There was an age of static websites and this was around 20 years ago. Back then it didn’t cross any of our minds to think more or out of the box or even research on whether the visitors actually find anything useful while they are on our websites. But, today everything has changed. We are at a point where Responsive web designs are going to take over and replace the traditional concepts of website designing.

In 2017, our aim should be to build perfectly responsive websites, if our aim is to attract customers and drive sales. But, to create a perfect website it is necessary that we try to avoid mistakes and here, are the 20 website design mistakes that you need to be avoiding:

1. Navigation:
Seamless Navigation is the key to your customer’s heart. It is one of the best website design practices to ensure that your Navigation is consistent and intuitive rather than frustrating to your visitors.

2. Screen resolution:
There are many websites where the screen resolutions suck. Your website should be a good fit for devices with almost all screen resolutions.

3. Dodgy images or animations:
They say using images is one of the best web design practices but excessive use of images or animations turns out to be one of the worst website design mistakes that need to be avoided now. Images are good to convey your business message unless they start annoying the visitors.

4. Whitespaces:
It is one of the best web design practices to include whitespaces. But, often, web designers are so busy with creating a beautiful site that they cram in a lot of clutter and forget whitespaces.

5. Music in the background:
Let’s cut this crap! Honestly, no one needs music in the background when they are on your website. We avoid including music in the background while designing websites because it is a nuisance from the visitor’s perspective and the objective of our site is to impress them. Food for thought and adoption of this technique…

6. Registration Forms:
Of course, we all love to show some courtesy to our customers or help them in every productive yet possible way we can. But, if your registration forms are too complicated and are requesting for a lot of information, do you think your customers would want to fill it and reach out to you? No! Never! Forms need to be straightforward and simple.
This is one among those website design mistakes that need to be stopped in the year 2017.

7. Inconsistency
Some designers are bosses when it comes to creativity and they just cannot stop themselves from flaunting their awesomeness. Of course, it is good to display your excellence but do not overdo it. There are websites where designers use a different pattern of designs on all the pages which are irritating and visitors don’t approve such websites. You need to keep our website designs consistent.

8. Search box:
Where do you place your search box? It is another important thing on your website! The eye of a customer goes to the top right corner whenever they hunt for a search box, so don’t tire them to go searching for one.

9. Responsive:
For the past 2 years, Google has been warning us to make our sites responsive. Recently, through no obvious coincidence, Google declared that if the sites are not made responsive then, it will not be ranked in the search engines. Again, you are going to lose out the game if you own a non-responsive site.

10. Content:
Content is the King. People come to your site to read content. If you are still showcasing the old and outdated content on your site then, people will stop visiting your site. Update your content regularly.

11. Displaying content:
The frame of your content is as important as your content itself. It should fit well into all kinds of devices irrespective of their sizes or specifications. Another point for responsiveness.

12. Cross-browser compatibility:
It is not just Google Chrome on which your website needs to be functioning well but there are other browsers which the users are likely to use and it is necessary that you test your website design is compatible with all of them.

13. Broken links:
This is one of the website design mistakes you need to be avoided in the year 2017. Our team of Web Designers and Web Developers in Virginia ensure that there are no “404 error pages”, or bad links on the website to avoid frustrating the visitors.

14. Font sizes and color:
As we already discussed inconsistency could earn you a black mark. Similarly, an inconsistency in the font sizes and colors that you implement on your website can again irritate your people.

15. No dead ends:
Always put a link to the Home Page on every page of your site. If not then people will reach dead ends.

16. Slow loading times:
We have been told to reduce the loading times since the day we started creating websites. So, let us avoid slow loading times for the success of our websites.

17. Call-to-actions:
Have you missed including a call-to-action? This could not be carelessness but sheer blunder that is causing you to lose millions of customers.

18. Legibility and readability

Sites that offer a poor legibility and readability are again committing website design mistake and needs to change this habit now. People are coming to your site to read!

19. Company Contact Information:
You know you are genuine but how do you prove it to your people that you are genuine? Company Contact Information! Include your address, contact number and email ID for their reference.

20. Links to your Social Media pages:
You have all your social media pages active but haven’t linked it to your website. It may have led to you losing more than half of your customers. Linking to your social media pages is one of the best website design practices.

Do you want help with website design?
We can help you!

Our team of Web Design and Web Developers in Virginia are highly qualified professionals and experienced at developing the best website designs. For further assistance, contact us today!

The Social Media Marketing team is lucky in a way that it has access to a large number of tools to analyze customer engagement on social media. Though you may have all the data you need, it is difficult to design an ironclad social media strategy as the trends change from time to time.

Let’s take an example of Twitter. Planning an effective Tweet strategy can be a bit of brain teaser. How can you identify the tweets that speak to your audience or the ones of their interest? How can you increase your efforts and amplify your reach?

In this post, we will discuss the ways we can use the Twitter Analytics dashboard to leverage your marketing strategy. The approaches listed below can be used to experiment, furthermore, understand your target audience and create content of value. Additionally, it helps with creating an identity for your business.

 

1. The interest of your followers
You would often think that it’s just the data behind the tweets and their engagement, but there’s more to it. Twitter Analytics’ audience insights dashboard gives data behind your followers’ interests. If your tweets are about beauty products and trends and a majority of your audience’s interests lie elsewhere, your engagement reduces. How do you know what the people want? The audience insights dashboard. The reduces the amount of guesswork that goes into understanding what your audience would be interested in and get better results.

2. The region your followers are located
Have you ever posted a tweet at a particular time and wondered why the engagement went through the roof? It could be night time where you are and just the beginning of the day for someone else. Twitter gives a bifurcation of your audience by country and state.

3. The accounts your followers follow
To make our business stand out from our competitors involves competitor analysis. Twitter will give a list of the people your followers also follow.

4. Tweet when your audience is online
Twitter has given you an overview of your audience by country and region in the demographics tab. Posting tweets when your audience is online increases the amount of engagement. You can use this time to spread the word about any promotions or campaigns.

5. Type of engagement – favorite or retweet?
You notice that some posts got great engagement over time, does that mean each of them performed the same? You can get a detailed analysis of each of those tweets. Were they favorites or retweets? Favorites symbolize appreciation. The tweet meant something to that person and hence favorited it. Retweets, your tweet has value. Someone saw that the tweet was valuable and chose to share it. Either way, it is counted as engagement.

6. Recreating the winning tweets
Twitter has given you the tweets that got the most engagement or performed well. Once you’ve understood what resonates with your audience, start creating content similar to those tweets. For instance, if you notice that three of your recent tweets with images have performed the best, try including different graphics content into your strategy.

7. Tweet reach – favorites and retweets
A drawback to Twitter Analytics is it may give your all the impressions, but it does not give you the number of retweets for that specific tweet. Buffer is a social media management tool that can fill in the gaps with Twitter analytics. In this way, you can figure out the reach of a specific tweet or of all tweets.

8. Plan your campaign on relevant events
What better time to tweet than about relevant events? Twitter is a platform to share your opinions, passions and real-world events. These events can be major events like festivals and minor events like #TGIFridays or #MondayBlues. You can discover these events through Twitters events dashboard and plan your tweets and create the content in relevance to that event.

About Us:
Emanate Digital is a Virginia based Digital Marketing Agency which is credited with some of the best works available on the internet today. We provide superior Website Design & Development, Branding, and Integrated Digital Marketing services and have catered to clients based all over the World. You can view Our Services.

Have a project in mind? Call us at 703-635-7115 or email us your query at corporate@emanatesolutions.com and we shall get back to you ASAP.

Have you ever considered all those times when you ended up downloading applications and have not used them or the newsletters you’ve subscribed to and never bothered to read out of the fear of missing out on important things? Each of those signups and downloads is a result of an effective ‘call-to-action’.
It is essential to have a step by step process planned to guide your visitors through the whole buying journey using strategic calls-to-action (CTAs). Food for thought – if you wouldn’t have been led through the whole process of signing up so persuasively through the CTA, you would have used very few apps and received very few newsletters than you do now.

 

Listed below are 5 examples of CTAs that totally rock.

1. Jive

The fastest and easiest way to grab user’s attention is by making your CTA stand out from the rest of your landing page with bright colors. Jive is one of the examples of a bright CTA. They have a busy background image as their homepage, yet, the call-to-action set far away will come to your notice among the major distractions in the form of the windows, people, and flying pages. As you can see, the bright orange color stands out from the remainder of the dark background. ‘Try Jive’ used on the CTA helps visitors build trust and works as a differentiating factor for their brand.

2. Evernote

One of our favorites, Evernote’s ‘Remember Everything.’
The tagline ‘Remember Everything’ used on the landing page of Evernote, lets visitors relate to the product immediately. The design on the website makes it extremely easy for the users to see how to sign up and the benefits of using the app. Additionally, the green color of the main ‘Sign up for free’ button stands out from the remaining white text on the banner and is the same color as Evernote logo.

3. Netflix

What is one of the biggest fears we have before we sign up for something? It is the pain of going through the entire long and tedious process of canceling the subscription if we don’t end up liking it. The “cancel anytime” copyright reassurance, just above the “Join Free for a Month” reassurance CTA, makes it easier for the user to sign up. The red color of the primary CTAs, match Netflix’s logo color. You’ll also notice the background image is a collage of the latest trending shows.

4. Humboldt County

Humboldt County’s website is breathtaking in itself. The full-screen beautiful video reminds you of the Alice In The Wonderland movie. What we really love is the eccentric call-to-action placed at the bottom center of the page, featuring a bunny icon and the phrase “Follow The Magic”. It complements the video playing in the background, making you feel like you’re about to enter a fairytale.

Further on the website turns in a sort of an adventure game letting you choose which path you’d like to take with the fun call-to-action, resulting in users spending more time on the site.

5. Barkbox

The main sentence, ‘Congratulations you’re a dog person’, on the home page immediately catches the attention of the visitor and relates to the ‘Subscribe’ CTA for people that are signing up for themselves. While the second sentence, ‘Takes one to know one’, relates to the “Give a Gift” CTA for the people out there who want to give Barkbox as a gift. It is living proof that they know their customers or audience very well.
If you pay attention, there’s a cute pop-up call-to-action on the right side of the screen prompting users to chat. Click on it, and a dialogue box pops up that reads, “Pack member now chatting”. Talk about a delightful experience.

By now we hope you know how important having a right CTA can be. What would you add to the list? Leave us a comment!

About Us:
Emanate Digital is a Virginia based Digital Marketing Agency which is credited with some of the best works available on the internet today. We provide superior Website Design & Development, Branding, and Integrated Digital Marketing services and have catered to clients based all over the World. You can view Our Services.

Have a project in mind? Call us at 703-635-7115 or email us your query at corporate@emanatesolutions.com and we shall get back to you ASAP.

Irrespective of your industry, you need to remain number one. To keep that rank you need to stay informed about the latest trends in the market. Listed are some of the blogs that we as marketers use to keep up with these trends, rules, and recommendations in the industry. There one for every category and need in Digital Marketing. Also, get exclusive access to everything you need to know about Digital Marketing curated by our very own marketing professionals.

 

1. Neil Patel’s Blog

 

 

What better articles to read than the ones drafted by the SEO guru? Neil Patel’s blog speaks about everything SEO. Along with his blog, he offers services to increase traffic to your website through SEO and the results rendered are too compelling to ignore. You can view them here. His blog is a complete saga with SEO trends from the beginning of his journey until today.

 

2. Moz Blog

 

 

Every digital marketer out there knows the importance of SEO for their business. SEO trends keep changing and you need to know these trends first-hand. The Moz Blog is your blog to get any latest news on SEO. They list everything there is in SEO with the ever-changing rules and guidelines. Whether you’re a beginner or expert, it has all the content you’ll ever need to understand the trends in SEO.

 

3. Google Webmaster Central Blog

 

 

SEO is the process of getting traffic to your website the organic way. One of the most extensively used search engines is Google. Where better to get the latest trends in SEO than the industry giant itself? Google Webmaster Central is the blog for all your SEO related information. Its clean-cut and nonsense-free approach provides the necessary information and tools that Google utilizes themselves. Driven by facts, the information on this blog won’t waste your time.

 

4. Google Inside AdWords

 

 

Surprised? I think not. Google AdWords blog contains all the PPC juice you’ll need to create better ads. A PPC marketing expert cannot live without the crucial tips and insights from the blog. While many posts promote Google products, it is the factual information and research done on the content published that makes it a necessity to come back to the blog for more PPC brownie points.

 

5. Content Marketing Institute

 

 

Content Marketing Institute has a little bit of everything. It includes a how-to guide to set your content budget, a model to set a good content marketing strategy and much more. Their articles focus on the key to content marketing – keeping content light and fun while delivering valuable information. In other words, making an impact with a minimum number of words.

 

6. CopyBlogger

 

 

Want to learn about everything that’s there in content marketing?
CopyBlogger is your go-to blog. It helps you focus on the big picture about content marketing, keep you up with the latest trends, and what is relevant in the market. You will find guides and other helpful content and receive various insights on the structure of content.

 

7. Vero

 

 

Vero prides itself on being an event-driven email platform for product-focused teams. They understand that data is everything have engineered a product that will handle all your customer interactions. In addition to its features and service, they boast an amazing blog. Being experts in personalized email marketing, they provide robust solutions to all your email marketing problems.

 

8. SendGrid

 

 

From best email practices to email marketing, partnerships, and community events, SendGrid has content enough to quench your thirst for information. On their blog, you can filter posts by category to look into a particular topic. Like other sites, SendGrid offers solutions and services in addition to a marvelous blog.

 

9. Convince and Convert

 

 

They pride themselves on being practitioners of social media, content marketing, influencer marketing, and customer experience. Digital Marketing advisors led by Jay Baer will tell you all you need to know about the industry. They also offer a wide range of resources like ebooks, blogs, podcasts, and much more. The articles on their blog are short, precise, and to the point. In short, the content they give will help improve your content.

 

10. Social Media Explorer

 

 

Ranked as one of the top 10 Social Media Blogs in 2017, they boast a team of contributors and VIP Explorers who are “done with dull and impatient with the ineffectual.” Known as renegades in the social media market, their blog is filled with original and insightful content that helps you “discern the marketing wheat from the withering chaff”, as they say. The blog filled with valuable insights will give you the “wow” factor that your social media content needs.

 

11. Kissmetrics

 

 

The blog gives you insights into analytics, marketing, and testing. Kissmetrics is known for its expertise in Data-driven Marketing. Their posts are mainly solutions to companies to improve its online marketing efforts. The plus point behind their blog posts is they are backed with metrics to support their posts and provide reasoning for the advice given.

 

12. Seth’s Blog

 

 

According to Business Week, Seth Godin is known as “the ultimate entrepreneur of the information age”. He’s also the best-selling author for ten of his books. A mixture of short passages and some lengthy pieces here and there, it perfectly describes the fundamentals of business. For a better insight into the art of marketing, his book called “All Marketers are Liars” is your antidote.