Monthly Archives: February 2019

7 Features Your Homepage Should Have

Homepage

When you are planning to promote your business online, the first thing that comes to your mind is to create a beautiful website. Your website should be designed in such a way so that your potential customers find it attractive and can have an exceptional experience. Online presence is the key to any business. Therefore, it is essential to build a website, which is professional and have a great user interface.

Regardless of your products and services, companies find it very difficult to choose a perfect home page for their website. Even the experienced digital marketers struggle to decide as to which contents to put in the website home page. When it comes to design a perfect home page design that converts into actual sales, literally there is no such formula as there are many different options to choose from. However, professional designers can guide you in this regard, and they can provide you with a checklist to be implemented on the home page. It is imperative that you follow the list to achieve your goals in the best possible manner.

Mentioned below are the 7 most important features that your homepage should have:

Start with a Creative Logo:

The first thing that every home page should have is a perfect logo. This is the first thing that your visitors see when they open your website. You should avoid crowding your logo with unnecessary visual ornamentations. It is essential to place your logo in the top left corner with enough space around it to make sure that it stands out. Also, consider the size of your logo and resist your urges to make it unnecessary bigger.

3D & 2D Logo Portfolio 9 - DreamLogoDesign

3D & 2D Logo Portfolio 8 - DreamLogoDesign

Professional Site Menu Bar:

Once you finalise your company logo, the next thing that you need to put in your home page is a professional looking menu. Your home page menu should include the most important pages of your website so that visitors find it very easy to browse through the pages. Nevertheless, it would help if you did not overcrowd the menu under any circumstances.

Quick Tip: You can use the hamburger menu icon, which is nothing but an image with three horizontal lines. These types of menu icons have become popular nowadays, especially on mobile devices.

Stunning Above the Fold Banner:

The above the fold section of your website is the part that users can see without scrolling down. This is the most crucial part of your home page, and you should never overlook this section. The above the fold banner should have the most engaging contents so that it attracts your potential customers. This is because in many cases customers are super busy and they don’t have time to scroll down and navigate through the entire website to find any information. Instead, they prefer to exit from the site and look for a better alternative (site). The above the fold banner should be unique, and there should be bold headlines with a prominent call to actions to engage your users.

Web Header Design Portfolio 8 - DreamLogoDesign

Web Header Design Portfolio 4 - DreamLogoDesign

Forms to Capture Leads:

This is important when you want to use your home page in different ad campaigns and look for inbound leads. A simple form with a clear call to action button like “Get a Quote”, “Book Appointment Now” etc. can engage your users more than anything else. You can also get a chance to capture your user’s contact information and use the leads for future marketing campaigns.

Enticing Headline:

The most crucial element of your website is the homepage headline. The purpose of using headline is to tell your customers about what your business is and who you are. No user wants to scroll through the entire page to know what your site has to offer. Therefore, you should be very careful to tell them about your business by using the unique and professionally written headline.

Call to Actions:

As mentioned earlier, call to actions are another vital feature of any homepage. Your website should have multiple calls to actions (CTA). It would help if you were specifically careful about creating a call to actions that are visually appealing.

Quick Tip: Always consider using the first word of your call to action button a Verb so that it looks like a command.

Don’t Forget to Include a Portfolio:

If your business offers any products or services, you should consider adding a portfolio to your website home page. Your portfolio is an essential element that your users would like to see first to understand your credibility.

7 Reasons Why You Should Not DIY Your Logo

Logo

1. New brand For a New Company

Several reasons are there for a company to become new even though the organization’s business perspective is the same. If someone’s company has a new name, for example, the brand performs the role of connecting the old to the original.

2. Companies Evolution

If some one’s company goes through a transition which has much meaning as far as the customer base is concerned, then for a brand which is in a refreshing condition it is an opportunity to assimilate the new & old in a unique manner. If someone promotes his/her companies age, many people do this in their logo & ‘est.’ Someone’s website & brand don’t have to reflect that he/she has not updated it for a long time. A company’s product which is named Wolley Home solutions is paying tribute to the past. Their brand & site has the demonstration that as far the faith is concerned.They are a reliable brand for the coming generations. They have a product which is accessible.

3. Support To Rebrand A Company

If there is a rebranding of any company then to support those hard work refreshing a brand is necessary. Through an updated brand a company conveys the message to its efficient customers “Here’s the new us” or “What’s New About Us.”

4. Expansion of Markets

If there is an expansion of new markets, then the primary purpose is served by a refreshed brand. So that the customers will come to know about the product, provide them the information about the newly launched product and its function. This is the right time for a refreshed brand to focus and to expand its reach. GAC services, business has been developed & then a broader variety of options were provided to its customers which includes cooling, heating & electrical options.

5. Brand Updates

There should be a reason for brand refreshment, one of the ideas can be mandatory for updates. If on the go too long, with no change in marketing material, it will not have a fresh look like garments, marketing design goes through styles.

If one look at Classic American companies like Ford, Starbucks & even Coca-Cola, they have a design & presence which can be differentiated, but they look different with time.

If one doesn’t have any idea about Starbucks then also there will be a logo along with Starbucks in the 1970’s words are printed on every coffee cup. With time logo also has changed. The emblem of Starbucks at present is a version which is streamlined of its water maid, it can be distinguished than the original, but they are close enough so customers can visualize if they see both the sides of the coffee cups.

6. Coordination of Social Media Channel

Channels coming through social media are significant in building networks with & driving sales to a person’s customer base. The different social media stalwarts of Facebook, Twitter & to various market segments they have a strong appeal. Instagram, for example, is most famous among youths & adults.

7. Brand ambassador For A Company

If someone’s branding has been very product or service oriented, a rebranding can result in a ‘face’ for that company. Selco, a company which deals with financial services that inform the customers about the rate of interest & products which are available. Employees in each branch are emphasized by their rebranding which takes place by including pictures.

Top 10 Brochure Design Trends For 2019

Brochure Design Trends 2019

Providing a great new look to an existing brand requires a lot of market researches and feedback received from the targeted group. However, in most cases, companies do not have that time or the right resources to do the same. A wise way to rejuvenate the existing look and feel of your current is to hire a professional agency to design a brochure.

What is Brochure Marketing?

Brochure marketing is an essential tool that companies can use to put details of their products and services in an attractive layout for clients and targeted customers. A good brochure design can provide clients and customers with essential information about your business as well as gives a unique idea about the brand. By designing a beautiful looking brochure, a marketer can build an authentic brand identity of the company.

Brochure Design Trends:

Just like any other graphic designs such as company logo, website, business cards, newsletters, banners among others brochure design trends also fluctuate as the time flies. Some of the design trends go away each year and others stay forever. As a marketer, you must have a clear idea about the latest brochure design trends before designing one. Like any marketing elements, marketers also want to draw the attention of the targeted customers or clients by using brochure. Therefore, they always look for the latest trends to implement in their brochure design ideas so that the result is something that can stand out in the crowd. Fortunately, a bunch of design trends come every year to create a memorable brochure design, and you can choose any one from them to hit the market.

Mentioned below are 10 key brochure design trends that are going to rule in the year 2019:

1. Decent Typography:

Typography is the most important of all design elements that designers love experimenting with. The first thing that most brands customize is typography. In 2019, using typography of different styles and notes is in the trend. For example, bold typefaces are going to rule this year.

2. Bold and Bright Color Combination:

Bold and bright colors are in the market. In the past years, designers were reluctant to use colors that are bright and bold in nature. They were mostly depended on soft hues to convey the message of the sophistication of the brand. However, this trend has changed a lot, and bold and bright colors are back again. Nevertheless, instead of using bold and bright colors directly, you can use different gradients and patterns of colors, especially when it comes to rebranding the brochure.

3. 3D Design:

Another essential design trend that is going to be very popular in 2019 is 3D design and typography. Three-dimensional models can change the entire composition and give a feel just about ready to pop. However, there is no particular rule for this; you can use any font and render the same in 3D.

4. Avoiding Rigid Grid-based Designs:

Designers are now moving away from using rigid grid-based designs. Instead, brochure designs are now made with various templates-based designs that feel more alive. In short, the asymmetrical design trend is on, and you can follow this for your brochure design as well.

5. Duotones and Gradients:

Gradients are also known as color transitions, and they are a well-recognized trend in this year. Simple one-color brochure design is not working anymore; more and more designs are now made with gradients.

6. Warm Color Palettes for Images:

If you are using many images in your brochure design, you can use something warm to give them a vibrant look. Using warm colors in images will give your design a feel more like the days when cameras and screens were not captured by using saturated colors.

7. Shapes and Structures:

Brochure design in 2019 will come with more geometrical shapes and structures to experiment with the look and feel of the company branding. Brochures will be made in some unusual geometrical shapes like triangle, rectangle, and square.

8. A lot of Illustrations:

Using many illustrations in brochure design is the latest trend. This is because illustrations can get immediate attention from potential customers. Also, designers get the chance to show their creativity when illustrations are used in the design.

9. Open Composition:

Although sounds like a bit peculiar, open brochure design composition, where you feel like you see a part of the whole story, is in the trend. These types of compositions embrace a lot of white spaces, and the elements are placed in such a way as if they could float away.

10. Using Color Fonts:

More and more brochure designs in 2019 will be made by using color fonts. The color font is the next big thing, and this will be incredibly popular this year. The most important reason behind this is that the software for using color fonts has recently launched and there is a pretty good chance that designers will use the software aggressively.

Why Should You Invest In Newsletter Design?

Newsletter Design

An email newsletter can be an effective marketing campaign, and it can be better than anything else your marketing team currently does. Email campaign significantly more effective way to drive targeted leads than any other marketing strategies – nearly 40-50% better than social media. There is a particular reason why an email newsletter is so influential. According to researchers, nine out of ten individuals check email every day; this number is even more than they shop online and visit social media sites. Therefore, there are pretty good reasons why you should invest in email newsletter design.

Creating Great Newsletter for Your Business:

Once you have made up your mind to invest in the newsletter campaign, the first thing that you can do is to hire a professional agency to design one for you. Your readers might have an inbox filled with a bunch of newsletters, with no or little time to go through all of them. That means your newsletter has to be designed magnificently with a great subject line to grab the attention of your reader. One way you can do this by letting the professionals do it for you so that they can provide you with a stunning newsletter design that works.

How to Design Great Newsletter Design?

The initial but most important part of your newsletter design process is to decide on a theme and subject. First, ask yourself why you are designing the newsletter. Is it going to offer any of product or is it for distributing some important announcement or data that drive traffic back to a particular page of your site? It is vital to have a clear idea as to what activity you want your newsletter subscribers to perform when they see the email.

Another thing you need to keep in mind that the newsletter design should coordinate with the basic appearance of your business website, you should let your subscribers know who the email is from as soon as they open the email. The subject line and the quality of the words you use in your newsletter are also crucial as they set up a connection between you and the reader.

Why is Email Newsletter Design Still the Best?

The strategy of grabbing the attention of your customer with an email newsletter is an old concept, but it can still give you significant result even today. However, the truth is that the process of grabbing the attention of your reader is more laborious today as it was ten years ago. Designing a stunning newsletter is still worth the effort. Despite the popularity of social media marketing nowadays, an email newsletter still works as it promotes the chance of 1:1 connection with the customers. If you can put some serious effort behind creating a stunning looking newsletter design, you can save the right amount of marketing dollars.

Another important task for you is to test a couple of versions of your newsletter design. This will give you a chance to understand better which version is affecting your results. Nowadays many different email tools come with built-in A/B testing capabilities.

10 Signs of a Great Web Design Agency

Web Design Agency

With so many web design agencies out there in the market, it can be an uphill task to figure out which one is the best for you. It is indeed not a decision that you can take lightly just because your website is going to be the face of your business. That’s why it’s essential for you to know the best qualities of a good web design agency. Mentioned below are ten signs of a great web design agency.

Listening to Your Ideas:

An essential quality of a good web design agency is that they look to your care. It is because you are the owner of your business and you understand it better than anyone else. You have the best idea of how to preset it to your potential customers. Therefore, if the web design agency is reluctant to listen to your thoughts, they are probably not interested in putting your ideas into action. You should never work with such an agency as well.

Provide You with Their Innovative Ideas:

Apart from listening to your ideas, a good web design agency should also provide you with their innovative ideas. After all, you should not pay an agency that only follows your views and doesn’t put any creativity in the design. A sign of a good web design agency is their creativity. The design agency must be able to produce exciting ideas in front of you.

Help You Create an Optimized Design:

Website design with no marketing element is just like a car with no driver. It may look great, but the website is not going to be useful concerning earning a return on investment (ROI). A good web design agency should have a marketing team that will help them to create an optimized design so that the result is worthy enough to fulfill the marketing goals.

Designing According to the CMS:

You always need a content management system (CMS) to run your website. Without this, your site will be a static one, and you cannot make changes in the same without the help of a web developer. The web design agency should be familiar with the best content management systems and should design a website by keeping a particular CMS in mind.

Responsive Web Design:

As a mobile website has become more popular nowadays and mobile website design has become one of the most important ranking factors in Google, the web design agency should know everything about designing a responsive website. Although in some cases a separate mobile site might have some advantages, responsive design is always a better solution.

Experience in Your Business:

Although this is not a must to have quality, a good website design agency should know every other industry so that they can understand their client’s requirement well. If the web design agency has experience about your business, this means they are familiar with what you think necessary for the design. Also, when the web designer has prior experience in working with a client that had the same business as you, he/she can better understand your requirement.

Following the Latest Trend:

The most important you can want from the web design agency is that they work according to the latest design trends. A web design agency should have proper knowledge about what’s popular and what is the latest trend because customers do not want to check websites with old designs.

Website Maintenance Services:

In some cases, the web design agency offers a few months of continued service for website maintenance to make sure that the website is working while you use it. While this is not a necessary criterion that you should look for when choosing a web design agency, this could be an additional service that you can ask. However, it is essential to ask the web designers to provide you with a detailed website manual so that you can maintain your website yourself.

Expansive Portfolio:

Hiring a web design agency is not a gamble. You need to check their records before hiring them. With that in mind, you need to check their portfolio. A good portfolio is proof that the agency has tremendous experiences with past clients.

Appropriate Pricing:

The most important thing that comes to your mind when choosing a good web design agency is how much will they charge for their service. Although the cost of hiring a web design agency varies widely depending on many different factors, a good web design agency should show you significant logic behind the charges.

7 Web Design Trends to Lookout for in 2019

Web Design

Like all other artistic fields, web designing is more like a fashion that changes almost every year. What got hit in the previous year can become obsolete, and a new trend may be popular in the New Year. To serve the customers and to make them 100% satisfied, you must design their website with the lookouts according to the current trend.

When it comes to designing a stunning website, it is crucial to develop the same as per the modern trends and for this; you need to stay updated with the latest trends in the web design industry.

Keeping all these in mind, we have discussed the seven web design trends to look out for in 2019.

Use of Bright and Bold Colors: Yes, the bright and bold colors are still popular this year. Gradients that are incorporated with bright and bold colors are going to rule in 2019 as well.  This is because, with these types of color gradients, you can easily customize your website’s appearance to produce something more dynamic that can define what your site is all about. Also, using bright and bold vibrant colors will make your site stand out in the crowd.

Use of Custom Graphics and Illustrations: Graphic design and illustrations are not similar; there is a minute difference between the two. Graphic designs are used to carry out a specific message to your audience while illustrations offer a visual representation of an idea or text. Both of these were an essential element of a website in the previous years, and they are even in the latest web design trends in 2019.

Incorporating Video Backgrounds: Similar to 2018, when video background was the king of marketing content, this trend is going to continue even in 2019. Since videos are lively, it’s hard for visitors to ignore them and thus, they can become the most powerful content in the digital industry. With social media marketing becoming stronger day by day, the trend of designing a website with videos in the background has become an essential trend in 2019. Use of video background in your site may have several benefits and can help you capture the maximum users’ attention, but the most important advantage that this latest trend offers is that video background help in useful conversions. With this, your website visitors will be prone to stay longer in your site and will more likely to sign-up or opt-in your services.

High-Quality Photos: According to the old saying, a picture says a thousand words. Therefore, using high quality and creative image in your website design will be able to evoke people’s emotion. Using little texts and more pictures have become a vital web design trend in 2019. Highly creative images enhance the online experience and moving forward in 2019 and coming years; they are going to be an integral part of web design.

Big and Bold Texts: Use of big and bold texts and typographies in the above the fold banner of a website is a hit in 2019. There are plenty of reasons behind this. Bold headlines look striking and help to create a strong identity of brands. Also, by using big and bold typography, you will be able to include more power in your message.

Animated Movements: Similar to the video in the background, small animated movement in the background is a big hit in 2019. Lively and integrated animation when placed strategically throughout the website can define great interfaces. It also helps to enrich interaction and make your site more exciting.

Responsive Website Design: The introduction of 4G has impacted a lot on the mobile users, and as more numbers of visitors are now opening their favorite websites on their mobile devices, the use of responsive web design has become an inevitable part of web design in 2019 just like it was in the previous years.

What is website design? What is the difference between web design and web development?

Website Design

The terms web design and web development may look similar, but they are different in reality. Although the role of both web developers and web designers is to bring a website to life, their responsibilities, required skill sets, training and way of work are widely different.

What is Website Design?

Website design is merely the process of creating a website. The entire process may include several aspects including the creation of webpage layout, content generation and last but not the least, graphic design. The most important thing that is necessary for creating a website is a markup language, commonly known as HTML.

Web designers create web pages by using HTML tags that define the basis of the content as well as of the metadata of each page. Based on the preferences and client’s requirement, the web designers create the basic design or layout of the web pages, and the plan and appearances of a website are typically defined by using cascading style sheets, commonly called as CSS. To sum up, we can say that most sites are a combination of HTML and CSS. These are the main things that define how a page will look like in a browser.

Role of Web Designer:

As discussed, web designers are mainly responsible for creating the HTML of the website and defining the appearance of the site by using CSS. Some of the designers prefer to start coding the webpage from scratch by writing HTML and CSS. Also, there are others who prefer using code editors like Adobe Dreamweaver. The advantage of using this type of WYSIWYG editor is that it provides a visual interface for designing the webpage layout.
Apart from that, a website can be designed by using a content management system like WordPress or Joomla. These types of CMSs offer a basic template for a, and this template can be used for the starting point of a new website. Web designers then add content and customize the layout by using any suitable web-based interface.

Importance of Graphic Design:

HTML and CSS can create the primary interface of a website, but the designers still need to create the images, banners, logos, and layout of the user interface. The individuals that produce these types of designs are called graphic designers, and graphic designing is an integral part of designing a website. Graphic designers mainly use programs like Adobe Photoshop to export the images in a format that can be implemented for the website design.

What is Web Development?

Web Development could refer to a single web page built with HTML and CSS that might contain a couple hundred lines of code. Or on the other end of the spectrum, it could refer to a website like Facebook that supposedly contains around 60 million lines of code

Difference between Web design and Web Development:

On the contrary to the web designers, web developers are mainly responsible for creating the code and looking after the functionalities of a website. In one word, web developers are concerned about the features of a site rather than the appearance of the website or application. Front end development includes several works like coding, CSS, JavaScript, etc and the backend development includes different programming language and framework like Ruby on Rails, Python. Apart from that web development also involves the understanding of databases, such as MySQL.

Regarding activities, the task of web design tends to be more creative and artistic, while web development is more analytical. However, with the ever-changing landscape, the role of both web designer and web developer can often become combined in the workplace. For example, many web designers understand the necessary web development concepts and vice versa. However, in most cases, companies hire dedicated members in both fields.