Enhance Your Ecommerce Website Through Quality Web Design

https://www.ecommerce-web-design-seo.com

In our previous blog, we explained Pay Per Click marketing; this time we’re looking at the quality of your website through quality web design and the impact that this can have on your visitors’ decision to buy.

How attractive is your ‘shop window’, and how is this affected by Quality Web Design?

Your website is your shop window. It takes only a few seconds to walk past most shop fronts. We all make judgments based on lots of pieces of information. For instance, imagine you’ve been working hard and you’re starving. In the time it takes to walk past your local sandwich shop, your brain can take in countless pieces of information:

One guy making the sandwiches is sneezing; none of them are wearing hats to protect the food from their hair

One staff member is handling delivery boxes whilst wearing food preparation gloves

Two tables by the window are stained with dried coffee; the window sill is covered in dead flies and wasps

So, how hungry are you? You’ll probably wait until the next food shop. We make decisions like this every day, and most aren’t so obvious.

Window dressing through Quality Web Design

The same principles apply to websites through quality web design. To capture the attention of any visitors, you need:

A visually pleasing, smart and professional design

Content that is well written

Photographs and images that are of a high standard

Quality Web Design

Passing visitors decide within a few seconds whether to stay or move on. Being price competitive is not enough: you need to create a good impression, demonstrate quality and build trust rapidly – via quality web design.

As most visitors are unlikely to know your company or brand, they’ll make a decision about your company based entirely on what they see on your website pages, heavily impacted by quality web design. First impressions are everything.

If your website has been cobbled together by a friend, or someone who ‘knows a bit of HTML’, you may need to think again, because the chances are, you don’t have a quality web design. Your competitors’ websites will have a quality web design by professionals who understand how to portray a powerful image, reliability and above all the trustworthy nature of their business – just through the quality web design.

Their websites are also likely to have been professionally written by a copywriter who understands how to capture people’s attention, nurture an enquiry and sell the benefits of their products and services – all in a few paragraphs.

So, if you want to attract high quality customers, make sure that the look and ‘feel’ of your website pages are also of a high quality and do real justice to your products and services through quality web design.

P.S. Fusionsoft offers a free quality web design review and search engine optimisation review for all Uxbridge, London and UK websites.

Tip: To see your UK government website complience requirements, and this months tip to encourage more customers to buy your products through quality web design and more, to to https://www.ecommerce-web-design-seo.com/blog-tips.

Html Email Design Best Practices

HTML Emails are arguably the most effective of all email marketing designs. Theyre eye catching, engaging and flexible. They provide you with a variety of opportunities to promote your business and achieve email marketing success. However, there are many pitfalls to be aware of when designing HTML Emails. In this article well highlight some of these and give you a few tips to help you design effective email campaigns.

Back to the old school

Theres no point denying it HTML Email design is Old School web design. This means no Stylesheets, JavaScript or Flash, they just wont work consistently across the wide and varied range of email clients.

When it comes to layout its back to a basic table-based structure, which may, to some web designers seem like committing web standards blasphemy. However, when you take into account the number of email clients that either remove or pay no attention to CSS it becomes quite clear going back to basics is the only way to guarantee your email looks the same regardless of which email client is displaying it.
We have found when designing table based layouts using merged cells (indicated by colspan and rowspan in your code), some email clients, especially Lotus Notes will usually distort any layout with merged cells. Instead, using nested tables will work more consistently than merged cells. For example, a two column layout could consist of a base layer of one table with two columns with other tables inserted into each column to give you space to enter your content.
Looking Good

A great deal of formatting can be done using Inline Styles small snippets of CSS code inserted into either a containing table cell (&#60td&#62), in paragraph tags (&#60p&#62) or span tags (&#60span&#62)

Below is an example of an inline style insert into a table cell tag:

&#60td width=”400″ align=”left” valign=”top” style=”color:#000000; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:11px;”&#62

This style would then apply to the text contents of that table cell. Other standard HTML formatting tags such as &#60strong&#62, &#60em&#62, &#60font&#62 etc can be used as well to vary the formatting on top of this base style.
When deciding on a font for your email its always best to stick to a font that most, if not all, of your readers will have. Common fonts such as Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Times New Roman and Georgia should be fine. If youre willing to take the risk of a slightly lesser-known font its good practice to specify a set of backup font faces in your inline style eg.
&#60td style=” Lucida Console, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; “&#62

If a computer does not have a certain font it will look to the next in the list to see if it has that one.

Time Warp

When we first got our hands on Microsoft Outlook 2007 we were a bit taken aback with what Microsoft had created, not only locking it down to use only the Word HTML rendering engine (Outlook 2003 will let you choose between normal HTML and Word rendering) but also support for background images had been removed, which meant a real step back with what you can and cant do to keep your emails looking good.

To ensure the most consistent display across the majority of email clients, we took the decision to not include background images in our designs (unless otherwise specified by the customer), and weve come up with a few little tricks along the way to help us keep our designs looking top notch. The main thing to remember is HTML text should only appear on a solid background colour (which you can set in a table cell). There should be no gradients or any other fancy effects behind actual text, unless you plan to include that text in an image.

The final few things…

There are hundreds of elements to take into consideration when designing a HTML email. These are just a few of the most important things to consider:

Create a plain text version of your email to send alongside the HTML version for those who prefer it and for mobile devices and email clients that only accept text only email.
Keep the width of your email between 600-650px to ensure readability for the maximum amount of email clients.
Assign an alt tag to each image so if readers have the images turned off they should see some sort of useful information to assure them the email is legitimate.
Always set height and width attributes on images in your HTML design. Some email clients like Outlook 2003 and 2007 will suppress images in the inbox. Failing to put a height and width will result in your deign be distorted by the security message that is inserted by the email client into the image space.
Use images at the size they are meant to be rather than resizing them with HTML some email clients will ignore the HTML resize and just display the image at its original size.

Whatever you choose to do with your email marketing designs, the most important thing is to test, test and test again. You should always proof your email into the major email clients to ensure its rendering correctly and ask a proof group to check for spellings or design issues too. However, just because there are limitations to HTML email design it doesnt mean you cant be creative or push the boundaries to see what impacts on delivery, open and click through rates. Remember the aim of any email is to achieve your goal and sometimes being safe with your design isnt the best option.

Web Design

Fantastic And Creative Web Design Styles www.guidedcreative.com Recently, my department was tasked with a goal that left a few of us filled with a bit of anxiety (as it does most teachers when asked to take on this task)-our goal for the new year is to create or revise an online teaching portfolio. While most teachers are expected to have a completed portfolio they can call up at a moment’s notice, that portfolio is generally in print form and lacks the interactivity that is possible with today’s technology. So, I was excited to tackle this project and expand my already existing mini-portfolio to a full-fledged site with samples, student work, videos, images, and lesson plans.

George David Clark of The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses three tips for a successful portfolio in his 2012 article on the subject. According to Clark, in developing a portfolio, a teacher should focus on organizing to minimize By providing the target audience with a clear organizational structure and cutting content that doesn’t web developers support that structure, a teacher can ensure that one clear message regarding theory and approach to instruction is being communicated. In addition, a strong teaching portfolio should clearly chart a teacher’s development and maturation as a professional. Finally, Clark suggests focusing on the student as a measurement of success.

Christmas is coming and we should think how to cheer up yourself or your design related friends and I came up with list where I included all bestsellers and the most popular and recommended design related books I could find. I am reading slowly through these books myself and I plan to review and feature them in future one by one! Of course in blogosphere you can find endless articles you could read,but what’s great with books – books have very clean and detailed content structure explaining and teaching you everything point by point slowly and clearly!

With a swift and convincing stroke, the authors of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web tear down many entrenched ideas about web designers london . Flashy animations are cool, they agree, as long as they don’t aggravate the viewer. Nifty clickable icons are nice, but are their meanings universal? Is the search engine providing results that are useful and relevant? This book acts as a mirror and with careful questioning causes the reader to think through all the elements and decisions required for well-crafted Web design. -Jennifer Buckendorff -This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Standards, argues Jeffrey Zeldman in Designing With Web Standards, are our only hope for breaking out of the endless cycle of testing that plagues designers hoping to support all possible clients. In this book, he explains how designers can best use standards-primarily XHTML and CSS, plus ECMAScript and the standard Document Object Model (DOM)-to increase their personal productivity and maximize the availability of their creations. Zeldman’s approach is detailed, authoritative, and rich with historical context, as he is quick to explain how features of standards evolved. It’s a fantastic education that any design professional will appreciate. more information

Advantages Of Tableless Websites

HTML was originally designed as a semantic markup language intended for sharing scientific documents and research papers online. However, as the Internet expanded from the academic and research world into the mainstream in the mid 1990s, and became more media oriented, graphic designers sought ways to control the visual appearance of the Web pages presented to end users. To this end, tables and spacers have been used to create and maintain page layout.

Problems then started to arise from the use of these techniques. As many webpages are build with tables nested within tables, this resulted in large HTML documents which use more bandwidth than documents with simpler formatting. With slower performance, the internet slowly begun to decline and the Web development industry shrank. Because of this, several UI development was carried out by coders with greater knowledge of good coding practice. It was around this time that many became critical of messy coding practices and the idea of tableless design began to grow.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were developed to improve the separation between design and content, and move back towards a semantic organization of content on the Web. According to popular Web design outsourcing Philippiness companies, the term “tableless design implies the use of CSS to position HTML elements on the page but it should be noted that tables and CSS are not mutually exclusive. Many experienced HTML coders use CSS to manipulate tables frequently.

Advantages
There are several advantages through the use of tableless websites, these includes:

Accessibility
As a result of the separation of design (CSS) and structure (HTML), it is also possible to provide different layouts for different devices, e.g. handhelds, mobile phones, etc. According to different Web design outsourcing Philippiness companies, it is also possible to specify a different style sheet for print, e.g. to hide or modify the appearance of advertisements or navigation elements that are irrelevant and a nuisance in the printable version of the page.
Maintainability
In tableless layout using CSS, virtually all of the layout information resides in one place: the CSS document. Because the layout information is centralized, these changes can be made quickly and globally by default. The HTML files themselves do not, usually, need to be adjusted when making layout changes. If they do, it is usually to add class-tags to specific markup elements or to change the grouping of various sections with respect to one another.
Bandwidth Efficient
Clever implementation of tableless design can produce web pages with fewer HTML tags thus reducing page download times. According to web design consultants and Web design outsourcing Philippiness companies, using external style sheets to position page elements means more mark up language may be cached and further reduce download times for subsequent pages using the same resources.

The Importance Of Images

As humans, our strongest emotional responses – both positive and negative – come from visual cues. That’s precisely why the old adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” has more than a ring of truth to it. When you’re flipping through a magazine or surfing the Web, the photos are what make you stop and look. Today, the images that are most effective in capturing the attention of readers and web visitors alike can be summed up in three words: ocean, water, life.

Imagery is Everything

Those who are in the business of advertising or web design understand that developing a wonderful product or a website full of useful information is important, but it’s only one component of success. Choosing the proper imagery to communicate to the potential customer or visitor can result in resounding success, while selecting the wrong images can be disastrous in terms of sales and web “stickiness.”

Carefully selected images can help to establish and reinforce brand awareness, can help to target niche markets, and can help to build customer loyalty. Today, lifestyle photography is the primary means of conveying consumer messages -so much so that product photography is often a small element of a print advertising campaign or a web design.

Lifestyle Photography Conveys Concepts

The primary purpose of lifestyle photography is to convey concepts. For example, a photograph of waves lapping on the beach can convey relaxation, freedom, luxury, and promise. Photography of crashing waves can communicate agitation, strength, and persistence. Images of still water with stormy skies can convey turbulence, doubt, conflict, and confusion. A hand reaching out of the water can relay a message of hope or of hopelessness. Photography that depicts surfing can communicate youthful exuberance or a hip, active lifestyle.

Finding Unique, Captivating Images

If you use these types of ocean, water, and life images in your advertising campaigns or web design work, you know how frustrating it can be to find the right photography to communicate your key concepts. Most, if not all, major stock photography companies have either a limited number of images, or images that are dated. When you’re looking for unique images that evoke the proper emotional tone, it often pays to patronize smaller stock photography companies, particularly those that specialize in ocean, water, and life images. The images that will allow you to stand apart from your competition may very well come from a company that is steeped in the surf and water lifestyle.

Besides offering unique stock images, the right stock photography company should be able to offer you exclusive rights, should you so desire, should track the use of all photos, and should consider commission ideas. In other words, if you need a certain type of ocean, water, or life image, the company should consider shooting the image for you and then adding it to their stock catalog.

With ocean, water, and life photography quickly becoming the most common images used in advertising and web design, it’s important to find a stock photography company that can deliver the unique images that will give you the edge and set you apart from your competitors.

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