Have you ever been talking to a friend who is an aspiring graphic designer, and they asked you what your go-to graphic design tools are and which tools you could never live without?

Because I have.

And it happened to me this week.

One of my friends and I were chatting over a coffee when she asked me what tools she absolutely needs to start out as a graphic designer.

And that’s when it actually hit me that I love and use so many tools on a daily basis, that it’s hard to keep count.

So I went home that night and wrote up a list of graphic design tools that I really consider crucial, and the list was at around 25 tools.

7 Design Tools I Can’t Live Without

But I’ve compacted only my very favorites into this list of 7 tools that I’m going to share with you today that I simply can’t do without.

So without further ado, let’s jump right into them.

1. Affinity Designer

If you’re not a Creative Cloud user, then Affinity Designer could be the thing for you.

I used to be a die-hard Adobe user until I started getting incredibly bothered by just how sluggish Illustrator had become.

I remembered reading about Affinity products and decided to give them a go, and never turned back.

The design revolution.

“Affinity Designer has truly changed the world of graphic design. Five years of intensive refinement since launch have been dedicated to our unwavering vision of a powerful, super-smooth app that improves your workflow and allows your creativity to shine.”

Of course, there are lots of other great tools out there like Figma and Sketch, but after trying out Affinity Designer for a while, I was hooked.

And yes, there are things that still need some improving, like their color tools, but other than that, I can actually say that I’m obsessed.

2. Affinity Photo

Another tool that I simply can’t do without is Affinity Photo.

If you happen to manipulate a lot of photos, you might find that Affinity Photo is much stronger than Photoshop in some areas, and mainly in bitmap scaling.

Due to Lanczos 3 sampling, Affinity Photo’s bitmap scaling is incredibly better and more useful than Photoshop’s.

If you’ve ever gotten frustrated with the hours that you’ve lost just manually calculating the horizontal whitespace so that it’s proportionate to the vertical, you’re not alone.

Affinity Photo has solved many of the small annoyances we’ve all had to deal with Photoshop, so if you’re over Creative Cloud, it’s time to give Affinity products a go.

3. TinyPng

There’s nothing worse than slow loading times.

If a webpage doesn’t load in half a second, I’m gone.

And I’m not alone in this. 47 percent of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less. 40 percent of consumers will wait no more than three seconds for a web page to render before abandoning the site.

So, when I need to optimize my designs for the web, I need to use some sort of tool that is going to help me with that.

TinyPng has been my go-to tool for the longest time. It’s free and it works quickly and efficiently.

So if you to optimize some of your images and designs for web format, ues TinyPng!

Not to mention that their mascot is the cutest little panda I’ve ever seen.

4. Khroma

If you’re amazing at finding, matching, and combining colors, then you could probably skip over this tool.

But this is a tool that I definitely wouldn’t want to design without.

Khroma uses AI to learn which colors you like and creates limitless palettes for you to discover, search, and save.

The way it works is quite intricate.

Khroma’s search allows you to search and filter the generator by hue, tint, value, color, as well as hex and rgb values.

Give it a go and see how you like it!

5. Codekit

Like most of us, I didn’t invest in getting into compilers as soon as I should have.

I used all the apps, like Minify, to minify CSS and JavaScript, but then one day, I found Codekit.

And I never went back.

What I found amazing about Codekit is that while I’m coding, I can also change the settings because it is a GUI, and don’t have to think another coding language.

6. Fontstand

If you’re not using Creative Cloud, then you need somewhere new to get your fonts from.

Fontstand is a font discovery platform that allows you to test and use high-quality fonts on all platforms.

You can rent fonts by the month with a dedicated app for macOS and Windows or start the monthly subscription with the new iPadOS app.

So basically, if you find a font you like, you get a 1-hour free trial with it to see if it fits your vibe, and if it does, then you can choose to rent the font for a small fee.

I think it’s an amazing platform that’s definitely worth looking into!

7. BrowserStack

And finally, we come to our last “can’t-live-without” product which is BrowserStack.

No matter what it is you’re building, it needs to be tested.

If you could, it would be best to test on real devices. But in the case that you can’t afford it, or don’t want to spend your money on that, you’ll need a live testing solution.

You can use BrowserStack for that. With their product, you can give your users a seamless experience by testing on 2000+ real devices and browsers.

No need to compromise with emulators and simulators!

Final Thoughts

So that concludes my list of must-use tools for 2020.

Or at least, a part of that list.

Let me know in the comments which tools you started using this year that you think you’ll be using for the long-haul!

Until next time,

Stay creative, folks!

Read More at 7 Graphic Design Tools I Can’t Live Without in 2020

You feel you have done everything right on your website. The copy looks compelling. The design looks magnificent. But still, visitors are not spending as much time on your website as much as you want them to. You have little to no clue about why it is happening and how to fix it. You try out a bunch of SEO tools, you undergo usability testing, but still, no significant improvements can be seen.

You feel tired and reluctant to try out more SEO tools and do more testing. You still have no clue why visitors are abandoning your well-designed information-rich website. You feel like talking to your visitors to understand what’s wrong, but how is that even possible? They certainly are in no mood to fill out a form on an exit popup or converse with your chatbot before leaving the website. The users that abandoned your website must have experienced issues you were not aware of.

Using a Real User Monitoring Tool

So, what’s next? With the attention span of people decreasing day by day, solving this problem for which you do not even know the root cause is imperative. Here’s how you can understand what’s going on. Try integrating your website with a real user monitoring tool.

Real user monitoring, an approach to web monitoring, is a type of performance monitoring that captures and analyzes every transaction of the user. It is a form of passive web monitoring because the monitoring services run in the background. There’s another type of web monitoring known as synthetic monitoring. In synthetic monitoring, the monitoring scripts are deployed via the browser to simulate paths that website users take.

Real user monitoring technology looks at how visitors interact with a website or an application. Real user monitoring tools enhance the front-end performance of your website by analyzing data to detect anomalies from real user sessions thereby increasing customer satisfaction. These tools can also send you alerts in real-time. Using these tools, you can get to know the exact underlying issues concerning your website. 

A real user monitoring tool like Sematext Experience is easy to use. It alerts you when user experience gets affected by website performance. You can inspect page-level specifics, track page loads, HTTP requests, UI interactions, resources, and more. Using such a tool, you can reduce performance-related issues by having 100% visibility into what areas are affecting UX.

How Real User Monitoring Improves SEO?

Real user monitoring lets you know the problematic areas on your website which could be affecting user performance. Here’s how such a tool can help in improving SEO.

Improving Page Loading Time

Google indicates that the loading time of web pages is a signal used by its algorithm to rank them. Google could be measuring the time taken to receive the first byte while calculating page speed. A poorly performing website degrades the user experience. Hence, such sites do not deserve to be promoted in search results.

Time-to-first-byte (TTFB) is the time taken by the browser to receive the first byte from a web server when a URL is requested. This metric includes the time taken to send a response, the processing time of the server, and the time taken by the first byte to reach your browser from the server. Here’s a graph of median TTFB vs ranking positions:

Source – https://moz.com/blog/how-website-speed-actually-impacts-search-ranking

Sematext Experience collects resource timing data for images, CSS, and JavaScript files. When someone visits your website, the browser begins downloading resources. These resources have a big impact on your website’s loading speed.

The resources are shown in the form of a waterfall ordered by the time they were discovered.

Resource Waterfall – Sematext Experience 

Load-time performance depends on various factors. If visitors experience slow page-loads or poor HTTP request performance, it is most likely caused by network latency, DNS servers, redirects, application performance, and other factors. A detailed timing breakdown on page loads and HTTP requests is displayed to understand which part(s) of the loading process is slow. 

Timing Breakdown – Sematext Performance

We can only optimize what we can measure. Once you have information on the resources which are slow-loading, you can start improving their load times. As SEO is impacted by loading time, here’s a list of tasks you can do to optimize your web pages for better SEO:

• Reduce the dimensions of images to fit the image containers on your web pages.
• Compress images to further reduce the space they occupy on your server.
• Stick to standard image formats (JPG, PNG, GIF).
• Use CSS sprites for images that you use frequently on your website like icons and buttons. A CSS sprite loads entirely in one go thereby reducing the number of HTTP requests. This technique helps in saving load time by not making users wait for multiple images to load.
• Reduce the size of your HTML, CSS, and Javascript files using a minification tool.
• Remove code comments, formatting, and unused code to reduce the size of the files.
• Reduce the number of redirects to avoid additional waiting time.
• Move scripts to the Footer to avoid render-blocking javascript code.
• Use browser caching so the browser doesn’t have to reload the entire page when a visitor comes back to your site. Browsers can cache images, stylesheets, Javascript files, and more. Learn how to leverage browser caching here.
• Improve the server response time by looking out for performance bottlenecks like slow database queries and routing. Try switching to a new hosting solution to further improve the server response time. The optimal response time is under 200 ms.
• Use a content distribution network (CDN) which essentially distributes the load of delivering content. It works as follows – copies of your website are stored at multiple data centers located geographically so that users have faster and reliable access to your website.

Improving User Satisfaction

The more the users are satisfied with your website experience, the more likely they will spend a lot more time on your website which in turn will help in improving SEO as time spent on the website directly affects your search engine rankings. Naturally, we want the average time spent on your website to be as high as possible for Google to take note of the importance of your website. 

On the other hand, if users are dissatisfied with your website experience, they are more likely to abandon your website which eventually will lead to an increase in the bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who abandon your website after visiting a single page. A high bounce rate means that visitors don’t like what they see on your website. We want to have the bounce rate as low as possible to have better rankings.

You learned how time spent on the website and the bounce rate impacts the rankings for your website. A real user monitoring tool like Sematext gives a measure of user satisfaction. 

User Experience – Sematext Experience

The user satisfaction score is based on the Apdex industry standard. Page loads, on-page transactions, and ajax requests are separated into different user satisfaction scores as they have different performance characteristics.

Conclusion

As 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine and 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search (source), it is important to improve the SEO of your website for better rankings. The fact is that there could be issues concerning your website which you might not even be aware of. These issues could secretly be affecting the user experience thereby making visitors abandon your website. You need real user monitoring tools to know these issues to improve your website rankings. Do research regarding which real user monitoring tool is good for you – one that fits your use case. The important part is to monitor the end-user experience and be in control of how users interact with your website.

Read More at How Can A Real User Monitoring Tool Help In Improving SEO?

Each year, loads of development tools come out. It’s becoming harder and harder to decide what tools you actually need and which ones you can live without.

 Honestly, it’s probably a personal preference, but it really helps me decide what I need when I have a list of useful tools to look over.

 So here we go: the top 8 development tools you absolutely need in 2020.

1. IPstack

IPstack allows you to locate and identify website visitors with an IP address. This is extremely helpful for a lot of reasons, but simply knowing who is coming to your website is one of the most valuable tools anyone can ever ask for.

Built within this tool are 5 different modules that are definitely worth mentioning:

• Location module

This module gives you all the information for the visitor’s location. All the way down to the zip code. With this information, you can optimize your ad targeting based on geolocation.

• Currency Module

Using the information above, you’ll also get an accurate report on the primary currency being used in the visitor’s region.

• Time zone module

The time zone module instantly lets you know the local time of the visitor. No more guessing and counting in your head.

• Connection module

Gather valuable information about the ASN and the hostname of the ISP your website visitors are using.

• Security module

IPstack will also detect any proxies, crawlers, or tor users. Security is a big deal for many users, and Ipstack makes sure you feel comfortable at all times.

Ipstack is fast and trusted by literally the biggest names in tech. To top it all off, they partner with the largest ISPs around the world, so you can rest assured that the information you’re getting is 100% accurate.

2. VSCode

VSCode is an open-source code editor that makes editing code as easy as pie. The developers of this tool basically took everything that sucked about coding and reinvented it to be easier.

So for example, they use InteliSense, which provides smart completions based on variable types, function definitions, and imported modules.

Possibly the worst thing about coding is debugging. At the very least, it can be quite time-consuming. But not so much with VSCode. You will no longer have to print out a debugging statement. Now, you can simply identify the bug and fix it right from the editor. Attach this to your running apps and debug with breakpoints, call stacks, and an awesome interactive console.

VSCode has built-in Git commands, it’s completely customizable, and it’s completely free. Check it out.

3. Postman

Postman is a collaboration platform for API development, and it has a lot to offer. Essentially, it’s your all-in-one tool for creating APIs. Here’s a list of some of the features you’ll have access to:

• API client

Send REST, SOAP, and GraphQL requests super fast.

• Automated testing

Automate your manual testing process.

• App mock

Run simulated endpoints and predict potential behaviors of the app.

• Monitor

After all is said and done, keep an updated report of the performance of the app.

Of course, there are quite a few features that Postman offers. Overall, it’s definitely worth checking out and using. It will make your life so much easier, and the amount you end up paying compared to the value you get out of it is incredible.

4. Docker

Docker is a platform for building, testing, and deploying applications. As simple as that sounds, it has quite a bit to offer. When I say a lot, I really mean a ton. There is a wide variety of development tools ready to go at any time. 

Docker has been a developer favorite for a while now, and it’s only getting better. If I added absolutely everything you have to look forward to on the list, we’d be here for a while. My best advice is to go and check it out for yourself to see what you think.

5. Sublime Text

I think Sublime Text said it best when they described themselves as a sophisticated text editor for code, markups, and prose. Even if they didn’t use the Oxford comma in their original description. 

In fact, just watching the demo on their main page shows you just how easy it is to fix and create text. Across the board, Sublime is getting great reviews for its ease of use, friendly interface, and for being the best text editor on the market. 

You may want to take the time to learn all of the specific commands for making the process even faster, as there are quite a few to memorize. But, all-in-all, you really won’t find a better product for editing text for code.

6. GitHub

Github has been a fan favorite for many years now. Some even consider it to be the best social coding and social sharing platform on the market.

The concept is simple: code together with your team to avoid confusion and delays. It sounds kind of messy, but I can assure you that it works pretty flawlessly. It really streamlines the process of bug fixing as well. Instead of making changes on a local device and then sending off the patches to be approved and implemented, you can simply (if approved by the lead developer) fix it on the spot.

7. Sifter

Sifter is definitely one of the best issue tracking software out there today. Possibly one of the best things about Sifter is how easy it is to learn and use. I would be very confident in suggesting this tool to even beginners.

Sifter brings all the issues it found to one platform. From there, the lead developer can label, attach files (screenshots, Docs, etc.), and assign them to qualified team members in basically minutes. On top of that, Sifter leaves a progression trail so that you can track exactly who did what.

Sifter also integrates really well with Slack, GitHub, and others to make sure that you have absolutely everything you need to make your app perfect.

8. Microsoft Visual Studio

Visual Studio by Microsoft is an IDE that is a great fit for anyone. It uses IntelliSense to autocomplete code and is notorious for the massive amount of languages it can support.

Visual Studio is jam-packed with all sorts of integration, plugins, and shortcuts to make your life easier. And that’s what we all really want, right?

Wrapping up

Now don’t get me wrong, there are thousands of development tools out there to get lost in. This is simply a list of the top 8 development tools you need in 2020. Or the top 8 that you should at least look into.

Regardless of your skill level, I think you’ll find something on this list that will help you out tremendously. Be sure to check out each link and take advantage of those free trials!

Read More at Top 8 Best Development Tools You Need in 2020

Your website is your business card in the online environment. As a representative element for your business image, your website needs to look and behave impeccably in the online environment. This is a must if you want your site to bring you results, drive traffic, and ultimately increase conversion rates.

In a world where the number of websites is growing from day to day, only the most advanced and well-developed websites will manage to bring your business to another level. Sites that contain very few mistakes, if any at all.

In today’s article, we’re going to reveal 5 mistakes that you are simply not allowed to make in making your website – especially if you want it to bring you the desired results.

Not mobile friendly

If anyone were to compile a massive list of mistakes to avoid in regards to building a website in 2019, this would definitely be at the top. Everyone preaches this. A website that isn’t friendly to mobile users is 100% wasted potential.

Currently, over 7 out of 10 people are searching on Google with their mobile devices. In addition, Google made it clear a while ago that mobile adaptive sites will have advantages in terms of positioning in SERP. In other words, the adaptability of your website is becoming an extremely important SEO factor.

More and more people are making the switch to mobile browsing, so we can only expect mobile search percentages to go up from here. If you do not have a mobile and tablet-compatible website in 2019, it’s like opening a business and consciously closing the door in your nose for your clients in 7 out of 10 cases.

Unoptimized SEO content

This is the second fatal mistake in 2019, and again, something that most people know by now. SEO content will always make the top of everyone’s list because the Google algorithm is always changing. It’s no small task to optimize your SEO content, but it’s a vital one.

Writing SEO optimized content means you adopt the text to Google’s requirements. For the most part, that’s pretty straight forward. However, the tricky part comes into play when you have to keep it SEO optimized and appeal to real people. You’re not just creating content to make a robot happy, you have to keep the users happy, too. SEO in 2019 greatly relies on relevance – the content of your website should be 100% relevant to your target audience.

You have to find the balance. Find your brand voice and keep the Google robots in mind. If you don’t, this might be the first and last mistake you make on your website.

Slow loading time

This mistake is every bit as unforgiving as the first 2. People come to your website to get what they need and get out. If you hinder their convenience in any way, you might find yourself minus a customer.

There are a lot of factors that come into play regarding loading speeds. Most of them have to do with your content. Think of it this way: longer content = longer loading times. That’s why it’s so important to say what you need to say, and leave it at that.

Lots of people mistake detail with long-form content. While it’s true that Google favors longer content, it doesn’t always mean your users will. Again, the key here is to keep it short and sweet for the sake of the real people but to keep those keywords in mind for Google.

Bad CTA elements

A website that does not present the information in an attractive way, influencing the sales by Call-to-Action elements, will be a website that is not successful in the online environment. If the essential information and the call to action are not VISIBLE on the site, in a way that will invite the visitor to act, the site will not help you accomplish anything. So basically, it’s useless.

It is recommended that each page uses buttons, icons, and links that will lead to the contact forms or the offer request pages. Each page of the website must push the user one step closer to the final stage: the sale.

Nowadays, everything happens at the speed of lightning. No one has time to read hot air on your website. The world searches for fast, easy-to-understand and understandable information. Take that away, you take your customers away, too.

Lack of updates

In 2019 everyone expects your website to be “up to date” with all the trends and information. If you provide outdated information (even information about your products), you’ve lost the race with competing sites.

Your site needs to be updated and provide real-time information about you, about your products and about your business in general. Also, functionality is very important.

Sites with dead links or pages leading to errors – lack of content or missing pages are among the most common errors that turn users away from your website. Keep your site up-to-date. All pages should follow this rule and all information needs to be up to date.

Your website will always be a work-in-progress

Don’t let this header discourage you. A proper website, no matter the content or who owns it, will always need improvements and updates. There will always be something new to do, optimize, or add.

These are the 5 biggest mistakes people make when creating a new website in 2019, and they most likely always be mistakes that developers struggle with. The biggest takeaway from all these mistakes? Learn and adapt. If you see a mistake, fix it, and always be on the lookout for ways to improve.

Read More at 5 Mistakes You Are Not Allowed to Make on Your Website

Choosing a domain name is similar to choosing a company’s name – it requires a lot of thought and consideration.

Your domain name is your identity on the web!

So you have to make sure that you choose a domain name that not only fits your business, but it is also easy to find and promote.

Do you want your website to make an impression and stir the user’s interest ever since the name was pronounced?

Find a domain name relevant to your activity, using Google’s keywords and Keyword Planner to describe your business and the services you provide.

Keyword Planner can be used to find a domain name, but you can also run a marketing and advertising strategy.

Do not use a long and complex domain name, risk being misspelled by users. Better short and easy to write, this is essential for online success.

Appropriate extension for domain names

Extensions are suffixes, such as .com or .net, at the end of web addresses. They may have specific uses, so make sure you choose one that works for your business. 

There are a multitude of new generic top-level domains – such as .bar, .pizza, . club , .pro etc – offers a great opportunity to record short and very relevant names.

See here a list of over 400 domain extensions you can buy.

Avoid numbers and crap

Numbers and mistakes are often misunderstood!

Without numbers and hyphens, the domain name is easier to write / pronounce, and you can avoid any confusion that the user can do, but this is not a general rule.

Be memorable

There are millions of registered domain names, having a field that is appealing and memorable is essential. Once you come up with a name, share it with your close friends to make sure it sounds appealing and makes sense to others.

Read More at This Is How You Choose A Domain Name

Every online business you can name has one goal: increase sales and profit as much as possible. In the online environment, this all starts with a simple process: increasing traffic on your website. Look at it from this perspective, if you have an online site but you do not have enough traffic, it consumes your resources in vain.

And yet, there are so many online sites that don’t benefit from user visits. Why? To be honest, there are quite a few reasons this could be. Below are the top 10 reasons.

1. SEO optimization on irrelevant words

Each niche has certain keywords that need they aim for to rank decently in Google. If you sell TVs and you rank on Google for audio systems, it doesn’t really help you. In addition, if you try to rank yourself for an extremely general keyword (like the word “TVs”) you will notice that it’s pretty much impossible to rank decently, or, at the very least, there’s an insane amount of competition.

You have to choose something specific. Keyword research is a vital part of SEO for this very reason. Identify what users are looking for on Google and optimize those words.

2. Faulty links

Another very common cause that affects traffic is lost or defective links on the site. Have you ever gotten that infamous error 404? In this case, check where that page is on your site. You may have redirected the page, or you may have changed the URL and did not make the interconnection by 301 redirects. This can lead to the loss of links, and this will surely lead to a decrease in traffic.

3. Penalties from Google

Google’s penalties are quite rare, but cannot be eliminated from the equation. If you’ve tried to optimize the website, if you have multiple suspicious links to your site, if you have duplicate content, or if you do not respect Google’s rules, it will penalize you. If your website traffic has fallen sharply, or if you simply launch the site and fail to get visits, that’s probably the cause.

4. Site loading speed

Ask anyone, absolutely anyone, and they’ll tell you that slow loading screens will make them click away. People use the internet for their convenience, if you interrupt that in any way, you’ve most likely lost traffic.

Every website should be optimized for the fastest loading speed possible. Here are a few, very quick ways to do that:

• Use images sparingly
• Limit the amount of GIFs and videos
• Condense text

Simply explained, if your website has a lot to load, it will take a while. You have to find the balance between necessary and extra content.

5. Server issues – low-quality hosting

And here, the problems are quite common. Visits to your site can be clearly influenced by the quality of your chosen hosting. Perhaps the site is offline fixed when a large part of your users enters it. To have quality hosting, make sure that uptime is guaranteed, as high as possible. What is the uptime of a website? You can see this here.

6. Navigation issues

The way users are able to navigate your site can influence traffic. If the user finds it hard to find the information they want on the site, they will definitely leave. Try to make a site as clear as possible, with an airy and clean structure. And do not forget, the content is also extremely important. It must walk the user up to the final step – the command. If he does not find interesting content on the site, the user will leave.

The answer here, for most sites, is almost always placing the search bar in an easy to find area. Don’t hide it, make the icon small, or neglect to use one entirely. Place that search bar front and center.

7. Unoptimized mobile site

Over 70% of current traffic comes from mobile, and we can expect those numbers to go up increasingly in the next few years. A website that is not optimized for mobile will have clear deficiencies in attracting traffic. From the start, your website should be optimized for mobile. As more and more users are starting to use mobile devices to find what they’re looking for, your website can become obsolete really fast if it’s not mobile optimized.

8. Lack of promotion

You can’t find a website if you don’t know about its existence. It’s not enough to build a model website if it’s not promoted as it should be. Online promotion is the best way to bring traffic to a site, especially if it’s new. Closely related to SEO optimization, promotion is an unimaginable growth engine for your business.

With that said, look for ways to advertise your website. Whether it’s organic growth, or growth created by paid ads, growth is still growth.

9. Poor or unattractive content

If your site does not tell a story to the visitor, they will leave and avoid ever landing on your site ever again. Poor, unskilled, and unattractive content for the user will quickly deter users from visiting your website. Try to maximize the attractiveness of content through copywriting techniques in terms of text, by combining text with pictures and techniques for creating interactive content.

10. Incorrect indexing

Indexing is the process by which Google sends crawlers to your site to view, categorize content, and position you on the search engine. If the indexing was done incorrectly (either because of technical difficulties or because of mistakes made by you in optimizing the site), it will not appear on Google and therefore will not have traffic. Make sure your site is properly optimized and reindeer it on Google.

The conclusion

Hopefully you don’t have any of these issues, but if you do, try to get them resolved as quickly as possible. The web holds infinite possibilities for us all, and it’s worth taking advantage of them.

Even if you are happy with your current site traffic, try approaching a few of these issues and optimize your website as best as you can. In the end, hopefully you’ll see growth, and we all want that, don’t we?

Read More at 10 reasons why your website doesn’t get enough traffic

There are many things to consider when creating a nice and useful website. You have certainly seen sites that look great and have caught your attention, but you also saw websites that simply left you in shock, websites that were infinitely more attractive than the others.

What makes such a site stand out so much is the very well-defined structure and those small details that actually make the difference. The user needs to feel comfortable navigating through the site, everything has to make sense, the content, the pictures, the steps they have to follow to get the information they need. All these aspects have to be established from the creation of the wireframe.

A wireframe that is done in the right way will make the website user-friendly because it gives you the opportunity to present the exact information you want your online visitors to get. Of course, it’s your way of presenting information, but the wireframe helps a lot to visualize how this site will perform after development.

You certainly saw a building plan. Wireframe is the exact plan of a site that an ‘online architect’ designs, transforms, and shapes the way he wants it. Just think, starting off with the plan of a building, we can extrapolate to a city plan. You can just as well develop a wireframe from the designing phase of the site, as long as the website can be modified.

Buttons, menus, text blocks, images, anything going through your head can be contained in a good wireframe. But there is another problem. Do not forget that you use this to make your site easy to navigate by the users. That’s why you do not have to load it too much because it gets tiring and you can fall to the other extreme.

A middle path must be found, of course, to suit your target audience. Because, eventually, when you do make a site you know what people are going to visit and depending on that, you guess how simple or how complex it can be.

If you target audiences is made out of seniors, you will take this into account and simplify it. If you will mostly be visited by young people, accustomed to the online environment, you can make it more interactive, you can play more with the content. However, what matters is to have this opportunity and it is up to you how you will exploit it and use it to grow your online business, traffic, interaction with visitors, and so on.

Explanatory video

A well-thought wireframe is the basis of a successful website. The wireframe is not an extra step in creating a site. It is not a waste of time and money, but it is the most effective way to bring to the common denominator the ideas of the client and the suggestions of the development team. All these in order to create an attractive and user-friendly site from all points of view. We promise your users will enjoy the most pleasant browsing experience you can offer.

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