Browsing Tag

Web Design

Content Management

5 Top Web Designs That Will Take 2019 By Storm

Posted on December 28, 2018


2019 is coming in fast, and if you want to get that sleek, new look before your competition does, enlisting the aid of a digital marketing consultant is the best way to do it. It’s time to renovate those stale web design trends of 2018.

Check out these top 5 web designs for 2019.

1. Clean, Minimalistic Design

The days of cluttered images and overly complex web design are fading away. Since 2017, developers have started to change their website to cleaner, more minimalistic designs. Developers did so in anticipation of the mobile-first indexing revolution, knowing that getting it done early would mean a huge boost in their revenue-earning potential.

This brilliant form of “flat design” not only provides a cleaner look but also improves function as it reduces the amount of time it takes to load a webpage for both PC and mobile devices. It also benefits a website’s Google ranking as sites which prioritize quick load times are better ranked, something image-heavy websites can’t dream of.

2. Micro-Animations

Sometimes as web designers, you’ve got to learn how to appreciate the little things. This is especially true for micro-animations — a subtle trend that is quickly gaining traction.

A micro-animation can be a number of things. It can be something as simple as changing the color of a call-to-action button when the user moves their cursor over it. It can also be something a little more visually appealing, like a list of links expanding downward when a “hamburger” menu button—the three parallel lines stacked horizontally that you find on the top left or right of a website—is activated.

While this may seem inconsequential, that couldn’t be any further from the truth. Little animations like these actually help site visitors better understand its layout better, increasing retention by providing an intuitive and satisfying experience as they explore what you have to offer.

3. More Detailed Footers

Footers, as far as web designing is concerned, have mostly been overlooked, but 2019 is looking to change that. In most cases, it was a space on the homepage where visitors could contact information and little else.

Now, designers are looking to utilize that space in a much more effective and efficient manner. While it should still have your company’s contact information, it should also feature clickable social media icons that can send a user to your social media pages (hopefully so they start following you).

However, it won’t be limited to just those elements. In fact, it can be heavily improved upon based on what your particular niche or business is. Take for instance 360gardalife.com. This sports magazine/blog shares local sporting information around the Malcesine area of Italy – and they are really hitting it out of the park in terms of a footer.

Now imagine having a customized footer that a potential customer can access to personalize the information that they receive from your company. You can bet top dollar that user experience and customer reviews with your company would skyrocket in a positive way.

4. Better Video Backgrounds

Remember when I said that minimal-looking websites may take the cake in 2019? Well, they are going to have some competition with websites that will feature a video background. I know, hard to believe since websites that can load quickly will be scored better, but video backgrounds have also been shown to increase conversions – and that’s always a good thing.

Before we continue, it won’t be like a YouTube video playing in the background while you are trying to read a blog. When a user lands on your site, they may see the video playing in the background—muted, of course. Short video content commands users’ attention more than texts or images can because it delivers your message quickly and effectively. Because of that, users are more likely to stick around to watch the video.

Of course, the more likely they are to stick around means that your time-on-site metric is going to increase.

5. Non-Traditional Scrolling

For as long as the Internet has been around, users have become accustomed to vertical scrolling—top to bottom. Twenty-nineteen is looking to change that up a bit, offering a unique twist to scrolling and piquing potential customers’ interests.

Some sites are looking to embrace horizontal scrolling, where instead of the page moving top to bottom, it is moving from left to right. This offers a refreshing and attention-grabbing experience to potential customers that are getting to know your brand.

To illustrate this in action, picture yourself as an owner of a business that sells artisanal cheeses. When a user lands on your home page, they see a brief loading screen—we’re talking 1 to 2 seconds of load time here—and then they are greeted by a quick history of your business.

As they scroll, the history portion shifts to the left and now the home page is featuring a special cheese on sale for the week. At some point, the carousel of information—if you will—will stop, and the page can scroll vertically as normal to other portions of your homepage that feature the daily product review, customer reviews, accolades, video content, or even that souped-up website footer that you created.

Kick off the New Year with a fresh new website style and then reap the benefits of your investment. Contact your experienced digital marketing consultant at (956) 566-4998 to get started.

SEO Web Design

Five Reasons Why You Should Do a Content Audit on Your Website

Posted on October 2, 2018


Fact: Writing content for a business blog or website is not easy. Not only do you have to cook up some creative copy that gathers the reader’s attention, but you also need to remain consistent throughout the piece to keep them engaged.

You also have to worry about all of the little intricacies of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that will get those eyes to your page in the first place.

It’s a lot of stuff to take into consideration, and even once your piece is published, you can’t just kick back and expect those leads to come pouring in. You’ll have to monitor how well your content is doing through tools like Google Analytics. If it’s doing poorly, you’ll need to address those problem areas.

That, in a very small nutshell, is what content auditing is all about. And if you want to convert as many leads into sales, you’ve got to do it.

Today, we’re taking a look at the five top reasons why you should do a content audit.

  1. You Just Started to Localize Your Content

    2. Localizing your content is the process of adapting the content that you produce based on a specific location. That means adapting your copy to hit local SEO factors in an effort to make your business stand above the local competition, making accurate translations that reflect your business message to people overseas, and formatting your content in a way that is culturally sensitive to the customs of people outside of the United States.

    That’s where a good ol’ fashioned content audit comes into play. It can identify areas in your content that need to be fixed including terminology, any processes, tools, and templates that need altering to fit localization. Outside of the U.S., marketers call this internationalization.

    Adapting your content to fit localization recommendations through accurate translations, and the like, can help establish you as a reliable source of information, gaining the confidence of people no matter where they live while boosting up your conversion rates.

  2. Your Company Merged With Another

    3. Company mergers can be a very complicated thing, and updating your website can be the last thing on your mind. Hiring a digital marketing consultant, however, can get you back on track in no time flat.

    In reality, your content needs to be updated to reflect any big changes. If your content still reflects the old business or department name, your visitors will lose trust, thinking that your company doesn’t care enough to update its online content. If the company doesn’t care to update its content, it can be easily misconstrued that your company doesn’t care enough about providing the best product or service either.

    Unfortunately, perception is reality in the marketing business, so conducting a content audit if or when your company or department merges with another is an absolute necessity.

  3. Attracting the Right Amount of Traffic for the Wrong Reasons

    4. If traffic is flowing into your site like milk into a cereal bowl but you aren’t getting much of an increase to your conversion rate, you may be attracting the right amount of traffic for the wrong reasons.

    What does that mean? Well, it can mean a few things:

    1. Your page copy isn’t targeting a specific buyer persona.
    2. Your copy doesn’t address your target audience’s interests or needs.
    3. Your content isn’t persuasive enough.
    4. Your content fails to clarify a call to action that your visitor must take.

    A content audit can help you identify the problematic blog pieces or web pages that need a little TLC in order to jump-start your dead-on-arrival conversion rate.

  4. Your Visitors are Having a Hard Time Navigating Through Your Site

    5. We’ve all been there – going to a website looking for information on a product, but with no clear pathway to get to where you want to go.

    It’s frustrating, and in most cases, you end up leaving the page without the information you initially went for. It’s no different for visitors to your website if there isn’t a clear pathway to get to the product or service information that they need. If they don’t find what they need quickly, they’ll leave, and your bounce rate will increase.

    Sometimes a quick rearrangement of the site menu bar or helpful links on the home or landing page can direct customers to the information they need. At the same time, a simple content audit can help you identify where the issue is and allow you to fix it.

  5. Rebranding Your Company

    6. Rebranding is a marketing strategy used where your company’s logo, name, slogan, symbol, or design is changed in an effort to revitalize your business, make appropriate changes to two companies that have merged, or to update the direction of the company.

    Rebranding shines when it comes to making your business stand out among competitors as well.

    When you’ve finally taken the plunge to rebrand your company and are left with the titanic task of redesigning your website to accommodate those changes, a content audit is just what you need to tie up all the loose ends.

A quality content audit is your ticket to greater returns. An experienced digital marketing consultant can help you get there.  

A content audit requires a skilled eye to read the data, interpret it, and create a digital marketing plan that can address the areas of concern. As a business owner, you have more than enough on your plate. Let a digital marketing consultant do the heavy digital marketing lifting for you.

Contact me today at (956) 566-4998 to set up a consultation and to learn more about a content audit.

Web Design

Five Moe-tivating Quick Tips for Website Design

Posted on July 31, 2018


Poor web design can make your website lose visitors faster than an ice cream melts during a Texas summer. Want to know how you can make it better to attract and convert customers? Let a digital marketing consultant like me, Mauricio Pina, help guide you through the sometimes tedious realm of website design.

1. Effectively Utilize Visual Hierarchy

Web designers have heard this term many times before but for those of you who might not be familiar with it – visual hierarchy focuses on organizing design elements in an order of importance.

That could refer to the website’s arrangement, size, color, and contrast. Its primary purpose is to guide the visitor’s attention to the important aspects of your website first. When used correctly, visual hierarchy will lead your visitor to your call-to-action (what you are trying to get them to do) without much fuss.

On the other hand, you must be careful when it comes to background colors, contrasts, text, or accompanying images. They could affect your visitor’s ability to read or consume your content.

2. Ensure Your Website is Readable

The readability of a web page is what makes or breaks your whole site. If a visitor cannot quickly scan through its contents because of poor formatting or unreadable text, they will leave to find another website that can cater to their needs.

This goes without saying that your bounce rate will increase, signaling to Google that your content is low quality, meaning you are about to lose some rank. But not all is lost if you’re a little insecure about the readability of your content. Here’s what you need to focus on to ensure that you keep all eyes locked on your web page:

  • Contrast Between Text and Background Color – A surprising amount of entrepreneurs don’t live by this very crucial practice. Often I see websites that have a red background with orange text, or some other mismatched colors that make reading content difficult. Depending on your brand’s colors, take into consideration what color you need to use to make the text visible. For instance, if your brand is heavy in purple colors, use white text.
  • Font Size – Of course, you shouldn’t create content that has a font size of 6 or a font where four words take up the whole page. Focus on using a font size of 16 when creating content for your website, but do keep in mind that different font types have different font sizes.
  • Ditch Serif Font Types for Sans Serif Types Instead – I know in high school we were taught that serif fonts like Times New Roman were the end-all-be-all of fonts to use, but when it comes to creating content online, you need to use a font from the sans serif family.
  • Formatting – Simply put, no one likes to read a wall of text. Break up your content into nice, digestible paragraphs.

3. Make Sure Your Website Is Easy to Navigate

Creativity may compel you to create a website that has a unique navigation pathway but you would only be doing yourself a disservice. Visitors just want the easiest path to get where they are going. Your one-of-a-kind design may look fantastic, but if visitors can’t find what they want, they’ll simply leave to find another provider that can give them just that.

Take these recommendations into consideration when designing your website for easier navigation:

  • Link your business logo to your homepage. At the same time, you will want to keep your homepage clutter-free and minimal; less is more. Fewer things for your visitor to click on makes it easier for them to navigate to where you want them to.
  • Place your Menu in the header on top, categorizing your sections in accordance to importance.
  • Include all of your important links on the footer like your social icons, a shortened version of your Menu, and links to your business’ FAQs/blogs/contacts.
  • Keep your important blogs detailing your business easily accessible and visible, or “Above-The-Fold”.

4. Make Sure Your Website Loads Quickly

Google’s “mobile-indexing first” campaign means the search engine giant will add mobile pages into a search first while using page speed metrics. When your page is loading at an average of 15 seconds, however, that may become problematic. According to Google, 53 percent of mobile site visitors leave a page that has taken longer than three seconds to load.

Web pages that have slower loading speeds tend to have a higher bounce rate, and at worst, these slow speeds can affect your conversion rate – that is site visitors that become customers.

To combat this problem, one of the many things you can do is a simple image optimization, ensuring that they aren’t bigger than they should be or saved in an incorrect format. This blog piece nicely details what you should do to reduce your page load speed. Check it out!

5. Optimize for Mobile!

YES! I’m saying it again…optimize your website for mobile!

Times are a-changin’, and mobile is on the up-and-up. According to the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of Americans own a smartphone, and in another 2015 article by the same institution, 51 percent of Americans purchased something using a cell phone. In total, 79 percent of Americans have made purchases online, which is equal to eight out of 10 Americans that shop online.

That means that you are going to want to have your website design properly optimized to ensure that your visitors—and potential customers—stick around on your website when they are accessing it from their mobile device.

A good way to check how your website would look like on a mobile device would be to, well, look it up on a mobile device. Check to see if all the content fits within the device’s screen comfortably. Check the menu for ease of navigation. Check the other pages to make sure they are in line with your mobile optimization.

Mobile is becoming a big thing, and if you don’t optimize your website for mobile devices, you will lose out on a lot of revenue.

A lot to take in? Why don’t you contact me, Mauricio Pina, at (956) 566-4998 for a one-on-one digital marketing consultation?

While some of the tips in this blog may just touch the tip of the web design iceberg, a one-on-one consultation with me can help you build a crisp, clean website that will attract traffic and compel them to stay.