Web Design & Online Marketing News Recap: June 12, 2014

Greetings, blog readers—what’s new in your world? We’re here this week with a pair of handy articles that provide extremely practical advice for your web design strategy. Have you been wanting to take your business’s web page to the next level by hooking up with a terrific design consultant … but aren’t sure how to make your specific desires and concerns known? Don’t worry—we’ve got you covered. You can walk into that first meeting with a potential partner feeling knowledgeable, prepared, and confident.

13 Essential Questions to Ask When Hiring a Web Design Company (William A. Beachy, Huffington Post)

If you’re not a web design expert yourself, it’s highly likely that you’ll want to partner with someone who is when putting together and launching (or redoing) your company’s page. The only problem is that if you aren’t super-comfortable with the ins and outs of web design, how can you be sure you’re hiring the right person for the job? William A. Beachy has put together 13 Essential Questions to Ask When Hiring a Web Design Company for The Huffington Post this week. He hits on lots of great talking points: how much experience does the design team have? What will all this cost? Are you able to incorporate responsive design best practices for smartphones and tablets? Give this list 15 minutes of your time before you meet with a potential designer—it’s likely that these 13 questions will be relevant to your needs and even inspire you to think of some of your own. Be sure you walk into that consultation meeting feeling 100% prepared!

Is your Responsive Design Mobile Website Delivering Acceptable Load Times? (John Siebert, Noupe)

We write a lot about the importance of a genius responsive design strategy. Today, John Siebert of Noupe asks: Is your Responsive Design Mobile Website Delivering Acceptable Load Times? Because if it isn’t, he explains, you’re hurting yourself in more ways than one. Google, for example, penalizes your rank if your mobile site takes too long to load—and by “too long,” we mean more than one second. And if your page is slow to load, it’s not just search engines that you have to worry about; it’s customers, too. These days, if a site is taking several minutes to render on a smartphone, the user is highly likely to surf to a different one. You don’t want to lose business to your competitors, so how can you make sure your shoppers aren’t frustrated by a site that moves at a snail’s pace? The writer highlights the importance of optimizing image size and using conditional loading. How well are all those pretty product photos loading on an iPhone these days? If you can’t answer that question, it’s time to evaluate your page and make sure it’s performing well on even the smallest of devices.

Have a great rest of the week, and be sure to check back next week for more useful design and marketing news. We’ll help you to stay on top of everything that’s going on in the industry.

 

  • By Dennis Consorte
  • Published on June 12th, 2014