website design Archives - Page 2 of 2

Guest Post: How to Design a Thoroughly Enjoyable Digital Storefront

Launching a successful eCommerce store requires more than the ability to offer high-quality products and services to an audience in need. In order to stand out amongst today’s competition, developing a thoroughly enjoyable digital storefront is a must. Knowing how to design your eCommerce storefront to deliver a positive experience to your visitors is a great way to gain trust and loyalty among your customers.

Define Your Brand and Aesthetic

Define your brand and the aesthetic you are going for before choosing a layout and design that is optimal for your storefront. If you want your visitors to view your storefront and brand as chic and modern, using outdated, grainy, blurry, or discolored graphics and imagery should be avoided. Align the design and imagery of your website with the brand you are trying to establish with your digital storefront.

Create a Site Map

Implement a site map into your website after you create a customer success journey map. A customer success journey map can be useful to determine how you intend to entice customers, gain their trust, and help them navigate throughout your digital storefront. Using a journey map is also a great way to develop your site map to help users better navigate your website when they are searching for items, looking to create an account, or want to check out.

Implement Easily Accessible Navigation

Easily accessible navigation is a key element involved in building any successful website, including eCommerce storefronts. Ensure that your digital storefront has a navigation bar or system in place that can be accessed via a desktop browser, a mobile browser, or even with the use of a tablet device.

Use a Mobile-Friendly and Responsive eCommerce Layout

When you are choosing or creating a design for your digital storefront, it is important to ensure that the layout you choose is responsive and mobile-friendly. As more individuals turn to use their mobile phones and tablets to browse the web, having a website layout that is responsive and mobile-friendly is essential. If a user visits your digital storefront and is unable to easily access your inventory, promotions, blogs, or navigation, they are much more likely to seek out an alternative online source.

Knowing how to design a thoroughly enjoyable digital storefront is a way to stand out with your eCommerce store in any market or industry. With the right design, maximize your eCommerce storefront’s online reach and your ability to generate sales.

Lizzie Weakley is a freelance writer from Columbus, Ohio. She went to college at The Ohio State University, where she studied communications. In her free time, she enjoys the outdoors and long walks in the park with her three-year-old husky, Snowball.

Guest Post: Five major reasons why your website is slow

Having a fast website is very important these days. But many people say that even though they have performed the required tasks their websites are still slow. So here we have created a list of issues that contribute to decreasing the speed of your website. Avoiding these problems should be your number one priority to increase the speed of your website.

Un-optimized Images

A Large amount of un-optimized images is usually one of the most common factors that contribute to slowing down websites. High-resolution and high-quality images can take up lots of bandwidth while loading. A common amateur mistake that is made by website developers is that they upload high-quality images and later on try to scale them down. This unnecessarily increases the size of your web page which leads to longer loading time and overall slowing down of your website.

The format of your images also affects the speed of your website. Some formats such as JPEG take up less memory as compared to formats like PNG and GIF. So, unless you are using a hosting package that supports large files and has the server power to load up high-quality images stick to lower quality JPEG images

Too Much Flash Content

Although Flash content is a great tool for increasing the interactivity on your website, it can also be contributing to your slow page load speed. Flash content is usually quite large in size, and the bigger the file size is, the more time it requires to load. And longer load times means slower speed.

So, eliminating flash files from your website or reducing their size can really help you improve your page speed. Another way to improve your speed is using HTML5 alternatives to your flash content.

Not Making Use of Caching Techniques

Caching is a technique in which all the most frequently used data points are stored in a cache memory. Later when these data points are accessed, they can be quickly retrieved from the cache memory. Using cache memory can greatly improve the speed and performance of your website.

Too Many Ads

Of course, advertisements are very beneficial for high traffic websites but to stay in a good position for a longer time. You cannot compromise the speed of your website for advertisements.

When your website is overloaded with advertisements the amount of HTTP requests generated is increased rapidly. This requires a lot of processing power, and as a result, it slows down your website. Especially ads like auto downloads and pop-unders take up a lot of memory and slow down your website significantly.

Not using the right kind of web hosting for your website.

Choosing the proper form of web hosting is very important to maintain the speed of your website. If your website features a lot of images and flash resources you should not opt for shared hosting. VPS or dedicated hosting is the best option for larger websites that require a lot of processing power. There are many websites like Hostiserver.com and GoDaddy available on the market, which provide different kinds of hosting services at reasonable prices. So, choose the kind of hosting that suits you best.

Barbara Morgan is a how-to’s technology writer for more than a decade, hardware tester, Linux power user based in New Hampshire. She regularly posts her how-to articles at the managed hosting Europe provider – Hostiserver.com

Guest Post: Improving your website speed without deteriorating its content

Do you know the 59 Second Rule? An average person who knows nothing about your business and comes across your website will spend nearly 59 seconds on the site before leaving it. Unless, of course, you find the way to keep their attention for a longer time. In order to achieve that, people go for various practices to improve their website.

The easiest and the most efficient way would be to improve your website’s speed. This way, the first 59 seconds the visitors will spend getting acquainted with the web content, not waiting until uploading the images.

Therefore, we suggest you taking a look at the ways your website speed can be hugely improved, without impacting the content itself.

Lazy loading

Lazy loading is probably the biggest trend in web design for 2018 that has been described by various sources including DesignContest. This is an ingenious design pattern that shows the images or videos only when they are needed. This way, the speed of your website will never suffer, no matter what visual content you have there.

How does the lazy loading work?

Lazy loading is an infinite scrolling in a way. You scroll the website up to the point where, logically, there has to be a visualization to confirm the data. Here, you see an uploaded picture or the video material that will fade away when you scroll further. This gimmick helps web pages to be responsive and to interact with users with the speed that is much more increased.

You can even make it more engaging with different kinds of navigation. For example, lazy loading will look great with a floating navigation. It is a special feature on your website that makes it different from your competitors in one more special way. It helps users to explore the website and makes this process interesting, entertaining, and engaging. Due to the fact that there are truly lots of options that distinguish the way users can navigate, its diversity has no limits.

2. Reducing server response time

To speed up your website, it is very important to know first how long the DNS (Domain Name System) lookup takes. Every time someone is typing the website’s URL, a DNS server transfers it to the IP address and signifies its location online. At the same time, a DNS lookup shows a specific DNS record.

The amount of time a DNS lookup takes is tightly connected with the speed of your DNS provider. If it is slow, it takes users more time to get to your website (because their computers cannot locate your site in a short period of time). That is why, if your DNS is slow, you might want to switch to a faster provider. This will cause no damage to your content but will help users to get to your website faster.

3. Use a simple website design

A simplicity is your best friend in terms of the website design, especially if you want your site to run fast. Using simple grids and clean design layers can bring some unexpected results. There is no denying the fact that, lately, design has been aimed at surprising people. However, brevity is still the soul of wit. That is why, smooth design solutions can bring you a double benefit. First of all, they never look kitschy or extraordinary. Second of all, it takes not so much time for them to appear on your screen. Thus, if you are looking for truly sophisticated solutions to represent your business online, a simple web design can save your day.

4. Enable caching

We bet it is not the first time you hear about caching but do you know what it is in fact? Cache is a component of your hard- or software that includes some data elements of your website kept in temporary storages. This means, that, once you enable caching on your website, some components will be loaded without needing the HTTP requests to the server. As a result, the website will be speeded up with no extra efforts from you.

5. Specify your image dimensions

A great idea for those who run a blog and want it to be fully optimized. Choosing the one dimension for our photo content will help you to make the website load faster. What is more, it is profitable when you think of the general look of your site. The one-size images create an unforgettable impression where all your content is separated and sorted out.

Bottom line

There are a lot of features your website’s speed depends on. However, some of those features can be improved with no significant efforts. Why not to make your website better right now?

Natalie Antiuk works for DesignContest, a marketplace that conducts web design services of the highest quality. She is keen on web design combined with its usage in launching startups and marketplaces.

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