Archive for Website Design Tools

Reader engagement is a key metric important to all publishers. Time spent, pages per visit and return visits are all numbers that every online publisher should hold near and dear.

The problem with the information overload of the internet is that website readers get lazy. When they come in from search engines, they often click, find … Continue

There’s a never-ending stream of new tools that pop up every day to help us become better web developers. We have a dashboard of tools we look to for ideas, assistance and even implementation, and it’s safe to assume that you probably do too.

Last year we discovered and shared a lot of web design tools … Continue

Branding comes into play when choosing colors for your website. Most brands stick with their main colors. However, some businesses go through an entire rebranding when they launch or relaunch their websites, causing the “color” question to be taken into serious consideration.

If you’re redesigning your website, or simply enjoy the art of color, consider … Continue

Use these 13 best website design tools when designing a website

The most important goal when designing a website is to figure out the main funnel that gets a visitor to complete a transaction. That transaction may be monetary (a sale) or not (a subscription to your email newsletter).

Effective website design is based on efficiency, clarity, … Continue

The website design process hasn’t really changed in the last ten years. You come up with a wireframe, a designer mocks it up, a developer makes a test site and after weeks of going through each agonizing detail you deploy your new design. It’s a fairly static process; however, there’s an endless supply of questions … Continue

Five website design tools and three tips for speeding up your website

“People hate to wait,” Andy King states in the opening line of his book, Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization (VOICES). “The Web is essentially a self-service environment. A core promise of self-service is speed. A customer turns to self-service to save time, … Continue

Join us on Nov. 6 for Designing Media Websites that Work so you can improve the state of your website

Your media website must include certain components or you’ll fail to retain an audience and generate enough revenue to keep operating.

Some online business owners don’t understand all the aspects that go into designing websites, and then … Continue

For those of you who are not sure what responsive web design is, it basically means designing your website so it will be able to adapt to whatever platform its opened on. Whether it’s a computer, tablet, smartphone etc. the site will adapt and fit on whatever screen is being utilized.

Below we have some articles going more … Continue

Is responsive website design the future for digital publishers?

As websites optimize for growing mobile demands, popularity turns towards responsive website design. Although not a new technique for designing, digital publishers are quick to consider the possibilities that come with responsive website design.

After researching the topic, I’ve come to find three important elements to responsive website … Continue

Today we are looking in depth at different website design tips from top bloggers. … Continue

When you’re designing a website one of the main objectives should be inducing traffic. No matter what the content of your website is, if you don’t create traffic its not going to be very successful. Not only do you want to create traffic, but also you want your users to stay for a while, rather … Continue

The number of people who own smartphones has been consistently rising for years and doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down anytime soon. Approximately 50% of people who own a cell phone have chosen a smartphone. What does this mean? That your websites need to be able to adapt for the smartphone viewer. Below … Continue

No matter what you call it, the top of your website is a strategic website design challenge

A funny thing happened on the way to today’s post. While doing keyword research to discover what you, our audience, call the top of your website, I found some disagreement. Various posts at other websites from Wikipedia to a … Continue

Effective website design is based on efficiency, clarity, and user-friendly elements.

Website design that does not utilize these components will have a hard time generating a robust audience of devote fans.

There are a variety of tools online to help develop effective websites. Four of these tools are listed below. … Continue

Author Stephen Covey is fond of pointing out how difficult it is to reach goals that you don’t have. “Begin with the end in mind” is my personal mantra for every website design project I start.

Publishing websites are like Swiss Army Knives. They can do many things well. This makes them the perfect tool for … Continue

These website homepage ideas will help you provide a better user experience through website design

Audience engagement is quickly becoming a very important metric to follow. Google is recognizing social signals and wants to provide search results that engage consumers with great content.

Below I’ve listed eight website homepage ideas, which can help you offer a better … Continue

When I first became the Managing Editor of Mequoda Daily, I wasn’t very familiar with optimizing images. However, I learned quickly, and realized how important it can be to optimize images.

If you are adding images to your website that aren’t optimized for the Internet, you website’s load time can be impacted. … Continue

We love to share our own experiences at Mequoda Summits. It is our program after all, and we’ve designed it to share experiences, both positive and negative, with our clients and attendees.

Within the last few months, we made a major change by redesigning our entire look and feel of our daily blog. This change focused … Continue

Tips and tools for getting advice from people who mean the most to your brand

Surveys and polls can be very telling. These direct comments from your audience can tell what they like and what they don’t like, while offering tips on creating better experiences.

When conducting surveys, remember to keep your research objectives in mind. This … Continue

Publishers are making adjustments to their websites to incorporate the social engagement opportunities presented by Facebook, which claims to have over 845 million active users.

Beyond strategies for publishing on Facebook, many of the adjustments being made by publishers involve the use of social plugins. … Continue

eMedia Vitals pointed out last week that five major magazine and blog publishers redesigned their websites recently. After studying their before-and-after looks using the Wayback Machine, it’s obvious that all of these publishers paid special attention to graphics in their redesigns, usually opting for more. Social media was also an important factor. Across all of … Continue

When starting off, some digital publishers approach their goals in strange ways. Would you ever expect success if you wanted to base your business off another, without any uniqueness to it?

For instance, if someone were to walk into our office and say, “I want to be the next Orbitz”, they probably receive a puzzled look … Continue

Does seeing other publishers redesign their website or make changes to the content they provide make you wonder about your own possible changes?

Streamlining Digital Asset Workflows is a session from our Digital Publishing Bootcamp that helps you make changes within your organization, designed to increase efficiency through the use of automation. … Continue

There are dozens of WordPress plug-ins that can transform the functionality and efficiency of your website

WordPress is the system we’ve used to build client’s websites with.

If you’ve been looking, it’s clear that we aren’t the only consulting and development firm that approves of the work from the WordPress community. Publishers like the Wall Street Journal … Continue

Don’t be fooled; there is a proper way to design for mobile.

I once read an article that claimed there was no such thing as mobile websites, because all websites were already mobile.

I hope the person who wrote that article doesn’t design sites for a living, or his clientele won’t last very long. … Continue

Add links to all your social media sites with this plug-in

If you visit a half dozen reputable websites right now, I’d bet most, if not all, have social media icons on their website.

These sites want you to interact with them in other manners. Brands are attempting to be more personal through their activities on … Continue

Daily publishers create and distribute a lot of high quality content. However, only certain pieces of content can be considered the ‘best’.

The best content does not take into account the editor or writer’s opinion of it; the best is defined purely by the audience’s interactions with it, the amount of social sharing it experiences and … Continue

Whether you’re optimizing your subscription website or adding keyword tags to the rapid conversion landing pages of your digital products, utilizing an XML sitemap helps search engines find your content easier.

XML sitemaps make it easier for the search engine crawlers to see the complete architecture of your website so they can retrieve the information … Continue

How do you add new keyword tags into your WordPress system?

Some operators are able to do it manually as they don’t add many keyword phrases at once.

However, for online publishers with a lot of topics and a lot of keyword phrases being added frequently, the process of adding keywords manually may becoming daunting. Fortunately … Continue

Sometimes, depending on their background, your new editors may be too technical or too informal in their writing style. It’s all a matter of educating these editors and through the use of proper tools. One such tool is the FD Word Statistics Plugin for WordPress. FD Word Statistics gives you the word and sentence count … Continue

Sending an email of assistance to users in need is a great way to improve your relationship with audience members.

If you’ve ever forgotten a password to login somewhere online, I’m sure you know what I mean. I’ve personally done this dozens of times, and have even given up the attempt to login once frustration … Continue

Whether you are designing your homepage to launch an online business, a template for an email newsletter or the components of a digital magazine, a color wheel helps for picking contrasting colors for your content.

Some color wheels offer you complete options visually, and when you hover over the colors of interest, you’re provided with the … Continue

The design of your online store is crucial to selling products. It needs to be clean and easy to navigate or potential customers are likely to get frustrated and leave.

Beyond a clean, manageable design, there are different ways of creating your online store. For instance, some retailers incorporate search engine optimized content to help … Continue

Consider this scenario: Your email sends audience members back to your blog. They read the article and completely love it. What happens then?

In some instances they may bookmark the article. But how often do people really return to content after it’s been bookmarked? Dozens of my bookmarks were done on impulse and never returned to. … Continue

Managing website activity can be a large task. For WordPress websites, the Role Manager Plug-in helps operators control the roles and capabilities of their users. Using this plug-in helps you dictate what users can and can’t do on your website.

The value in the Role Manager is that it allows you to define and manage multiple … Continue

Alignment is a relevant aspect of operating a professional blog. If you are attracting traffic to your website through specific keywords, don’t you want those visitors to stay longer and read more of your content?

For WordPress websites using the Efficient Related Posts Plug-in, they can easily present similar content to their audience members, allowing for … Continue

You buy a home, you fill it with nice things. To secure your home, you add locks to the doors, sensors to the windows and all kinds of other security systems.

Isn’t your website kind of like a home? You fill it will valuable content. You build your site’s readership. In time it becomes a web … Continue

Enhance customer experience by asking for their opinion

Having best practices for survey functionality helps you effectively communicate with your audience.

In addition to having analytics show you the keyword phrases visitors are arriving at your website from, you can survey your audience to ask about the types of content they like and prefer. This helps … Continue

Even with recent frustrations, Google is still the search partner content publishers turn to. Its search engine is the most comprehensive, and we like to think that its actions are always performed with good intentions…their informal corporate motto is “don’t be evil” after all.

One way Google has helped published make their own websites more searchable … Continue

How are you monitoring the sales of your products?

Knowing which products generate the most revenue helps you optimize your content strategy while dictating the future creation of new products. Especially now with publishers embracing video content and bundles, it’s necessary to know how much more successful some efforts are compared to others, and which formats … Continue

Many niche, special-interest publishers have been focusing on customer relationships for years. There’s a passion behind the content shared by publisher and consumer alike. Plus, publishers realized building relationships directly with customers was necessary as their audience universes were much smaller than those of major banks or car brands.

Enhancing the user experience involves a … Continue

Website taxonomy needs to be clear and easy to understand so your audience members can find the information they seek. The mobile version of your website has to be even more concise and understandable since it’s displayed on a much smaller screen.

Did you go through all your online business’ topics prior to launching your … Continue

Modeling your website modeled after successful content producers in your market

If your website is getting created, or you’re working on a redesign, what parameters will it follow?

In order to create a website that will effectively meet the needs of your audience you need to have a relevant starting point. If you’re creating a subscription … Continue

Website usability tests are performed to determine if websites are functioning correctly. If they aren’t, users will have a hard time executing on their desired tasks, leading website publishers to fail in building rapport and generating revenue from these users.

There are three basic approaches to usability testing. They include expert reviews, heuristic testing and … Continue

An efficient option for retailing through WordPress websites

Think of the top online retailers…Amazon and Overstock come to my mind immediately. The reason I mention this is due to the ease in which transactions can be made on these websites.

Purchasing online is a common activity, but audience members expect the process to be safe and efficient. … Continue

Phrasing, lettering and style best practices for attracting seniors to your website

“I hope I die before I get old.” –The Who, My Generation

One of the most famously quoted lines in rock history, written by Pete Townshend, apparently has nothing to do with age, but rather, is speaking out on becoming rich and apathetic. So if … Continue

3 website factors that can lead to lower page ranks

Online publishers and content marketers are constantly looking for ways to increase their search engine optimization.

We are all aware that Google makes algorithm changes and plays with ranking factors each year. Due to this, a lot of attention is given to correlating factors that lead to … Continue

Eight in-depth guidelines for analyzing your own website homepages

As someone who’s looked at your website every day for a long time, you probably have no business reviewing your own website. There are probably things in the back of your mind that you’ve kept a mental checklist of – items that need to be optimized, altered … Continue

Make your users feel smart by designing a website that works exactly how it’s supposed to

Want to know a great way to confuse, distract and drive away new users? Design a website like a print ad. Go ahead, throw underlines under things that aren’t hyperlinks. Overdesign your button graphics so that nobody knows that they’re … Continue

August Home’s Don Peschke encourages publishers to focus on the customer experience and proves once again “he’s the smartest guy in the room”

Andy Clurman, President & COO of Active Interest Media, summed up Peschke’s presentation perfectly at the MPA’s IMAG event last week in San Francisco. Clurman asked out loud, “How is it that year … Continue