Web Design Archives - Page 5 of 14 - Lytron Fort Lauderdale Web Design & SEO Agency

In the 21st Century, Businesses Need an Online Presence

We are only 20 years into the 21st Century and already life has changed enormously, especially in commerce.

We are on the verge of having self-driving cars and trucks, packages that are delivered to our doorsteps by robotic drones, and widespread automation in both the home and the workplace.

Despite all these futuristic technological advances, one thing hasn’t changed for business owners: If you don’t continually attract and engage new customers, your business isn’t going to be successful.

Creating an Online Presence

Today’s consumers are looking for the products and services they want online. That’s a modern business fact. So if you are relying on outdated methods to attract new customers such as print media marketing, costly radio or TV ads, or direct mail, you may not be getting the most for your marketing dollar.

A better approach today is to cultivate an online presence using a business website, especially one that is mobile friendly. You also need a comprehensive web-based marketing campaign that includes SEO, a heightened social media presence, and an aggressive approach toward actively attracting and engaging Internet users who have shown an interest in the types of products and services you offer.

Building Your Web-Based Business

This is where “Lytron Lead Generation” can help. We specialize in heightening the online identity of both existing and new businesses. We have worked with dozens of clients both in South Florida and throughout the US establish, promote, and expand web-based business solutions that produce profitable results.

We can help you create a website, expand your social influence, and attract new customers both online and in the real world.

The 21st Century will continue to create new high-tech opportunities for businesses that are willing to adapt. “Lytron Lead Generation” can help your business optimize your response to these advancements to build your business and expand your online presence.

Does Your Website Look Professional?

When you spend so much time developing and creating your website, it’s sometimes difficult to get perspective. You are so up close and personal with the online content on your web page that you often can’t tell if it actually looks professional, let alone good.

We’ve all seen websites where we’ve thought, “What were they thinking?” Probably the page creator was thinking too much about the tiniest details of their web page that they couldn’t see that it didn’t have their original intended effect.

A Fresh Set of Eyes

When you are first developing your business or personal website, a good rule of thumb is this: The more people looking at your website, the better. You need to get as many different perspectives as possible so that you can measure how effective your web page is to a dispassionate observer.

You may not have an unbiased view of your website because you have put so much work into developing it. But when friends, family members, co-workers, classmates, and others critique your website, they don’t share your passion for the content. So they are more likely to see flaws that you perhaps can’t see.

Competitive Analysis

Another effective way to measure the value of your web page is to look at the websites of your direct competitors. What do their web pages look like? What kind of content do they include? How are their pages designed? Is the design effective?

If your web page looks like everybody else’s, it may not necessarily be a great thing. Similarly, if your page is way different than anything else you see your competitors are doing, it may be food for thought.

Keeping tabs on the competition and getting a fresh set of eyes on your web pages can help you avoid design errors that can harm the effectiveness of your website.

Without a Website, Who Can Find Your Business?

Businesses today need to have an online presence. The days of opening a storefront and waiting for customers to discover your business are long gone.

Today, nearly all customers search for the products and services they want online. And why wouldn’t they? It’s faster, easier, and more efficient. And today more than ever, people are all about getting things done quickly.

The Amazon Effect

Think of your own shopping habits. If you are like most people, the percentage of products you order online has gone up significantly just in the past couple of years.

Part of that has to do with innovative companies like Amazon, which is constantly developing ways to make buying from their website irresistible. Whether it’s promoting voice-activated devices like the Amazon Echo or floating the idea of drone deliveries, Amazon is leading the way in online ordering.

And other companies are following suit. Right now, retail businesses and the service industry are in the midst of a digital revolution. And no business can afford to sit on the sidelines.

Without a Website, Who Can Find Your Business? The Digital Revolution and Your Business

What does that mean for your business? While you may not have the bottomless resources for research and development that Amazon does, you can start somewhere. And for most businesses, that includes a website that customers can access online from their mobile devices.

Click and order retail is the future of business, whether you like it or not. Businesses that don’t embrace this future are going to find out the hard way whether or not they are on the losing side of history.

When you are ready to boost your business’s online presence and take part in the digital revolution that is going on around you, “Lytron Lead Generation” can help. Contact us today to find out how we can help you create the online presence that will put your business in front of prospective web-based customers.

Without a Website, Who Can Find Your Business.

Competitive Research Can Improve Your Website

Does your website look like everybody else’s? If so, you could be missing out on potential clients and new business because you blend in with the crowd.

The key to promoting your business or personal website online is to be distinctive. And the first step toward standing out from everybody else is to see what other web page owners in your niche are doing. In other words, you need to do some competitive research.

Competitive Research – Capturing Your Customer’s Imagination

The best web design is unique and distinctive. The worst is derivative and bland. Where does your website fit in?

If it’s in the latter, you probably aren’t realizing your full potential. Make a point of regularly checking out what your direct competitors are doing with their websites. If they all look exactly like yours, you probably need to make a change.

While it’s important that you get your core message across clearly and quickly to your web page visitors, you can do it in a way that doesn’t look like everybody else’s website. People looking for products and services online can be prone to “website fatigue” when clicking on one page to another.

But if your website has a unique perspective, great photos or images, and — most importantly — doesn’t look like anybody else’s, you stand a better chance of getting their business.

Making the Leap

Competitive research can help you identify the merits and drawbacks of your website. It’s the only way you can tell if your website is better or worse than those of your direct competitors.

Depending on your industry, competitive research should be done quarterly, monthly, or even weekly. It doesn’t take very long but it offers huge benefits to the quality of your website, and the profitability of your online business.

Five Basics Every Web Page Creator Should Remember

Web design today is more complicated today than ever before. Now that just about everybody is online pretty much all the time, websites always need to do more, more, more.

Keeping up with the latest developments can be a real challenge, especially for new web designers. It’s very easy to become overwhelmed by everything that’s going on to the point where the simplest, most basic things are forgotten.

With that in mind, here are five basic things every web designer needs to keep in mind when creating web pages of any type.

Five Basics Every Web Page Creator Should Remember – Keep It Simple

The last thing anybody wants to see when they log onto a web page is TMI, which stands for “too much information”. Generally, the simpler your website, the better.

Since most people are going to be looking at your website on their phones, it’s important to remove any dense blocks of text. Instead, use photos, illustrations, and key phrases to get your message across.

Make It Instinctual

Web users today don’t read instruction manuals. They want to land on your site and instantly understand what they need to do.

Make your website instinctual so that anybody can automatically use it even if they are totally unfamiliar with your content.

Highlight Your Brand

Don’t get distracted from your core message: Your brand. Whether you are promoting products or services, offering entertainment, or any other end purpose, you have a brand. Find it and promote it above everything else.

Get to the Point

People’s attention spans are shorter than ever. Anything extraneous on your website should be purged so that you can drive your visitors to do whatever it is you want them to do.

Five Basics Every Web Page Creator Should Remember – Make It Personal

One of your biggest goals should be to get people to return to your website again and again. Capture personal information like visitor’s names, email addresses, and phone numbers so you can continue to market to them in the future.

Websites today are more complicated than ever. But if you keep these five simple basics in mind, yours can be successful.

Use Separate Websites For Specific Audiences

If your business uses a website to promote your brand, sell products or services, or simply generate new customer leads, you already are ahead of the game. An increasing number of people worldwide are choosing the web over every other media to find the companies, products, and services they want.

But what if you are doing business in one country and want to attract a more global customer base. For example, you have a business based in the US but want to be able to attract customers from Canada, the UK, or Australia. How can you do it?

The Money Problem

If you are simply offering information and not products or services that need to be paid for, you may be able to get away with just one website. But if you are doing actual business in other countries, you probably will want to consider a separate website for each country that you have paying customers.

The problem is with the money. While it is technically possible to accept multiple types of currencies on the same website, it can be really complicated. And you can’t expect customers to pay in your local currency. You wouldn’t want to buy a product online from China and have to pay in yen, would you? Of course not!

Canadian customers need to be able to pay in Canadian dollars. UK customers need to use the English pound for currency. Mexican customers want to be able to pay in pesos. If you require them all to pay in US dollars, you’re probably going to lose the sale.

Use Separate Websites For Specific Audiences – Focused Content

Another benefit of having separate websites for each country where you do business is that it gives you the ability to fine-tune your content to your specific audience. You can even use a different language.

When you globalize your company, you generally need to use a different website for each specific set of international customers.

Web Design Florida: Stock Photos vs. Authentic Images

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Have you ever gone to a website and seen a photo and thought, “Hey, I’ve seen that before!” If so, it was probably an image that the web page creator copied from a stock photo service.

Stock photo services can be either paid or free. Free services include Wikimedia Commons and Flickr. You may need to attribute the author of the photo but you can usually use their images without having to pay a royalty.

Paid stock photo sites include Getty Images, Shutterstock, and many others. When you use photos from these sites, you typically need to pay for them. How much depends on the photo.

Benefits of Stock Photos

But both paid and free stock photo sites types include hundreds, if not thousands, of images that can serve to illustrate practically any type of web page content.

Writing a blog about tree houses? You can grab a stock photo of a tree house to include with it. Creating a web page about pet adoptions? There are stock images of sad-looking puppies or kittens that will perfectly illustrate the point you are trying to make.

Stock photo sights are simple to use. You just use the search function with the keywords that describe the photo you want and you instantly can be connected with dozens of appropriate images.

Stock Photos vs. Authentic Images – Authentic Images

Authentic images are those you take yourself using the camera on your smartphone, professional photographic equipment, or other photo-taking gear.

There are two big benefits to using your own photos on your web pages: 1.) You don’t have to pay anybody a royalty (or worry about being sued for copyright infringement), and 2.) They give pages viewers a more personal insight into you and your content.

Most web designers will agree that including images on your pages is critical to connecting with visitors, whether you use stock photos or your own authentic pictures.

First Impressions Critically Important for Websites

When meeting new people, first impressions are important. How people look, the way they act, how friendly and helpful they are all influence your decision whether or not to interact with them.

The same holds true for web pages. In fact, first impressions are even more important when people land on your web page. That’s because visitors will make judgments about the credibility of your web page in as little as 50 milliseconds after they land there.

And one out of every five people who visit your website will leave and never come back.

The First Crucial 10 Seconds

There are two primary questions people ask themselves when landing on a new website:

Is it safe?
Does it provide specifically what I’m looking for?

If a website doesn’t seem safe — in other words if people fear their laptop, smartphone, or another device might become infected by a virus or their personal data may be stolen — they will jump off instantly. With so much malware out there, it’s a legitimate concern.

Similarly, most internet users today don’t have the patience to waste time with a website that isn’t exactly what they are looking for. Within 10 seconds, visitors are likely to size up your web page and decide if you are giving them what they want. If not, they will click off and likely never return.

First Impressions Critically Important for Websites – Testing Your Web Pages

That’s why it’s a good idea to continually test your web pages to see how it measures up to these two questions. Test it yourself using different devices than the ones you usually use.

Plus, you want to have other people test your websites as well. Ask friends or co-workers to give you their initial impressions. Or incentivize your customers to respond to a brief survey to share their thoughts.

Fast-Loading Pages Keeps Visitors Coming

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It’s no secret that internet users prefer speed. If pages take too long to load, particularly on mobile devices, visitors are likely to bounce somewhere else.

In fact, recent studies have found that if a web page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, about 40 percent of people will just go somewhere else. That’s a problem if you rely on your business website to attract new customers and hang on to existing ones.

Google and AMP

Google, the world’s most popular search engine, is aware of how important speed is to website creators. That’s why the company launched a new initiative to build a better, faster, and more user-friendly mobile web platform that is specifically designed for mobile devices.

Accelerated Mobile Pages is a project that essentially creates a set of rules that form a simpler, faster version of HTML. Pages that follow AMP load very quickly on mobile devices so that page visitors will stay longer and not bounce off to someplace else.

Because AMP pages feature a more streamlined version of HTML and CSS, pages load about 30 times faster than non-AMP compliant pages. The average AMP-ready page loads in just 0.7 seconds on a standard mobile device, compared to 22 seconds for non-AMP pages.

Fast-Loading Pages Keeps Visitors Coming – Cloud-Based Content

Another way AMP loads faster is that content is cached in the cloud and not delivered from webpage’s server. That frees up a lot more processing time.

The downside is that AMP is relatively new. It was only introduced in February of 2016. So there is still a lot of caution about it among some web page owners who may want to see AMP prove itself before adopting this new technology.

If you a ready to give AMP a try, there is a free WordPress plugin you can use to “amp up” your page loading speeds on mobile devices.

Too Many Bounce Backs Can Hurt Your SEO Ranking

Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others use a lot of different kinds of metrics when assessing the value of your website. One of the most important is the number of bounce backs they detect from your web page.

A bounce back is when somebody goes online, finds your website and clicks on it, then immediately clicks back to the search results page — presumably because they did not find what they were looking for on your website. Too many bounces will definitely hurt your site rankings.

Bounce Backs Hurt Your Rankings

Search engines don’t always know why a visitor bounced back from your website. Nor do they care. They simply want to make sure they are providing their search engine users with high-quality results they can actually use.

So when Google detects a lot of bounce backs from your website, it will automatically assume that your website isn’t useful. And it will penalize your website by ranking it lower.

Too Many Bounce Backs Can Hurt Your SEO Ranking – Reducing Bounce Backs

There are many different reasons why your website may have a lot of bounce backs. The most common one has to do with user experience, also known as UX.

User experience is related to things like site speed, site architecture, quality content, and even the colors and fonts you chose to use on your website. If visitors don’t like any of these things, they are likely to bounce back to the search page where they found your website in the first place.

To improve your site rankings, it is critical that you identify the reasons for bounces. Once you can identify what people don’t like about your web pages, then you can do something to correct it.

Fixing bounces is one of the fastest and most effective ways to show immediate improvement in your rankings on the most popular search engines.