Month: March 2018

Web design Santee calls for more than the necessary technical skills and experience. An important key to success is keeping up with the latest web design trends from the realm of online publishing and beyond. Even if you prefer walking your own path rather than following the herd, it is imperative that you keep abreast with the latest trends and tips in web design. In this post, we shall be taking a look at the crucial tips you need to be using when building a website in 2018.

Start the design off-screen
As a web designer Santee, you may have the habit of creating your code and design on the screen rapidly without worrying about how things will turn out. To achieve better results and avoid time wastage, you should consider starting the design work off-screen. This means using a pencil and paper to sketch the design you want to create. You need to plan your website layout off-screen first. There are also wire-framing and prototyping tools you can use to sketch your website. When you can see what you need to create, you will spend less time re-editing your code and layout. Do it like the architects do; using floor plans to plot out doors, windows and rooms.

Use large fonts
Big typography has been in use for years as an aspect of design. This is still a great practice you should follow in 2018. Big fonts grab the attention of readers and places focus on the content. All in all, you should not make your font too large. The font just needs to be big enough to grab attention. It must also be readable.

Leave more white spaces
If you have been keen on the top trends in web design Santee, then you know that white spaces are your best friend. The lack of white spaces causes a web page to look cluttered and this ends up distracting the readers. White spaces enable readers to focus on the important parts of your website. It also offers you the chance to build a better web design. White space needs to be included between and around elements to help guide the readers.

Responsive design is no longer optional
More people are browsing the Internet using mobile devices. If your website doesn’t have a responsive design, it will end up locking mobile users out. As a web designer Santee, you have to invest in a mobile friendly design. This will not only help you accommodate more visitors but also help your website rank better in search engine results.

These are crucial tips you should use when working on a website. There are many more tips that you can use. The rule of thumb, however, is to ensure that you are using the trends that are practical to what you are trying to achieve.

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An experienced web designer Santee knows that people no longer have minutes to spare when searching for information online. They want information on their fingertips and if a website takes longer than 10 seconds to load, they will abandon it. As a webmaster, you need to note that any abandonment is registered as a bounce and a high bounce rate will impact your overall search engine ranking. Focus has to be on making your website faster. In this post, we will be taking a quick look at the things you ought to do to create a faster website.

Compress the images
High quality images are usually of a big size. They will significantly affect the overall size of your website. This is more so if you are using several images in your web design Santee. Your website cannot run without images. The workaround here is to compress your images. All the images you upload to your website need to be compressed. It is possible to shrink/reduce a .JPEG or GIF image by half its size without affecting the resolution. Specifying the height and weight of the image in the HTML will further reduce the load time.

Keep your code clean
Keeping your code clean will do wonders in improving the load speed of your website. There are many things you can do to keep the code clean. You should start by revising your code by eliminating the unnecessary spaces, deleting unnecessary tags and making use of white spaces. When it comes to web design, you ought to remember that less is more. Use the defaults for tags or get rid of them whenever possible.

Make use of thumbnails
If you are working on an ecommerce website, you might want to use thumbnails. These offer customers small, fast loading images of the product they are considering. If they wish to view the image closely, they can click on the thumbnails and give the larger image time to load.

Switch to CSS
If you have been keeping up with the trends as a web designer Santee, you know that more web designers are using the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in place of the traditional table layout. CSS is a dual purpose styling language. It will save you time when creating a website and also save your visitors time by reducing the page size as well as the download time.

Reduce server requests
Any element of your website that loads from the server will cause speed problems. This is irrespective of whether the element is an audio clip, an image or a plugin. To load these elements, HTTP requests are made for each. Creating a website with fewer external content will help reduce the load time.

These are the crucial considerations you need to make when trying to make your website faster. In addition to that, you have to keep an eye on the page size. The ideal page size is 30KB. Target that size in all your pages. You also need to note that your hosting service provider might be the one affecting the load speed.

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A web designer Santee knows that simply installing the right theme and plugins to build a website is not enough. There is a lot more that has to be done for a website to excel online. In this post, we will be taking a look at the crucial things you have to do to make sure that your website achieves success.

Easy to type and memorable domain name
The first thing you will need to do is to select a domain name that is easy to type and easy to remember. The domain name is the address your visitors will be typing into their browsers to get to your website. If it is hard to type or remember, you will lose valuable traffic. Therefore, before you start working on a web design Santee, you have to invest more time in research to find the perfect domain name. A good domain name is short, doesn’t include hard-to-type characters and contains a keyword. Try various keyword combinations before settling on a domain name.

Reliable hosting service
Second, you need to find a good hosting service. You can have an amazing website but your hosting service will cause problems. The last thing you want is to use a hosting company that doesn’t guarantee 99% uptime. If their servers are down at any one given time, so will your website. You want a hosting company that has been in business for years and one with a great reputation more so when it comes to their uptime. In addition to that, it is imperative that you pick the right hosting package. Shared hosting might work for a family website but it will not cut it for a business website that receives loads of traffic.

Mobile friendly
More than 60% of the traffic your website will be receiving will come from mobile users. Make it easy for these visitors to consume your content. This means using a responsive web design Santee. This is an intelligent design that will adjust to fit any screen it is being viewed on. That means you will be able to accommodate both mobile and desktop users. It is good to note that having a responsive web design will further boost your search engine ranking.

Great content that is optimized for search
The next most important step is to create remarkable web content. This is the soul of your website. It is what keeps visitors coming back for more. You have to cover interesting topics and create high quality content that your audiences cannot find anywhere else. You content must also be optimized for search using keywords.

Quality backlinks
Last but not least, you have to spend time in link building. These will help increase the worth of your website thus giving you better ranking results.

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The right web designer Santee will not only save you time in web development but also ensure you are up-to-date with the trends. The main problem, however, is that not every designer out there has what it takes to build you a remarkable website. Some are great with the web layout but terrible with online marketing. You want to work with a designer who can handle every aspect of your website. Here are some important considerations you need to make when hiring a designer.

Experience in your industry
The mistake most people make is that of simply hiring a web designer who is experienced in web development. What they fail to understand is that if a web designer has no experience creating web shops, his support will not be as reliable. With that in mind, you need to hire a designer who has experience in your industry. Ask for samples of his work and the contacts of recent clients. You need to take a look at the web design Santee that he worked on recently and see if it has what you are looking for.

Appropriate pricing
Working with a web designer is obviously not cheap. It costs money. It is your job as the client to find a competent designer who offers the most competitive prices. Take note that the cost of working with a designer varies from one designer to the next. The price is also determined by a number of factors which include the complexity of your project and the location of the web designer. Setting a budget is the key to finding the most reliable designer.

Expansive portfolio
While it is important to hire someone who has experience in your industry, you will get better results if you work with someone who has worked in various industries. This is because the more experience a web designer has the more reliable he will be in meeting your web development needs. The portfolio does not need to be flashy. They can be links to what the designer has done. The portfolio of a designer will tell you a lot about his competence.

Extent of their services
What you are interested in is web design Santee. This does not mean you hire someone who only offers that. To save time and money, you need a designer that offers an assortment of services. For example, he should be able to help you with SEO, online reputation management, graphic design and other things that can affect the success of your website.

These few points will help find and work with the most reliable web designer Santee. To avoid surprises, you need to make sure that you get into a reasonable contract and hire a designer who offers website maintenance services. Only hire someone you have confidence in.

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Web design Santee does not remain the same. It keeps on evolving. As a matter of fact, some of the things you did five years ago in web development might not be applicable today. It is your duty as a web designer to keep up with the latest developments in web development and embrace the best trends. This is the only way you will remain ahead of the curve. In this post, we shall be taking a quick look at the no-nonsense web design trends that are dominating 2018.

The continued rise of video content
There is no doubt that video content is gaining more and more popularity. This can be attributed to the fact that we have better Internet connections and better apps that can play the videos. As a result of this, in addition to adding text, it is not uncommon for a web designer Santee to add a video to add more details. However, for video to work in your favor, you must avoid the use of auto-play videos. Let your visitors choose whether or not to play the video.

Subtle effects in scrolling
Parallax web design took the world by storm but is now gone. Its downfall can be attributed to the fact that web pages took longer to load because a lot more content needed to be loaded. However, this does not mean fancy effects cannot be added to a web page when scrolling. The use of attached background images is one of the many ways web designers are adding subtle scrolling effects. The background image doesn’t scroll with the page.

Sticky navigation
Having fixed or sticky navigation such as the header menus that follow you as you scroll is not something new. It is, however, very important when you need your visitors to take action. The sticky navigation can just be the ‘Contact Us’ button. Regardless of how much the user scroll, the contact button will be right there for them to click once they want to make contact. The sticky navigation can also be such buttons as ‘add to cart, book now, sign-up now and so on.

Round photo edges
A popular trend changing the way a web design looks has been the use of rounded edges instead of the square edges on images. This is a trend that has been inspired by the move taken by Twitter in 2017 to replace the square profile photos with round ones.

There are many more trends that are dominating the realm of web design. As a web designer Santee, you have to keep up with these changes. Failing to embrace the most relevant popular trends will cause you to lag behind. Don’t be unresponsive to change.

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Web design Santee has to be done with search engine optimization in mind. It makes no sense to create the perfect website that never gets seen by the target audience. Most designers make the mistake of creating remarkable websites without accounting for SEO. Don’t be one of them. Here are some of the main things you need to do when creating a web page that is search engine optimized.

Use SEO friendly URLs
Search engine optimization starts right from the purchase of domain names. The perfect domain name needs to be short and should include keywords that are relevant to your business. The URL should also be easy to type and remember. The best URL is the one that gives Internet users an idea of what the website is about.

Optimized images
As a web designer Santee, you need to make sure that all the images you use on your web page are optimized for search. Search engines are not able to understand images. They use the image caption to determine what an image is about. For a better rank in search results, you need to optimize the images using the text on your site. You must also refrain from using images that are too large as they will cause your website to load slowly. The image size should be between 30 and 100KBs with a 72 dpi resolution.

Responsive design
Google recommends the use of responsive web design. This is a design that allows your website to load optimally on multiple devices. Needless to say, Google made an algorithm update that favors websites with a responsive design over those that don’t. Having a responsive design also means fewer bounce rates. High bounce rates result from mobile users landing on a website that is designed for desktop computers. When a website has a high bounce rate, its online reputation goes down and so does its ranking.

Quick navigation
A great web design Santee is one that has a quick navigation. The navigation should give users an easier navigation when they get on your site. Finding what they are looking for must be easy. The navigation bar should be on top or along the left margin of your web page.

Fast loading pages
The load time of your pages will impact search engine ranking. Not many people will be willing to wait for a full minute for a page to load up. If they click away, that will be recorded as a bounce and it will impact your reputation. You can reduce the load time of your pages by enabling compression, using smaller images and leveraging on browser caching.

Relevant keywords
The most important thing you can do to boost SEO is to use the most relevant keywords. However, you should not overuse the keywords. The Google Keyword Planner will help find the most suitable keywords for your website.

These simple practices will help you optimize your website for search. Don’t be in a hurry as a web designer Santee to finish your work. Make calculated decisions.

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Web design Santee keeps on evolving. Before all you needed was a simple static site with basic info about your website. After the birth of smartphones, you needed two versions of your website; a mobile version and a desktop version. Today, what you need is a responsive web design. This is a web layout that adjusts itself automatically to fit any screen it is being viewed on. Although this method of web development has been around for almost a decade now, not many people consider it. If you are one of those people, understanding the benefits of having a responsive web design might help you reconsider.

Cost effective
Running two versions of your website can be expensive and time consuming. This is because you have to handle maintenance twice. What is more is that having two versions of your website increases the risk of duplicate content which can lead to negative SEO. These are not problems you can expect to deal with when using a responsive web design. As a web designer Santee, you will only be running one website. This means tremendous time and money saving.

Better web traffic
More than 60% of the visitors you will get on your website will come from mobile users. This is according to data from InMobi. This means having a mobile friendly website will help you accommodate more visitors. What is more is that in 2014, Google made upgrades to its algorithm which gives ranking priority to websites with mobile friendly websites.

Improve SEO
In addition to the new Google algorithm update, having a responsive web design Santee will boost your overall ranking. When mobile users land on a website that is not mobile friendly, they will quickly click away. This is registered as bounce rate. A high bounce rate will impact your online reputation thus leading to poor ranking.

Improved user experience
Nobody wants to keep scrolling left and right to read something online. This is what you get with a website that is not optimized for mobile. A responsive web design will adjust to fit perfectly in any screen it is being viewed on. It will also load faster. This will lead to improved user experience. Needless to say, a better user experience will lead to more traffic and more sales.

Less time spent in marketing
Last but not least, it is good to note that having a responsive web design will save you time that would have been used in marketing. The reason for this is because you will only be marketing a single website.

There are so many reasons why you need to invest in a responsive web design. However, you should not hire just any web designer Santee to help with that. Make sure the person you hire has experience creating mobile friendly websites.

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A web design Santee alone will not help you achieve the success you are looking for in online marketing. This is because the web content is the soul of your website. Yes a great web design will lure visitors in but only great content will keep them on your website and compel them to come back for more. It goes without saying that creating great content is never easy. The purpose of this post is to give you a few tips and guidelines to help craft better web content.

Know your audience
The first step in content creation is identifying the target audience. The only way you will be able to keep visitors on your website and compel them to come back for more is if you offer content they can associate with. Creating content that is engaging is all about tackling topics that your audience will be interested in. A web designer Santee doesn’t need to work on the content by himself. It is always a good idea to outsource the work to the professionals.

Use subheadings
Creating great headings is one of the ways of attracting traffic. However, you must never forget about the subheadings. One thing you need to understand about the readers of today is that they only focus on what is important to them. Online content is often scanned and not read. Subheadings will make your content easy to read and ensure your audiences never miss the important point you want to pass across.

Brevity
Although a good web design Santee will make it easy for readers to consume your content, you have to be as straightforward as possible. Web content is unlike print and other content. You have to always assume that your readers are running short on time. Don’t beat about the bush. Get right to the point. Your content should make use of short paragraphs and focus on the interests of the target audience.

Keyword rich
When writing content for a blog or website, you must make use of the right keywords else the content will never be found. Search engine bots mostly rely on keywords to determine the relevance of content based on a search query. If your content lacks relevant keywords, it will not be indexed and this will hurt your online presence. Keywords are what help you get the content to the right audience.

Provide facts
Last but not least, as you write content, you have to include verifiable facts. The Internet is full of fake information. The last thing you want is for your website to be associated with fake facts. If you cannot verify a fact, don’t include it in your content.

Your objective as a web designer Santee is to create a website that will be viewed and one that will meet its purpose. This will only happen if you add relevant and high quality content.

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Web design Santee keeps on evolving. A while back, the only option you had was to create a website using HTML and refine it with CSS. This is no longer the case. So many advances have been made and one of them is the introduction of WordPress themes. There are millions of themes to pick from on WordPress. This means you don’t need to spend a lot of time designing your website from scratch. But why exactly should you consider the option of WordPress themes?

They are affordable
Working with a web designer Santee to custom build your website from scratch is a bit expensive. Typically, custom built websites cost between $5,000 and $50,000. If you are a non-profit or a startup, this is an impractical investment. To avoid these costs, you can use the premium WordPress themes. These are professionally crafted and are very affordable. They are even cheaper to maintain unlike custom web designs where you have to pay for customer support.

They are customizable
The fear that most people have when it comes to the use of WordPress themes is that they will not be able to tweak the themes to their liking. This is not true. These themes are customizable. You can mold them the way you want to match your content. It is also possible to hire a web design Santee to custom build your personal WordPress theme. You can also change the functions of your website easily by installing WordPress plugins. The actual code of the theme can also be edited.

Easy content management
WordPress has garnered immense popularity because of how it simplifies content management. The platform currently powers more than 58.6% of websites. It offers remarkable support and great themes to make your work easy when creating and managing a website. Posting content is easy because you don’t have to write codes. You can paste videos, photos and text and the coding will be done for you.

Mobile friendly
You want a web design Santee that will run smoothly on both mobile and desktop computers. The WordPress themes give you that option. The themes are all mobile friendly. They use an intelligent code that adjusts the website to fit any screen size. You will not need to have two versions of your website to serve mobile and desktop users.

There are so many more reasons why you should consider using WordPress themes. All you have to do is setup a free WordPress account and you are set to go. However, if you are not sure of what you are doing, make sure you work with an experienced web designer to help with the setup.

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Web designers Santee know that their work is not done after completing the design part. There is a lot of work that needs to be done which include search engine optimization and fixing bugs on their website. One thing you cannot afford to ignore is negative SEO. There are so many people out there trying to bring your ranking down. You have to worry about hackers, spam links, fake social media profiles, plagiarism, and removed backlinks and so on. If you don’t take care of negative SEO, your online reputation will go down and so will your business. Here are important things you need to do when managing negative SEO.

Setup a Google Webmaster Tools for Email Alerts
Google is familiar with negative SEO and has made available tools to help combat this problem. One of the best tools you can use is the Google Webmaster Tools email alerts. This tool will help you know when you have malware on your website, you have received manual Google penalty, your pages are not being indexed and when there are server connectivity problems. Setting up this account is easy. Log in to your Google account and select Webmaster Tools Preferences. Be sure to enable email notifications and save changes.

Track your links
Links are very important for your local SEO ranking. The more high quality links that you have the better. However, you need to note that spam backlinks and removed high quality links is a major problem. Your web design Santee will be tarnished by your competitors who pay porn sites, casinos and other malicious sites to create links that point to your website. Hackers can also be used to remove your best links. Keeping track of your links is the key to managing your online reputation. Be wary of:

• Links from sites written in a foreign language
• Links that trigger malware warnings
• Links from gambling, adult and other illicit topics
• Sites with over 50 links on a single page

There are many tools you can use to monitor your backlink profile. Open Site Explorer and Ahrefs is one of the best tools you can use. You can also use MonitorBacklinks.com.

Keep website secure from malware and hackers
The key to avoiding negative SEO is keeping your website as secure as possible. If hackers cannot get in, you will not have to deal with deleted links. As a web designer Santee, you need to consider doing the following things when securing your website:

• Install Google Authenticator plugin. This provides a 2 step verification login.
• Create stronger passwords and encrypt your login page
• Create backups of your website regularly. This will make it easy to restore it in case it is hacked.
• Install antivirus

Protecting your website from negative SEO is the best thing you can do to keep your business thriving. If you feel overwhelmed, don’t be afraid to seek help from web design agencies. They have the resources to secure your website and protect it from negative SEO.

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