Now, with a shift to mobile, web designers are stepping back and realizing that fancy graphics don’t translate to the small screens. All of a sudden, new technology is actually limiting design!

The good news is that design trends are shifting along with the limitations and we are seeing a movement towards flat design, which looks pretty awesome. Nick Bilton recently posted his observations about flat design in his article, “The Flattening of Design” on the New York Times’ Bits blog and it was so good that we thought we should include some of it here.

“There are cultural and technological reasons for this new look and feel.

Steven Heller, co-chairman of the M.F.A. Design Department at the School of Visual Arts and author of more than 150 books on design culture, said that part of the push toward flat design was to try to escape the overabundance of design that looks digital, where things ‘have started to look cliché.’

‘Every so often there is a new fashion that comes about in design for any number of reasons, not the least of which is technology, and now there has been a reaction to mechanistic-looking design where you press a button and get a specific look,’ Mr. Heller said. ‘In response, designers have started to turn to flatness.’

One of the biggest drivers for this stylistic change is being forced upon designers by the constraints of smartphones.

Justin Van Slembrouck, design director at Digg, the social news site, said that while some design decisions were made as stylistic choices, ‘it is increasingly being driven by mobile, where you’re designing for the lowest common denominator so you can’t load a site up with heavy graphics.’ He added, ‘The end result, with flat design, is that it all feels less cluttered.’

In some respects, flat graphics can be seen as a nod back to early print, specifically Russian propaganda war posters. At the time, before computers — yes, there was such an era — designers were forced to create flat images because of printing constraints. Now it seems to be happening again, but with screens.

When today’s graphics are too busy — layered with gradients and elaborate typography — people are forced to try to navigate a clutter of information in a very small space. On a smartphone screen, for example, a flat icon of a musical note can tell a story much quicker than an intricate picture of a shiny sparkling CD.” – Read the whole post here.

You’ll notice that we love the clean look of flat design. You can find it lurking around our site and the other sites we’ve worked on. In fact, one of our other favourite web design trends, parallax scrolling, works great with flat design. Read our blog post about parallax web design to learn more!

Have you said hello on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Tumblr yet? No? We’ve been sitting online waiting for you!

The post Mobile sites favor flat design – and we’re ok with that appeared first on Toronto Web Design, Website Designer, Webdesign Designers.

You’re right. Instead of staring at meaningless numbers on a page, graphs allow us to see their visual relationships to each other. We’re all familiar with the appetite inducing pie chart and know that being able to see how these numbers look as a visual space helps us understand their impact.

So what’s new about an infographic?

Infographics have been around for a long time, in various forms, but a specific style shot up in popularity in the last few years, thanks in part to their shareability on social media. Infographics are among the most shared items on places like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

No one wants to read raw numbers about How Canadians Use the Internet in 2013, but we will happily look at a well-designed poster giving us the highlights in an easily digestible package.

Wow, we are great at finding subtle ways of slipping our design examples into a blog post. I guess that by mentioning our subtlety, I’ve ruined it.

Moving on!

How can an infographic work for you?

We’ve designed infographics for a bunch of different industries and the main purpose is to show your audience some statistics to back up your marketing. No one needs to explain why this is effective, but the magic is that one group of images in an infographic format can reach a TON of people when combined with your social media.

3 Reasons Infographics are Worth Their Weight in Gold

1.  If you are the one creating them, you become an expert on that niche topic.
2. Infographics can be embedded into other websites, linking back to your site and helping your SEO.
3. As your infographic is passed around the internet, like a cool new hockey card, your company is advertised along with it. Linking your brand to valuable data is quite frankly good for business.

If you need another reason, get in touch with us. We can share more about how we use infographics and about the results our clients have seen from our infographic designs.

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Tumbler and we’ll let you know when we post new infographics. We’re always cooking up exciting projects!

The post Trifunk Dictionary: Infographic appeared first on Toronto Web Design, Website Designer, Webdesign Designers.

Bellroy makes wallets. Seems normal enough – until you go to their website.

When we’re designing a website or making a marketing strategy, one of the questions we ask is, “How is your product or service solving a problem for your consumer?” This simple question can provide direction for the content of their site and can become the basis for their branding and marketing.

For Bellroy, the problem is that bulky, paper-stuffed, back pain-inducing wallet you have shoved in your back pocket. The solution? “Slim your wallet” (I took that right from their site tagline. See what I mean?)

The best way to show the great web design and branding elements in the Bellroy website is through the story they tell through their page “How to Slim Your Wallet”.

Case Study: “How to Slim Your Wallet” by Bellroy 

1. The Beginning

As with standard storytelling, you need to set the scene. In this case, Bellroy is demonstrating to their customers that, whether they realize it or not, they have a problem. With simple design and movement through parallax scrolling, they paint a picture of a man suffering with an overstuffed wallet. They add actual facts to prove that the mass you’re probably sitting on as you read this is really an issue.

In a moment of brilliance, they make a George Costanza reference and really could have stopped there and sold some wallets.

2. The Middle

Many companies will miss this part and go straight from problem to solution. Bellroy cultivates brand culture with the middle of their story and gives simple tips for slimming your wallet without their product.

Uh oh. They’re giving away a reason for their customer not to buy what they’re selling.

Not true! They are developing brand trust by showing their customers that Bellroy’s goal really is to help out with the giant wallet disaster – regardless of whether or not you buy from them. Plus, you need to adopt their strategy in order to use their product successfully.

3. The End

“Combine these new skills with some smart design and you are almost there,” says the site. This is where Bellroy shows the features of their product, which conveniently answer any lingering doubts about the reality of a slim wallet. The only logical choice is to pick your favourite and then shell out the cash.

As an added bonus, they have created awesome product videos to go along with the images and descriptions. No stone seems to go unturned.

Trifunk is a web design agency in Toronto. We also help our clients with things like branding, marketing, SEO, and social media. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Tumbler.

The post Web Design and Brand Stories Done Right: Bellroy appeared first on Toronto Web Design, Website Designer, Webdesign Designers.

You may have noticed that no matter what you answered, all roads also led to Responsive Design.

There’s a reason why.

Responsive Design

Responsive Design is web design technique that allows a website to function on multiple internet capable devices. It doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at the website on your smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer because you’ll always have a great web experience if the site has used Responsive Design.

The term itself gives us a fair bit of information about how Responsive Design works. The website detects what device a site visitor is using and responds by adjusting the navigation, simplifying some of the visual elements, and making sure that everything fits onto the screen.

Is being multi-platform friendly all that important?

This is a question I’ll let you answer, but to help steer you in the right direction, you should know that 62% of cell phone users have a smartphone and of those smartphone users, 43% also have a tablet.

Because the internet is so readily available to us, we don’t bother to wait until we’re sitting down at our desktop computer to research products or services anymore. Businesses with websites that are difficult to use on our smartphones are quickly skipped and we go with a company that has a mobile-friendly site.

Responsive Design ensures that your potential customers aren’t lost because they’re frustrated by a poorly designed website.

A final check.

Visit your company’s website on your smartphone. Try to use the navigation. Browse your products. Attempt to contact someone at the company.

If you don’t have a responsive website, you might have difficulty performing any of these key tasks. Unfortunately, your customers will be having the same trouble and might give up.

Consider switching to Responsive Design (we can help you with that)!

If you went to do your final check and couldn’t because you don’t have a website, come talk to us! We are web designers in Toronto and would love to work with you.

You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Tumblr!

The post Responsive Design: Is Your Website Annoying to Mobile Users? appeared first on Toronto Web Design, Website Designer, Webdesign Designers.

Most recently, Mashable covered Prudential Life Insurance’s new interactive marketing campaign, where an ad on nytimes.com asks visitors to enter their birth date and then, like magic, they produce the New York Times’ front page from that date. It’s a neat trick because we are all incredibly curious and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see what was going on in the world on the day we entered it.

“To execute the ad, the Times developed an API with an index of 139 years of front pages, from 1863 to 2002, a spokesperson said. That’s more than 50,000 covers in total.

The ad links to a microsite that explores lengthening lifespans and how Prudential’s products can accommodate them. Share buttons encourage you to share the unit on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The ad is invitingly interactive, and compliments Prudential’s message and the environment in which it appears. We only wish the covers were a bit larger so we could read the headlines.” (Mashable)

Unfortunately, the front page that appears is too small to actually read and judging by the comments people have been making, the marketing campaign has been a bit of a letdown. I’m not sure if the ad was taken down for this reason, but we tried to go back and see the ad again, but it was gone.

I suppose that this reinforces the thought that a successful idea is only as good as its execution – and it really was a good idea! Hopefully, Prudential will make a few tweaks and the ad will go back up.

Trifunk Media is a web design agency in Toronto, Ontario. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Tumblr.

The post Prudential Takes a Personal Approach to Marketing appeared first on Toronto Web Design, Website Designer, Webdesign Designers.

Social media always falls into this category even though we strongly believe that it is essential and shouldn’t be the first thing neglected when you get busy.

That being said, business owners are busy. You might want to tweet, but when you also need to serve a customer walking through your front door, social media loses out (and rightly so – serving your customers is more important).

IFTTT is basically a service that let’s you put some of your online activity onto autopilot. Now, don’t jump for joy thinking that you can set it up and then forget about social media forever. This is more like a tool to make sure that you don’t miss anything.

In other words, IFTTT is less like a substitute and more like an assistant.

How does IFTTT work?

IFTTT uses “if ____ then _____” statements to perform certain actions under certain circumstances.

For example, “If the Toronto Maple Leafs win, then tweet “Anyone who shows a ticket stub gets 10% off their bar bill.”

That sounds a little like magic. I need more info.

IFTTT works with 60 different channels (eg. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, ESPN, Gmail) and uses all of the information published on these channels to complete these “if ___ then ___” statements, otherwise known as recipes.

You create custom recipes in your account so that you don’t need to frantically grab your phone and tweet if the Leafs win. It is perfect for business owners who don’t want to disappear online during business hours.

Mashable just put up their gallery of 10 IFTTT Recipes for Businesses, so we thought we should share some of them with you:

1. “If it snows, then send a tweet about soup.” – You can personalize this to your business, of course.
2.  “If someone tweets with a specific hashtag, then add it to a Google spreadsheet.” – This one is great for keeping track of contest entries.
3. “If someone has a birthday, then send him an email.” – I might steal this idea for my regular life and never miss a birthday again! Realistically, this is best used for businesses that want to give a deal to customers on their birthday.
4. “If [X competitor] creates a blog post about [Y subject], then text me.” – What a sneaky way to keep track of the competition!
5. “If a user likes your Instagram photo, then save it to a Google Spreadsheet.” – Any of these kinds of recipes are great for remembering what social media posts worked and which ones fell flat. Recreate the good ones!

As you may have noticed, IFTTT isn’t social media specific. Some people make recipes to keep track of orders that come in or to receive a text if a specific person emails them. With 60 different channels, you’ll be cooking up a storm. Get it? Recipes? Cooking?

Feel free to make the recipe, “If Trifunk posts a blog, tweet about it!”

Now that you’re in a social media kind of mood. Add us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Tumblr!

The post IFTTT helps you be two places at once appeared first on Toronto Web Design, Website Designer, Webdesign Designers.

SEO is not just for websites! Your social media pages to need SEO to improve their visibility in search engine results as well as internal social network searches. With Facebook’s launch of Graph Search, in fact, SEO for your social media profiles has become all the more important.

Here are some tips on how you can drive SEO through social media:

URLs and About Pages

Your URLs and About pages are the places where people expect to get a general idea of what you have to offer. It is therefore advisable to customize your URLs so people will know immediately what a page is all about.

It’s a good idea to include your business name in your URLs so your pages will rank well when people use your business name in their searches. Try to keep your URLs consistent as well so as to make your presence in social media more user-friendly and scalable.

You should also make sure your About pages on all of your social media accounts contain a concise description of your company and your brand without necessarily stuffing it with keywords.

Although it’s necessary for you to use a couple of targeted keywords for search ranking purposes, you should make sure the description is written in a conversational manner readers will appreciate. It is also a good idea to include links to your website towards the end of each description to imbue your site with more link juice.

Content

If you want your social media pages to rank well on search results, you’ll have to use the best practices in SEO when you’re creating social media content. Bear in mind that the primary goal of social media is still engagement.

Your content should therefore be engaging and relevant to your target audience. You should be able to affect your audience’s emotions through your content and encourage them to share your content to others.

The more interaction you achieve with your audience, the more authority you’ll have. As you very well know, authority is looked upon very highly by search engines when they rank pages. Of course, you should still use keywords in social media content, but be sure to use it wisely and incorporate it into your content as naturally as you can.

Updates

By now you should already be aware that search engines hold fresh and updated content in high esteem. It would therefore be wise for you to post a new content or update existing content on a regular basis so your readers will always have something to look forward to.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you have to post something several times each day. That will only result in flooding your followers’ walls and may irritate them enough to stop following you. In general, it’s best to post new content every other day on Facebook, everyday on Google+, and a few times each day on Twitter.

One thing you should always remember when working on social media SEO is that you should be persistent. Remember that this is not a one-time endeavor, but an ongoing process you need to go through each day so as to continually attract quality visitors and maintain high search rankings.

The post Tips for Social Media SEO appeared first on Toronto Web Design, Website Designer, Webdesign Designers.

So far, it looks like a giant grid, displaying music trending on Twitter with the option to play a preview of the track, buy it on iTunes, or tweet about it. If you’re logged in to your Spotify or Rdio account, you’ll be able to listen to the full-length songs, as long as you have the paid subscriptions.

It’s important to note that Canadians taking advantage of the six months of free music from Rdio don’t seem to be able to transfer this free plan to #music, which will likely mean that those users will stick with using Rdio straight-up until they purchase a plan or until #music honours this free one.

Continuing on with this topic, Spotify isn’t even available in Canada!

Let’s go back to the positive side. If #music takes off, this could be awesome exposure for artists in the “Emerging” category, which gathers information about relatively unknown acts still being tweeted about.

For a brief look into how #music works, here’s Matt Peckham’s report from TIME.com:

“Twitter #music’s raison d’être, says the company, is to help us find trending music as well as music related to the groups we follow. It does this by collating activity on Twitter to “detect and surface the most popular tracks and emerging artists” (“popular” being the operative word — this isn’t where you’ll go to unearth likable local acts, say, or obscure indie gems).

Potentially cool: You’ll be able to play songs without exiting Twitter. The company says it’s sourcing three popular digital music services to handle music playback at launch: iTunes, Spotify and Rdio. The default player will be iTunes, with no login required, while Rdio and Spotify subscribers will have to log in to their accounts to hear songs streamed from either service. Twitter says it “will continue to explore and add other music service providers.”

One of the more intriguing features is the #NowPlaying category, which only shows you music that the people you follow on Twitter have tweeted about using the hashtag #NowPlaying. This will obviously increase the use of this hashtag and will give song recommendations a little extra time on the radar – instead of disappearing in the great abyss of a Twitter news feed.

Overall, we’re interested in how quickly, and to what extent, the service will be adopted. So far, the response has been relatively positive, except for predictable frustrations about needing to subscribe to Spotify or Rdio to truly participate in #music.

Are you following us on Twitter so that we can see your #music recommendations? While you’re in the social media mood, follow us on Facebook, Pinterest, and Tumblr too!

The post Twitter #music Now Available – But Not Very Canadian Friendly appeared first on Toronto Web Design, Website Designer, Webdesign Designers.

If you haven’t updated your website in a while, it might benefit from that mirror experience.

Many businesses go through the initial process of designing a website, but then forget about it, thinking that the website’s existence is enough to help their business. Time goes by (always quicker than we realize) and they visit their website, only to find that its colours are outdated, the content barely represents their company values, and they haven’t told their customers anything new about their business in ages.

You wouldn’t open a storefront and never repaint the exterior, refresh the displays, or talk to your customers, would you?

Let’s go through a few indications that your website could use a spruce. Because we’re a friendly web design agency, let’s also talk about solutions. “‘Cause if there’s a problem, yo I’ll solve it.” (You miss that haircut, don’t you?)

5 Signs That You Need to Update Your Website

1. People have stopped visiting.

Have you taken a look at your site traffic? If your traffic has been decreasing, you might need to update your website’s SEO keyword strategy.

Solution:

Meet with your web designer or web strategist and talk about what keywords people should be searching to find you. Plan a way to incorporate these words into your website content. Consider updating your web marketing strategy to include current SEO techniques like blogging and social media.

2. The information is just plain incorrect.

Businesses change and that’s ok. Maybe you stopped offering certain services or aren’t carrying specific brands. Nowadays, people are browsing online before they even enter a business’ physical location, so if your information is incorrect, you might have one frustrated customer on your hands.

Solution:

Access your content management system and start fixing those errors. If you need a bigger overhaul, talk to your web designer and get the problem sorted out. This should be high on your priority list.

3. Your target market has changed.

If your business was new when you launched your website, there’s a good chance that you have grown and refined what you do and the people you do it for. This likely means that your target audience has changed (even a little bit) and you need to update your website to reflect this market.

Solution:

First, celebrate that your business has grown! After that’s done, get to work with your web designer and start gathering information about your target audience. You may need to tweak something simple like the tone and style you’re using for your social media and website posts or your website might require some design adjustments.

4. No one can tell that there’s a person involved in your business.

Websites that sit online without human interaction are no longer effective in the current internet world. Search engines will always favor websites with social media interaction and regular content updates (eg. a blog), so unless you’re the only person in the world offering your product or service, your site is competing with a business that search engines will probably like better.

Solution:

Social media and blogging sound much more intimidating than they need to. It really can be fun! If you know that you don’t have time to post regularly or interact with your customers on social media, ask employees to pitch in or hire someone to do it.

5. Your site looks bad on a mobile device.

This is a HUGE issue with websites that were designed a few years ago. Now, 87% of smartphone users access the internet on their phone at least once a day. Of these same users, 64% expect a website to be as easy to use on a mobile phone as it is on a computer. Is your site mobile-friendly?

Solution:

The only way to fix this one is to get a web designer on-board to make your website mobile-friendly. Once you do, you should notice positive changes to your web traffic and the length of time people are spending on your site.

We don’t want to toot our own horn, but we are pretty great at updating websites. Contact us if you would like to talk to a web designer about freshening up your website.

If you’re on social media, come and say hi! You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Tumblr.

The post 5 Signs That You Need to Update Your Website appeared first on Toronto Web Design, Website Designer, Webdesign Designers.

Unfortunately, the truth is that refusing to equip your website to take orders and receive payment is what will cause a business to lose money.

83% of internet users have made a purchase online. That is a weighty stat, right? We’ll wait while you let it sink in. Ready? Let’s add another one.

In Canada, 26% of college students buy more online than they do in person.

Not just an add-on anymore

When making purchases online first got started, small businesses could get away with staying off the field because their local competition was sitting on the bench with them. This is no longer the case. If you sell a product, your consumer now expects to be able to purchase it online.

This is a good thing! Who doesn’t want their customers to have access to their goods 24 hours a day, seven days a week? The moment that your product crosses a consumer’s mind, they can purchase it. Someone happens to mention your company on Twitter? Potential customers can head to your site, browse your products, and then buy something!

E-commerce on the run

With the ever-expanding mobile internet, your customers don’t even have to wait until they get home to buy from your online store.

Imagine if you’re sitting on the streetcar and notice that the person next to you has a scarf you really like on. After asking where they got it from, you can pull out your phone and order one in three different colours.

Why all of this shopping in front of a screen?

Statistic Brain recently posted the top reasons why people shop online and here they are folks!

1. To save time (73%)
2. There’s more variety online (67%)
3. To compare prices (59%)

Those reasons are hard to argue with!

On a lighter note, Mashable partnered with PayPal to publish the 17 Things You Didn’t Know About E-Commerce. Now that you’re interested in e-commerce and want to learn more, we figured that we should share a few of our favourites with you.

“1. By connecting a modified domestic television with a phone line, Michael Aldrich invented online shopping in 1979.

5. During the third quarter of 2012, $4,423 was transacted per second via PayPal.

6. Zappos’ referrals from social media per order yield $0.75 from Pinterest, $2.08 from Facebook and $33.66 from Twitter.

8. 71% of shoppers believe they’ll get a better deal online than in stores.

10. Pizza Hut began offering online ordering on its website in 1994.

11. India is home to the fastest growing ecommerce market, and France is home to the slowest ecommerce growth.”

Read the rest of the facts here.

 
Would you like to know more about outfitting your website with e-commerce capabilities? Get in touch! You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Tumblr.

The post E-commerce and Mobile: A sale is just a finger tap away appeared first on Toronto Web Design, Website Designer, Webdesign Designers.