Monthly Archives: May 2019

What Should You Invest In First? A Logo Design or Website Design?

Logo design or website design

When starting a business, the main target of the service provider is to grab the attention of the clients. The current market is now full of challenges as new competitors are joining in the business field every day with a complete package of their unique offerings. It often becomes challenging to establish a business as a reputed brand in the marketplace. A good Logo and a well-developed company website both are necessary to create a brand name. However, choosing one between the two is the most challenging decision. A website is the information provider from where a potential customer generally collects all the necessary information about the service offered. For example, services like price, product description, availability in the market, new product launches, offers, subscriptions. On the other hand, a good logo creates the first impression in the mind of the clients/customers about the company while helping to win the faith of the clients.

Website:

A website provides a general description of the products, price, and much other information which the customers may find valuable. A well-composed website attracts more customer than a blunt and ordinary looking webpage does. A good website offers images, graphs, ratios, charts, business statistics, and other types of vivid description of the products as well as the company.

A medium of communication:

To establish effective communication between the buyer and the seller, the website is the most useful medium. Instead of visiting different stores located at different parts of the town, a customer can get a glimpse of the products from the website and can establish contact via the provided email I.D. and other contact details.

Helps in marketing:

A well-constructed website helps a company in marketing its products and services. When a new company enters the market, it struggles to find potential customers. A good site helps the latest company to spread its products among the customers through its well-structured offers, flash sales, product images, customer reviews, and recommendations etc.

Brand maker:

In this modern era of digital marketing, a buyer or a dealer always depend on online search result to find a company’s reliability. With an eye-catching website, a company can win the trust of the fresh customers, who are also eager to explore new products. Thus, a well-developed website helps a company to develop a brand of its own.

Logo:

Although the website helps a new business to create a brand of its own, it’s a logo which helps the business to stand out from the crowd. The logo is not just a simple image; it tells more about the company than we think. Imagine the logos of popular food chains, reputed mobile phones, or acclaimed airline services. When we see those logos while ordering or choosing something from the list, they not only create the first impression but the influence on our choice and preference as well.

The best thing to establish graphic communication:

A professional logo helps a company to emerge as a prospective brand in the competitive market. A good logo targets a particular audience, so it must possess excellent graphic design, intelligent choice of color, theme matching with the offered product or service, etc. A good logo can be the acronyms or emblems related to the company, which helps the customers to identify the brand. The logo appears everywhere, from the newspapers and T.V. commercials to the website, flyers, and billboards. So, one can complement a logo by saying that it is a visual communicator who works as a bridge between the sellers and the customers.

A simple yet powerful tool to make an impression:

The buyers or the customers often judge a book by its cover. So, for a logo, having the right appearance is very important. A clean, simple, yet powerful logo makes the product or the brand unforgettable. In some cases, it is observed that a simple mono-color logo leaves more impact on the customers than what a vibrant and gaudy logo does. The reason behind this is, for a customer, a simple logo with a powerful message is easy to remember compared to the complicated logo designs which may convey multiple messages. A satisfied customer can easily recognize his preferred products by their logos.

Professional touch matters:

A professional logo designer spends a long period in researching, experimenting, and crafting a logo with high-quality graphics. A costly logo design possesses one of a kind of uniqueness which helps to create an identity in the business field. On the other hand, a second logo lacks a proper understanding of the target audience as well as excellent logo design ideas. Sometimes, the cheap logo makers borrow design ideas from other logos or websites which may lead a business organization facing legal trials over copyright issues.

Long lasting effect:

A well-researched and well-designed logo will continue to float in the market for a long time. The company might need to re-modify its website in five years according to the market scenario, but the logo will be everlasting since it will live in the minds of the customers.

Trust matters:

A professional logo helps a brand to win the trust of the customers. The most favored and the most preferred brands in the market have one thing in common- they have been continuing with their original authentic logo design.

So, it can be concluded to that although a website helps to establish secure communication between the customers and the sellers or service providers, it is the logo, which wins the attention and trust of the customers. So, investing in a good logo design will be much beneficial for a company.

The Influence of Voice Search on Featured Snippets

Voice Search

Featured snippets have become popular nowadays because they can scan the user’s queries and provide a trusted result without even leaving the search engine result page. Having a featured snippet also helps you stand out in the crowd in the field of digital assistants as it provides search queries with a better answer. The bottom line is if your web pages are in featured snippets, you have pretty good scope to get a significant amount of traffic from the voice search.

Importance of Optimizing Your Page for Featured Snippets:

The rise of mobile searches and increase in voice search assistants has dramatically changed the way users search for information. No matter which search engine you are using, the importance of voice search is undeniable. According to Google’s prediction, more than half of search queries will be voice search by 2020. Here comes the significance of Featured Snippets. The central aspect of featured snippets is that they are the results that are read aloud in the response of queries of voice searches. These are the direct answer results that come at the top of search engine result page in a box, and in most of the times, they have a link back to the source of the answer.

The critical point to consider about featured snippets is that here a user searches by using voice search and expect a verbal reply, and in that case, the user will not be presented with a choice of search results. Instead, only one result will be read out. The voice assistant will only choose the outcome where there is a featured snippet. You may have spent a reasonable amount of time in optimizing the Meta title and descriptions of your site, but if you have not tuned your page for featured snippets, your web page content will not be read aloud, and you will miss a thousand of traffic that comes from voice searches.

Reconstruct Your Content to Grab the Attention of Featured Snippets:

There is a considerable difference between the way we write and the way we talk. The featured snippets too, are being displayed for searches that are very closer to how users speak. Therefore, to do well in featured snippets, you must optimize your content in such a way so that it is being returned for voice searches. It is important to optimize your web content with longer and more natural sounding sentences.

How Does Voice Search Work?

The way search assistants do their voice search is similar to natural language processing. For example, if you ask the voice search assistant, “What are the best speakers for $200,” it queries “best speakers for $200.” Then when you follow up by asking, “What is the best Bluetooth speaker for $200,” it searches “best Bluetooth speaker for $200”. Not only does a voice search assistant manage to construct the search-phrases into complete sentences, but it’s able to link two different queries accurately. Also, when it comes to featured snippets, the words ‘best’ and “how to” return more featured snippets than any other phrases.

Therefore, the content that is optimized by keeping this in mind tends to dominate the majority of featured snippets. As a website owner, you need to optimize your website with quick, easy to follow contents that can deliver fast and quality information. Also, if you focus on formatting your “best” and “how to” content into list format, there is a good chance that your website appears in featured snippets and voice searches.

The best way to implement this is to integrate your contents in Q&A style formats. This is not just implementing a FAQ page, and it is reconstructing at least some of your content to fit the Q&A style. The rule is to make your content more accessible for voice search assistants to pull for the featured snippet. The better you can do this; the more likely your materials will be displayed in the featured snippets.

Utilizing Voice Friendly Snippets:

Given the influence of voice search on featured snippets, you should optimize your content in such a way that tracks voice friendly snippets. It would be best if you started creating a list of newly modified keywords that sound more natural when read out loud and implement them with your website content. Identifying a set of voice friendly keywords can help provide some valuable information to rank better in featured snippets and gives your website a competitive edge in this new age of voice search on smartphones.

Steps to Lightning Page Speed of Your Website

website

Website loading speed has become one of the most significant factors nowadays that determine the value of your site in the search engine result page and its ranking position. Google’s effort of making its search algorithms perfect has made website loading speed optimization a must for webmasters who want to rank well in the search engine result page (SERP).

A slow website is also harmful to your business as the users are reluctant to spend time on a site that loads very slowly. However, it’s not just your potential customers that hate slow website – Google and other search engines have also started to penalize slow-loading sites. Most of the search engines now consider website loading speed as a ranking factor, and to improve the online presence of your website, you must employ a significant amount of time in correcting your site’s loading speed error.

With all of these points in mind, you must keep the following things in mind to make sure your website runs smoothly and in no time.

Lower Down the HTTP Requests:

One of the most critical factors that determine the loading time of a website is the number of HTTP requests it sends before it is fully loaded. Given the highly interactive user interface nowadays, it is quite common to find websites that need to load at least a handful of images each time when a user tries to load the site. A website sends an HTTP request each time when an image is being loaded, which slows down your website loading speed. The more pictures in a website layout, the more HTTP requests it sends each time – which is high enough to hinder your website from loading faster. The only solution to get rid of this problem is to compress all your website images by using CSS. Combining images into CSS sprites can make your website load insanely faster than anything else.

Use of Caching for E-Commerce Websites:

User experience matters the most for an e-commerce website, and it is essential to optimize the loading speed of your online store so that it loads fast even when it receives a large amount of traffic. Using caching is a sure way to make your eCommerce website runs smoother as it prevents unnecessary loading files. Caching technique stores data of a page into the memory so that when anyone opens the same website in the next time, it loads from the mind instead of from server.

Try to Use Content in an Optimized Way:

According to Google’s best SEO practices rule, a website with long and descriptive content with a significant number of shareable videos, images tend to attract more customers and rank higher in the search engine result page. This could be an effective SEO practice but can reduce the website loading speed. Therefore, it is important to use contents in an optimized way so that it takes minimum space and consumes lesser bandwidth while loading.

Consider Changing Your Hosting:

There are times when a site runs extremely slow because of an unreliable hosting provider. Using these types of hosting harms your user experience as well. The golden rule to research a bit and choose a reliable hosting provider. However, you should not use a hosting just because it worked well for someone else’s site, because the concept that one type of hosting will work best for all kinds of website is not genuine at all.

Avoid Using Unnecessary Plugins:

If your website is built by using a WordPress Theme and you are using a lot of additional plugins, it can significantly slow down the site. WordPress plugins are, and many developers use the same because of their easy accessibility and ease of use. However, using additional plugins in a single site will slow down its loading speed and result in negative user experience. The best way to get rid of this problem is to remove plugins that are not in use.

Use Content Delivery Networks:

One common practice of improving the website loading time is to use a good content delivery network (CDN). CDNs are an enormous collection of servers placed in different locations all over the globe. The benefit of using CDN is that it stores several copies of your website on different servers in different areas. As a result, users, visiting your website from their locations, will be able to access the website that is hosted in the same place. The result is a faster loading website with superb user experience.

Which is The Best Ecommerce Platform?

Ecommerce Platform

For business owners who are planning to start a new eCommerce business in 2019, it’s vital for them to get an idea as to how the eCommerce platform has evolved in the past couple of years. Before selecting a particular eCommerce platform for your business, you must keep the significant highlights of the eCommerce industry in mind.

Choosing the best eCommerce platform for your store is a difficult decision as there are many different things to consider. In case you are not up-to-date with the current eCommerce industry, there are a thousand platforms that can be regarded as the best eCommerce platform. Wix, Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, 3D Cart, OpenCart, ZenCart – these are all popular eCommerce platforms, and they have active users and communities. With so many options it becomes challenging for the users to choose a particular one, especially when they all call themselves the best eCommerce platform.

When choosing the best eCommerce platform, you must consider the critical factors like popularity, features, cost, user experience, customer support, and overall reputation. Based on these vital factors, we have assembled a list of 5 best eCommerce platforms that can help you start your store in 2019.

Shopify:

This is a Canadian based eCommerce platform that has been assisting online businesses across the world since 2004. Shopify is always considered among one of the top eCommerce platforms that have evolved their platform according to the latest trends and technologies. Shopify provides its users with a powerful social shopping experience, and it even doesn’t let your customers leave their social media platform to purchase the product.

The most important advantage that Shopify offers is that you can directly integrate this platform with your Facebook account and make your FB account an eCommerce store. The only drawback of using Shopify is you need to pay additional transaction charges in case you are not using Shopify Payment gateway. Despite the drawbacks, Shopify can be the best solution for the startups and novice eCommerce entrepreneurs who are looking for a conventional eCommerce solution.

Magento:

Introduced in 2008, Magento is a popular open source eCommerce platform which is known for its reliability and ease of use. Due to its scalability, Magento is considered among one of the most popular eCommerce platforms available in 2019. Many popular businesses have their websites built on the Magento platform. Magento is the best choice for business owners with a massive volume of products. However, Magento is not the right choice for a business owner who has little or no knowledge in the programming language. At least, the store owner needs to have a team of professional programmers who are working on his team.

WooCommerce:

WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin, and it is widely popular in the world of eCommerce. It provides users with many benefits like secure payment gateway and a high-quality shopping cart. As it is open source and very easy to handle, even the novices with little knowledge in WordPress can feel the WooCommerce platform. However, one needs to install an additional plugin to initiate a multi-product eCommerce store.

BigCommerce:

BigCommerce is another important eCommerce platform which is often compared to Shopify. Like Shopify, BigCommerce also offers a similar user experience and allows users to choose from a range of prices and packages. BigCommerce is an affordable eCommerce platform, and all its packages are tailored to different kinds of businesses. This platform is highly customizable, and if you know the necessary coding, you can customize its themes and templates to build your eCommerce website. However, not all these themes and templates are free, and you may need to pay an additional cost to use a particular BigCommerce theme or template.

Wix:

Wix is the easiest of all eCommerce platforms available nowadays. It has unlimited free themes and templates that you can use to build your eCommerce website. Wix has an in-built artificial design interface that lets you create a website by using its AI program. Another important reason why most people prefer Wix is because it is very affordable. Wix comes in only $5/month. The most expensive plan for Wix comes with $25/month. It’s true that Wix doesn’t support multiple features that the other big eCommerce platforms do, but it satisfies the requirement of most small eCommerce entrepreneurs.