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• website design|development, Syracuse
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• your site will be professional and user-friendly
• your site will rank higher in Google
• your business credibility will increase

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Design must also be concerned with how a website works »[Hide »]
Self-Service Website Design – Speed, Convenience and Simplicity
Self-service design is absolutely obsessed with speed, convenience and simplicity. Online, speed doesn’t kill. Complexity kills.
read Gerry McGovern’s article: The movement towards service

Designing a better slider/carousel
Jakob Nielsen on how to make these user-friendly

There Is No Page One on Google Anymore
As an internet marketer, it means that you can no longer reliably predict where your search results will be when someone does a search. Maybe you show up, maybe you don’t. It’s no longer about keywords and getting optimized for that phrase. Position reports are meaningless and not worth the paper they’re printed on.

Google is rearranging the search results that they display to YOU, based upon your history, and what they know of you personally.

You can’t even reliably see if you’re showing up on the search engines, because doing the search from your own computer has your own history built into it, and well, it’s a biased search. You’ve polluted your own data.

By the way, logging out doesn’t really help either. Don’t forget you have your browser history too, as well as all the searches you’ve done from your IP address, even if you go incognito on Chrome.

This means that there is no page one of Google any more, because you and I and everyone else has their own personal history of likes, dislikes, favorites, and so on. Google is going to give each of us different results from each other, every time we do a search. As marketers, it also means we have to create great content on every subject, and cannot predictably determine the results we’ll get from that content. read the article

Avoid these navigation mistakes in website design from the Nielsen Group. Four Dangerous Navigation Approaches that Can Increase Cognitive Strain

Tips for writing for your web visitors: well written, objective copy helps build customer loyalty. To engage users, website copy must speak to readers and not at them. Include words people can relate to, and avoid jargon, business speak, and feature-driven language.

Jackob Nielsen: Flexible Usability Testing

Mobile: Native Apps, Web Apps, and Hybrid Apps

Why do organizations hate their content management system?
....It is still true—to a frightening degree—that technology is bought for its own sake. It is bought because it fits into already existing IT systems. It is bought because of some new, cool features. It is bought because it ticks each of the many boxes in an enormous, unwieldy "kitchen sink" Request For Proposals. It is bought because there is a belief that technology is transformative in and of itself. Too often, management naively believes that new tools only will improve practices but I find that is rarely the case....Information overload or content bloat is often a hallmark of content management systems. One of the key selling points is often that you can distribute publishing throughout the organization. But distributed publishing is often a disastrous strategy as it allows content amateurs to flood the environment with low quality content.... The Web has turned millions of organizations into accidental publishers, whose strategy has often been to buy technology to deal with this. But that’s no strategy. Strategy begins with a purpose. What is the true benefit to us—and more importantly—to our customers?
read Gerry McGovern’s full article

Design must also be concerned with how a website works
The fact that GOV.UK has won a top design award shows that the benefits of functional web design are finally being recognized... Design is not just how it looks. Design must also be concerned with how it works. For things to work on the Web they must be findable....it’s simple, direct... Web design must be judged by its ability to help people do things. Thankfully, we are beginning to see more and more of this outcome-based design thinking emerging. It’s exciting times. The Web is finally leaving behind the world of print and TV and developing its own design approach.
read article: The functional heart of web design

Jakob Nielsen: Writing better usability Reports
For usability testing to be valuable, study findings must clearly identify issues and help the team move toward design solutions. Website Reading: It (Sometimes) Does Happen
When web content helps users focus on sections of interest, users switch from scanning to actually reading the copy.
read article

A good SEO specialist/consultant won’t make promises they know they can’t keep
A promise like "I’ll always get you ranked on page 1, position 1 in Google."
A promise like "You’ll never drop in search engine rankings or traffic."
A promise like "I’ll buy you buttloads of links and that’ ll keep you in the top of search results."
A promise like "We’ll write up lots of articles and submit them everywhere!"

read article

When is the User Interface too fast?

When you add complexity to a website you often add complexity to the navigation: simplifying menus and links

When you get those emails soliciting for SEO Services
Read article: The Good, the Bad, and the SEO Ugly

Seniors as Web Users

In the Big Bang of Big Data...we need a much greater focus on supporting and helping rather than telling and selling
...."This is the age of the customer, not the age of content. Those who will succeed will relentlessly focus on helping customers complete tasks and be successful. In the Big Bang of Big Data, we need far more customer service professionals and far less content producers. We need more information architects and professionals who understand online customer behavior. We need a much greater focus on supporting and helping rather than telling and selling."

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