Web Design

5 Ways To Ensure Your Web Design Yields Better Rankings On Google

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If you were to start listing all the ranking factors that Google uses to determine where a website should appear for any given search, you would end up with an extremely long list. We are talking about at least two hundred of them, and more. However, that should not deter you from trying to optimise for as many of them as possible, and the first place to start is your web design.

Whether you need a new website created, or plan a redesign of your existing website, both of these are ideal opportunities to implement several optimisations that should improve your rankings. These optimisations are not only proven to gain favour with Google, but in addition, Google themselves have published information that tells us they are web design attributes which it wants to see. Here are five of the most effective web design practices that work.

Your Website Should Encourage Visitor Engagement

One of the core principles your web design must adhere to is to ensure that the experience for visitors to your website is positive. This can be achieved in many ways, but one of the most effective is to engage with them. This can be achieved by ensuring that the content on your website is of the highest quality, having an appealing website layout, having interactive features in your website, and including different types of media such as videos, infographics, and audio.

Your Website Pages Should Load Instantaneously

Nothing will kill your website’s rankings more than if it loads slowly. With today’s fast broadband speeds, including on mobile networks, Internet users are not used to waiting for websites to load. Instead of waiting, they will be gone before you can say, “Google”. Your problem is that Google identifies websites that visitors click away from, and those websites soon see their rankings plummet. So, whatever it takes within your web design, make your page load speeds quicker.

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5 Website Types With Very Different Purposes And Costs

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If you spend any time browsing the internet will be aware of the huge level of diversity of websites. Bear in mind each one has been created for a single business, organisation, or person, and many of the features relating to its functioning and its appearance will have been included to suit their needs.

Whilst the diversity we have just mentioned has to be welcomed, it is not without its downsides for some people. By that, we mean those who know they need a new website but are somewhat overwhelmed by the vast number of different ones to choose from. Thankfully, the choice they have to make is not as difficult as it might first appear.

Whilst there is an infinite of website designs that a web designer can create, the choice is easier because the number of types of websites is quite limited. Obviously, there still needs to be decisions about the layout, styling, content, and functions to name but four but as for the type of website there is arguably no more than twenty.

To help anyone who is still unsure what type of website they need, we are going to briefly outline just five of them, but rest assured these account for the vast majority of websites online and there is a good chance that one of them will be suitable, especially if your website is for business purposes.

eCommerce Website: These are websites that sell products directly online. Within them, there will be individual product pages, and these will be divided into product categories. eCommerce websites will have functionality that allows for payments to be taken securely via debit or credit or other payment processors such as PayPal. Costs will be driven by the size and functionality but for a decent one, prices will start around $5,000.

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Three Questions Your Cabinet Making Business’s Sales Copy Must Address

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Within your website and any other online location where your cabinet making business has a presence, there will be many words that are written with the intention of influencing someone to take actions moving them closer to becoming one of your paying customers. This point is emphasised by the digital marketing specialists who rightly advise that no business exists without clients and customers being persuaded to say ‘Yes’, at least once, even if you are the best of Perth cabinet makers.

That ‘Yes’ is not always going to be one relating to the final decision to buy. Moving someone from being a visitor to your website, to them giving you their credit card details, will entail them going through a sales funnel which has several steps. Each step moves them further away from being a website visitor to a paying customer, and at each one that person will have been persuaded to make a positive decision.

The most common means of influencing those decisions in your business’s favour is copywriting. This is the words a person reads or hears, and which produce emotions,  spark their interest, their desire and ultimately their absolute belief that they want to buy whatever the words have been written about.

Copywriting is an art, and skilled copywriters are highly paid, for it is they who are able to create the words which provide a business with a steady stream of prospects and customers. Before they can write any sales copy, three critical question must be answered. Without the answers to these questions it is impossible for them to even start. Here are those questions, and if you require copywriting for your cabinet making business, you must be able to answer them.

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The Top 12 Free Open-Sourced Platforms for E-commerce

The Top 12 Free Open-Sourced Platforms for E-commerce

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eCommerce
This is absolutely free under General Public License, is extremely easy to install and run but vastly popular as well. It powers more than 200,000 online stores, which makes it difficult to separate out your store from others. To differentiate yourself, you need to install multiple add-ons available, which however are not free.

Magento
Boasting of a top client list including Samsung, Nespresso and Stussy that use this software for powering online stores, this platform is growing very fast. Though the Community Edition is free, the multiple features loaded Enterprise edition has to be paid for.

Spree Commerce
This platform enables you to have your store customised to differentiate yourself from competitors and provides support to 50 plus payment gateways, thereby saving effort and time of merchants.

OpenCart
Helps creating unlimited categories, selling unlimited products, accepting multiple currencies with choice of 8 shipping and 20 payment methods. Being user-friendly and having SEO ensures top listing in Google.

VirtueMart
Designed for working with Joomla, this cart has the ability to make customers instantly comfortable. Having 2.5 million users till date, most have been satisfied about its performance.

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Advanced Horizontal Flash Menu – Joomla Module

Advanced Horizontal Flash Menu – Joomla Module

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Advanced Horizontal Flash Menu for Joomla 1.5 – 2.5 with Administration Control Panel for multiple flash menus customization.

Advanced Horizontal Flash Menu Features:

– Unlimited numbers of Flash Menus on website
– Advanced Horizontal Flash Menu has transparent background
– Tooltip on mouse over the flash menu item
– Use custom URL or select Article as Flash Menu item
– Special glow and shadow effect on mouse over
– Icon Size 256×256, 128×128, 64×64,48×48 or 32×32
– Icon file format PNG, GIF, JPG (transparent PNG recommended)

When you install com_AdvancedHorizontalFlashMenu, demo menu Flash Menu is installed by default.

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16 Chrome Extensions for Web Developers

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Lorem Ipsum generator:
Lorem Ipsum generator is a fun extension that generates random text. As the chrome page says, it uses less code and minimal work to do that and is so much better than other applications that do the same.

Ibrii:
Ibrii is an extension that is useful in capturing snippets of pictures or videos and posting them anywhere from twitter to facebook.

Site Geo IP Locator:
Site Geo IP Locator is a great application for SEO research, this extension shows the IP address of the website you are browsing.

SEO Quake:
SEO Quake is an extension that displays the page rank and Alexa rank of the website you are currently browsing.

Domain Availability Checker:
Domain Availability Checker is an extension allows you to check the availability of a domain name from your very own toolbar. Saves much time.

WebEdit:
WebEdit is an extension that makes any web page you open editable. You can do any kind of change to it but it is not permanent, nevertheless, it’s still a fun extension.

Chrome Flags:
Chrome Flags is an extension displays the flag of the country the website you are currently browsing, is based at.

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Amazing CSS3 Techniques That You Probably Don’t Know About

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5 Really Awesome CSS3 Tricks
“WordPress Website Builder” takes you through 5 very cool CSS3 tricks that you’ve probably never even heard of! You can find coding examples for each trick on their website.

The HSLA Colors feature allows you to tweak your Web page colors to the max by manipulating the HSLA values individually. HSLA stands for hue, saturation, light, and alpha. This feature works in Firefox 3+, Opera 10.1+, Chrome 2+, Safari 3.1+ and IE9.

Box Rotation is a 2D transform feature that lets you play with your DIVs; you’ll be able to scale, skew, and rotate them all via CSS. This feature works in Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox 3.5+, IE9, and Opera 10.5.

Transitions is an awesome feature that lets you add special affects to your page elements. This is something that at one time was only possible via Flash and JavaScript. This feature works in Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox 4, and Opera 10.5.

Text Select Color lets you change the highlight color of text whenever it is selected/highlighted on your website. This feature works in Google Chrome 2+, Safari 3.1+, Firefox 3.5+, Opera 9.5+, and IE9.

Reflections does just that: it lets you add reflections to your page elements such as images. Unfortunately, for now this feature only works in Chrome and Safari.

Animated Buttons
You may think that buttons can only be animated via JavaScript, but did you know that you can now also animate them with CSS3? Well, you can and it’s pretty simple too!

The blog “PremiumCoding” takes you through the steps of designing a button with rounded borders and shadows, and then adding the CSS code required to animate the button with mouse hover effects. This means that when you move your mouse over the button, you’ll immediately see the animation effects.

All of the required coding along with live demos can be found on their website. While the examples are simple effects, with some extensive CSS knowledge you can design some really advanced and creative animated buttons.

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