Most small business owners are too busy to run their own social media campaigns. Instead they hand it out to an intern or outsource it. For smaller businesses this can be a mistake. There is no other media that gives a business owner access to its customers like social media.

Know your customer

Social media is all about the customers. Marketing basics dictate that you should think like your customer. This is especially true for social media. Not sure where your customers are? Ask them. Then setup your presence and focus on those specific social media networks. For example, some groups are only active on LinkedIn and so that should be where all your social media attention should be focused.

Time

Social media is easy for a lot of businesses to get into due to the fact that it’s free. You can create facebook pages, accounts, twitter accounts etc all for no cost. However an effective social media campaign does have a cost: time. A proper campaign should be targeted to where your customers are. Remove any profiles on any platform that has no value to you or your customers.

Success

For a lot of people, the total number of followers indicates success. That is not a good metric to go by. Popular brands can have follower figures in the millions while a few hundred for a small business can be considered a success. Look at the quality and engagement with your followers. Their devotion and enthusiasm for the business and its product is the target.

As designers and creative of digital communications, a number of our choices are based on how we understand our target audience.

Almost every element in web design be it text, colors, interactive interface and images is picked based on how we perceive culture too. Yet there is also another aspect: the human eye and how the brain registers what the eyes are catching.

In other words, if you understand visual design principles, this can lead to the creation of effective websites.

Here are 3 ways to make web design intuitive:

1: Design for the brain first

In order to learn proper design, it is important to learn design history first. As you will discover, all the great designers followed (or broke) the simple rules. No matter what, it was these basics that helped them to achieve fame in their lives.

It must be said that bold colors and type, placement and contrasts are what catch the eye. Also, very rarely will your target audience read all the text on the site and which is why the first two paragraphs should contain the most important information.

Of course, there are a number of these simple rules that one must take into consideration when designing a website for maximum effect.

2: The Golden Rectangle

Also called the Golden Ratio, it is a seashell-shaped figure that helps you to find the spot where a person’s eyes is most likely to pay attention to. When you understand this principle, then you can use it in website design where you place any important element (UI, call to action, text) right in that area. One excellent example is the New York Times that uses this principle on their website.

3: Master the grid

By definition, the grid is a structure that is made up of a number of intersecting straight or curved guidelines that helps one to structure content. This grid can help the designer organize graphic elements so that the eye and brain can absorb content easily. Using a tool like UXPin, one can organize graphic elements accordingly both in relation to a page as well as other graphic elements on the page. The only issue is that since this isn’t taught properly by graphic design teachers, it can be difficult to grasp.

Typography continues to dominate web design trends even if we are in 2015. In particular, designers are using typography to create big and eye-catching headers or landing pages. This is for the simple reason that these are the first things that people look at on a webpage.

Here are 3 fonts that can help you do just that as a webdesigner:

1: Mute

Clearly a san serif typeface, this font was made by Manushi Parikh. The use of this font can be both for mobile applications and user interfaces. It can also be used on homepages given that it looks precise and linear and comes across in a friendly manner too. As for the letter, they have a low-stroke contrast while the terminals end on the vertical or horizontal. This font costs about $130.

2: Galano Classic

Created by Rene Bieder, this font is inspired by the classic grotesque style of the early 20th century. Classic geometric faces are combined with more modern proportions. The letters themselves have a few interesting details: the uppercase ‘R’ has a long stretched leg while ‘Q’ can be likened to a stylized magnifying glass. This font can be used for big headers but is just as effective with small sizes as well as long text too. The entire family is worth $200.

3: Cereal

Designed by Carlos Fabian Camargo, this family of fonts has been released by Andinistas. In all, this entire pack consists of eight families of fonts that either work in groups or independently. It’s clear that it can be used to create words that depict a warm climate. You can use this font in book covers, logos, posters, home pages or even wedding invitations. It costs about $64 upwards depending on the version you download.

Article write by seoscape.org.

It’s vital that your website performs at its best at all times.

Doing this involves measuring several factors. That said, here are 4 tools that can speed up your site:

1: WebPageTest

Being free, it tests the speed of your website. Browsers from locations from around the world test the website. The results throw up plenty of performance diagnosis information that proves to be useful. Apart from this, the tool also makes suggestions for improvement. Remember, the lower the SpeedIndex score, the better your site performs.

2: Google PageSpeed

This tool analyzes your website and gives it a rating on 100 for both mobile and desktop. If there are areas that it considers to be below par, it offers suggestions. Keep in mind where you use this tool in your workflow. It affects build completion time.

3: Chrome Developer Tools Audits

Chrome Developer Tools can assess web performance, thanks to its built-in auditing system. It also has improvements to offer such as unused CSS. The line numbers where you can find offending items are also provided.

Click the ‘Audit’ tab in Chrome Developer Tools. Ensure you check both ‘Network Utilization’ and ‘Web Page Performance’. Now hit ‘Run’ to get a report. Click each item to reveal files and the line numbers too.

4: Google Analytics Performance Anomaly Detection

Once your website is live, you still need to track its performance. Issues can always occur and vary in nature but will affect the speed of the site. For this, the Google Analytics’ Intelligence Events feature comes in handy. It will help you to detect poor performance and generate alerts when problems begin.

No matter what you think, having a mobile-friendly site is hardly a luxury but actually a necessity. This has been made evident by a study conducted by comScore that reveals that mobile usage has exceeded that of desktop usage for the very first time.

If that’s not enough, most mobile users say that they will not return to a particular site if it does not load on their smartphone. And recently, Google said that it would include being mobile-friendly as a factor for search engine ranking.

That said, if you aren’t sure, it’s time to test the site and if it fails, here are two ways to both optimize a website for mobiles:

#1: Creating a Mobile Friendly Version of Your Site

Probably the fastest way to build a mobile-friendly site is to create a mobile version of your desktop site by using a conversion platform such as Duda Mobile and bMobilized. The only problem is that it creates two sites and that means it will be difficult to update both sites at a time. This will frustrate users if they find differences between the desktop and mobile versions.

#2: Utilize Mobile Plugins on CMS Platforms

It goes without saying that Drupal, WordPress and Joomla are the most popular CMS platforms over the internet. What is also true is that they have solutions to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly too. Apart from writing content that is mobile-friendly, it is also a good idea to add features that are used on mobile devices.

In other words, to use mobile plugins such as WPTouch and JetPack for WordPress. As for Joomla, Responsivizer and JoomlaShine while Drupal offers 2 modules such as MobileTheme and ThemeKey.

The Internet took off quickly engaging into a crazy growth. Now for the last years, mobile use has experienced the same massive user explosion. Mobile internet usage is soon set to surpass general internet usage and as such companies are preparing for this boom. The growth of mobile usage poses the issue of having responsive websites that would be viewable by all users.

Basis

The basis of the responsive web design or RWD is that page should be viewable on every screen size and device whether mobile or desktop. The website should not only be viewable, it should also be intuitive and offering the same sort of experience on all supports. The RWD is often broken down in three major components, namely the flexible layouts, media queries and flexible media.

Flexible Layouts

In order to build a flexible layout, one needs to start with a flexible grid which would enable the dynamic resizing to any width, depending on the resolution of the screen. These flexible grids use relative lengths units in terms of percentages or em units. Common grid values such as the padding, margin and width would need to be declared using the relative lengths.

Media Queries

Media queries allow developers to specify various style depending on the browser or device. This enables unique styles to be applied for different user experiences. Common media types include the screen, print, tv, all or braille.

Flexible Media

Flexible media is an important aspect of RWD as it allows media to be resized and scaled as per the device and screen view from. An effective way to make media scalable is through the maxwidth property by setting a value of 100%.

Written by eTargetMedia.

The call to action (CTA) can make or break your email campaign. If done correctly, it’s the treat that convinces readers to click through to your website for more information or to make a purchase. If done incorrectly — or not done at all — people reading your email will have no interest in clicking on your email and you’ll see minimal benefits from your campaign.

So what can we do to make sure that our calls to action are as powerful and compelling as the rest of our email marketing content? Leading email marketing company eTargetMedia has a few suggestions for creating a killer call to action:

Keep Your CTA Simple: You want people to be able to quickly glance at your email and know what they need to do next and what they can expect to get out of clicking within the email. Keep your CTAs to one or two words so they will stand out.

Be Thoughtful With Your CTA Placement: There’s no “magic” rule for where to place the CTA in your email. For shorter emails, it often works best to have the CTA have prominent position at the beginning of the message. However, an eye-catching CTA in a longer email may be better served in the middle of the content to break up long strings of text.

Multiple CTAs Are Ideal: Remember that it’s great to have more than one call to action in your email message. This is especially true if you are trying to get readers to connect with you in multiple ways such as registering for your Facebook page or bookmarking your blog.

Marketing experts turn to eTargetMedia for assistance with crafting and executing high-value direct marketing campaigns. The company also offers high quality email and postal lists.

Landing pages are have an important purpose in the overall success of a website. They look great, provides good communication and are often conducive to conversions. It makes perfect sense to get a nice landing page for your next project. But before, you might want to check out these points for a successful page.

A clear goal

A landing page should have one goal, and only one. This contrasts with traditional websites, where the goals could be multiple and diverse. However, for landing pages, you want one goal. Be it collect the user’s email, get the user to fill a form or simply sign up for your product.

Adapted for the audience

Once you know your audience, everything makes sense. Your landing page should reflect your lambda user. If you are targeting big companies, you would want to show certifications and testimonials. But if you were to target younger startup companies, then a catchy video might work better.

Clear communication

Your landing page should be in grammatically perfect. There shouldn’t be a single typo or mistake. These innocent errors play a big role in giving you an unreliable reputation. This is because, people often associate bad grammar to spam/scam websites.

Appealing design

This is the last point because it is so obvious. Landing pages are very different from traditional websites. Landing pages should be immaculate.

Landing pages are meant to convince the random Internet citizen to choose your product over another company’s. This means that the only way to judge your product is to judge your landing page.

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This article was provided by Web Design Express. Web Design express provides WordPress based web design and ecommerce site design. They also offer landing page design and optimization services.

Article provided by easy-website-solutions.com

There might be no substitute to experience and experimentation when it comes to web development. But there are some shortcuts that can be used to gain effectiveness in the work.

1. Clearing Floating Elements

Floating elements need to be constantly taken out of the way and this is part of the daily grind of most web developers. However, there are some elements that would undeniably escape your loop. For instance, how can floated list elements be cleared with the setting of a height. By adding display: block;overflow: hidden; to any floated list, the height attribute would be automatically calculated and adjusted.

2. Using Web Inspectors

The use of web inspectors has proven to considerably save time and some thought juice. The opinion of developers diverge in which is the best web inspector. Undeniably though, it was a real struggle before browsers had implemented them. On Chrome and Safari CSS changes can be previewed live with the “Inspect Element” feature. New elements and edits can also be made from the inspection pane. On Safari it is found in Preferences > Advanced > Show Develop.

3. Single Responsibility Principle

Each object within your code should be able to have only one function. This applies to CSS as well. Putting all styles into a .button class should be avoided. It should instead be split into .button-face and .button-structure for example. The Single Responsibility Principle ensures that if something breaks, you would be able to easily find the problematic object and fix it rather than having to spend time tracing back through your code.

Building a mobile app that would be capable of running on multiple platforms can be quite a feat. This is due to the different types of OS, screen sizes and capabilities to add for offline usage. The tips below might come handy when developing mobile apps.

Keeping Data Responsive

Data is everywhere and it is used by almost every mobile app that you might come across. Business applications thrive in data. Games as well require the ability to delve into game states and to send scores or moves over the web. Apps would need to be fast in order to be perceived as performing well. It is because of this that the app would be best designed to work on a locally kept copy of data and then the data can be synchronized in an asynchronous manner over the web.

More Sophisticated Data Handling

WebSQL can be used if you would need to persist data between each session on the device. This allows the local and on-device storage of persisted data between each launch of the application. It would also enable you to retrieve data from a subset of SQL. JSON can also be used for the creation and generation of tables in the existent WebSQL database. This would make bridging AJAX results simpler and data would be persistent and easy to query.

Making AJAX Requests

Intel XDK New now comes with jQuery mobile which generates AJAX requests by using $.getJSON or $.ajax. There are however some cross-domain security restrictions associated with this due to the fact that the code is on a mobile device and not fetched from the remote server.