Tim Ash
Beginning now, we are introducing a weekly post recognizing top Internet marketers for their contributions. Our goal is to help business owners, marketing managers and others gain a broader understanding of the marketing landscape as it exists today.
These are the thinkers and pioneers in online marketing. They’re the people we pay attention to and learn from, while we develop cutting edge technologies of our own. Hopefully, in learning a bit about them, you’ll be inspired to take your own marketing efforts to ever greater heights.
I first learned of Tim Ash in 2007 when I read his book, Landing Page Optimization. By then, I already had several years of digital marketing experience behind me—especially SEO and conditional messaging, and sales-pipeline kinds of activities.
In the 2-3 years prior, I had begun formulating my own ideas about how marketing, especially online, was more of a statistical exercise than an artistic one. It was Tim Ash’s book that solidified my thinking, and gave words to what had previously been vague ideas and thoughts.
Even today, I recommend Landing Page Optimization to all of our newly hired Internet Marketers at OCG. Around here, Landing Page Optimization is referred to simply as “the book.” Save for the expected evolutions in available technologies, “the book” is a relevant today as it was in 2007.
Tim Ash is the President & CEO of a company called Site Tuners, a CRO (conversion rate optimization) firm that works with large organizations to ensure the highest possible ROI for their online efforts.
His Ph.D. studies were in Neural Networks and A.I., and he has a Master’s degree in computer science…. So, enough said about qualifications.
In many ways, we build and utilize landing pages the way we do today, because of the effort of Tim Ash back in the 1990s. I was an Internet Marketer at that time, working with some of the very first companies engaged in this new concept, e-commerce. That was before Google, and the search leaders were companies like HotBot, Inktomi and Ask Jeeves!
To imagine someone like Tim, with the foresight to analyze consumer behavior at a time where we were just focused on getting our SSL connections to work is amazing to me. It’s also humbling.
So, thank you, Mr. Ash. You’re an inspiration to me, and a great resource for our company.
If you’d like to learn more about Tim Ash, visit http://sitetuners.com/about/management/tim-ash/.
Effective internet marketing for any business often starts with SEO, that is, Search Engine Optimization. Google is constantly updating its search algorithms in order to connect customers to the most relevant results. This can make it difficult for small, local businesses to stand out among the top pages. Local SEO services provide a way for physical businesses to improve their online website rankings. By branding your company to a specific location, you become visible and relevant to customers in your area. Targeted keywords and educational content help boost businesses among the top ranks.This roots you into a community and connects you to an ideal local customer. Local SEO services typically include the following:
Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Safari use keywords to link potential customers with websites. Keyword research is one of the most valuable steps in your SEO process. In order to have effective keywords they need to:
Consistent content like blogs can be the key to a company’s success. Targeted content or blog posts can drive shares on social media as well as traffic to your website. Here are other ways that good content can boost your business:
Ultimately, your website is where you want leads to end up. It’s where their journey to conversion continues. If you aren’t getting traffic to your website, or are seeing a high level of bounces, your website may need to be optimized for local searches. These services will help increase your traffic and conversion rates:
OCG Creative is here to help with any of your SEO and Reno web design needs. Call us, we’ll answer your questions. 775.324.1644
For those unfamiliar with local SEO services (Search Engine Optimization) it is worth taking time to define and explain the diffe
rences between local and global SEO, especially within the context of Google My Business and its relationship to local searches.
Large scale search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo perform countless searches each day, but have you ever considered how these search engines prioritize and display this information back to users? Did you know that given the right information, your local or small business could consistently appear as one of these top positions? When a potential customer searches for goods or services, your name could be made to appear at the top of list through the use of targeted keywords and relevant content designed to educate.
Local SEO is just that - local. This is important for local or regional businesses that operate within a targeted and specific city or region. Local search engine optimization allows for the use of targeted and specific keywords that focus on increasing a webpage's relevance so as to better target local customers. By comparison, global SEO (also known as international SEO) refers to the optimization for search engines on a more global or international scale. Google stores and recalls information differently from its global index than it does for local searches. Here, business and companies compete for keywords targeted to specific audiences, but without specific emphasis on physical location. While local SEO efforts center around your Google My Business profile, global organic search efforts rely on content relevance and inbound linking (backlinks), social media activity and other cues. Both forms of SEO are important, but your business size and goals will determine what resources and how much energy should be put into each.
Search engines accommodate a myriad of "near me" mobile or desktop searches. As an example, when out searching for a restaurant "near me", or similar local modifier, Google and other search engines often display convenient, mobile-optimized views of search results based not only on proximity to a given restaurant, but on its keyword and content relevance to the query. Google My Business is essentially a compact, public profile that displays your business' relevant information and is often optimized for mobile platforms. It is then incredibly important that your business interface local SEO with Google My Business to properly optimize and display information pertaining to your business's location, hours, description and relevant information. Local SEO is the process of optimizing your business' Google My Business profile, potentially drawing in more customers and simultaneously providing them with all of the relevant information they need to make an immediate buying decision. So before you do any SEO on your website, have a specific plan and strategy. Know what mix of SEO you need: global and local, what location you are targeting, who your target audience is, what your keywords and relevant information is and how all of this might be properly displayed through Google My Business. If you have further questions about local and global search engine optimization or you are unsure where to begin; we can help. OCG offers local SEO services for all types of organizations. Call us. We'd love to help. (775) 324-1644.
When you work in a web design company, in digital marketing, or in SEO, Google Algorithm updates are often a trigger for mild panic attacks. You hold your breath as you start to see the effects of the change. You cry a little if your traffic starts to tank, or you jump for joy if your traffic sees a large rise. The good news, though, is Google’s Penguin 4.0 signal change might just work as well as a meditation ritual for reducing your stress.
Google’s Penguin signal has been focused on the effects of spammy links since 2012. Like the rest of the internet, the signal has evolved a lot since its original release - and for the better. The largest complaint for prior Penguin versions was the intermittent and inconsistent penalization of bad links.
As it ran the Penguin algorithm in waves, Google only assessed and removed website penalties periodically. Meaning, if you were a site that had disavowed your bad links, you may not see any removal of your penalty for several weeks or even months down the road. Your site’s rankings, in the meantime, we're still being penalized. In your web design and content strategy, you then were stuck waiting for Google’s next wave before you saw results of the positive work you had done since the disavowal.
Painful timelines aside, Google’s older Penguin versions also implemented a one-size-fits-all policy towards spam links. If you received link penalties on one page, your entire domain was penalized in the rankings. Now this small problem, on top of the long timeline before your penalty could be removed, became a massive migraine for web design companies and strategists.
Penguin 4.0 was slowly released throughout the fall of 2016, and has now been made core to Google’s algorithm. The new release, deemed the ‘Real Time’ update, seeks to expedite the link penalty process. Operating in almost ‘real time’, Google will now assess and remove penalties for websites much more quickly. If you have a poor web design company who with many spammy links, this update may have killed your traffic. Sorry. While you previously may have been able to go for longer periods before penalties were assessed to your site, this is no longer going to fly with Google. If you have a great web design company and a solid set of credible and clean backlinks, it’s your turn to jump and cheer. Google can now reward your good behavior by quickly decreasing the rankings of sites with spammy links, thereby increasing your rankings. Free traffic without additional effort - just for doing the right thing in your web design to start with!
Penguin 4.0 also removed the one-size-fits-all policy and removed the automatic penalty to the entire domain. Now, Google will not confirm that this means only the page that the link appeared on will be penalized. But, it is likely that your entire website and rankings will not be penalized for one page with bad links. Google also has become smarter and more selective around reviewing and interpreting your links. For example, if your website is in an industry where spammy links are plentiful across competitors, rather than knocking all of these website’s rankings, Google may just decrease the weight of the links in its ranking algorithm. This is just one part of how Google has become more semantic and understanding of the subtleties of linking strategies that a web design company uses.
The trick to adapting to Google’s changes and staying on top of your rankings is often by utilizing a creative Reno web design company. With a full-time team of designers, developers, and strategists, a web design company can stay in the loop with Google’s changes. They can also keep your site and link strategy evolving with the Penguin releases. OCG Creative provides a full team to help you with Reno web design, content strategy, SEO, and ongoing internet marketing initiatives. Call us. We’d love to help. (775) 324-1644
Local SEO services provides local businesses opportunities to reach local customers using internet marketing. Local SEO aims to provide search engine visibility close to to the time of purchase. A good example might be a mobile search for "pizza." Being mobile, we know the searcher is probably on the move and hungry. As a business owner, top rankings for local searches can provide a huge boost in business. Local searches are almost always very closely aligned with user intent. In our example, the searcher wants pizza now. If you are nearby and happen to sell pizza, you'll almost certainly win the business. Local differs from global, organic SEO. Google ranks local results separately. Preference is given to websites that provide the best experience for mobile users. The foundation of your local SEO plan should be your Google My Business listing. More on that in a minute. Local SEO also includes managing online directories like Yelp, Superpages and TouchLocal. Keeping tabs on these helps you reinforce your presence in online search. It is also critical for managing your online reputation.
The first step in establishing a local plan is to make sure your Google My Business page is complete. Start with the following list:
Online reviews impact your business. While not as dire as bad reviews, having no reviews at all sends the message that your business isn't very active. The number and quantity of online reviews is generally considered a ranking factor as well. You should never create fake reviews, but your should definitely encourage happy customers to share their experiences. Most often, they'll be glad to talk about you, but aren't likely to think of it on their own.
Going through these steps will go a long way toward boosting your local search engine rankings. In reality, these local SEO tips only scratch the surface, but are nevertheless essential. If you are too busy, unsure where to begin, or are in a very competitive market, it might be time to bring in the pros. OCG offers local SEO services for all types of organizations. Call us. We'd love to help. (775) 324-1644
With the rise of digital technology, it seems that each year there's a new security breach that puts the previous year to shame, and 2016 was no exception. Except now, end-users face even bigger threats when it comes to data theft: the bad guys now have all the time and resources they need to decrypt the account passwords.
It seems to have become so common place that inevitably each of us will have at least one account/password combination that's in the wrong hands. While we can't prevent that from happening as end-users, we do have the ability to make that information outdated sooner, and thus, less useful. Good password habits are the best defense.
Over time, the bad guys have created huge dictionaries of previously cracked passwords that are used first in attempt to crack their latest cache of stolen account data. Creating longer and meaningless passwords is a good start, but as humans with limited password combinations, that's not so easy to do.
Using a password management service like 1Password does a great job of generating meaningless and difficult to crack passwords that are unique between all of your accounts. The downside is that they don't always work with every service and they usually have monthly fees.
Using a password generator utility like PWGen can be a big help. It's a free and open source utility you can run locally to have it can create lots of cryptographically-secure passwords for you to choose from with minimal effort. This type of tool makes it easy for users to ensure they have unique, secure passwords for every account that gets changed often.
With the ability of cracking software to churn through billions of guesses per second, using secure passwords by themselves isn't always enough. Using 2-factor authentication can add an additional layer of protection. This added layer requires not only a username and password to gain access to a site but also an additional piece of information like a constantly changing secret key.
Google Authenticator is a useful tool for 2FA that's widely supported among different applications and services (there are even WordPress plugins to support it like this one here). Once the application or service is configured to require a Google Authentication key, the user provides their usual username/password combination along with the randomly generated key displayed in the smart phone app for that service.
Overall, the best way to keep your passwords secure is to generate unique, randomized combinations that are cryptographically-secure. If you pair that with 2-factor authentication, you should be on your way to a much more secure password management system.
With a new year on the horizon, the OCG Creative team has collaborated to give our 2017 Digital Marketing Predictions. While the digital marketing landscape is fast-paced and ever-changing, we wanted to take a moment to pause and reflect on 2016. Here's some our best insights of what we think will be important in the upcoming year.
One of our marketing predictions for 2017 involves marketers needing to focus more on human language searches. “Digital assistant” platforms like Siri, Google Now and Cortana are increasing in popularity. For these, “voice search” is the obvious interface, but even in the search bar, Googlers are taking a more conversational tone. For some time, Google has been including a snippet at the top of the SERP (that’s search engine results page, for you non-nerds), answering direct questions like, “What is science?" SEOs are still somewhat mystified as how to reliably win that spot, but human phrasing of the search definitely plays a role. It’s not among the results for every search, but the Google Snippet will only become more common in 2017. Another one of the marketing predictions we can expect to see are that there will be constant, significant (albeit subtle) changes to the look and color scheme of Google’s SERP. The reason seems to be de-emphasizing organic rankings in favor of Adwords results. We already saw major moves in that direction throughout 2016, including some searches that only display 9 results instead of the usual 10. Finally in 2017, say goodbye to unsophisticated Internet marketing campaigns. The internet is still represents the most cost-effective, highest ROI marketing opportunities in human history. But, technology and the fierce competitive landscape have reached a point where home-brew websites without a real plan just don’t produce results like they once could. – Joe Ross, President at OCG Creative
Brand strategists will focus more on the message and less on the look. With all roads leading to “content” online, companies will need to have a better understanding of who they are, what they do, why they do it and who their perfect client is. The days of being a pretty face with no substance are gone! You better be able to back that great look up with relatable messaging. – Jill Rutherford, Vice President
If you thought 2016 was the year of mobile web, think again. 40% of Black Friday sales came via a mobile device. That's up almost 10% from the previous year. Mobile search and mobile optimization should, therefore, be a top priority for digital marketers in the year 2017. If your phone was glued to your had by now, it will be. – Mike Rollman, Sales
It seems that every year there's a new security breach that puts the previous year to shame and 2016 was no exception. One of the biggest threats facing end-users when their service provider succumbs to system data theft, is that the bad guys now have all the time and resources they need to decrypt the account passwords. It seems to have become so common place that inevitably each of us will have at least one account/password combination that's in the wrong hands. While we can't prevent that from happening as end-users, we do have the ability to make that information outdated sooner and thus less useful. Good password habits are the best defense. – Rick Ross, VP R&D
High contrast print pieces are en vogue; even the classiest printed piece will look dull if it’s slathered in one type of coating no matter how modern or bleeding edge that coating seems to be. Mix it up, add variety to the piece. Spot UV set on smooth silk adds a brilliant way to give your viewer pause as they travel across a page. But here’s the trick, don’t just place this highlight on top of a picture or text and call it a day. Rather, use negative space wisely and create imagery that adds depth to the piece with shine. Don’t know what I mean, just ask and we’ll show you. – Charles Driver, Print Manager
In 2016, we saw a trend of websites being developed with minimal content, under the notion that “people don’t read anymore.” In reality, people do in fact read online, but they are choosy about what they spend their time on. This year, it’s going to become even more important to make content mobile friendly (with headings, bolding, and keywords) so that people can scan and find important information they need. If they find what they need, then they spend the time reading it. Removing content from sites hurts rankings, because that’s the majority of the algorithm that google uses to crawl sites. – Allyson Lambert, Content Strategist
In a fast paced world, people don't have time to pick up their dry cleaning much less wait for a slow loading web page to pop up. A recent study published by Google reveals that more than 7 in 10 people browse the web on their smartphones or computers and out of those people, 71% are browsing on a smart phone. Web designers should be thinking more about the mobile experience by designing sites that collapse down to an easy to read and fast loading mobile page. Designers should be placing content strategically on the page, the use of bright colors and bold fonts are going to be a must in 2017. Bold fonts and brights colors will help guide you readers' eyes through the page faster as well as giving them the important information that they need to know. Plus bright colors and bold typography are always great design solutions that will make any website fun and modern. People browsing the web on a mobile device want an instant solution, which also means they want to get the information they need just as fast. - Chelsea Bosco & Mason Fur, Designers
It is important to interpret and analyze any trends when it comes to the marketing world. This will allow you to make marketing predictions for years to come and you be able to prepare your business for the upcoming year.
Marketing can be overwhelming for small businesses and entrepreneurs just starting out. It can be hard to know where to start. A lot of the time, we get caught up in our own heads and miss opportunities while we're waiting for the “perfect” strategy or plan to appear in front of us. The reality is, we all have the ability to create our own success. It just depends on the actions and effort we're willing to put in to get there. The same holds true for internet marketing. We get back what we put in.
"The biggest risk you can take is taking no risk at all."
Creating a great marketing strategy takes a lot more these days than just creating a post card or brochure and sending it out to a mailing list. With a whole digital landscape at our fingertips, it can be easy to get overwhelmed and not know where to start. However, don't let the overwhelm stop you. The worst thing you can do for your business is to do nothing at all. Sometimes fear can paralyze us from taking the next actionable
Whenever I start a new project, I literally keep a quote on my desk that says “Done is better than perfect.” Often times, we don’t get started on a project because we think the outcome won’t be "the way we want it." This type of thinking is flawed because we're never truly "done" with anything in life. Every living organism on earth evolves, and the same holds true for marketing campaigns.
When you don’t jump on opportunities and stay proactive, you're literally missing out on opportunities generate new business and convert leads into clients. Don’t let yourself get caught up in your head or in the "what ifs". For example, consider that you delay a website launch by seven months. Well, that’s seven months that you missed out on potential opportunities. Getting organized and staying focused on your goals will help you gain more moment with your business.
If you're wondering if I take my own advice, the answer is yes. This blog post and vlog are far from perfect and I'm hitting "publish" anyways. Why? Because I feel like the message is important and people can benefit from it. And that's the key. With marketing, you must focus on your message first, and the rest of the details will follow. Thanks for reading! For internet marketing questions, feel free to email me at allyson@ocgcreative.com.
For small business owners, the holidays can be a crazy time. Between Christmas parties, client meetings, and work events, it can be hard to keep up with the never ending tasks. However, if you want to stay competitive in your industry, it's important to maintain your productivity year round, especially if you run an online business. Remember, Google takes no breaks! This year, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite productivity hacks, so that you can spend less time getting tackled at the stores, and more time marketing your business online.
Email marketing is a powerful tool, but let’s be honest. If left unmanaged, it can clutter up your inbox faster than you can say "unsubscribe." In a pinch, you can use unroll.me, to unsubscribe to all of the unwanted emails that are flooding in during December. Getting rid of the clutter will allow you to focus on responding to important emails this holiday season.
There’s no hiding the fact that internet marketing is a lot of work. However, you don’t want to let your marketing efforts slip during the holidays. If you know you’re going to be out of town, schedule your social media posts using Hootsuite and write blog posts in advance to stay ahead of the game.
Holiday parties and family gatherings are a great place to meet new faces and discuss your business in a low pressure environment. With no pressure to sell, you can bounce ideas off people and get feedback on your website. Jot down some quick notes and return to the office to share comments with your team.
This time of year can be busy, not to mention hard on your budget. Choose selected events for your calendar, and politely decline others. Don’t forget to schedule some down time to work on important tasks and goals.
Use this time of year to craft holiday content that’s relevant to your business. Not only will it help you get into the holiday spirit, but it’ll also help you market your business at the same time and review your website analytics.
December is a great month to send an email campaign to your clients and customers. Offering holiday discounts, or simply dropping into say hello and share new content, is a great way to engage your email list and take advantage of the holiday shopping season. Schedule your campaign a week in advance to leave plenty of time for planning and implementation.
Go outside and get active! Instead of staying indoors in the cold weather, bundle up and get outside for a run or hike. Hit up the gym for some extra energy to push through tight deadlines and long projects that extend into the holiday season.
While his time of year tends to focus on consumerism, it can be refreshing to have a clean start in 2017. Use extra time off to donate unwanted belongings. Also, ask friends and family to limit spending on gifts. You’ll have a clearer mind and focus when the New Year rolls around.
It’s often a habit to put off “big tasks” for the New Year. Instead, choose one big project, such as a website launch or new blog to work on during December. Come New Year, you’ll be ahead of the game.
Balance productivity with plenty of seasonal fun. If you set aside focused time to work over breaks, say in the early mornings, then you can enjoy the rest of the day—guilt free.
I love sports! I love to play. I love to watch. I love to coach. Especially team sports. I love the camaraderie, the collaboration, the celebration. You win together. You lose together. For all these same reasons, approaching internet marketing as a team effort makes a heckuva lot of sense.
Our favorite and most successful clients are those that see the benefits of teamwork. If you’d prefer to be a spectator, we’re happy to take the ball and run with it. But, we’ll make the touchdowns much quicker if you’re running with us. Let’s face it, you know your business best, so who better to assist us with goal setting, keyword selection and content ideas? It’s our job to coach you on best practices, visitor behavior, search rankings and opportunities. Then, together we determine what our strategy is for the next play.
1.) Reno Web Design/Development: They key here is to NOT over-design or over-develop. We stay up on web trends and statistics and focus on the user experience. After all, it’s the visitors to your site that make the buying decision, not you or I.
2.) SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Research, test, analyze. Repeat. Much like a good training program, SEO requires constant attention and repetition..and a long term commitment to achieve maximum success.
3.) CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization): Once we’ve got them coming to your site, what do we do to get them to make the decision or the purchase? We monitor the onsite behavior and put measures in to place to increase the percentage of visitors that convert to actual customers.
4.) Content Marketing: It’s more than just writing relevant and engaging content. Google loves great writing, but we go the extra mile with info graphics and videos.
5.) CRM (Client Relationship Management): We’ll help you manage and analyze customer behavior to improve business relationships and client retention.
Now, that you’re a well conditioned internet marketing athlete, let’s take a few laps together and get ready for the game. And if you really want to win online, pick the right team and get yourself a spot in the starting lineup. OCG Creative is a Reno web design and internet marketing team that can get you to first place. Go team go!
The best creative web design for clients all have one thing in common; image quality. Images are the number one visual way information is communicated and in the day and age of increasing demands for quick information, images do a great job at telling a story quickly for site visitors. Images are crucial for efficient web design because they break up content on pages which can be overwhelming for visitors. Essentially, people want information fast, and when they don’t get the answer to a search phrase, they leave the site (contributing to high bounce rates, low conversions, and lowered SEO scores). What better way to convey information quickly than through pertinent images paired with good keyword-heavy content aiming to match a visitor’s search phrase?
Efficient use of images can be hugely beneficial to a site and can add to a business’s branding, their tone toward visitors, their business’s image, efficiency in converting visitors, guiding efficient site-navigation, SEO, and much more. Images work hand in hand with creative web design and are increasingly recognized in their importance in conveying information:
“A common finding is an observed processing superiority of pictures as compared to words, suggesting that pictures have a faster and more direct access to meaning, while words are discussed to require additional translational activity...” -Schlochtermeier, et al. (2013).
Given the importance of images to visitors, it is good to know what constitutes as good images for a website to make the most of creative web design.
When people think of the best web design they typically only think of a site’s layout. However, most people forget that a large portion of layout is where to place high-quality images and content. The best web design is unique for each client and their business. However, there are similarities with site layouts and how images are arranged:
Simple and effective designs use layouts with images that do not confuse visitors, help them navigate the site, sell your unique message, and help convert visitors into a customers. Good layouts also use images to guide visitors toward pertinent pages or locations on their site.
There is a misconception that images need to be small for a website. Images need to be as big as possible to get high resolution, only their file sizes need to be small. Thankfully OCG takes care of all file compression so even if you give us massive photos, we ensure they are optimized on your website. Images that are too small are 'pixelated' or 'low-res' and look bad on websites and can hurt your online appearance and brand identity.
High Res Image
Low Res Image
The images need to be well lit. Avoid using a flash because it tends to wash out all images. The main source of lighting should not be behind the subject either and you should avoid highly contrasted images that add a lot of distracting patterns. This is very important because many images on a website have text over them and high-contrast images make it difficult to read the content and can be strenuous to look at on their own.
Good Lighting
Bad Lighting
Having everything in focus can make the image too cluttered and distract from what you really want to viewer to see in the image. A ‘soft-focus’ pulls the viewer’s eye toward the object you want site visitors to pay attention to while softly blurring the rest. This can also help de-clutter busy images.
Good Focus
Bad Focus
Many people think that if you want to draw attention to something it needs to be centered in the image. That can get repetitive with many images on your site. Take images from close up and far away with the subject in different places. It can be a mistake to take all of your images from one perspective using one composition, unless you are taking product shots.
Good Composition
Bad Composition
You may hear web-designers or account-coordinators talking about ‘mastheads’. Mastheads, banners, or site headers are the images that display at the top of each web page. These images need to be large (to work with a responsive website) and need to be ‘landscape’ not ‘portrait’. Additionally, because visitors only see a tiny part of the whole image, it is a good idea for the image to capture 'depth’. For example, instead of taking images from a top-down angle on a subject, try taking shots from different angles that emphasize perspective. A good way to do this is taking a series of images starting from the ground-level and moving up.
Good Perspective
Bad Perspective
Many clients find sites and ask what we can do to make their site more like the example they choose. The most common site people tend to ask for is Apple or other sites for technology companies. So what do they do that makes their layout work so well?
Designing a website is a lot like buying a car, you want the car to be fast, attractive and affordable, as well as being just the perfect shade of race car red, while also accommodating your need to impress everyone by having all the latest gadgets and gizmos. I am no car expert, but I do have a few knowledgeable pointers for anyone designing a website. Web design, just like everything else, creates new trends every year (I think to keep people on their toes), but really to improve on last years trends that were successful or to replace things that had as much success as Pokemon Go. 
This will drive the reader's attention to the places you want to focus on the most, it also adds a great deal to the design. Typography is all about hierarchy the largest fonts are read first and the smaller fonts are read after. Make sure your headlines POP. When reading a website, I'm sure you will agree, you're looking for specific information and when that information isn't easy to find, or read, you'll move on.
Nothing turns people off faster than an unattractive and hard to read font. Pick fonts that aren't over crowding, preferably a Sans Serif, also pick fonts that have the option of being bold and light and everything in between. It's easy to play with fonts when there are more options to choose from.
While, script fonts are elegant and provide visual interest, they are very hard to read. There are very few applications where script fonts are a can do, wedding invitations and tattoos, web design is not the place for a beautiful script font that no one can read.
The quality of images can really make or break a site. Web sites are marketing engines; however, if you have images that make your business look bad, your marketing efforts won't be as successful. Invest a little bit of time and money into taking images that really portray all the awesome things your company offers and does. High quality images will greatly highlight the content of your site and most importantly, keep the reader's attention longer. Images are great tools to help break up the content of a site and give people time to digest what they have just read.
If your website isn't responsive or mobile-friendly, you are loosing viewers. People always have their mobile devices with them and very few people sit at a computer just to surf the web. By making the conversion to a responsive website design, you'll have the potential to grow your traffic and help your business grow. So make the switch, web designers everywhere will thank you.
Just like with glue, less is more. An over designed website is overwhelming and hard to read, and often times, slow loading. Looking at a screen is already hard on our eyeballs, we shouldn't be adding to that pain by cramming a whole bunch of content, images and colored backgrounds into one hard to read monster. Creating negative space in a design will not only help reader's eyes, it will also help the overall design of your website. I want everyone to be aware that “award winning websites” often utilize the theory of negative space. So lets hop on the wagon and maybe we'll win some awards!
Sliders were the next big thing in web design, but what people don't understand is that sliders and carousels are very distracting to readers because sliders often times continue to loop after you have already moved on to the next section in a website.
A typical viewer scrolls past a slider without even seeing the second slide; meaning all of your efforts have gone to waste anyways. Sliders and carousels add to slow load times for websites, and are ultimately a downfall rather than a benefit.
