Critical Aspects for a Successful Website

Although everyone’s visual preferences are different, there are a number of universal principles that symbolizes successful websites. As the website develops, people come to your site with greater expectations. Not being able to satisfy those certain anticipations can radically decrease the efficiency of your website.

1. Excellent Content
People go to your website to view its content. Providing worthwhile content is one of the most vital issues that website owners need to attend to. The quality of the content plays a vital role in drawing more customers, as well as increasing your search engine rankings. Great content is quite time consuming, so make sure that you make suitable allowances for content production in your planning phase.

2. Usability
A lot of sites on the net fail to meet client’s needs, because most of the time people can’t understand how to use the site or they find the navigation system too advanced and incredibly hard to decipher. To guarantee that people find your site user-friendly, it is advisable to run some tests with a small amount of people from your target demographic and ask them to do some simple tasks on your site. You’ll be surprised at how efficient the findings will be, which you could use to improve the overall look of your website.

3. Ease of access
People access the internet in various ways using different browsers, connections, and devices. From fast company connections to blackberries, speech browsers, iPhones, android and lots of other ways; your site needs to be functional on any platforms that people are likely to access it from. The main idea is “graceful degradation” which basically means that although a simple device might not be able to display your entire website’s glory, it should still represent in a respectable and easy manner.

4. Great Strategy
A great strategy is crucial to attaining good return on the money spent in developing your site. Make sure that you exactly know why you have a site and what business results you are expecting before investing into anything.

5. An Engaging Design
Everyone wants to have the finest looking site. A lot of web designers became obsessed with this idea, partly because it’s fun and an easy sell at the same time. Though your site should look great, the exterior look is just a fraction of the bigger picture. The key is to recognize your target demographic and craft a website design that they find interesting, but make sure that all of the other aspects stated above have already been addressed.

6. Marketing Strategy to Endorse Your Site
Merely having a website is no longer adequate. You need to actively construct traffic by endorsing and promoting your site. There are numerous ways of doing this such as; Pay per click advertising, Search Engine Optimization, as well as the traditional offline methods of radio, prints or flyers. The main thing is that you should have a strategic approach and accomplish it.

7. A Reason to Come Back
For some people, there are sites that are meant to visit only once. Unless your site is one of those, provide these people a motivation to come back. Most people browsing the net visit so many sites that they basically can’t remember all of the sites they’ve been to. Your site needs to contain some convincing value proposition for people to revisit.

8. Use Analytics
There are advanced tools around the net that could track how many people visit your site, and can convey what they do when they get there at the same time. This offers valuable feedback that can be utilized in improving your site by recognizing departure points and bottlenecks. With feedback based on actual usage, your site can be developed to improve its effectiveness.

9. Regular Website Updates
With the unending trend towards social networking and social media, your customers expect some fresh and latest information. A well-designed website is all about keeping the web pages as current and up-to-date as possible.

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The Most Important Components on Your Website

Have you ever questioned where your guests look first once they enter your web page? Two brilliant researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology established the answer to this concern by means of eye-tracking software. In line with the outcome of their study, it takes about 2.6 seconds from the moment a web page loads, for a person’s eyes to center their attention on a specific element. From a design viewpoint, this means that whatever your visitors are looking at first better be great.

First impressions are essential, as more people use the Internet to look for information, a user’s first impressions of a website can make a big impact. It all comes down whether your audience perceives your site favorable or unfavorable.

A recent study shows that 56% of customers are more likely to buy goods from certain brands if they find their website designs great.

Keep it simple
A well laid-out and user-friendly website is always more effective than a messy, chaotic page full of unnecessary information. If possible, limit your top-level navigation menu (don’t exceed to more than six to eight tabs), keep them visibly labeled and organize the related pages under those tabs.

Add site search to the upper right corner of your web page for your visitors to use, so they can quickly find what they are searching for. Use a few deliberately placed, high-quality images to give your website a professional look.

Easy access to contact information
Your contact information should be easily noticeable. If possible, place it at the top of your home page, so that people don’t have to look hard for an address or a phone number if they want to communicate.

Making sure that your contact information is accessible through the main navigation menu could also be a good strategy.

The study conducted by Missouri S&T found out that users usually spend time looking at both social media icons and the bottom most part of the website. Placing social media account links at both header and footer of your web page will serve as an attention grabber, and also a way to keep in touch with your customers.

Benefit from the SEO
A picture is worth a thousand words, particularly on a website. But that certain photo should be SEO-friendly, in order for people to easily find your business.

SEO is another serious aspect of website design. Search engines usually analyze your webpage from top to bottom and left to right. Pictures will most likely not be picked up by search engines, so it’s important to place titles and alt tags that will allow your images to appear in top results.

Mobile-optimize your webpage
People would commonly use their smartphones and tablets to browse the Web these days. It’s more significant than ever to ensure that your website can run smoothly from both desktop and mobile views.

Clients already demand a desktop experience when browsing their smartphones and tablets, creating more reason for your website to be mobile-optimized. This could be the key ingredient to conveying that high demand. Websites with inadequate content and awkward navigation tabs will most likely be passed over for another site that could supply a better experience.

You need a website service that will automatically add all this to to the job, so you can focus entirely on running your business. Check out our web design service here.

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How To Create Your Own Domain Name

Deciding on a domain name may seem simple, but there are quite a few significant factors that should be deliberated, and most of them are not obvious.

A domain name is an initial step towards beginning your online business. Don’t be deceived into thinking that it’s a simple event listing your company name with “.co.uk” attached to the end. There are many concerns when registering and purchasing a domain name, some of which you may already be aware of, but some aspects don’t show as obviously as the others.

Before we go into the processes of obtaining domain names, let’s look at a brief history so there is an understanding of how the domain name system was developed.

In the early 1980s, a system was employed to let users connect to machines by human-readable names, as a replacement for physical address embodied by numbers (the IP address). Shortly after, Domain Name System (DNS) architecture was proposed by the American Paul Mockapetris that still remains in effect these days. This enables people to type in a name to link to a machine rather than using an IP address. This notion remains the same today with the added extensions like .uk or .au.

Diverse types of domain names
First, you must consider the domain names you are going to acquire. The most common choice to start with would be http://www.insertyourcompanynamehere.com.uk/ but there are other options besides this. There are countless extensions of the .uk such as: .org .edu. asn .gov .info .net .biz. Some of these are being used for associations and government, but there are other variations of the .uk that may suit your brand well.

Domain names and Trademarks
Before you choose and register your domain name, it is vital to make sure there is no possible trademark violation by doing so. As the applicant for a domain name, it is your task to make sure that the domain name you want to purchase and register does not infringe trademark regulation.

What creates a trademark infringement?
“By using a domain name that is deceivingly similar to a registered trade mark or identical to, there is a possibility of trade mark infringement, especially if the name offers similar or the same services or goods enclosed by the trade mark registration.”

Choosing a domain name for your brand:

Short and Concise
Recalling several terms rather than two to three simple words makes unnecessary difficulty for prospective website design clients. Remember to keep your domain name as short and concise as possible.

Be Specific
Incomprehensible names can complicate and confuse users when trying to remember your domain name. Some may also go to relevant site-name when searching for your service or product by using major search engines. There is also a term called ‘type in traffic’. This is the type of website visitor that is looking for home insurance or shoes and will type in http://www.homeinsurance.com.uk/ or http://www.shoes.com.uk/ to their browser, so ensuring a specific domain name can help draw people into your web page.

Make it easy
Simplifying and decreasing the amount of work a customer needs to do, to use money with you takes you one step ahead of your competitors. Your contenders are only a back button away.

Don’t use ostentatious words
People are usually lazy customers. We want something on hand, easy to find, with the slightest amount of hassle and stress. This attitude applies to the online world as well. Just because your business brand consists of flamboyant words, don’t assume your prospective customers to try to spell these kinds of words when there are thousands of other businesses whose labels are easier to recall.

Multiple Domains
You are allowed to register several domain names and this method proves beneficial from a search engine optimization and marketing outlook. If your company is called SoftwareNow that generates online learning software and content management software, you may also want to try registering http://www.onlinelearningoftware.com.uk/ and http://www.contentmanagementsoftware.com.uk/. Doing this may also show success in generating better rankings for those keyword terms in various search engines.

Old domains
Occasionally, viewing expired and old domains can help get your website ranked better in major search engines. For instance, an old domain may have quite a few hundred links to it. Indicating this old domain to your own site might increase the speed of your site getting indexed which may eventually help in search engine rankings.

Different countries
If you’re trying to sell internationally, purchase that country’s specific extension if possible.

Make it remarkable
Some words that instil themselves into our language and become informal are part of today’s everyday life; hence, these kinds of addresses can typically be easily recalled.

Is your domain already taken?
A lot of people think the registration of your company and business name automatically inhibits the equivalent from being listed. That is not true. Domain names are handed out on a ‘first come first served’ basis make sure to quickly register the finest possible name for your brand.

What if your domain name is already registered?
If you feel as if there is no other alternative name that best describes your business, and you’re compelled to list a similar name to one that is already taken, there are some options that might be accessible. For instance:

• acronyms or use abbreviations

• adding a hyphen to the name

This technique should be used as a last option as there are still a lot of available domain names for the innovative site owner.

I now have my domain name. What now?
Be sure to keep the specifics of your domain name registrar. These are the list of people you need for all your domain name concerns. It’s important to know that you don’t really own a domain name. You are just licensed to use it for a set amount of time. This is essential to remember because if your registration expires, someone else can legally register your old domain.

Domain name scams
Ensuring to keep your domain name data and information in order, can guarantee that you are authorized to use the said domain, and not get caught out by scams. One of the widespread scams has been piloted by collecting information about domain names from openly available sources, and distributing emails to the owners of these domain names informing them that they should re-register their domain name; else they could actually lose it.

The unsuspicious owner then pays this so-called renewal to a company they’re not aware of and have never communicated with. These scams would initially ask for a small fee to avoid mistrust.

Be aware who your domain names are registered through, and save all your paperwork so you can check it anytime you need.

Check out our web design service here.

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Website Design

 

A brilliant website designer combines various disciplines to guarantee that each key aspect of every single website built is accommodated properly. These aspects include; the time it takes to load in a browser, the look of the site, adherence to web standards, visitor tracking, usability, functionality and accessibility to name a few. MLA Web Designs have the expertise to turn your ideas into reality on the world wide net. We are capable to deliver stylish online shops to simple online brochures, and even a complex data driven website. Our team has the knowledge and experience to generate a website design that fits your market, your budget, and most especially, your brand.

Have a look at our portfolio to see finished products.

Web Standards
Web Standards are broadly known to provide styling (css) and best practice markup (xhtml) for web designers. MLA Web Designs utilize this system by splitting the content from the formatting, making sure our websites are easily accessible to vast pool of audience by means of devices for surfing the web and disparate range of browsers.

Graphic Design
MLA Web Designs consists of website graphic design and programming staff whose task is to produce a website that not only looks brilliant, but one that also captures the exceptional character of your brand and what it stands for.

Search Engine Optimization

A lot of your prospective and current customers are commonly using search engines (such as Google) in finding certain services and products, so being easily accessible is important. We can increase site traffic to help your website get easily noticed by optimizing your website to enhance search engine rankings.

Slideshows
Slideshows lets you to utilize photographs and other digital content that is significant to your website to effortlessly enlighten your clients.

Blogs
Keep your clients notified with what’s going on by integrating a blog to your site. Blogs lets you to connect with your clienteles at a particular level. You have the chance to write your thoughts and deliberate on current events. You have the autonomy to publicize a new product or impart the world with your values and philosophy. Numerous businesses have already learned how beneficial blogs are in engaging and forming genuine discussions with current and prospective customers. Developing your relationships with your clients is imperative; integrating a blog to your web page is a clever way to accomplish this.

Website Graphics
Our Artists and Graphic Designers are brilliant in many ways. Our team knows how to entice prospective clients with anything from clean and soothing all the way to loud and edgy. Our team of designers know what guests assume and can guarantee that you acquire a design that is suitable for your audience and can be coded for astonishing presentation.

Web Integration
The current talk in web integration is all about “The Semantic Web”; which is just basically for web services, websites that can share data and information with other websites, and web assisted applications.

Copy-writing
Not one person wants to read information full of misused apostrophes, spelling mistakes, and grammatical errors. MLA Web Designs studies and examines your web contents before publishing anything.

SEO Methods