Tag: 2019

February 3, 2019

Brandwill

The Website Design scene is evolving. No matter if you are a designer or a business owner, if you want to stay competitive, you need to follow the latest trends. Otherwise, your website will soon become outdated.

What’s more, having an out-of-date website can cost you a lot more than quality website design does. Especially if you consider that a staggering 46.1% of all website visitors treat website design as the top criteria when deciding whether the company is credible or not. So, what’s going to be hot in 2019?

1. Lightweight but Beautiful

Long gone are the time when your site could weight 20MB and load for ages. Depending on your industry, the number of your mobile visitors will most likely keep increasing. Considering that for every second your website visitors have to wait for your site to load your conversion rate decreases by 7% (on average), having a site that is fast will be a lot more important than what you put on it. As long as it’s eye-catching and memorable – speed alone won’t be enough, either.

The good news is, if you optimize it properly, you don’t have to get rid of too many elements. Although if you are in e-commerce or any other niche where customers need to make a quick decision, we would avoid videos and other fancy, distracting features. And what if you really want to add that video? At least add a neat play button so that it doesn’t slow page loading (critical on mobile).

2. Website Design Will Focus on Increasing Conversions

Chats (including robochats), conversion alerts, social proof… and any other elements that can help you increase your conversion rate. No matter what your business is, the competition is fierce. A fancy looking website won’t help your business if it won’t bring in sales and have a positive impact on user experience and the process of building a relationship.

Of course, you shouldn’t overdo these elements either – that’s why the best designers will work with CRO specialists to provide your business with a competitive edge.

3. More Elements Will Become Shoppable

On their quest to improve your sales and help you present your offer website designers will need to implement solutions that will make your website stand out – which equals making it even more interactive and memorable. One of such elements that will become mainstream in 2019 are “shoppable images”.

They allow you to present information about your products and add purchase buttons right on the product image – without obscuring it in any way or negatively affecting customer experience. And, even more importantly, if implemented correctly, they can skyrocket your click through rate and, as a result, your sales.

4. Copywriting Will Be as Important as Ever

Many website designers fail to focus on adjusting their design to the copy – and yet it’s the latter that’s created with the goal of persuading your audience to take action. To reduce their cost per acquisition, more and more businesses will switch from adjusting their web copy to website design to doing it the other way around – where website designers create landing pages based on the copywriter’s idea.

Naturally, that doesn’t mean you should focus just on copywriting – most people prefer to read something beautifully designed than something plain, so make sure that your copywriter and designer work together. It’s crucial that your site conveys what your offer is about right away – everyone has less time than ever to try to guess what you want to sell them.

5. Personalized, Separate Landing Pages and Dynamic Text

2019 will be a very busy year for website designers who create landing pages – mainly because more entrepreneurs are aware of the importance of creating separate landing pages that suit the marketing campaign and its goals.

Long gone are the days when you could just drive AdWords or Facebook traffic to the main page of your website and enjoy the profits. Customers can go to your competitor in a click of a button – that’s why your presented offer should be exactly what they are looking for at that particular moment.

This is also why many websites will implement dynamic text replacement that changes web copy depending on where your visitors come from, who they are, or how far they are in their buyer’s journey.

6. Animation – But Done the Smart Way!

So far in this article, we’ve been pretty against fancy design or any distracting elements on your website. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use the technology in your favor. While ill-planned UX effects can hurt your website, funny, interesting animations can help your business a lot.

This is especially true if your animations align with your brand, present your offer in an eye-catching way and make your visitors smile as they see them. The goal is to get the attention without distracting from the main goal of your site.

In fact, we believe that animations will become so prevalent, that they will go far beyond the homepage, and will be used to evoke emotions and increase conversions in pop-ups, slide-ins, and many other marketing elements on your site.

7. Illustrations or High-Quality Images

The general increase in the quality of images used across professional websites has been clearly visible over the past few years already. 2019 with see the proceeding “death” of low-quality, out-of-place and ridiculous stock photos.

Instead, companies will try to leverage high-quality, realistic images and custom-designed illustrations to strengthen their brand and grab the attention of their visitors. And many of those that will be using faces or photos of real people, will use that of their customers or employees, instead of those of random online stock photo characters.

By using unique, never-seen-before graphics, you instantly make the brand stand out, what makes it a lot more memorable and trustworthy. Check out our branding section to see a few examples of how we used these principles in practice.

8. Breaking the Website Design Rules

While this trend hasn’t been discussed as widely as the other ones, at Brandwill, we believe the next big thing will be to go against the crowd and break the unspoken rules of website design. As Homam Alojail, our Agency Creative and Managing Director puts it:

“I believe that with the constantly rising numbers of businesses advertising online, website designers, and with them, their clients, will need to break the rules and look for new ways of differentiating the offer. Only then will they be able to catch the attention of impatient visitors who are constantly overloaded with information.”

These are not the only trends that will shape the website design space throughout the 2019 and beyond. But we believe that, considering the ever-growing competition in almost any industry possible, the two things every business owner should focus on is creating a strong, memorable brand and increasing conversion rates. The rules can be bent, as long as the result is beneficial to the business.

By helping your visitors remember your site and building trust as early as possible, you increase the chance that they’ll share your brand with their friends and colleagues. And by boosting your conversion rates, you can effectively lower your cost per acquisition of new customers, what’s essential if you want to increase your profits and keep growing your business in the highly competitive environment. Ready to take your website design to the next level? Find out what we can do for you and let’s get in touch!

July 25, 2018

Brandwill

The search engine optimization game has become more competitive than ever before. Blasting low-quality links at your site and writing thin, keyword-stuffed content won’t take you anywhere anymore. The rules are changing every year, and so should your optimization strategy. What are the things to keep an eye on in 2019?

Battle for Clicks – Skyrocket that CTR!

Because the number of businesses ranking for the same keywords as you do keeps increasing, you need to do everything to win as many clicks as possible. One of the easiest ways of doing that is adding schema structure data – which will soon become an industry-standard. In fact, as you can see in the below image, it has already happened for some keywords – but it’s no surprise, as it helps both Google and your potential visitors understand what your site is about.

By using structured data together with well-optimized meta-tags, you can create irresistible invitation to your website that will bring you lots of clicks even if you don’t rank in the first position for your chosen search query. Keep in mind that it is believed that a high click-through rate is seen by Google as an indication of high relevancy – what can help you further boost your organic position.

Voice Search – Add Those Natural Long Tail Keywords

Voice search has been on the increase for the past few years. It is now believed half of all searches will be performed using voice by 2020. And yet, despite rising popularity and little time to adjust, still many businesses fail to use the technology to their advantage.

The key to benefiting from voice search is to understand the intent of your users, anticipate potential questions from your customers and use longtail keywords to help them find you. In the end, we are used to asking questions using full sentences – which means that you should be as natural and helpful in your content as possible. How to find those neat longtail keywords?

You don’t need anything else other than a typical keyword research. On top of working with the standard keyword tools, make sure to check Google Trends and try to think like your potential clients who could be on the go and in a hurry or sitting comfortably in their living room, talking to a smart speaker.

User Experience – Put Your Visitors First

if you have been neglecting user experience up until this moment, let us show you one statistic that should change your mind – it is estimated that a staggering 88% of online users are unlikely to return to a site after a bad user experience. It’s no surprise then that Google has started putting such a strong emphasis on UX when reviewing your site’s search engine optimization efforts.

Loading speed, clear call to actions, online chat, convenient menu and breadcrumbs, compelling graphics and easy to understand (and relevant!) content are the key elements to ensuring that your site visitors enjoy the time spent on your site, establish a relationship with your business, and buy your product or use your services.

What’s critical here is that when it comes to user experience and SEO, they no longer should be taken care of separately. In fact, UX has become an integral part of search engine optimization, especially if you consider the aforementioned user intent and voice search.

Considering how important is the user experience in today’s digital environment, Homam Alojail, our Agency Creative and Managing Director believes that soon user experience will be on a par with (or even overtake) price and product as the critical online brand differentiators. This is also why all of our branding and design services put such a high emphasis on user experience.

Image Search – Optimize Everything

Because search engine results are becoming more crowded than ever before, you need to look for every possible venue that could bring you extra organic traffic. Especially that, it’s no longer possible to use that many keywords on a single page if you want to avoid over-optimization penalty.

One of the best ways of sneaking in a few extra keywords and potentially generating organic visitors is a proper image optimization. That’s why it’s so important to use images on all of your pages – whether it’s a landing page or a blog post – as on top of helping your SEO efforts, they make your content more user-friendly.

The number of people that use Google image search is increasing, and yet it’s still a pretty untapped way of attracting new potential customers to your site. Naturally, don’t try to stuff too many keywords in the tags – make sure that your title, alt, and description tags are natural and properly describe the contents of the image.

Keep in mind that tags are just a part of how you should prepare your images before you put them on your website. Another important thing is their size. Luckily, tools such as TinyPNG can reduce their size in seconds, without affecting the quality.

Mobile – It’ll Remain a Priority

Even though desktop searches didn’t die out (in fact, considering that we still use laptops and desktops for work and entertainment, they aren’t going anywhere soon) the majority of searches is now performed using mobile devices. But the prevalence of mobile searches is not the only reason why you should double check if your mobile website is properly optimized.

People are so used to browsing the internet on their smartphones that today 85% of adults (read: potential customers) believe that the mobile site should be at least as good (or even better) than the desktop one. In fact, 52% of users admit that a bad mobile experience was the reason they were less likely to engage with the business.

It could be that these statistics were one of the reasons behind Google decision to start rolling out Mobile-First Indexing. The shift in algorithm means that Google now crawls your mobile website first, before deciding if it’s going to look at its desktop version. What’s even worse is that if they don’t like the former, they might not even visit the latter at all.

How to ensure that you won’t get affected? Naturally, its speed remains the number one thing your visitors will look at – but convenient menu, lack of mobile-responsiveness errors and the ability to perform the same operations as on desktop are just as important.

Machine Learning – Google Knows More than Ever Before

Thanks to machine learning and the ongoing development of artificial intelligence, Google is becoming more and more effective at answering difficult queries – even those that have never been asked before. This also helps the algorithm better understand the intent and expectations of its users – which means that even complex queries are providing much better results than they used to.

Luckily, you don’t have to worry about AI taking your site out of search engine results. As long as you always put your website visitors first – something that Google has been preaching for years now. This means that to make your site competitive in the ever-changing environment, you need to master more variables than ever before.

The good news is, by merging our UX experience with the SEO expertise of our team members, we know exactly what to do to design an SEO-friendly website both Google and your customers will love. Visit this page to learn more about it and reshape the online image of your brand.