; otherwise they will instantly be put off, especially if they don’t know much about your services. Your web design should be crisp and formatted correctly (words cut off at either side of the page are not good) and should also be professional. It doesn’t matter what size of business you have, if you want it to grow, put some effort into your style and design. It is a good idea to put yourself in the position of the visitor; what do you like to see, what attracts you to a website and keeps your attention?

Search Engine Optimization

The content on your website is also crucial, if you want people to have any chance of finding you. Make sure the content is always kept fresh and updated, and make use of search engine optimization throughout; as this will help you rank more highly in Google. It is worth paying attention to this if you want to stay competitive.

New major updates to Adobe Dreamweaver

The first new feature updates for Dreamweaver CC have arrived and this popular web design tool is promising.

Back in May, Adobe announced the release of new updates for the CC version of Adobe Dreamweaver. It also announced that all new versions of its CS software products would now be launched exclusively on the Creative Cloud subscription services.

Adobe promised web designers that they would be getting new features for their software all through the year rather than waiting for the release of a boxed version every 12 months. So users of Adobe’s best known software tool for creating, publishing and managing websites, Dreamweaver CC, have been waiting eagerly for this update.

The updates are now here and Adobe is promising a number of new features and improvements and they include:

Live Highlight

Live Highlight is an impressive feature that allows web designers to visualise the relationships between HTML elements in Live View and applied CSS Selectors. Designers can now inspect and highlight the HTML elements in real-time. So this allows you to spend more time in CC and less switching in and out of your browser to test your content. This saves you time and means you can complete your work faster and improves all-round efficiency. To see Live Highlight in action, simply hover and click Selectors in the CSS Designers.

Modernised Live View

Modernised Live View is another new feature that has been introduced in CC and it provides an integrated rendering engine with a similar performance and HTML5 & CSS3 support as the Chrome Browser. This means you can test your designs without leaving the application and this saves you a lot of time.

Sync Settings

Sync Settings is a feature already available for Adobe Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC and has recently been added to In Design. This feature has now been introduced in Dreamweaver CC and enables designers to sync work spaces, keyboard shortcuts and more between multiple PCs via the Cloud.

Adobe recognised the bloating in the software that affected earlier versions and they have removed redundant parts of the application and this includes 10 panels, 14 dialog boxes and more than 62 menu items have been removed thus far. The hope is that this new simplified User Interface will improve the workflow.

Additional updates include:

·         Code View has received line number highlighting and the highlighting of matching tags as well as CSS Selector code hints including support for colour customisation.

·         Adobe has added support for PHP 5.4 and the jQuery Mobile Library has now been updated to version 1.8.3.

·         Adobe includes a colour picker feature which promises to speed up visual CSS editing workflows.

Adobe are promising that the update of Dreamweaver will be an ongoing process and the Creative Cloud release schedule may have saved the software from the trashcan. 

Celebrate a Decade of Web Design Success

Over the past ten years the World Wide Web has changed a lot and as a result your web design agency has had to constantly adapt the way they work. Some things haven’t changed much at all however and overall it is safe to say it has been a fabulous decade for those in the web design field.

The internet was first used in the 1980’s commercially however from the moment it emerged, shiny and new for the public to enjoy it has grown with a speed that no-one could have predicted. From the first “schweeaorrr…bip….bip” to the superfast broadband or even fiber optic internet connections we enjoy today we have seen many changes, not only in the way that we use the internet, also in the way that websites are being designed.

Back in 1994 most websites remained text-based, Yahoo was in its infancy and Google and Ebay were nowhere to be seen. While clearly a lot has changed since then a lot has stayed the same, namely what is needed to make a website truly effective.

The levels of development in technology has given us laptop computers, notebooks, tablets and now even mobile phones that are cable of browsing and using the internet from pretty much anywhere that a Wi-Fi signal can be used. What this has meant for the humble web design agency is that web designers have had to optimise web sites in order to ensure that all information may be clearly seen and all functions work regardless of how the internet is accessed. Apps are probably the latest web design trick to help us savvy internet users doing what we want in the minimum of time.

Back when the internet first became widely available web designers had a list of points to consider when it came to designing a website and many of those points will still remain true today.

Usability is a key issue when it comes to web design and your web design agency will no doubt have spent much time looking at ways to make navigation easier and do so in a way that pleased Google’s search crawler bots. This focus on usability hasn’t changed since the World Wide Web became open for business for the public and this is good to see.

The fundamentals of good web design have remained as important today as they were back at the beginning and this in itself is something to celebrate. It would be very easy for web designers to get caught up in SEO, the newest developments, the fastest working apps and more and forget about what consumers really need when it comes to a user-friendly website.

There is no doubt that the internet will continue to expand and develop, as will the technology that it may accessed on over the next ten years or so. It is safe to assume however that whoever writes this article in another ten years will still be celebrating the fact that a web design agency still values the important core factors of web design over anything else. We can but hope this is still the case.

Attribute to: Duncan Cumming

Having established his career in digital sales and marketing, Duncan formed his own digital marketing agency. Along with the running of his business, Duncan spends time writing informative and helpful articles about the different areas of online marketing.