If you’re in B2B sales, a website serves as your digital business card to which potential customers will navigate verifying legitimacy and more. Don’t lose business because you’re not online. These are our top 5 features to increase conversion instantly with your small business website.

Use Reliable Hosting with Tech Support

Before getting started on your website, hire affordable and reliable website hosting services. Professional website hosting services ensure around-the-clock protection, while you focus on your brand and offering. Website hosting service providers worry about web elements like speed, backup assistance, tech support, SSL certificates, dashboards, email connectivity, and so much more, as an all-encompassing service. If you have no idea or only half of an idea of the aforementioned means, you need a website hosting provider.

All-in-one hosting integrates all elements of your website under one roof.

Website hosting service providers also assist with website development. Website development by professionals can be the difference between low-budget and low-quality engagement versus smart websites built and designed to elevate your digital brand. In this way, should things go down or go haywire like Rogers, who temporarily went down across the globe, you will have immediate service before it causes significant interruptions or losses. Although large-scale events like this are rare, a small business can lose impactful business when customers can’t access purchase pages and more.

Get a Content Manager System

Content management systems or CMS are applications to create, edit, and publish content throughout a website. CMS tools include application systems like WordPress, Magento, SquareSpace, Wix, and many more. These application tools allow you to add a variety of plugins and features like counters, blog posting, digital media, an online store, and other engaging and fun features.

We personally love WordPress and help customers achieve original and highly personalized websites using this platform. Firstly, WordPress is open-sourced meaning original code and more are made available and free to users across the globe. If you build a website with the intention of seeking new managers in the future, they will be able to gain access to your small business website and navigate seamlessly. WordPress provides easy solutions to grow your business online and is very secure. Identify the digital experience you’re looking to convey for your small business website to leverage the right content management system.

Engaging Interfaces Elevate your Website

The point at which users or potential customers engage with your website is called an interface. To create a great user interface, you need to combine beautiful design, information, and interaction into one smooth experience. Smooth experiences start with great layouts that meet your branding goals while simultaneously inspiring potential customers to buy. Follow Hick’s Law to ensure fewer stimuli that distract, straightforward features, and optimal design that stands out.

Build engagement to increase your bottom line.

Expert web designers will implement Hick’s Law alongside key design principles when creating your website. We get it, this sounds complicated – it’s not. Design strategy, laws of stimuli and choices, and seamless integration simply mean your website needs to provide optimal choices in an interesting way that allows potential customers to get from learning about products to buying them, easily. Users depend on you to create easy and fast experiences. A great interface transforms your small business’s simple website into a trusted digital source.

Get to Know SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an amazing yet simple tool you can implement throughout your website using words. Keywords and key statements attract Googlers who may be searching for the exact thing stated throughout your website’s page name, headers, slugs, and throughout your content.

SEO is a free tool that anyone can implement throughout their website using paid sources like ahrefs and Moz to research your market. With millions of pages flooding Google, it’s not enough to include simple words, you need the right words and full statements to ensure your website is “clicked.” If you’re looking to expand reach beyond your current client base using your small business website, search engine optimization (SEO) can help you capture potential customers on their terms, organically.

Website Maintenance Matters

Ongoing maintenance is crucial to the performance and security of your website. Website maintenance and support include services and products that run your site without worry. Maintenance support features to look for include site backups, CMS updates, SPAM monitoring, PHP and server monitoring, security monitoring, and other additions like theme and plugin updates.

Security support and maintenance keep you and your customers safe when making purchases online and more.

In the random event that something goes wrong or your server becomes breached, professional maintenance plan providers are there fixing the problem before it affects your brand. The last thing your business needs is faulty passwords or platforms that can be easily targeted for malicious ware. Your customers will thank you. Creating a small business website platform where customers are safe to use credit card details, location information, and passwords is paramount to your digital business.

Don’t discount a seamless and well-designed small business website for your brand. Whether you offer B2B services through word-of-mouth or niche-industry B2C products, you can benefit from reliable hosting, content management, engagement, SEO, and helpful maintenance support.

Contact our team today to learn more about our comprehensive support and maintenance service. We offer valuable website hosting to help every big or small business website create buzz and new business.

The post Top 5 Features for a Superior Small Business Website appeared first on MYC Interactive.

When you hear the words “email marketing,” the first thought that usually comes to mind is SPAM. We all get suckered into those promo emails that never seem to deliver anything more than strategically hidden unsubscribe buttons. That’s not what we’re talking about!

Email is still one of the most widely used forms of communication. In fact, 3.9 billion people use email every day. Once more, over 73% of millennials prefer to use it out of all modes of digital communication. This means email marketing, good email marketing, is important and has a massive audience to leverage.  These are our top email marketing best practices to get you back into email marketing, the right way.

Share your Brand’s Personality

If you’re at the stage of researching email marketing best practices, you likely have a business model, products and services, as well as a solid customer base. That’s great! But, when it comes to email marketing, getting to know your business involves a bit more digging. Email marketing is your chance to get personal with customers and getting personal involves sharing your personality. I guess that’s obvious, but what isn’t obvious to customers is what makes your business tick.

Ask yourself, what topics showcase your brand’s personality within the vicinity of your product or service offering? For example, if you sell tea, perhaps sharing your favourite calming techniques or books might help attract customers near your target audience. This gives you a chance to appeal to new customers while maintaining intrigue among your current fans.

Get on your Customer’s Level

To best connect with your target audience, you must speak to consumers on their level. Use language and ideas that appeal to your niche audience. If you’re looking to make waves in high-brow literary communities and your audience likes facts and details, avoid colloquialisms or trendy fads. Your audience must perceive your newsletter as a valuable source of information that they either read immediately or enjoy reading when they’re available. This rule applies to any niche industry.

If you’re writing about events and parties to audiences under the age of 25, headers and taglines that read like text messages are a great way to capture attention. Honestly, I’m serious!! Speaking your customer’s language is key to your email marketing best practices. It can make the difference between SPAM-and-unsubscribe versus that FOMO-and-read-more feeling.

Create Engagement Opportunities

There are many popular news sources that use email marketing to drive traffic – and they’re successful. If your goal is to increase business and build a stronger client base, develop content that creates digital interaction. Embed videos, polls, and promoting opportunities to have customers’ ideas shared in your newsletter are all valuable tools.

Think of email marketing engagement as a feedback-and-feedforward system. Your customers rely on you for valuable information and you rely on customers to confirm whether your content is of value. You can leverage this to your advantage by allowing customers to be heard and included. When providing engagement opportunities, be sure to be concise and get to the point quickly. Avoid arduous reads with your final sentence serving as the value statement.

When it comes to dated ideas on email marketing best practices, the common condenses is that it’s SPAM and isn’t effective. As expert content writers and digital strategists, we can tell you that this is misleading. Sure, bad email marketing is annoying and no one wants anything to do with it. On the other hand, great email marketing builds relationships and helps foster new business. What great tools do you use for your email marketing best practices? Email us at ideas@mycmedia.com to share and be featured on our next post.

The post Your Expert Email Marketing Best Practices Guide appeared first on MYC Interactive.

1. Select topics your audience wants to read.

This goes hand-in-hand with knowing your audience. You should always know who you are writing for. Once you’ve determined that, determine your topic. Think about your target audience and write information that appeals to who you would like to attract to your business. If you are attracting experts to your B2B e-commerce platform, share content writing that explores niche industry topics that may not be known to the general public, but draws in your professional consumers.

On the other hand, if you are a B2C service or product retailer, writing about technical elements of what you do may not always appeal. Sharing the latest trends, products, special prices, promotions, seasonal events, popular culture, internal changes, or topics that pertain to a buyers’ experience may be more beneficial to you. Make room for trial and error and get to know your readers.

2. Use headers and subheadings that turn heads.

One of the many ways Google targets keywords online is through headers and subheadings used throughout your content writing and long-form posts. Ensure your headers are working for you by implementing the right keywords that match common terms being searched online. This sounds easy, and it is in a sense but involves a bit of back-end work to make sure the words you select and implement capture your ideal client base. Think: if it’s not helping me grow my business, it’s wasting my time.

If you’re a blogger who writes to let off some personal steam, you do you; but, if you’re a small business owner looking to make it, make those headers work for you! In addition to keywords that match your target audience and content theme, think about powerful words, phrases, and sentimental statements that entice readers to click on your posts. When combined, you create dynamic headings and subheadings can help increase engagement.

3. Research! Research? No, really. Research.

It’s important to know your topic well, to write well.

Getting to know your topic is the best way to ensure you write robust information. In fact, the more you research using great sources, the easier it is to write great content.  In the instance you are an expert, don’t let your ego get in the way of fact-checking. You would be surprised how easy it is to inaccurately remember small details that can cause readers to lose trust should you misstate small points.

This includes dates, locations, names, historical references, quotes, and all those tip-of-the-tongue facts that you know, but don’t know, you know? Research builds trust in your brand and can help increase traffic simply because customers may look to you for answers following great blog content writing. And blogging is all about building familiarity, ongoing engagement, and trust. In summary, although research takes time, it will decrease your writing process down and increase valuable engagement.

4. Include images and multimedia in your blog posts.

Although this image uses a book to represent writing, it doesn’t say a lot about this blog.

Images and video create an interactive experience for fans reading through your curated content writing. Select stock photos, images, and videos that emphasize your topic and select those that add value to your content writing. Make sure your images help tell a visual story, guiding readers through their reading journey. The same rules apply when using video. If discussing a topic or response based on a video, include the video in your post or if you’re promoting new products, share a lively pomo video.

A great feature of videos and images that help serve your content’s back-end visibility, is in their name. By naming images and video appropriately with keywords and descriptions, you increase your rankings on Google. Every little bit helps, and if you’re in the beginning stages of content development, this is a great small but mighty technique to use.

5. Edit your content writing

Spelling, grammar, and paragraph structure aid in easily digested content writing. We’ve all seen random spelling mistakes throughout posts, and unlike your high school essay, misspelled words are not the end-all of your work – unless they’re a keyword. There are many tools you can download directly to your computer, like Grammarly, that help new writers avoid small spelling mistakes. Beyond minor spelling infractions, ensure your post reads well. Maintain the basic structure of any writing piece, which is a beginning, middle, and end.

Structure your information so that everything you intend to say, is stated. Never include new information in your conclusion, but avoid repeating identical statements as written throughout your body and intro. Have fun with your content writing and be yourself, but be sure to edit. Polished content writing distinguishes between professionals and novices.

Content writing takes time and, for many, is a drag when implementing into their marketing strategy. Our above tips will help you write better, with a bit more ease, and all while ensuring an increase in engagement that promotes brand trust.

The post 5 Amazing Content Writing Tips to Increase Engagement appeared first on MYC Interactive.

What is e-commerce?

We live in a competitive digital world and 2020 to 2021 has been no exception. We have seen measurable changes in e-commerce use with an unexpected increase over the past year. Although e-commerce has surpassed trajectories causing massive brands to close their brick and mortar shops in recent years, staying indoors by government mandates has increased e-commerce beyond what anyone would have imagined. This leaves no room for error. Businesses must get online to survive and, as digital branding becomes increasingly innovative, the competition is ferocious.

You can implement expert e-commerce that uplifts customer engagement. 

So, what is e-commerce? E-commerce is a simple model that establishes buying and selling exchanges through an internet platform and includes B2C and B2B engagements. With a multitude of free analytical tools online to help business owners sell products and services, you’d think platforms have established foolproof e-commerce strategies to help businesses be successful with little investment. If everyone is looking to use the same free tools, the same free templates, models, and “modern”  interfaces, you can expect shoppers to navigate to your competition who may be investing in profound innovation that sets them apart. We have gathered some of the hottest e-commerce trends of 2021 to help you navigate these unusual times with a bit more clarity into your digital branding and online offering.

E-commerce & SEO

Let’s get back to basics. When people ask us, “what is e-commerce and how do I get started” we always start with the basics to help explore why and how it all works. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the most powerful and simple tool to get potential customers to visit your website, web pages, and, potentially, convert.

Reach customers with strategic social media.

SEO works by using keywords that internet goers may naturally use when searching for a product or service to find what they are looking for. Your website may be stunning – great colours, expert branding, and you might have incredible videos riddled throughout, but if your content does not contain keywords placing you at the forefront of google ranking, you’ve staged a great show, while forgetting to sell tickets. Search engine optimization (SEO) is paramount to your e-commerce platform because it drives traffic to your featured items in simple words or phrases that may be used to naturally describe your products when Googling online. If you sell beautiful pottery, nix calling it something overly complicated that’s not traditionally known to your public. This is the simplest way to put it but certainly involves a lot more work. Expert e-commerce specialists explore the back-end of your website to see what words are being captured through your website and optimize each term and phrase to ensure more optimal ones are being captured, and all so you can capture customers. There are many ways you can establish keyword ranking to get to the front page of Google and includes expert content writing, SEO strategy, website development to house it all, and more.

Social Media E-Commerce

Privacy has become a massive concern for the public and many are reluctant to use social media for obvious reasons. We completely understand your hesitation, but don’t discount social media platforms entirely when thinking of your branding and e-commerce strategy. Social media has many functions, the least of which involves sharing the contents of your breakfast. When written and posted strategically, social media can serve as backlinks that promote your website and can increase business. For example, say you post blogs you’ve written on LinkedIn and include your website, this serves as a link that redirects potential buyers to your website. The same works for other social media accounts when placed on various profile summaries and so much more. These are very small examples of backlink opportunities you can hone to garner sales through increased traffic. You can do this on your own, but remember the experts can cover all your bases without you having to research and take time away from running your brand. When getting down to the business of what is e-commerce, don’t let the waves of the future catch you in an undertow. You can do this. Better your e-commerce strategy so fans can find you and buy what you’re selling. So, what is e-commerce? It’s the online shopping experience your customers engage with. You owe it to yourself to implement the best digital marketing strategies for your customer’s e-commerce experience. Contact MYC Interactive to learn more about what is e-commerce and how we and help innovate your digital branding for increased business.

The post What is E-commerce? Great Tips for Your Business appeared first on MYC Interactive.

With multitudes of marketing companies detailing the importance of digital strategy, marketing campaigns, and other listed marketing techniques deemed “fundamental” for your business to be successful, MYC Interactive has compiled the top tried-and-tested absolutely true factors that will make the difference between good online marketing and expert online engagement for your small or large business. These are this month’s top 3 tips for better online marketing strategy your business needs.

#1 Contemplate Content

Are you content with your content strategy? Sure, you know your audience, you have set your strategy goals, and you know your brand vision better than anyone has known any vision for life and business in the history of all things branded, but can you post well?

Developing amazingly curated expert content for your social media account involves all elements of your brand – vision, services and products, and goals to create a distinct online voice or brand persona. Your business can do this through videos, engaging messaging, curated graphics, and much more. Seemingly topical, creating great content takes time exploring the unique facets of your offering with an objective lens. Do you know how first-time customers perceive your social media, website, and overall brand? This part of your marketing strategy can be tricky to navigate, but getting in touch with our team might help you better understand what you are capturing well and what you are missing for key conversion rates.

#2 Google Remarketing Ads

We get it, you want to increase engagement, get new and repeat business, and develop a digital marketing strategy that is cheap and easy. Marketing agencies aren’t like they used to be. You don’t need to be a fortune 500 company to be able to afford marketing for your business, and trust me you will want professional help.

Google Remarketing Ads help you reconnect with people who have navigated to your website, after they have exited. Google Ads are reminder tools – you’re not bombarding potential customers with unwanted advertisements; rather, you are reminding customers of the product or service they already searched for and converting them into paid business.  Did you know that Google’s display network reaches 90% of internet users worldwide, while 65% of users are reached every day? That means your business has the potential to reach over 1 billion users every month with online Google Ads.

We understand the burden of having to hire a digital marketing strategy agency struggling to figure out what you mean to say, online. At MYC Interactive, our experts were once where you are, and we are passionate about building your success through powerful marketing tools.

#3 Accessibility Features

When thinking about accessibility features, MYC Interactive’s team thinks of both online mobile device accessibility and accessibility features designed to help those with disabilities navigate the internet with ease. Ensuring your website can be viewed on any mobile device is key to increasing user engagement across platforms. In addition, accessibility features that cater to existing and new customers allow easy navigation that everyone can enjoy. We recommend every business with a functioning website have both mobile accessibility and accessibility that caters to persons with disabilities to engage all future businesses.

Our team believes in the success of your business by offering the best in website development, content writing, and marketing strategy to meet the unique needs of your brand. Without the right tools to propel your business forward, your expertise will become sidelined by the competition. You conduct your business better than anyone! Don’t lose out to the competition due to better strategy and engagement. Get in touch with our team to learn more about how we can tailor our offering to meet the needs of your specialized small or large business.

The post 3 Tips for better Online Marketing Strategy appeared first on MYC Interactive.

Frequently Asked Questions about Local SEO

Ranking and optimizing your business to appear among the top Search Engine is complex, but we try to simplify the process by sharing the most important KPIs and marketing strategies that can truly help you reach your target audience. In this blog, we discuss Frequently Asked Questions about Local SEO and provide a brief outline of how to incorporate local SEO in your marketing strategy.

Is local SEO really important?

Stats: 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information. (Source: GoGulf) and 97% of people learn more about a local company online than anywhere else. (Source: SEO Tribunal)

Local SEO

I am interested. But, What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is a common SEO practice to improve the website to rank higher in local search queries.

Why do you need Local SEO?

Local SEO is highly important if you are a storefront, you are looking to get found locally or if you have a target area.

How do we incorporate Local SEO in our marketing strategy?

Keyword research and targeting on your website. By looking at the image below, you will observe when a person in Mississauga is looking for coffee near them, they get search engine results from local businesses before they are given. These listings appearing before the organic search results are a feature of Google’s snack pack. So, are you interested in becoming a top-lister and dominate your local SERP ranking?

We can show you how to achieve local search engine results through Local SEO,

with these steps:

1. You should register your business with Google My Business and optimize it by entering your complete data, verifying your location, updating your business page gallery, and posting frequently. We advise adding relevant products and categories, tagging images with relevant keywords. Higher reviews and engagement with customers can offer you the competitive advantage you need to achieve a higher rank in the search engine results.
2. Getting Local Citations for your business help your local audience discovers you easily and impacts your local search engine ranking. Register yourself in industry and location-specific platforms. They can be professional groups or business directories. The more citations you have, the more accurate your business seems to have. The quality of citations also affects the authority of your website.
3. Enhancing your website by improving interlinks, ensuring you create local content, and that your business name, contact, and address remain consistent online. Local Keyword Research can help you incorporate your Local SEO strategy into your structured data. For example, as a digital marketing agency, our local SEO will focus on keywords like SEO company Mississauga.
4. Leveraging Social Media with local content and engagement. This active presence can help your audience reach out to you and support you with positive testimonials and reviews.

MYC Interactive is a full-service digital marketing agency providing web development, hosting, SEO, Social media, e-mail marketing, and other digital services.

 [/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

The post Local SEO appeared first on MYC Interactive.

Looking back on our experience with numerous social media strategies and tools, we have realized there are so many answers out there, but it always starts with these three primary questions when you are crafting a social media strategy:

The three Social Media Questions to build your Social Media Strategy With:

1) Content Creation: What content to deliver (topic, keywords, image, post, blog, video), When and Where?

2)  Content Curation: How to engage with my audience? (Reposts, Retweets, Replies, etc.)

3) Investment/Divestment: What social media channels, influencers, third parties, partners to leverage?

In this blog, we present the answer to these questions by offering you a brief guideline and set of tools for your social media strategy.

To answer the first question, the question of Content Creation, as a marketer you need to analyze and arrive upon the key content that resonates with your audience the most.

For this, you can use research tools like

Moz: The SEO software and data to help you increase traffic, rankings, and visibility in search results. The tool offers you backlink data and keyword trends along with SEO recommendations to improve your website. Moz helps you understand the key content you are ranking for and offers you keyword suggestions to improve your keyword strategy. Aligning your social media strategy with these keywords can help you offer relevant content your audience can engage with.

Answer the public: A keyword tool that visualizes search questions and suggested autocomplete searches in an image called a search cloud. Understanding the search queries for your audience can help you deliver the information and content your audience is looking for. Using the Search Console can also help you to understand which search queries lead your audience to you.

Google Trends: A tool to analyze the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages.

You can also take a holistic look at your social media to see what works for you through tools like

Keyhole: Keyhole is a social marketing tool useful for both, new as well as old businesses. You can conduct marketing research on the volume of mentions, engagements, and impressions their topics keywords bring.

For example, a cake shop or bakery would be interested in knowing who their key influencers are, what content does the audience engages with the most, and what times are the most effective ones for their social media engagement. Keyhole can be used to understand the most linked websites around a given topic, engagement by gender, devices, location, and sentiment.

If you are already doing all of the above and are on the top of the social media food-chain, with consistent impressions and engagement from your audience, you would like leveraging their sentiment by connecting with them. Brand loyalty increases when you engage with audiences in creative and unique ways.

And, this would lead you to your second question: Content Curation.

It isn’t always important to conjure something up from thin air when you are looking to engage your audience, often, your audience will tell you.

And, you can hear them using the social listening tool, Brand24 and engaging with your audience. A similar tool to Mention, we prefer it due to its capability of offering up to 50k mentions via their Plus Subscription. We recommend making that decision as per your needs.

Brand24 is a tool that gives you real-time data, daily and weekly reports to track brand mentions across social, news, blogs, videos, forums, reviews, and more.

This is what Burger King’s marketing department would be keeping track of every week.

And, this is how they can leverage it.

You can observe despite no direct mention of the brand, which would have sent them an alert; Burger King was not only able to find the message, but also, engage in a personal way. Thus, increasing your scope by keeping an eye on product names, competitor’s mentions, as well as common misspellings, can make engaging with your more effective.

As you go on to perfect your brand voice and master social media, you will soon understand that it is just the tip of an iceberg. One day, you will feel like the Content King. You are targeting the right audience at the right time with the right content. Next, you are scratching your head and wondering why you are not able to bring conversions to your website.

Understanding your social media effectiveness will help you decide whether to invest/divest more time and resources in each of your social media activities.

The answer to this lies in your Google Analytics.

In your analytics account, choose Acquisition-Social Overview to observe what social sources bring you the most audience, which social mediums lead to the maximum audience and online conversions, which social interactions contribute to the conversions on your website via Assisted Conversions.

We do recommend overlapping this data with conversions and revenue streams. For example, if you are an e-commerce brand promoting a category of your product line for example pants, you would want to look at the conversions paths that have led the audience.  This would involve targeting the segment of your audience that has shown interest, made a purchase, visited the category over the past months.

Stay in the loop. Follow us on our social media. Next week, we talk about how you can navigate through Google Analytics to create your own custom goals and events to define conversions on e-commerce and non-e-commerce websites.

The post Top 3 Social Media Questions appeared first on MYC Interactive.

If you haven’t read our article on “What is Web Design“, we suggest you give it a quick read so you can understand the scope of this article. In that article we explain what a web design is and how it does not mean the same thing as web development or equate referring to a whole web project. A website is like a marriage – web design being one part while the other half being web development.

Most people, when referring to a web project, say web design by default. However, now that you understand what a web design is (or is not), we hope to help you understand what a web developer is and when you need web developers versus when you need web designers.

“A WEBSITE IS LIKE A MARRIAGE – WEB DESIGN BEING ONE PART WHILE THE OTHER HALF BEING WEB DEVELOPMENT”

WEB DEV EXPLAINED

Web development is the part of the web equation that no body aside from the web developer (or web developers) see(s). They are the underdogs of a website project as the only part of a website you can really see is the visual design of the site. However, if you pay more attention as you browse through the pages of a website, you will notice the workings of the web development process. Have you ever gotten frustrated that a page isn’t loading properly, or that a function on the website isn’t working or performing as intended? Maybe you’ve been impressed by how the web page loads or makes you feel like you are actually in an application that doesn’t load any pages. Maybe you’ve seen or experience something amazing that makes the website enjoyable to use. Without realizing it, you have been affected (positively or negatively) by the art of web development.

What is Web Development

Web development is the process of taking a web design that is a static visual file, and translating what you see into an non-static platform that a client can interact with. They are created using web dev languages such as HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, PHP and many more frameworks and libraries of these languages. These “languages” have specific rules (called syntax) as to how to write out a website. This process is commonly referred to as coding a website. In the process of becoming web developer, they often study multiple languages to leverage the power and versatility of multiple web development languages to create jaw-dropping functionality that makes the web design come to life.

Web Development Examples

It is difficult to show you examples of web development as easily as showing a web design because web design is visual while web development is functional. If you have browsed the internet, you already have a underlying understanding of what what development could be. It is what makes the website work and come to life.

To show you how the back-end of a web dev project looks like, take the following instances of some HTML5 and CSS3 code that is written on the back-end of a web site, following with the result of what it would actually look like on a web page:

[html]
<div class="blueBox">
<h1 class="testHeading">Heading</h1>
Some Text to follow the heading

<button class="button">Some Button</button>

</div>
[/html]

[css]
.blueBox button.button {
background: white;
border: none;
padding: 1%;
color: #2b6fb7;
}

.blueBox h1.testHeading {
color: white;
font-weight: bold;
}
.blueBox {
background-color: #2b6fb7;
padding: 1%;
box-sizing: border-box;
color: #efefef;
}
[/css]

Makings of a Website

You can see how wanting to show a simple heading, paragraph and button consists of writing 24 lines of code. When you hire a web developer or a digital marketing agency such as us, you can see how much work is involved in a web development project to get your web design translated into a website that functions and looks how you would like it too look. Understanding the difference in separating web design and web development is key in a successful web development project. Equipped with the tools that we have informed you with regarding these differences, you now know how to interact with your web designer or web developer and know what to expect from them. Showing you these processes, we also hope help users and clients appreciate the work that goes into making a website specific to their needs. It’s not as simple as dragging boxes around on a screen, but involves knowledge of an art that is often not appreciated.

The post What is Web Development appeared first on MYC Interactive.

With the increased popularity of the internet, websites have become an almost-standard marketing tool. Because of it’s increased popularity, like anything when it becomes noticed, people have started to use terms such as “web design”,  “web development”, or even “responsive web design and development”. However, just because such terms such as these are becoming commonplace doesn’t mean that people who are using them know what they actually mean. Today, we’re going to be focusing on two commonly misunderstood phrases for services that are used interchangeably, while in truth they are both completely different. We will show you how web design and web development are two sides of the same coin – they can not exist without the other.

“Web Design and Web Development are Two Sides of the Same Coin… They Can Not Exist Without the Other”

Web Design Explained

Often times when people use the phrase web design they are referring to the full process of creating a website – all the way from research, wire-framing, mock-ups, coding, testing and completion. Who can blame them? When you see a website you are immediately greeted with visuals that are made to try and grab your attention (at least they are meant to). You don’t hear a user say “What amazing functionality” as they visit a web page. Instead, you would hear things like “What a great looking page!” or “These pictures are beautiful!”. Because that is all that an average user knows about a website – how the design looks – they associate the terms, “website design”, with the complete service of making a website. They don’t see the code that is used to make the website come to life, or the server hosting the code so that people can view the site from their own computers. They mistake a web design company to be a digital marketing agency, or a web design to be a full website project.

The Role of a Web Designer

As professionals in the industry, it is our responsibility to help clients differentiate between the design and the development aspects of a website project. A web designer is someone who understands your brand and comes up with the design elements that make up the visual part of the website that a user sees. The visual part of the website is whatever the user sees on the web page. Pretty easy and straight-forward right? In a nutshell, a website design is a complete visual “outline” of how your website will look once a web developer works on it. During this phase, it is very common to have placeholder text or images on the webdesign if content hasn’t been finalized for the website. This is so that a client can still see a near-finished version of how the website will look when it has final content that it is populated with.

To come up with this visual representation of how your website should look, the designer usually goes through the following process to come up with a design for your website:

• Conduct a creative brief with the client to understand the brand
  • Ask about the brand and it’s history / reason for creating the brand
  • Ask about brand guidelines (if any) such as colors, fonts and any other rules to follow
  • Ask about the desired look and feel of the website
  • Ask about custom elements that are absolutely needed to design a UI (user interface) for it / them.
• Research the brand
• Research the competition
• Meet with UX Design team and understand the wire-frame structure of the website for marketing strategy of the website
• Design a visual mock-up of the website design as a flat jpeg or pdf on software after gathering previous information
• Work with the client for any modifications to the webdesign before moving on to the next step – web development.

The Website Design

The actual design of the website is a visually summation of all the research and information that the web designer has gathered during the creative brief, UX (user experience) understanding and personal research time. All that information is used to create a vision of what the designer has in mind for how he feels the website should look to help portray the brand best. Because information is so easily available through various means such as mobile apps or search engine requests, web designers will often scour the internet to look for a web design inspiration from other professionals in the industry to get an idea for what is available out there, and how they can use some of that inspiration in their own specific web design projects.

During this phase, it is very important that a client understands that the webdesign is just a mock-up and template of how the final website will look once it enters the web development phase of a website project. All the information on the web design is not always complete or correct. Quite frequently, designers will use placeholder text or placeholder images to populate the design with some sort of content so it doesn’t look empty. The reason web designers follow this procedure is because content writers or marketing teams don’t always have textual content or graphics finalized during the web design phase of a project. They usually go through several severe changes for optimal marketing effect. However, the web design work can not be kept on hold until this content is finalized, so in order to still provide a mock-up to a client, placeholder information is a great way to populate the areas of the webdesign where content will eventually be so that a client still gets the effect of what something will look like when the final content is populated.

Example Web Design Mock-up

Website designs can be extremely simple or complex, depending on the scope of the project and client that you are working with. A simple design can show how the web designer envisions the landing page to look like, while a more complex web design mock-up can include more elements such as design of the page on a desktop as well as mobile devices, designs of elements such as buttons and forms, and a storyboard of web page designs that show how a user flows through the different pages of the website as they would navigate it once the website is developed. This is what an extremely simple webdesign mock-up looks like:

IT’S NOT A WEBSITE … YET

Hopefully you are able to tell so far that all that a website design is is a a image or PDF of what the live website will look like once it is in the development stages. You can not test how the site will work, or click any elements. You can go to a URL to interact with the site or browse it’s pages like you would when a website is live. It is just a visual file of how the website will eventually be. Once a web design is approved by the client, it moves on to the web development phase of the project. Explaining web development is outside the scope of this article, so if you want to learn more about it, please go here to read more about web development and how it’s different from web design.

However, all we wanted to do was to drive the point home that the web design is not a website. It’s how a website will look. Now that you understand what a web design is and what a web designer does, you can know how to talk with and understand the lingo of digital marketing agencies. Don’t mistake or confuse a website design for a website. It’s only a part of the website building process, but not another word for the process.

The post What is Web Design appeared first on MYC Interactive.