You can’t run a truly successful small business in today’s world without having a website. Even the most old-school operations are adapting to the realities of the new economy.

Your website is the front door of your business. On its most basic level, it needs to accomplish two things: It has to look good and it has to work. Everything else filters down from these two key prerequisites.

There are about 28 million small businesses in the United States. Yours needs to stand alone if you plan on carving out space in such a congested environment. These are some reasons why your small business needs a website marketing strategy.

Website Design

You shouldn’t underestimate the importance of website design. In fact, the vast majority of consumers cite this among the top reasons they mistrust a website.

The truth of the matter is that consumers really do judge a book by its cover. You can’t expect your business to generate new leads and gain new customers if your website is ugly and difficult to use. Here are a few things to consider with your website’s design:

• How easy is it to find things? No one wants to spend a bunch of time searching through your site for things that should be readily available. Make sure your site is easily navigable.

• Does it look clean? It’s preferential to build a professional site that is streamlined rather than one that has a lot of extraneous distractions. Eliminate unneeded aspects to make your site better.

• Does it work? Make sure you click through all pages and links on your site before making it live. People will be turned off to your brand if your website has dead pages or links.

It‘s not a bad idea for small businesses to choose a web host that offers a variety of website themes and templates. This simplifies the process of building a site, while also making it more available to people on a budget.

Choosing Your Domain

Even more than site design, inexperienced entrepreneurs overlook the significance of their site’s domain name. The right domain will help you get better rankings in organic search results, while a bad one will make your site look unprofessional—if not straight up sketchy.

The first step is to look through all available domain names related to your small business. If none of these are available, there are a few alternate strategies you can use to find the right domain name:

• Purchase the name if it’s not too expensive. This often won’t be financially viable for small businesses if it’s a highly desirable domain.

• Add a location to your domain. This can be a country, city, or other geographical region. This will make it easier to get a domain, and can also improve SEO in certain cases.

• Use an abbreviation. This will work best for companies that have multiple words in their name.

Search Engine Optimization

There are few marketing tools more valuable to small businesses than search engine optimization (SEO). This is essentially a way for organizations to improve their ranking in organic search engine results. The best parts of SEO are that it won’t cost you a lot of money, and it can be incorporated into just about every website. Start by looking at your metadata options. These can be found on the administrative backend of your content management system (CMS). Make sure tags and keywords are in alignment with the overall goal of your site. You should also consider creating a blog for your website. Making blog posts with targeted keywords is a great way to improve the SEO friendliness of your site. Always have a goal in mind before you create SEO-focused content. Otherwise, it will likely just be wasted effort.

Small business owners need to invest time in building their websites. Part of this should involve fleshing out your website marketing strategy.

There’s a lot of focus on trying to market to younger generations. There have been countless pieces written about selling to millennials and other young people.

But for whatever reason, Baby Boomers seem often to be forgotten. While they’re not as flashy as their children and grandchildren, there’s no denying the importance of Boomers to the economy.

There are currently 75 million Boomers in the United States, holding about 70 percent of the disposable income. Ask yourself why you should be ignoring the age group that has the most wealth. Once you realize there’s no good answer to that question for your bottom line, here’s what Baby Boomers really want from ecommerce sites.

Offer Answers to Their Questions

They almost always want to get more information before making a purchase. For this reason, you need to make product details readily available on your site. You should approach this from several angles. First, make sure your product descriptions are up to par. They should all include things like weight, dimensions, shipping costs, materials, refund policies, and anything else that might be important to a consumer. However, you must also make it a point to answer their one key question; “What’s in this for me?” Sell the benefits in addition to the features.

Additionally, you need to make an effort to be reachable to Boomers. Boomers prefer email and phone contact when they need clarifications. A chat bot can also satisfy this function, though a lot of Boomers prefer to deal with a human being instead.

Easy, Intuitive Layout

While there’s a time and a place for artful website design, you probably don’t want to experiment when you’re trying to attract Baby Boomers. These people tend to prefer things to be presented in a straightforward fashion. Design for design’s sake can lead to non-intuitive navigation. This can confuse older users, who will abandon the site if it doesn’t make sense to them. You can use a free website template to get some great foundations for your ecommerce site. These produce store that are almost always very easy to use.

More Traditional Marketing

Your parents might be on Facebook. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to respond to ads on social media. Less than 20 percent of Instagram users are age 55 or older. The reality is that the Boomer generation just isn’t as comfortable with social media as their children and grandchildren. However, those who are, tend to prefer Facebook.

With that said, you’ll find you best tool to be email marketing when trying to attract Boomers to your ecommerce store. Older adults are typically receptive to receiving emails regarding promotions from businesses. Plus, email marketing tends to have a high ROI. This approach should be thoroughly considered when trying to connect with Boomers.

Make Security a Priority

While online security is important for all your customers, its value is increased more for Baby Boomers. As already stated, older users tend to not understand computers as well as younger ones. You need to make it clear that your site is secured. People won’t want to enter their credit card information if they feel that your site might not be safe. Give people of all ages some peace of mind by making your ecommerce store PCI compliant. Offering multiple payment methods and allowing people to pay without creating an account, are two more ways to boost confidence in your site.

When it comes to your profitability, this generation can still wield a lot of clout. Knowing what Baby Boomers really want from ecommerce sites—and giving it to them—is essential to getting their online business.

Social media analytics is the key to success in social media marketing. Without a way to make sense of all the data collected you won’t be able get any actionable insights.

But, the question arises, what kind of data should you collect? What should you measure? There are numerous key performance indicators (KPIs) that you should measure anytime you are running a social media marketing campaign. Social media KPIs are values used by social media marketing professionals to measure the performance of social media campaigns.

In this article we have categorized the KPIs you should measure into five broad categories; distribution, interaction, influence, action and internal KPIs.

Before, we get into the KPIs, it’s important to mention that you should set a baseline and then record the rate of change as you conduct your campaign.

So, let’s get right into it.

Distribution KPIs

Distribution KPIs are all about the social media networks you are using to get your message out. These KPIs should tell you if you message is effectively being heard and whether the audience is large enough to justify your marketing budget.

1. Blog subscribers
2. Fans
3. Followers
4. Inbound links
5. Number of mentions
6. Reach
7. Social bookmarks (StumbleUpon, Delicious)

Interaction KPIs

The next set of KPIs are interaction based. These tell your much your audience is engaging with your content. These KPIs include:

8. Comments
9. Contributors and active contributors
10. Forwards
11. Like or rate something
12. Pageviews
13. Response time
14. Retweets
15. Reviews
16. Shares
17. Time spent on site
18. Traffic from social networking sites
19. Unique visitors

Important Note

At this juncture, it is important to pause a little and discuss an important metric known as conversion rate. The conversion rate is derived from distribution and interaction KPIs. It is arrived at by taking the number of interactions and diving this by the reach and, expressing this as a percentage.

Influence KPIs

Influence KPIs measure how audience attitudes change as a result of your social media efforts. In other words, influence KPIs measure your brand value. They are more qualitative as opposed to quantitative. Some of the KPIs you should measure include:

20. Net Promoter Score
21. Number of brand evangelists and micro-influencers
22. Satisfaction
23. Sentiment positive, neutral or negative
24. Share of conversation vs competitors

Action KPIs

Also known return on investment KPIs, these KPIs measure the impact of your social media efforts to your bottom line. This is where the rubber meets the road. These KPIs have historically been difficult to measure with respect to social media which has led many social media skeptics to wrongly claim there is no correlation between social media marketing and the bottom line. These KPIs provide this information they include:

25. Conversions (email subscriptions, downloads, install widget or tool, etc)
26. Cost of lead
27. Cost of sale
28. Issues resolved and resolution rate
29. Lead conversion rate
30. Lifetime value of customers
31. Net profit
32. Number of leads (per day, week, month)
33. Registered users
34. Revenue (per follower, lead, customer)
35. Sales revenue
36. Share of repeat customers (from social media vs other channels)
37. Support cost (per customer in social channels)
38. Transaction value per customer

Internal KPIs

Finally, we have internal KPIs. This is the raw output from your social media marketing team. It is important to measure these to find out if you are fully utilizing your human resources. These will inform you whether you need to make staffing changes and whether to increase/decrease the work load. Some of the KPIs you should measure per marketing employee includes:

39. Blog posts
40. E-books
41. Facebook updates
42. Forum posts
43. Presentations
44. Social media development costs
45. Social media marketing budget
46. Social media staff payroll
47. Tweets
48. Videos

Conclusion

As mentioned before, the way to get the most out of these KPIs is to have a baseline before you start. This helps you track your progress throughout your campaign. Once you have the KPIs results, benchmark these against your competition. Competitor information can be obtained from a number of sources such as industry bulletins, research websites, government statistics or from your research.

The last thing that any owner of a website wants is for their bounce rate to be high. What this means is that a viewer didn’t move off the page on which they first landed.

Ideally, you want users to explore your site and to find other things of interest to them, and hopefully make a purchase (if you’re in ecommerce).

Another piece of important information that must be considered along with the bounce rate, is the length of time spent on the site, because it always is possible that people were focused on just your landing page but on nothing further.

One often ignored cause of this is having poor graphic design.

The Importance of Being Easy to Read

One of the key issues with design is going to be legibility. You could have the best content and still be driving people away, because the print is just too hard to read. You have just a matter of seconds to grab a person’s attention, therefore, when a website contains the wrong colour combinations, the results can be disastrous. If you’ve recognised that this is a problem on your site, look at enlisting the help of professionals like Pelling Design to get everything back in working order.

Whether they do it consciously or not, people will be rating your reputation as an online presence from the way your site has been designed. Having something that looks homemade or not quite up to par may hurt your brand or business, therefore, producing a good layout and attractive colour scheme is a must. You want to make a good impression to those visiting your site just as you would if they were walking into your brick and mortar.

Is Your Page Too Busy?

Part of your layout has to do with how many things are on your front page. It’s natural to want to call attention to various items and to grab hits for your different offerings. You may also have ads, and other links intended to generate revenue, all screaming for the viewer’s time. Unfortunately, this approach can often have the reverse effect: overwhelming the customer.

It’s important not to bombard people with everything and anything the moment they type in your web address. Care must be taken to thoughtfully use your space in a way that not only looks polished but uncluttered.

In addition, you do not want to distract people away from your call to action. Your purpose should be clear. Another important step is to make sure that your site loads well on mobile devices, this will significantly help to reduce your bounce rate.

Focus on the Details

There are many beautiful fonts available these days, and the key to using them properly is often to exercise restraint. Be sure that your choices do not obscure the meaning of the words written and that they will serve to enhance your overall look. It is also important not to use too many different types of script on the same page or image.

Along with this, you also do not want to use such data-heavy content that it is going to take your page a long time to load. Most people have been shown to give up after about 4 seconds. This is why simplicity is so important.

Another crucial aspect to your design is to avoid having preloaded music or a video that begins to play when a client comes to your page. These also tend to overwhelm the person, and it is likely that your tastes are not their tastes.

You want to aim for a pleasant, clean, and bright look that leaves no confusion as to what your business is about.

The best thing that you can do when it comes to marketing is to figure out how to do it for less money. Marketing is never a sure-shot. Whether you’re running a small local campaign or a global push, there’s some luck and a whole lot of trial and error involved.

When you bring your marketing costs down, you’re able to take those shots without breaking the bank. That allows you to take more shots, and it allows you to stay in the game for as long as you need in order to make an impact.

It can be tricky figuring out where you should be putting your advertising budget, where you can afford to cut costs and how to bring your marketing plan in under-budget. Here are a few tips to help you along the way:

Take stock monthly

If it’s been a month since you launched that radio ad campaign and it doesn’t seem to be doing you any good, you may want to go ahead and put that money towards something else. It’s unlikely that any campaign will completely pay for itself in the first thirty days, but if it’s not generating a single lead in that time, then it’s unlikely to generate a lead in the next thirty day following, either.

Message, not materials

All marketing is communication. It’s about getting your message out to people. The only reason to consider the materials you’re using is because they are part of the message. A Xeroxed flier sends the right message for a punk show, but maybe not for a luxury condominium community. Generally, what you want from your marketing materials is something cost-effective, above all. This can mean cheap to the point of disposability, or it can just mean reusable, like flexible, modular stands for your exhibition setup that can easily be reused. It’s rare that you make a sale because you spent the extra cash on something fancy. If you’re getting your message across, that’s all that really counts.

Talk about your brand

Whether at conventions or neighbourhood parties, telling people about what you do tends to go a lot farther than impersonal newspaper ads and radio spots. Think about it, was your favourite band recommended to you by a TV commercial, or by a friend who has great taste in music? Did you settle on your favourite drink because of a radio ad, or because you remember sipping it with friends on long Summer days?

The most effective way to push your brand is to connect with people in person. That’s not always easy, and you may have to reach beyond just the people you can talk to face-to-face in order to make a healthy profit, but face-to-face is the foundation of a strong brand and strong salesmanship.

Always be promoting

T-shirts and car magnets are a great way to promote your brand in your everyday life while you’re out and about. And aren’t people always asking if you have a pen handy? All those little promotional items you see with phone numbers and websites printed on them, they do, in fact, work like a charm. They allow you to promote your brand without having to buy a minute of advertising time.

Building a brand requires a lot of hard work, from creating and testing the product, to getting it into people’s hands, to doing the promotion and marketing that helps to establish your presence in the consumer’s mind.

The best way to approach all of this is to make sure that you can do it cheaply. Marketing is not done through grand slams and big hits, it’s done through persistence. For every overnight sensation, every Dollar Shave Club or GoDaddy, that seems to spring up in a single day with a massive viral campaign, there are thousands of brands that build through slow, steady work, that win a few more customers every day.

The year has been a bit of a bumpy ride for coders. For all the advancements in web development, coders still have got their work cut out for them. Thanks ever so much for that, Internet of Things.

But coders are nothing if not adaptable. We keep up with the onslaught of client-demands and time-crunch, juggle multiple projects at once, get our spines bent from infinite hours of coding.
It’s enough to make anyone tear out their ear hair. But we manage to cope, thanks to a load of tools in arsenal.

Here’s a list of 15 of our favorites among them. Take a look.

1. Vagrant

It’s not just software, it is environment.

This beauty allows you to create portable, reproducible work environments; by combining virtualization, server box, and configuration tools in one awesome punch. It’s written in Ruby and works with PHP, Python, C#, Java, and JavaScript. Platforms like Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and FreeBSD support Vagrant

There’s no silly frills attached with Vagrant. It is brutally fast because there’s no GUI to take up space and screw up functionality.

Absolutely must for testing and development.

2. BugZilla

For the low, low price of absolutely-nothing-at-all, you get a sweet server-side system that tracks bugs on your behalf.

Brought to you by trusty folks at Mozilla Foundation, Bugzilla lets you keep track of bugs, code changes, collaborate with others, review and submit patches, and maintain your site’s overall quality. A dedicated team supports, reviews, and tests the tool constantly.

The tool works on Windows/ Mac OSX/ Linux. It can be used for system administration, deployment, and IT support queues.

Thanks, Mozilla.

3. Notepad++

This is a beautiful text editor for Windows.

Based on Scintilla and written in C++, Notepad++ is free and lightweight and very fast. A significant upgrade from traditional Notepad, it has line numbering, syntax highlighting, search-and-find, and more improvements.

For a basic text editor, it’s pretty neat.

4. Sublime Text

While Notepad++ is for writers, Sublime Text is a complete IDE just for coders.

It’s supported on Windows/ Mac OSX/ Linux, and based on Python. It is fast. It has amazing features that’ll get you hooked like multiple selection for interactive, quick code changing, split screens, distraction free mode, project switch, command palette for sorting/ indenting code and the like, and looks great.

5. –prefix-free

You can thank Lea Verou for “deliverance from ‘prefix hell’.”

This tool adds vendor prefix to style sheets in link or style elements without you having to bother yourself about it. Also, with the help of plugins, prefixes for any changes in CSS files, new link or style elements and jQuery’s .css() , will also be taken care of.

All of it behind the scenes; so you don’t have to face prefixes again.

6. CSS 3.0 Maker

CSS 3.0 Maker prevents us from throwing rage-tantrums when we can’t remember trivial CSS3 style syntax.

This neat tool generates code for box radii, gradients, transforms and transitions, text shadows, box shadows, and rotations of all degrees. The generated code can be copy-pasted from a viewing area, or downloaded in an HTML file.

It will also show desktop and mobile browsers that support those style properties so all your hard work doesn’t go to waste. It’s a nice guy like that.

7. Blokk Font

‘Lorem Ipsum’, the standard placeholder text, literally means ‘pain itself’. Internet is hilarious, you guys!

But we’ve also beaten the joke to death five times over with a ruler. It’s been that long.
So in the memory of the joke’s ‘dead horse’, we use Blokk Font. It replaces all the text with blocks.
It’s simple and makes for neat wireframes and mockups.

8. Fontello

The idea behind this thing is so simple it’s almost laughable. But instead of chortling, we raise our hands and thank Vitaly Puzrin for brainstorming it.

Fontello generates scalable, single-colored icon font-files. You can select the icons from a sizeable gallery, customize them, and Fontello will wrap them up in a nice font file for you to install and use.

Did we mention it’s free? It is.

9. Typetester

This one is pretty straightforward. Typetester is an online tool that lets you compare different fonts and test how they would look on a website. You can customize size, tracking, color, etc. until you find something you like.

It doesn’t sound like much, but when you have to compare 36 different typefaces at once, you’ll need this.

10. CSS Lint

“Will hurt your feelings, but help you code better.” – CSS Lint homepage

CSS Lint is the professor that knows what he’s talking about and will take no cheek from anyone.

It’s a powerful online CSS cleanup tool, and unique. As it points out your mistakes, it will also tell you, in tear-inducing details, why you’re an amateur and how to stop being one.

Okay that was exaggerated. But you get the point.

11. Browser Shots

You checked your design on different screen sizes but it still isn’t ready to go.

That’s because you have to check how your site renders itself across different browsers too. Browser
Shots checks your page for browser compatibility on recent and old versions of all the popular browsers and some that are not (I am looking at you, IE).

You can tick the boxes on browsers you want to see your site rendered on. It will then allow you to download the screenshots. Easy.

12. Foundation

There’s no point to this list if never got into RWD.

Foundation is amazing and the internet (and most front end developers) will tell you that. Other than the sort-of unfinished-looking interface, Foundation is practically perfect. The grid systems, right to left support, off-canvas navigation, and tours are off-the-charts.

It works great with SASS and CSS. It’s flexible and fast and a favorite of ours.

13. PageSpeed Insights

Google’s PageSpeed gives you insights on a webpage’s front-end performance. It has punctured quite a few developers’ egos.

You enter your page’s URL and it measures the time elapsed between request sent and above-the-fold content rendering; and request sent and full-page rendering. The test is based on network-independent aspects to calculate page performance: server configuration, HTML markup structure, JavaScript, CSS, and any other media.

You’ll find it impossible to score anything above 95 points, so don’t try. Otherwise, it’s a great tool for performance testing and improving.

14. Git

GitHub is a community of Git repositories. Git itself is an open-source revision control and source code management system that keeps image-based track of your version history in a repository. It’s the digital equivalent of an assistant.

It’s a great tool for creative experimentation and collaborative efforts with others. With multiple repositories and branching/merging, you can pick out individual features in separate versions to work on and merge them together.

It’s fully distributed, so you won’t have to fear no-net-nightmare when you’re offline (by design or accident). You can simply add the updates in your main repository, which will be waiting for you patiently back online.

15. W3C Markup Validation

W3C Markup Validation is a necessary test. Those who observe the best coding practices will take it without fear.

It teaches you how to be standard compliant, which is a good thing, because browsers are built on those standards.

Wrapping Up

After years of coding, every professional developer will eventually gather or create their set of tools. Most free applications on this list ended up being there because another coder realized it was inconvenient and did something to make it easy.

So keep creating. The next big idea could be yours.

More than 108 billion emails are sent and received every day, but what happens when you hit the send button?

There’s a whole process that your email goes through once it’s off in cyberspace, and it all happens in a matter of a few seconds.

However, in those few seconds your email will pass through numerous refined systems put in place to decide if it’s authentic, secure and safeguarded for the receiver’s privacy.

But what is it about your emails that mean it doesn’t always get where you want them to go? And how come you can find yourself as an untrustworthy email source?

Find out all this and more with this pretty awesome infographic from Instiller, who have used the classic game of snakes and ladders to walk you though the difference between a successfully sent email, that helps you climb the ladders, and the emails that get you rejected and blacklisted, meaning you slide down the snake!

Each step of how you create your email is a potential risk of not getting your email where you want, and even then it may not be opened so knowing what will get it there and opened by your audience is pretty important.

Start at the bottom and play the game yourself!

Planning and collaboration have always been the two major pillars of any successful web project.

As a web designer, you too would have invested a good amount of time and effort into using different techniques that can aid you in designing the website well in synchronization with the expectations of your client. It is here that wireframes have a significant role to play. Continue reading the post to know more about wireframes and reasons which make them a must-have for every web designer(an amateur or professional).

What are Wireframes?

Wireframe is basically an image or a set of images which display the various functional elements of a specific page that needs to go into a website. Especially used for planning the website’s layout, Wireframes offer a skeleton, helping you chart out a perfect layout for your website.

Wireframes – What makes them a necessity for web designers?

• Defining Navigation Positioning becomes a breeze
A distorted navigation can silly ruin your entire website. Making users squint their eyes for finding links is something that won’t prove beneficial for your site’s visitors’ count. It is wireframing which enables you to place the navigational menus and links at their appropriate location. And that’s not all, even the accurate placement of CTA buttons and other navigational links becomes quite convenient when you have wireframes ready for your use.

• A viable means of creating meaningful content
The process of building a wireframe includes the task of leaving small boxes for all the content that needs to be accommodated into the particular web page. Since nobody is inclined on reading long pieces of text, as a web designers it is better if you choose to include just the content that is utmost essential for enabling visitors to understand the message that you intend to convey via the website. Wireframe would render you a good indication of where to position the subheads, how and where different font sizes should be used etc.

• Getting a clear insight into website features becomes easy
There are chances that your client might not understand the meaning of common website features like: google map integration, news feeds, light boxes, dynamic slide show and many more. It is under such a scenario that creating a wireframe will allow you to make your client understand how the website features would work and where would they be positioned on certain web pages. Hence, your client would be able to focus on other key aspects related to his/her web project.

• Cost of design changes is reduced by a considerable level
Design changes can’t be avoided, especially when you are delivering a website to your client. It’s hardly possible that the client gives you a ‘green’ signal for your very first design. He/she will definitely ask for some or the other changes in the site’s layout. While some changes consume little amount of time, others take multiple hours to get completed in the desired way. Here, working on the design in synchronization with the wireframes is undoubtedly an intelligent decision. By reviewing the wireframes, it becomes convenient to work on the changes that have been asked by your client. You are only required to do some coding tweaks and things can be achieved effortlessly. Plus, making changes on wireframes actually involves minimum expenses-something that you’ll feel delighted about.

• Allows you to push website usability to the forefront
As one of the vital aspects of wireframing process, pushing usability to the forefront definitely serves as a great sigh of relief for the web designer. By enabling you to point out errors in the site’s basic architecture, you’ll be able to look into the website’s conversion paths, placement of navigation, naming of links, placement of key features and a lot more. All this serves as a great help tool for finalizing everything associated with the website’s looks and functionality.

• The overall project development time is reduced
With wireframing, you can get onto attaining more calculated designs. That means, your entire website design and development team is well aware about everything that needs to go into the website. They know how the different features are going to work and where would they be positioned on multiple web pages.

Wrapping Up

Experience shows that wireframing is indeed one of the most vital parts of a web design process. Just like the way a house is being built using a blueprint, in the same manner, wireframing the web process makes way for quick and efficient development of the desired website.

Being mobile ready in the modern online world is a must. With mobile browsing surpassing desktops in 2014 (as reported by comScore) it is no wonder that if you want to reach a wider audience you ought to be mobile friendly.

Seeing how developing an app for all three major mobile platforms (iOS, Android and Windows Phone) can be quite costly, the best practice is to use HTML5. It is easy, it is free and most of all – it is adaptable. The Responsive Web Design or RWD will be the topic of today’s discussion. Using the updated HTML script with CSS and the new media queries, you can create a responsive web site quickly and have it run on all major platforms and mobile devices (both smartphones and tablets). However, before jumping in there are several things to consider – some to abide to and other to completely avoid in order to maximize the benefits from the RWB.

Responsive Web Design Do’s

Let’s start with what you should do. The best strategy is to start with a design that will fit on a smartphone first. If you start with a desktop you might end with a whole line up of problems liek scaling, improper font and image size, etc. If you take the opposite approach you can scale UP everything for use on a device with a larger screen. Speaking of fonts, you should always go with a bigger selection (and we don’t mean type of fonts). If you think 12 point font on a desktop is big, try reading it on a smartphone or tablet (it is quite tiny). So, rule of thumb – use at least a 16px font and don’t be afraid to dream big (font-wise). Also, keep in mind that the average user won’t know whether your site is responsive or not so keep the engagement natural when designing your responsive site. Functionality always comes first so even if you think some feature might work better ask yourself if the user will benefit from it if it is implemented first. CasinoShorts.com is a site that has been converted to a responsive design. Font selection and sizing are key to this site being accessible and usable across all devices.

Another thing to note is not to over clutter the site – no one wants a mobile site that loads forever. Keep things light and up to the task. Avoid large, ultra HD pictures that might look great on a 27 inch desktop yet will load forever on a phone. Keep in mind that great optimization can do wonders for your visitors. Last but not least, test everything. This isn’t more a hint but a general rule of thumb. Before committing on a final design, log in from another device and test your design while still on a staging server. A good example of a site that has been built on these principals is XnetEntCasinos.com. Note the image sizes, yet they maintain quality and speed.

Responsive Web Design Don’ts

Now that we got the right stuff for your Responsive design strategy, let’s observe some definite no-noes. Right off the bat – don’t do it for the sake of doing it. Will your visitors really benefit from a responsive website? Will the additional work bring more users or is this just your personal preference? Do the math – sometimes overcomplicating things doesn’t mean it will help your overall goals. It is more important to have a clear vision than an additional feature which might not bring you anything.
We already stated you shouldn’t overburden your responsive design with extra features but that doesn’t mean it should be barren of the necessities which are included in your desktop version. With the excellent mobile prioritized strategy, you will be sticking to your basics yet implementing all the important elements of your website in no time.

Speaking of clutter, never try to make things more complicated than they should. Design-wise it is the worst if you “must” have a set of features like additional side bars or navigation buttons which lead nowhere. Stay clean and stay focused – the user won’t give a hoot about your loaded (and very useless) data.

Finally, try to be original but never go too far from the adopted design rules and conventions. Some things just work and while it is easy to experiment and add new things you think are cool, always remain vigilant and observe your work from a user perspective. This way you will create an original design that won’t stink of the “author” stench, i.e. a designer’s Lily.

Trust and Faith are heavy words, the burden of which often remains exerted on the shoulders of a website owner.

Keeping the user faith in your website is a task which is much easier said than done. Reputations are built with hard work, endurance and keeping up with your commitments. Faith and trust become serious issues in the wake of internet frauds and leakage of personal identities. So a website needs to set high standards for convincing users to do business on it.

The relevancy of trust and faith greatly enhances in eCommerce business, which is the probably the biggest thing that ever happened to internet. A user needs to be sure before he ventures out to do any transaction of your site with his credit card. Here are a few tips which you may follow to build up user trust and faith in your website.

1. Logos of your clients

If you are a reputed website then you must have done business with many clients, and if your clients are satisfied with your work, they shall not mind if you display their logo on your site. Experience is what users look for. More business achieved means more experience and more satisfied clients. Just imagine what a Microsoft logo pasted on your site would convey to your users. It will literally say what mere words cannot convey. If a client like Microsoft is satisfied with your work, then you hardly need to say anything to develop user trust.

2. Payment Logos

Displaying payment related logos is absolutely necessary when you have an eCommerce website. An eCommerce site requires credit/debit card payment transactions and users are always concerned about the security of their sensitive information. Displaying payment logos like PayPal will instantly boost user confidence in your website. If you have trusted payment partners like Citibank and HSBC, then users will seldom abandon their checkout cart. A recognizable payment service provider logo ensures peace of mind of users.

3. A Face for your website

It is never a good idea to hide your face behind your websites. Users are humans and not cyborgs. They instantly connect with a face. Emotional bonding with users will only happen if they can see and identify your face. Users do not like to do business with a site which is faceless. They consider such sites as unaccountable, in case something went wrong with their transaction. An image always speaks louder than words. If users see your photograph on the site, they will understand that you stand by the site and its content totally.

4. User Testimonials

There is no greater asset for a business than a satisfied client. Blowing your own trumpet never works. Users are increasingly become aware and only believe what your other satisfied clients have to say about your products and services. Placing user testimonials of your satisfied clients along with their photographs and geographical locations will greatly influence new users. Since these testimonials are unbiased, users are most likely to trust them with their eyes shut. Whereas your own testimonial will hardly make them budge.

5. Content which is of user interest

Content which is related to your business and product marketing never seems to do the trick alone. Users visit your site only if something interests them. Help and knowledge is what users often seek. If you can provide them with vital tips for problem solving, then they shall be more than grateful to you and perhaps more than willing to do business with your site. Your job as a web owner does not end at just marketing and promoting yourself, but should also be aimed at educating the readers. This is how you will establish a bond with them and develop their trust over a longer period of time.

6. Social media proof

When it comes to digital marketing, social media as a tool for creating business prospects cannot be ignored. What happens when a user visits your site for the first time to find out that you have 20,000 followers on LinkedIn? Obviously, he is going to get intrigued and stay on your site for a longer time to find out as to what exactly makes you so special. The mere fact that you have a strong social media presence, cements your position as a trustworthy business.

7. Your “About us” page

Some might find an “About us” page irrelevant in evoking user trust, but it is far from true. An About us page should be clearly definitive about your business. What you do? What you are offering? Etc. should be explained precisely. Putting your message across to users in the correct way is absolutely essential to gain their trust and faith. Bragging and boasting should be avoided and the tone of the content should be polite. Don’t overwhelm users by trying to oversell yourself.

Conclusion

Convincing is a painstaking task which becomes even more tedious due to the short time which you might get to please your online users. An unsatisfied user is highly unlikely to give you his business. So follow these tips for gaining user trust and faith and achieve higher conversion rates of visitors to customers.