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It’s Time to Get Your Modern E-Commerce Site on the Web

March 19, 2018/in Web Design /by Cary Blackburn

Are you a business owner? Are you in the process of establishing a new business? Even if you are only in the “could do” stage, you need to think about getting a site for your business on the web. This is the place where millions of people will come to see what your new business may have to offer them. If you want to gain the widest possible exposure for your business, this is one step you definitely need to take.

It Isn’t Hard to Build a Site, But it Needs to Be a Good One.

It’s hardly a chore these days to put up an official site for your business. But just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should. If you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, you just may make a mess of things. This is why it’s always a good idea to get professional help from an expert in these matters. If you want to establish a first-class modern e-commerce site, it makes sense to take counsel from a pro.

What Features Should Your Official Company Website Include?

There are some very important features that your new website will need to have. One of them is first class e-commerce web design. To be seen as a credible competitor, your site will need to contain such elements as a web store and shopping cart. It will also need to make use of the latest modern responsive website design features.

It’s an excellent idea to install an instant messenger system on your site so that visitors can quickly reach you with any questions, comments, or concerns that they may have. You can also have your official website synced up with your Twitter feed so that visitors can get the latest news.

A Fully Modern Web Design is the Mark of a Credible Online Vendor

If you want to survive in your chosen industry, you will need to establish instant credibility with the public. The way to do this is to present your prospective customers with a fully modern web design. Your site needs to be able to give your customers everything they need to quickly and easily make a purchase from you.

Calling upon the services of a professional e-commerce website developer is your best bet in this situation. At a stroke, you can get the aid and counsel of experts in the industry. If you want to make the best possible first impression on millions of visitors, you need a website of the best possible quality. This is only possible when you hire design experts to build your official company site.

Vancouver Web Design

Hurricane Web Design Vancouver
#1002 – 1831 Robson Street
Vancouver, BC V6G 1E4
(604) 256-7081

3 Basic Web Design Hacks to Skyrocket Your Conversions

November 17, 2017/0 Comments/in SEO /by Cary Blackburn

Traffic is only as good as it CONVERTS into phone calls, sales, and revenue for your business. You can have the best website designed in the world, but if you cannot get your visitors to take action, you’re not going to be able to monetize the traffic.

In this article, we will discuss some basic and beginner-friendly tactics to ensure that people who visit your website get enough information to feel comfortable enough to pick up the phone and call your business or fill out that Contact Form. This is mostly applicable to independent business owners who may have put up their site a while ago and have not seen tangible results from it yet.

Prominent Call to Action

Make sure your PHONE NUMBER is visible no matter where the visitor is on your site. An easy way to do this is to make it prominent in the top right corner of the site, visible on all pages along with your Navigation Menu. If your website does not have a prominent and clear call-to-action, ask your web design company to set one up as soon as possible.

Making it difficult for your customers to find your contact details is one of the biggest mistakes that beginner business owners make, especially when they haven’t had a professional consultation. For a customer to find their way to your Contact page just to find your number is big No-No!

You need to understand that your customers are going to be different kinds of people and at different places in the buying process. Some are going to want to call you right away and will get frustrated if they can’t find your number. Others won’t feel comfortable calling you just yet but might fill in a Contact Form to find out more. So, you also need to have a prominent secondary call-to-action to capture these leads.

Add Trust and Credibility Elements

Understand that MOST people who come across your website DO NOT contact you. And think about why. Is it that they are just browsing for the services you provide and not really looking to buy? Or were they disappointed that the information on your site was not sufficient, so they went to look for someone else? Or perhaps you did have enough information, but they just didn’t feel comfortable or didn’t trust you yet?

All these are possibilities you must consider to improve your conversion rate. Think about the first impression that your site is giving to your visitors. If necessary, ask some people you know about how they feel when they first visit the site. It always helps to get a fresh visitor’s opinion on a site you might feel biased about as you may have put a lot of work into it.

Once you have a list of potential issues, think about how you can solve them on your site. For example, if trust is a factor, you can add some of your past client’s logo so convey that other businesses have trusted you. You can put up video testimonials as well.

If credibility and information is a problem, you can display some of well-known websites, magazines or newspapers that you have been featured in, put up photos of events you have spoken at or a video of a TV interview.

Harness Social Media to Humanize Your Business

Your website is the online representation of your business. But don’t forget that people feel most comfortable buying from other people, rather than websites. This is particularly true for B2B businesses and service-based businesses.

As a human, you can only be at one place at a time. But as a website, if you do it right, you can be in many places and always be operating! So don’t make the mistake of hiding behind your website. Instead, use it to ramp up your presence online, create and publish as much content as you can, and you will see your organic leads go through the roof!

Social media helps to accomplish exactly this. It tells your visitors that your business is active and current and values their customers enough to engage with them on social media platforms. You can embed your feed in the Sidebar of your website if it goes with the look of your site or you can simply.

Vancouver Web Designer

Hurricane Web Design Vancouver
#1002 – 1831 Robson Street
Vancouver, BC V6G 1E4
(604) 256-7081
https://www.hurricaneweb.net/

10 Website Design Trends Expected for 2017

January 11, 2017/in Web Design /by Nick Rojas

Happy New Year! Now that 2016 is in the books, everyone is looking ahead to the upcoming year. In web design, this means looking at trends from the past two or three years, which set the direction for some stunning design innovations in 2017. Here are some of the big ones.

1. Big Type, Bold Statements

Websites are starting to use fewer words to get their point across, preferring it short and sweet rather than long and explanatory. This is allowing room for bigger and more creative fonts, and many of them are custom fonts rather than the typical ones we’re used to.

2. Composition

Composition refers to how everything is laid out, and the direction web design is headed points to simple, minimalist designs and layouts for 2017. This is not to say that websites will no longer contain information, but accessing it will be streamlined, either through longer scrolling or innovative navigation menus. This is all in response to the growing number of people using the web on mobile phones.

3. More Scalable Vector Graphics

Scalable Vector Graphics, or SVG, are a way of manipulating a graphic to resize it for different uses (say, cell phone screens versus tablets versus desktop computers). In the past, this was done by stretching and shrinking more traditional formats such as.JPEG and.GIF, but vector graphics have an advantage over these because they bypass pixels to present a crisp, clear graphic no matter what the device. Predictions for 2017 see the use of these growing in response to broader use.

4. Dynamic Color

Color schemes and palettes are moving in the direction of being less aggressive and bright. Some designers are using natural greens, browns, and pinks while other designers are going for pastels. Subtlety is the color of 2017.

5. Animations

Eadweard Muybridge [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Animations have always been part of web design because they’re eye-catching and fun. This will continue in 2017, especially as. GIFs become more mainstream. More attention will be focused on them this year, especially as new tools are developed to work with them.

6. Personalization

Web design has always been about attracting potential clients, and what better way to do that than by making it as appealing to individuals as a site can? Designers are looking this year toward making content personalized users, allowing them to filter their experience in new ways. This has already been a challenge, but this year more and more designers are taking it on.

7. Virtual Reality

While gamers will be among the first to benefit from this, web designers are challenged with incorporating virtual reality into websites. The objective is to take the user’s experience to the next level by making the site highly interactive and the visuals sweeping and immersive.

8. New Navigation Menu Conventions

Navigation menus will undergo changes in the coming year. Traditional menus are on the top or down the side of a site, but more designers have been creating new menus that will eventually replace the old conventions. These include splash menus, constraint menus, and especially visual menus with pictures that link to the text information.

9. Smoother Transitions During Load Time

Web designers call the transition during a page’s load time “interstitial anxiety,” referring to the anticipation of the user while the page loads. Transitions during this phase are not just about fast load times this year. They’re also about presenting content to users while they wait, so the user has something pleasing or interesting to the eye as the page is loading.

10. Age-Oriented Design

An important aspect of a user’s experience with the web is whether or not the content is useful to them. Websites are usually made with an “average” audience in mind, but more websites now will be designing with age in mind. This means muted colors, larger letters, and simplicity for elderly users, and bright colors, cartoonish fonts, and lots of animations for younger users.

These are just a few of the exciting innovations in web design this year, changes which can bring a stylish look to any website. Designers are looking at making sites that are informative but also pleasing to the eye, leading it around the page to maximize the user’s experience. Ease of use is a target goal this year, and designers are working hard to come up with new ways to make that happen.

Web Designer Vancouver

Hurricane Web Design Vancouver
#1002 – 1831 Robson Street
Vancouver, BC V6G 1E4
(604) 256-7081
https://www.hurricaneweb.net/

Nick Rojas is a self-taught, serial entrepreneur who’s enjoyed success working with and consulting for startups. Using his journalism training, Nick writes for publications such as Entrepreneur, TechCrunch, and Yahoo. He concentrates on teaching small and medium-sized enterprises how best to manage their social media marketing and define their branding objectives.

Five Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Mobile Website

August 30, 2012/in Web Design /by Cary

mobile web design If you are the decision maker for marketing your business, then there’s no question you recognize just how necessary it is that you have a strong presence on the web. There are many ways to create this presence, from social media websites to blog sites, and you need to have a presence on all of them. One of the current, most effective means of taking complete advantage of the Internet’s marketing potential is by having a mobile site. A mobile website is exactly what it seems to be – a website specifically produced to be accessed on mobile devices. So, why does your company need to have a mobile website if its conventional web site is doing quite well?

Here are 5 convincing reasons why you need a mobile site:

Visual beauty

You may be wondering why everyone can’t view your conventional site on their mobile devices. The reality is, they can. The additional reality is that your conventional website simply does not look that good on a mobile device. Do this: access your website and reduce the view on your computer’s web browser by zooming out until you have to squint to read the content on the page. I think you would agree, this is not a good viewing experience, is it?

The statistics

The numbers don’t lie. Simply put, there are more people today who utilize their mobile devices to access the web than they do their desktop computer or laptop computers. Additionally, a lot of people who are on the Internet today ONLY do so through their mobile devices. Can your business afford not to meet this significantly big sector of the market?

The cost of data transfer

A significant number of mobile customers must pay data transfer charges. Conventional websites have much more data than mobile websites and therefore can cost people a great deal of money to view your website. Ask yourself this: how many customers are willing to have to pay you in order to have your market to them?

Navigation

As mentioned before, conventional websites are a great deal smaller on those small mobile device displays. This means that visitors to your website need to do a great deal of scrolling in order to view the whole page… and let’s be honest, website visitors would rather not work in order to view a web page. Likewise, it’s almost impossible to tap navigation buttons on such a small display when the website hasn’t been enhanced for mobile devices.

Today’s audience on the web

The truth is that a lot of people, including your potential clients, access the web by means of a mobile device. This also means that a lot of people utilize their mobile devices for a great number of things – shopping, searching, entertainment, and a whole lot more – plus these are all features you could include in your mobile site to widen your reach and increase your client base.

As you may see, there are a number of excellent reasons to design a mobile website for your business as quickly as you can. The mobile website experts at Hurricane Web Design can help you create a mobile site for your business. Feel free to contact us at 604-477-1996 or email us at questions@hurricanewebdesign.com.

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