The Guessing Game

By not wanting to meet with the web design companies, you are only wasting time playing the guessing game. Web design companies have to guess what features you want through that brief requirements and you have to guess if they are good enough based on the estimated cost which is not accurate at all.

You should be concerned if a web design company doesn’t give you a thorough diagnosis of your business problems. Take for example, your car got damaged from an accident and this car workshop is able to quote you a fixed price based on a photo of the damaged car. Will you be worried that this car workshop might not be fully aware of the damages based on the photo alone? We will. We would want a full assessment of the car to make sure that we are aware of the parts that have been damaged.

Let us give you another scenario to illustrate our point.

Imagine this:

You suspected that you have cancer and decided to call up a few clinics to ask for the cost for an operation to remove the tumor. Guess what the doctors and nurses will say to you?

They will definitely ask you to come down to the clinic so that the doctor can examine you thoroughly before they conclude that you have a cancer. At the very best, they can only give you a price range of the doctor’s consultation fee.

Now put this story in the perspective of getting a website quotation.

Your current website is not getting enough sales for over a year now. So you are suspecting that the website needs to revamp and decided to call up a few web design companies to ask them for the cost for a revamp of your website. Guess what the web designers will say to you?

By now, you should start to see a pattern here. Good web design companies will definitely request a meeting to understand your business problems in depth before they can advise and provide a proper quotation or proposal. The best thing is that the consultation session is usually free!

Respect Designers As Expert Advisors

We think that the main reason why you act differently from getting a prescription from the doctor and getting a quotation from the web design company is that you see web design as a commodity and not viewing them as expert practitioners.

You see web design as a commodity and not viewing them as expert advisors.

A good designer will be able to point out the root cause of your problems and sometimes you really don’t need to revamp your website. You just need to have a better digital marketing strategy to reach out to your potential customers.

Conclusion

Be open and meet up with designers to see how they can value-add and find the root cause of your business problems. One of the advantages the outside expert brings is perspective. And one of the hallmarks of creativity is the ability to see problems differently, and thus find solutions others cannot see.

We cannot be effective and responsible designers if we provide a quotation without a proper meeting.

The post Why Designers Always Ask For Meeting Before They Provide Quotation appeared first on Puzzle Hive.

A broad definition of user experience encompasses all aspects of an end-user’s interaction with a company, its products, and services. Good UX design provides for an exemplary user experience by meeting the needs of the user without fuss or bother. Its simplicity and elegance make the user experience a delightful one.

Relating more specifically to the digital domain, a pertinent component of user experience is usability, which is a key factor in determining if users stay on your page. When a page fails to clearly communicate what it’s offering, users leave. If the information is hard to locate or users get lost on a site, they leave. In this way, poor usability has a very real cost on your site’s performance. On the other hand, the statistics show that spending a mere 10% of a design project’s budget on usability yields, on average, an improvement of more than double a website’s desired quality metrics.

How You Can Improve Usability

1. Consistency

Consistency allows users to ‘learn’ how to navigate a site. For example, having all buttons on your site in red and in a rectangle shape allows users to discern that if an element is red and rectangle, it is likely a button and clickable. For example, in the illustration above from the SingPass website, the ‘Login’ button
is in red and of rectangle shape which lets you know that it is a button. However, the ‘Log Out’ button is grey in color which is confusing as grey buttons are commonly used to denote disabled buttons and may confuse users.

2. Intuitive

Is it possible for users to easily navigate a site unassisted to achieve what they want? Are elements on a website self-explanatory and follow logically from each other? An intuitive design anticipates the needs of users and sets out to meet them before users are even consciously aware of it. The result is a user experience that is in equal parts seamless as it is effortless.

3. Informative

Where certain desired applications are not pervasive and cannot rely on common user conventions to guide navigation, good design is informative and unambiguous. Consider the above example from the CapitaStar mobile app, which confirms the successful purchase of a voucher and informs the user where to proceed to redeem it, even allowing the user to get to the wallet via a simple click on the notification.

Now You Know

User experience is not simply a fancy term to glorify the design thinking process. It is the fundamental task of understanding what it is the end user requires and from there designing the user interface to meet the needs of the user.

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Keywords tell Google what your page is about in order for it to return the most relevant results to a user’s search query. When multiple pages contain the same keywords, Google does not know which page out of all your pages containing the same keyword to return in its results. Known as keyword cannibalization, it hurts your ranking and can affect your conversion rate.

For example, if your site sells backpacks and all of your pages are targeted only for the ‘backpack’ keyword without differentiating for the different types of backpacks (outdoors, school, etc.), you are effectively telling Google every page is about backpacks. When a search for ‘backpack’ is employed, Google is forced to pick the page it thinks best matches for the term. However, it can at times get things wrong and consequently return a less than optimal page. In this way, rather than a single highly authoritative page, your pages now have to compete against each other to appear in Google’s search results.

Furthermore, if your site produces content and has posts that are picked up by other sites, having multiple pages on the same subject may lead to other sites linking to different pages. This spreads the attributed authority thin amongst internal pages and lowers your ability to rank well in general.

How do you know if your problem is keyword cannibalization?

Some common symptoms of keyword cannibalization include Google returning the wrong page for a search term, a page on your site no longer getting traffic for its key search term, or a page on your site disappearing and appearing again in Google. To verify if you have a keyword cannibalization issue, compile a list of all your site’s important URLs and the keywords on those pages to determine if there are any duplicate keywords. Keep in mind that meta information in your title tags can also contribute to keyword cannibalization, so make sure to look them through.

What you can do to resolve keyword cannibalization

1. Differentiate pages and link back to a main landing page

Rather than targeting ‘backpacks’ for every page, distinguish pages by their variations and link them back to a main landing page for the general keyword. For example, following from our earlier analogy, we would separate the site into individual pages that reflect the different types of backpacks there are and target those pages for the specific keyword variation – a page for ‘school backpacks’, another for ‘outdoor backpacks’ and one for ‘work backpacks’, then link them all back to a main ‘backpacks’ landing page. Thus, Google can now easily determine the most relevant page to return for a query.

2. Collate your content

In other instances, your content may not be robust enough to justify having multiple pages targeting different keywords. For such cases, consider collating your content into a single page so that it yields a more authoritative showing. To pass the ranking power of your previous individual pages to the collated main page, use a 301 permanent redirect. It will also send all traffic from the previous individual pages to your collated main page.

Conclusion

Organizing your content well allows you to dictate which page to put forth for a particular search term and search engines to easily understand your site’s information architecture in order to return the most relevant results to users. You get a landing page most optimal for conversions, Google doesn’t get confused, and users get their queries answered – a win for everybody!

The post SEO Keywords Cannibalization – Are You Making This Mistake Too? appeared first on Puzzle Hive.

With the rise of technology and the convenience it offers, customers increasingly experience brands online first before they do so in real life. We have established the detriment of poor web aesthetics, but how can you improve it?

As a web design Singapore company, we understand the importance of putting forth a good web impression, and we’re here to help you with that. Today, we will be talking about color, a key pillar of aesthetics.

In a study by the University of Loyola, Maryland, it was found that color registers in the brain even before images and typography, demonstrating the substantial role that color occupies in consumer perception.

Consider this image of a cartoon character, both before it is colored in and after. Take a moment to contemplate how each image makes you feel and why that is the case.

In the same way, the colors you choose to use will evoke emotions in customers and impress upon them your brand. This is why companies tend to utilize major shifts in color schemes when rebranding themselves. Take a look at the following example of BurgerUp’s recent rebranding efforts:

From its signature black backgrounds to pops of teal and amber, a vastly different brand impression is conveyed.

While most of you may not be looking to undergo a whole overhauling of your brand, knowledge of color theory can still go a long way in common design tasks as notices and social media posts. So let’s get started, shall we?

Hues, Tints, Tones, & Shades

Color theory proposes that pure colors are called hues, and when mixed with white are called tints. When hues are mixed with grey they are called tones, and when mixed with black are called shades. This determines the vibrancy, or brightness of a color, which dictates the emotion of a design. For example, a yellow hue conveys energy and joy, while its tint presents a softer pastel yellow that communicates calmness and peace.

Warm & Cool Colors

Another dimension that can be used to categorize colors is by how ‘warm’ or ‘cool’ they are. Colors have inherent moods that are strengthened through the socialization process by the meanings we assign them. For example, Blue projects trust and reliability and thus is a common corporate color.

Warm colors show enthusiasm and passion while cool colors are relaxing and give the impression of professionalism, making them suitable choices for more formal design assignments.

Harmony

Harmony is the function of how the colors in a color scheme complement each other – a color scheme that is not in harmony is either boring or overwhelming. According to color theory, extreme unity leads to under-stimulation while extreme complexity leads to over-stimulation. Thus, harmony is a dynamic equilibrium that when achieved delivers visual interest and a sense of order.

Accordingly, color theory provides direction for attaining harmonious color combinations:

• Complementary: Any 2 colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel. E.g. Red and green. This combination contrasts one color against the other, and is appropriate when you want something to stand out.
• Analogous: Any 3 colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. E.g. Sky blue, green, and lime green. Such combinations are often found in nature and provide a color scheme that is easy on the eye.
• Compound: 3 colors are used comprising a base color and the 2 colors adjacent to its complementary color. E.g. Violet, orange, and green. Both warm and cool colors are utilized in such a combination, providing for a balanced color scheme.
• Triadic: 3 colors that are evenly spaced across the color wheel are used, forming a triangle. This combination tends to return a lively and colorful scheme.

As informative as color theory is, it can be daunting for a layperson to apply in practice. If you’re just starting out, an easy way to obtain harmonious color combinations is simply to draw from nature.

Source: http://typennington.com/inspired-by-the-colors-of-spring/

Conclusion

Use of color is critical in design and the strategic application of it can prove to be most effective. As with anything, practice makes progress. Keep at it with color theory and you will see your color combinations start to surprise even yourself!

The post How To Use Color appeared first on Puzzle Hive.

One of the most common forms of SEM is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, which are the ads you see at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs). Unlike traditional advertising where you pay a lump sum for ad placements, the draw of PPC advertising is that you are charged only when someone clicks on your ad. Imagine serving your ad to hundreds of thousands of users and not having to pay a single cent until someone clicks on your ad!

Ready to start PPC advertising? We will use Google Adwords for the purposes of this explanation.

An Introduction

There are multiple advertisers looking to reach audiences at any one given time, and they make known their target audiences to Google by providing keywords they anticipate users will search for. Advertisers then bid on these keywords, stipulating the maximum price they are willing to pay per click for their ads to be shown to users searching for the identified keywords and its variants. When a user performs a Google search, all ads that match the search query are entered into an ad auction to determine which ads are shown to the user.

The Ad Auction

Contrary to common belief, ads that win the auction do not do so solely due to a high bid. This is so because Google takes into account other factors as ad relevance, expected clickthrough rate, and landing page experience, together with bids placed by advertisers to determine which ads win the auction. Ad relevancy In order to determine ad relevance, Google looks at how well your ad’s message relates to a user’s search query. Ensure that your ad’s message closely matches the keywords you bid for to nail this component.

Expected clickthrough rate (CTR)

Google predicts the number of people who will click on your ad based on historical data to obtain your CTR. There are three possible statuses your ad may get: below average, average, and above average. If you get a below average status, consider editing your ad’s copy to be more relevant to your top keywords.

Landing Page Experience

Landing page experience has to do with the page users land on when they click on your ad. It describes how useful and relevant your landing page is to users. Can information relating to the user’s search terms be easily found? Does your landing page lead to where your ad says it will lead?

Quality Score + Bid = Ad Rank

How does it all come together? Consider our example in this illustration: the highest bid of $5 takes the last position while the lowest bid of $3 is instead awarded the top position. This is so because ad relevancy, expected clickthrough rate, and landing page experience are aggregated, and a resulting quality score is assigned to each ad. This is computed with your bid to derive your Ad Rank, and ads with the highest Ad Rank in each auction are shown to users. Thus, a high bid alone is not a sure guarantee that your ad will be shown to users.

Sum it up

Ensure that your ad message is tailored closely to your keywords and your landing page is well-organized to allow users to easily find the information they need, allowing you to maximize your ad spend and achieve improved rankings.

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1. Understanding Of Your Business

A designer is not able to give good advice and recommendations without first understanding what you do and the problems you are facing. The first thing that a good web design company will do is to gather as much information as possible about your business operations by asking the right questions and listen attentively.

2. Process flow

A process flow outlines the way a project is managed and is as crucial to a web design company as systems are to a logistics company. It provides a plan to move forward with, pre-empts problems, and ensures that all relevant parties are clear on the deliverables and respective deadlines, allowing for accountability where it is due. It is a good sign if a web design company has an established process flow that has a proven record of returning results for its clients.

3. Attention to detail

This is a typical measure of a competent designer and for good reason. While it does take a learned eye to spot detail-oriented design, indications of poor attention to detail are easily spotted. One common slip up is where the website is not optimized for mobile experience prior to launch, resulting in misalignment of text or swathes of empty space. On the other hand, a design that has attention paid to detail is consistent site-wide and is crafted with the end user in mind. An example is having texts start at the same place on each page so that users to know where to look each time they land on a new page.

4. Their thought process

Ask your web design company why something was done, and pay attention to the answer. The rationale for the decision will clue you in on their thought process and how they do things. Do they strive for the best in what they do or is good enough adequate for them? Is the way they think things through sound and thorough? Is attention to detail demonstrated?

5. Adding value

You pay a web design company for their knowledge and expertise. For this reason, they should provide value rather than simply follow your instructions. Good web design is not solely determined by how attractive a site looks. Functionality and user experience tops mere aesthetics. As a layperson, what you want for your site may unwittingly compromise site functionality or the user experience, and it is their responsibility to advise you so. Brownie points if alternative suggestions are offered!

6. Responsive

How prompt are their replies? Do they demonstrate the keenness to work together? Are responses crafted with consideration of your specific needs or a copy-and-paste template? 1 to 2 working days from when you send your enquiry is considered a fair amount of time for a web design company to revert.

The Takeaway

While price is an important factor, it may not be an accurate determinant of service quality. Now that we’ve given you the key indicators of a good web design company, you can be more aware of what to look out for to find a good fit for your web design project. Ultimately, which web design company to actually work with depends on what you value and how comfortable you feel actually working with each company.

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As an SEM Singapore company, we understand how important it is to reach targeted audiences for your offerings. Hence, we bring you a step-by-step guide on how to create a Facebook ad. To start, enter your own Facebook ad manager here.

1. Choose your objective

The versatility of Facebook allows for it to be used to achieve a wide range of marketing goals, be it to drive traffic to your site or retail store, generate leads, reach audiences, promote app installs, increase brand awareness, or sell products. Select your desired campaign objective to start.

2. Select a target audience

While the ad itself is important, do also keep in mind the people who are actually going to be viewing it. Sometimes, simply switching up your audience is all it takes to bring you the results you’re looking for. Experiment with audience targeting to find the optimal audience for your offering. For example, try different interest categories and audience lookalikes to target audiences that have shown previous interest in a similar offering. If your campaign objective is to gain awareness, consider excluding people who have already liked your page to maximize your ROI on ad spend.

3. Choose where to run your ads

Decide where you want your ads to appear. Because Facebook also owns Instagram and Messenger, you have the choice of selecting whether you wish for your ads to appear on these platforms as well.

4. Set your budget and schedule

Facebook allows you to set a daily budget (your ad stops appearing for the day once the budget is reached) and lifetime budget (your ad stops indefinitely when the budget is exhausted) as well as when you want your ad to start and its duration. Further customization for a more targeted reach is also available under ‘Advanced Options’.

5. Start creating your ad

Create a brand new ad or use an existing post. For the latter, choose ‘Use Existing Post’ from your Ads Manager dashboard and select the post you wish to advertise. To create a brand new ad, first choose the ad format you want your ad to appear in:

• Photo: Your ad shows as a single photo; create up to 6 ad variations with each image
• Video: Your ad shows as a single video
• Slideshow: Your ad shows as a slideshow of up to 10 images
• Carousel ads: Your ad shows as a scrollable display of 2 or more images/videos with links that direct to specific locations on your site
• Canvas ads: Your ad shows full-screen with the choice of a combination of images and videos
• Lead ads: Your ad shows with the ability for audiences to sign up for more info
• Collection ads: Your ad shows with a display of related products

Note that some formats may be unavailable depending on the objective you chose for your campaign.

You can now start crafting content for your ad! Feel free to experiment with your ads. Create different ads with varying accompanying images and copy and run them to see which performs best. This also has the additional benefit of minimizing ad fatigue, which occurs when people
view the same ad multiple times. Once done, you’re all set to go!

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1. Map business goals

To create an effective social media strategy, it is critical to be clear what business goals it should be achieving. What exactly do you want to achieve through social media? More brand awareness and engagement? To generate new leads? Listen in on consumer sentiment about your brand? Drive traffic to your page?

Clear business goals inform your social media strategy and provide a metric for gauging the success of your social media campaigns. List down all the business goals on a piece of paper and determine the KPI (Key Performance Indicator) for each goal.

2. Choose your platform

Depending on your business goals, you can begin to filter the various social media platforms to determine which platforms your target audience use most frequently, how you wish to engage with them on each platform, and the kind of content you should be creating for each platform.

For example, a platform like Instagram would require regular updates of visual content with hashtags used liberally because that’s how Instagram users find new content. However, as web addresses in captions are not working links, Instagram is probably not a good platform to use if your goal is to drive traffic to your site. Conversely, 92% of all Twitter engagement can be attributed to link clinks, so Twitter may be a better choice if your goal is to drive traffic to your site.

3. Consider available resources & plan accordingly

Ideally, you should have engaging content that adds value to your users and updates regularly on each platform, yet there is a limit to your available resources, so the next best option is to try and maximize the possible results that can be obtained for each unit of input. Drawing from the Pareto principle, which states that 80% of results can be attributed to 20% of effort, take time to consider which platforms are likely to give you the best returns and require the least amount of effort to plan your social media content calendar.

4. Review and adapt

Use analytics to your advantage. All of the major social media platforms from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram have built-in analytics that can track and analyze how your content is performing. After posting for a few weeks, you should have some numbers to work with. Don’t be afraid to change strategies if the numbers don’t reflect your intended marketing plan. Feel free to adapt the plan accordingly depending on how users are actually engaging with your brand.

Conclusion

Having a social media strategy provides a structure for content creation and clear objectives to meet. It saves time and increases productivity by outlining exactly what needs to be delivered each week on each platform so that energies can be better left to what’s really important – actual content creation.

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What is SEM?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM), is advertising on search engines to achieve the marketing goal of driving traffic to the desired page. Because audiences are already looking for something when they use search engines, they are more likely to convert when clicking on a link. For this reason, SEM traffic is commonly viewed as a key source for internet traffic. Some examples of SEM include the text ads that appear at the top of search engine result pages or shopping ads that feature a product and related information like its price.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), attempts to improve the visibility of a page by optimizing it such that it increases its ranking on the SERP (search engine result page) and appears more frequently in organic search results.

There are 2 main types of SEO – on-site and off-site SEO. On-site SEO is the optimization of your site to help it rank higher in search results and therefore drive more traffic to it. It includes the content of a page, title tags (the title of a page that is displayed on search engine result pages), and accurately formatted URLs, amongst other things. Search engine takes all these into account to determine if your site has good content that is relevant to a user’s query.

Off-site SEO complements on-site SEO to help search engine ascertain the quality of a site by the number of other sites that link to it, and how reputable those sites are. The idea is that if multiple reputable sites link to yours on a given topic, it is a good indicator that your site is a trusted authority on the matter.

The Difference Between SEO & SEM

So, what is the difference between SEO and SEM? The confusion is understandable as marketers sometimes use them interchangeably. This is so as SEM was once used to include all efforts directed at increasing traffic through the use of search engines. Following from this definition, SEO was considered a subset of SEM as it sought to increase traffic via search engines.

However, in more recent times, search industry professionals have come to distinguish the two, with SEM to refer specifically to paid marketing activities and SEO referring to efforts to drive traffic through search engines organically.

This distinction reflects the nature of both strategies: SEO is a long-term strategy and takes time for results to show, while SEM can be used to achieve results in a much shorter span of time – you simply pay to appear at the top of the search results.

Accordingly, the moment you stop paying, your site stops appearing in search results. Thus, the optimal solution is to invest in both SEO and SEM to ensure your site turns up in both paid and organic results.

Conclusion

To answer the question, the fundamental difference between SEM and SEO lies in that one is paid, and allows for results to be achieved almost immediately, while the other is a long-term strategy that strives for organic traffic.

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1. What do I need to provide?

Clearly defining expectations at the outset can help reduce unnecessary conflict later on about what the web design company should do. For example, you may not want to engage copywriting service for your website. As such, you will need to provide page by page content for them to add to your website. Also, you should clarify if a bullet list of points is sufficient. Setting out who is responsible for what gives both parties a clear idea of what to deliver on moving forward.

2. Will I be able to edit web content on my own?

The ability to edit your web content gives you control over what is published on your page. Yet, business owners oftentimes underestimate the complexity of editing or publishing content on the backend, only to be stuck when the time comes round for them to do it themselves. Checking with your web design company beforehand will give you enough time to seek advice and/or assistance as necessary. That said, not all elements of a webpage may be readily editable. In which case, consider checking with your web design company on the charges for updates and how that is determined.

3. What support do you provide after the site goes live?

What happens if something doesn’t work? Are routine backups provided? Is there a maintenance package? What issues are appropriate to approach your web design company for help with? Establishing post project expectations with them allows for open and fair accountability.

4. How long will it take?

Depending on the number of revisions you request, keep in mind that the exact project duration may differ from your web design company’s initial estimate. However, it is still a good question to ask as it gives you an idea when your website can go live and paves the way for further discourse on issues as possible penalties for missed deadlines or how much time you have to review and provide feedback.

5. Is it a responsive design that will work across all mobile and tablet devices?

A responsive design is one that adapts to the user’s browser screen size. It allows your website to be as functional on a mobile or tablet as it is accessed on a desktop. Clarifying this is essential as it has significant implications for how users will encounter your website. If it is a responsive design, check if mockups will be provided for the mobile and tablet interfaces as well.

Conclusion

While there is no perfect answer to these questions, the responses your web design company provides can shed light on possible discrepancies between expectations and should give you a better idea of what to expect.

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