Website Designer Questionnaire For Clients

We have been learning one thing since childhood, is to ask questions to clear your doubts, obstacles, etc. The more the questions asked the clearer your concepts are set in your mind. A similar thing applies to your professional life too. Being a designer it’s very important to understand the client’s perspective and needs. The perspective can only be cleared when asked multiple questions to them. This will help to understand the client more deeply. Also, their work which can be services or products, their brand, budgets, aim, and many more things. By the question, we not only understand the client but also help us to plan the strategic, timeline and deadlines.

So without any time waste, let’s get started to the set of questionnaire.

1. Learn more about the business

Until and unless you are clear about your client and its business there is nothing you can start with. Get to know about the business location, contact number, reviews, etc. This will help designers and developers to grab the basic information about the industry.

2. Know about the website

If the client owes the website previously, get the most of it. Get to know its technologies, version, frameworks, etc. Also, in terms of marketing, its current condition in the market, place holding in google, keywords, etc.

3. What they want 

Ask your client about their expectations, ideas, perspective and whatever they want. By doing this you get the checklist to do things which are attached to the requirements. At this level, you can see the clear path on which work needs to be started.

4. Specify the keywords 

Certain clients have this specific requirement about the keywords. List down the keywords and check the current scenario, so the progress can be measure. If they don’t have any specific keyword, ask them for their views about it.

5. What’s your USP

Every company has its unique selling points, ask for it. This is the one thing which makes them stand out in the crowd of competitors. Also, it needs to be added on the website which is highlighted to attracts the customers.

6. Who are your competitors 

Knowing your competitors always helps to know your current position and where to reach in future? Referring them one gets the idea about the current competition level in terms of development as well as designing.

7. Target Audience 

For any business its important to know the target audience in the initial stages of designing. Depending upon the B2B or B2C business the layout and the appearance varies. Customer-oriented website is more interactive as compared to the business one.

8. Do you have references 

Nowadays people are fascinated by some of the other things and they wanted it on the website. So clients do have few references and ideas which they wanted to get implemented by the website designers.

9. Deadlines 

This question shouldn’t be missed out to ask by any client. Certainly, depending on the work and implementation the time may vary. But it’s good to have the deadline which shouldn’t be crossed.

10. Budget 

Well, this is the never missed question neither by the client, not the professional designer. This question has different lookout from all the companies.

It may be a designer or the client, having a clear understanding of the project is very important. The professional website designers have the ability to undergo the brainstorming process to get the best of the work. These questionnaires will help to resolve the hurdles while designing a site.

5 Web Design Mistakes Your Business Needs To Avoid

As a web design and development company in Pune, we do a lot of work designing our client’s websites. Surprisingly though, we also spend a lot of time re-designing old websites and giving them a fresh look. Another reason we get so many website re-design requests is because of the relatively common web design mistakes that are previously committed. In today’s topic, we’re going to talk about the 5 most common web design mistakes most companies make that should be avoided at all costs.

Common Web Design Mistakes To Avoid

1. Not optimizing your website for mobile

One of the top cardinal sins of web design since 2016 is not having your website optimized for the smaller screens. Since 2016 Google has been focusing more and more on a better mobile-first experience and for good reason. People spend so much of their time on their phone that it only makes sense that your business should be represented well on the phone as well. People don’t take that into consideration while designing the website. They design the website to look unnecessarily flashy, too heavy with a lot of graphics and photos, but all that leads to is a heavy website that takes too long too long both on mobile and desktops and that the users don’t enjoy looking at.

2. Not optimizing your website for SEO

Now you may be wondering how Web Design affects your website SEO. Well if you read the previous point carefully you’ll notice how speed is a factor in both web design and SEO. Now a faster loading website won’t necessarily give you a higher ranking, but a slow website will definitely be penalized compared to its faster competitors. Web design plays a role in SEO also because if your site is designed well, your customers will love to visit it and spend more time on it. The more time they spend the better signals they send Google and the higher your rankings will progress.

3. Simplify the Layout

Another common error that most web design companies in Pune tend to make it that they make the layout of a website, web page too complicated and complex to show the effort they’ve put into the design. We at CodePlateau believe that the hardest design is a simple one where a lot of different elements work together seamlessly. Of course, clients tastes might differ from time to time but in most circumstances, we would definitely recommend something clean and simple.

4. Use Clear Communication

Within the first 10 seconds or less of having your customer visit your site, he should be able to tell what business you’re in. Even if he has never heard of your business ever before, the communication on your website should be crystal clear. While we’re on the subject of communication, we also need to talk about the typography you will be used as part of your web design aesthetics. Using clear easy to read fonts will go a long way in helping your content consumers enjoy their time on your site.

5. Not using Social Media Icons

People love sharing what they love and you as a business owner should provide your customers with every opportunity to share your website or your blogs with them. You can do this by adding your businesses social links in the footer on your website while also providing sharing options across the blogs and other content you may have. The more viral your content, the more exposure for your business.

Conclusion

It’s easy to summarize how to avoid making web design mistakes by always remembering one mantra for web design. When designing a website, always have the customer in your mind before anything else, design only for him and you’ll go a long way to make your business successfully online. If you need help with your company website, get in touch with the professionals.

Updates of AMP in 2019

Since 2016 Google has been giving businesses an opportunity to focus on their websites mobile experience. The release of Accelerated Mobile Pages was a clear indicator of how Google was trying to prioritize the mobile-first approach. If you do have an online business are not optimizing your website for a faster, smoother, & richer mobile experience, then you’re definitely setting yourself up for failure. In this blog, we will be looking at the evolution of AMP & its current state of progress at the moment.

The Evolution Of AMP

As I’ve mentioned before AMP was launched during 2016. It was an open-source project by Google which combined the development efforts of millions of people to ensure faster delivery of data on mobile pages. What AMP does is, it removes all the “unnecessary” clutter that might be delaying the loading of the pages. From what you can see, you’ll notice AMP pages will be without too many images, they’ll have a simple font. Under the hood, the CSS will be optimized for faster delivery of data, HTML and JS code will be delivered as a first in first out basis.

History Of AMP

Since releasing in 2016 AMP have been the talk of the town among Digital Marketers all around the world. Digital Marketing professionals and tech enthusiasts are both looking at AMP pages from the perspective of gains. While marketing professionals see it as another method of lead gen through articles, the IT dept is looking for ways to go even faster. But lead forms were not always available and have only been recently introduced leading to a spike in the popularity of AMP pages, ensuring 900,000 businesses online are currently using AMP for some if not all their pages.

While AMP pages were initially built to deliver news faster, companies have adopted it to suit their requirements for a variety of different pages. Brands are focused on AMP developments for their product pages as they’ve seen a significant bump if buy-ins from the customer based on faster data delivery. Especially e-commerce players who say an increase of up to 20% in their sales figures as compared to companies that did not use AMP.

All AMP Updates of 2019

In the first quarter of 2019, some interesting updates were released by the AMP team. Let’s look at some of the most interesting one’s below:

1. Video Optimization on AMP

One of the most important updates to AMP in 2019 has been the video optimization efforts that have been taken. As a digital marketing company in Pune helping small business access the gains of AMP, we know the importance of video in a marketing strategy. Three new updates have been made,
i. Videos can now be docked so that the user can continue to scroll as they are reading their content
ii. You can now install a video player that has AMP video interface features you might need as a business
iii. You can use the AMP video optimization to run ads and keep a track of them on your website

These three features have really come as a blessing to video marketers, especially who were recently seeing a decline in watch times across the internet.

2. Input Masking

Lead gen on AMP pages is just in a nascent stage but it is still an extremely necessary step that needed to be taken. One large step forward for AMP lead gen pages is that you can now customize what you form should look like to a large degree.

3. Smoother List Scrolling

Since the internet is filled with the list, & one of the most common actions users take on their phone is to scroll, AMP has now enabled smoother scrolling options while the page is in development. You can set the grid and, resize the containers to provide the best experience to the users.

Conclusion

Very few businesses in India are taking advantage of AMP pages as there are not too many digital marketing companies in Pune that are technically capable of providing that solution. If you want to know what CodePlateau can do for your business, get in touch with us today!

Laravel: A New Era in PHP Framework 2019

If you are in the business of building web applications for your clients or businesses you might have flirted with the idea of using several different types of PHP frameworks. CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Yii, and Phalcon are some of the most popular PHP Frameworks but there is one that goes above and beyond these tools and one that is our favorite here at CodePlateau and that is the Laravel PHP Framework. But what makes the Laravel PHP framework better and different from all the others? Let’s take a closer look.

Why Laravel Is The Best PHP Framework For 2019

1) Object Oriented Libraries

One of the reasons Laravel is as popular as it is (more than 1 million sites use Laravel, and it currently has more than 51,192 stars on GitHub) that it has Object Oriented libraries and plenty of pre-installed ones. Surprisingly none of these libraries are part of any other major PHP frameworks. It’s easy implementation and advanced features has made it a success across the world and you have access to tools like password reset, CSRF protection, encryption as well as authentication.

2) Authentication Techniques

As discussed above Laravel provides several object-oriented libraries of which authentication is a major item. It provides a very simple and straightforward method of implementing authentication techniques across platforms. Even the control access to resources as well as the manner in which authorization logic is organized is very simply configured which makes Laravel one of the easiest frameworks to adopt.

3) Security

One of the biggest concerns businesses has, especially those that work directly with customers, is the threat of data security. Even companies like Facebook have come under the scanner for leaking their user’s data. Laravel takes a unique look at security and provides a really clever response. Security is covered within the framework itself. Instead of saving passwords in the plain text they use salted and hashed passwords. It avoids injection attacks by avoiding user injection of <script> tags. Overall it’s one of the safest PHP frameworks to work within 2019.

4) Artisan

Apart from the business reasons many companies choose to work with Laravel, there are plenty of development reasons that developers have chosen Laravel as the best PHP framework in 2019. Laravel provides an in-built command line tool called Artisan, which allows programmers to avoid tedious, repetitive tasks and rather focus on the tougher parts of the build.

5) Database Migrations

Change is the only constant, in life and in programming. Sometimes 1000’s of lines of code will need to be updated due to a feature change, or you’ll have found a better way to manage the database, the reasons could be anything. Database migrations with Laravel is extremely easy. As long as your changes are carefully managed in migrations and seeds you can migrate changes into any other development machine you might have. If you’re looking to make your developers life easier you should definitely consider Laravel as your PHP development framework in 2019.

6) Tutorials

Assuming you’re new to Laravel & haven’t had the chance to explore it as much as your peers, you don’t need to worry. There are plenty of tutorials available on YouTube, however, Laravel offers its own tutorial service (which no other platform does), Laracast, which provides excellent, high-quality, insightful, videos that give you everything you’d like to know in one place. While the tutorials are not entirely free you do have plenty of free videos available on Laracast which should help you more than cover the basics. It’s only the advanced tutorials that you need to pay for.

Conclusion
Your developers will surely thank you for picking the Laravel PHP framework and if the decision was left upto them, that’s what they would pick 9/10 times. At CodePlateau we have a team of highly skilled programmers who are experts in Laravel and Web Application development. If you ever have any requirements for web design and web development, do get in touch.

How To Reduce Website Bounce Rate And Improve Conversions?

If you’ve ever seen the statistics on your Google Analytics you might have noticed a small tab that mentions bounce rate. A bounce rate is very bad for business. But what is a bounce rate and why are so many businesses committed to reducing it? Simply a bounce rate is when a person comes to your landing page and jumps off even before they’ve had a chance to view it properly. Not viewing your landing page means not having an opportunity to convert. No conversion means less business. Below, we’re going to highlight the steps you need to follow in order to improve your website & reduce bounce rate & hopefully improve conversions.

How To Reduce Bounce Rate On Your Website?

1. Improve Website Speed

The first thing you’re going to need to do is to improve your website speed. The faster the content loads the faster the customer is able to view the content you have to display on your page. Statistics say that customers will not wait more than 2 seconds for their webpage to being loading. If your landing page takes more than 2 seconds to load you have to fix it immediately.

2. Improve Your Content Readability/Display

Once you’ve improved the page load speed of your landing page make sure you give your customers something exciting to look at. The content you have on display, whether they are images, words, or a video has to be neatly displayed on the website. The formatting of the content should be easy to read. If you’re writing a blog then make sure to include an appealing heading and image to draw the user to the content. Write shorter paragraphs and include images as a reference and as break points for your readers.

3. Avoid Using Pop-Ups

Content Consumers don’t like when there is a disruption on their content consumption journey. Whether it’s watching a video or reading a blog. Having unnecessary pop-ups that distract the consumer will only want them to push away from your website and webpage. But Pop-Ups do work, so you’ll need to place them strategically so that they become a part of the content journey of your consumers.

4. Keep Refreshing Your Content

Most websites offer static content to consumers. A blog is typically the only place that you are able to keep refreshing the content on a weekly basis, so make sure you do that. However, for your website, make sure to update the content every few months to make sure that the most relevant is reflecting on your website. Your customers will be thankful to you for that. Not only will it lead to a lower bounce rate, but you’ll also become their go-to source for all industry related information.

5. Attract The Correct Type Of Visits

The best way to ensure that you have a low bounce rate on your website is to ensure that the person visiting your webpage or website has a relevant reason for being there. Either you’re selling a product he’s looking for, or he’ looking to avail the services you’re offering or quite simply your blog or website has an answer to the question he has. Either case, using targeted relevant keywords will ensure that your website visitors will have come to complete a certain action and helping them to do that will reduce your bounce rate. Don’t add irrelevant keywords or content to your website, not only will this lead to a higher bounce rate, but also a search listing rank penalty from Google.

Conclusion
The logic to reduce bounce rate is pretty simple, give the customers what they want, as soon as possible and in as visually appealing a way as possible. Meeting these three targets should help you achieve your bounce rate standards. If you need help with getting more conversions on your website, please do let us know and we’ll be glad to help you with a free website consultation.

Checklist for a Mobile Friendly Website

Smartphones have been integrated into our world and how! You can’t turn a corner today and see someone’s head glued to their screen. While the question of where does this lead us as a society is for greater minds, we’re looking at the checklist you need to keep ready to be able to implement a mobile-friendly website. In today’s blog, we’re going to be covering just that topic. Hopefully the end of it, you’ll know exactly what you need in order to have a fully functional mobile-friendly website.

Mobile Friendly Website Checklist

1) Implement Mobile Friendly Design
There are at least 3 ways in which you can serve your customers with a responsive web template. However, out of these 1 is highly recommended by Google and is relatively easy to implement as well. This is by using a responsive design template. The HTML code, the URL shared to the customer is the same in the responsive design template. The other two options that are not ideal, but good to know are, by dynamic serving where you URL shared is the same across the different devices, but the HTML served on each device is slightly altered for the screen. The third option is to use a completely separate URL, one for mobile viewers and the other for web browsing.

2) Structured Data
Using structured data will definitely help Google understand the content on your website. The same applies to your mobile website as well. The pages on your mobile website should have the same structured data that is on your website. Google does mobile first indexing. Keep that in mind.

3) No Flash
Adobe Flash is quite an outdated tool. Some of your favorite games had been built using Flash but in more recent times flash has encumbered websites and makes them slow. More importantly, Chrome automatically disables flash on most sites due to security and speed issues. So it should be pretty obvious to anyone building your mobile website that they should not be using any Flash on your mobile-friendly website. Use JavaScript, CSS or similar other modern properties instead.

4) Font, Buttons, Design Is Important
Another important aspect of ensuring that your website is responsive and mobile friendly is the design architecture of the website itself. Being responsive enough is not enough it should have to be aesthetically pleasing as well. Pay special attention to the fonts. Mobile screens have been steadily growing bigger over the years, but they are still no comparison to screens of your websites and desktops. Fonts that are easily readable on larger screens are not so when using your website on mobile screens. It’s not the same with mobile phones. Buttons themselves can have an impact on your customer experience which can again have an impact on your website SEO.

5) Performance Matters
Apart from the fonts, buttons, design the performance of your mobile responsive website is also of the utmost importance. You have to focus on optimizing your mobile website to give your customers the kind of experience that they have come to expect from your website. There are several ways in which you can optimize your mobile website such as

– Improve your images
– Boost performance by improving the server response time
– Reduce the file size of your uploads by using tools like GZip
– Optimize your CSS

6) Focus On Your Customers
Maybe you won’t be able to display everything your website has to offer on your mobile website. That can be irrelevant. Your mobile website can be the platform that gives customers exactly what they need when they need it. Mobile users are normally looking for information on the go and they need accurate information quickly. If you are able to serve it to them through your mobile website then your customers will be dependent on you. Optimize the content for your users and you’ll almost have the battle won.

Conclusion
Having a mobile website can be easy but ensuring that you develop a mobile-friendly website that looks good, delivers on the design, content, and experiential aspects to the customers is not a piece of cake. You can do so by hiring the best web design and development company. If you’re looking to hire a professional web design company get in touch with us today.

Transformation of Web Development with AI

From the growing number of self-checkout cash registers to advanced security checks at the airport; artificial intelligence is just about everywhere. AI is beginning to embed itself into all aspects of our lives. But how can we use artificial intelligence in Web Development?

Artificial Intelligence combines a number of goals like problem-solving, reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, machine learning, natural language processing, motion and manipulation, perception, social intelligence, creativity, and general intelligence. AI has impacted the web development field as well. Things like web design, design images, content development, search engine, product suggestions, etc. can be automated with the help of AI.

Self-Learning Algorithms

Artificial intelligence can be applied to web programming as well. The AI algorithms can be used to develop codes, which modify and alter from scratch and transform into a fully functional code, without the need for any manual interference. A number of tasks, such as adding, updating database records, as well as identifying the code snippets that would help solve a problem are some of the points where artificial intelligence can be applied. Web developers can make use of these predictions to formulate a perfect solution. This helps developers to build smarter apps and bots at a much faster rate than before.

Artificial intelligence can be applied to web programming as well, the AI algorithms can be used to develop codes, which modify and alter from scratch and transform into a fully functional code, without the need for any manual interference. A number of tasks, such as adding, updating database records, as well as identifying the code snippets that would help solve a problem are some of the points where artificial intelligence can be applied. Web developers can make use of these predictions to formulate a perfect solution. This helps developers to build smarter apps and bots at a much faster rate than before.

Artificial Intelligence in Web Design & Web Development

Web design is an important area, where the creative skills and the conversion optimization knowledge of the web designer can help build a high-performing website. The latest development in HTML based website development has been the integration of AI-based algorithms. In fact, working on AI-enabled platforms has made it easier for web developers to take decisions related to design, layout, brand imaging, and content. The real-time suggestion based on analysis of existing similar websites helps companies to create a better web interface, which can reach target clients efficiently. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are constantly helping in delivering better user experience and product/service presentation to quality analysis, security strengthening, coding etc. Using AI solutions, you can adapt your website better to the user’s needs. Real-time learning technology evaluates customers mood and understands their preferences. According to the information received, this technology allows to dynamically modify website per each customer.

Some Other Uses of AI in Web Development

Image Search
The AI has been implemented by Google in the image search as well to detect labels of the image, detect explicit content, detect landmarks, detect faces, and various other such features. Apart from this, Google has also undertaken research projects to design images with the help of AI.

Personalized Search Results
Amazon is one of the best websites that make use of AI in it. Based on the search results, it provides you with an appropriate combination of the products. These help you to find the similar products and related products to help you decide the best product to buy within your budget. It impacts user behavior and helps makes them return again. It also keeps a track of your browsing history and recommends suggestions based on the same. This in turn also enhances its revenue with the increase in sales.

Chat Bots
Chatbots made the communication process more natural. Based on Artificial Intelligence, they soon will learn how to recognize human emotions. More and more online buyers will find it easier to interact with a website via a Chatbot. This option will remove all communication barriers and make the shopping process even more easy and pleasant.

Effective Marketing
Artificial intelligence marketing solutions truly understand the world in the same way a human would. This means that the platforms can identify insightful concepts and themes across huge data sets, incredibly fast. AI solutions also interpret emotion and communication like a human, which makes these platforms able to understand open form content like social media, natural language, and email responses.

Does this all sound too good to be true?
Researchers predict that by as soon as 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human. That’s only two years and some change away.

How to Build A Successful Brand With Your Web Design

It takes a lot of hard work and time to build a brand, something that’s recognized worldwide. However, there are always a few tips that you could use to speed up the process and start impressing your customers immediately. Now while there are many ways in which you can build your brand a simple process is to use your website. We’ll be looking at the best ways to build your brand using your website design.

7 Methods to Build Your Brand Using Web Design Quickly

1. Choosing The Right Theme
Your customers want to be able to associate your brand with some kind of personality. If your brand is focused on the youth you want to be able to inject some colorful personality theme to your website. Your website theme will decide the rest of the brand decisions on your website. I don’t mean a WordPress theme you choose, I mean the overall theme of how you want the website to look and the vibe you want the website to give off.

2. Choosing The Right Colours
Your web design theme should be centered on the right kind of colors. Each color should try and represent a unique brand identity if possible. Another thing of note here is that colors are very representative of emotions so pick colors based on the emotions you would like to evoke in your customer.

3. Be Consistent
No one likes inconsistencies be it in your product specifications or brand. Each aspect of your web design should be consistently designed. Use the same colors on each page of your website. Use the same fonts for the content. Your fonts for the headline and main body can be different but you still need it to be consistent.

4. Watch Your Tone
Your brand proposition will decide what kind of tone you should set for your content. If you’re appealing to businesses you need to be a little bit more formal but still friendly. For a younger audience try to be friendly and fun but informative. Whatever your tone may be you still need to be genuine in everything you say to your customers.

5. Show-Off Your Logo
Your brand logo is one aspect of your business that you can proudly display whenever possible (ideally place it on every page). Now logo placement is crucial. Such is the industry that unknowingly a trend has formed which usually brings out the best results. The best location to place your logo is actually on the top left of the screen because our eyes have naturally been trained to look there for company logo placements. Companies have tried for some unusual placements and it does occasionally work but when you’re just starting out with the brand building exercise we would recommend you stick with the top left corner of your website.

6. Evident Value Proposition
What many companies fail to understand is that their value proposition is an invaluable part of their company brand. There are some really important factors that go into building a value proposition for your business but that’s a whole other story. Make sure the value proposition is clear, concise, and something that’s truly going to provide value to the customer. High up on your website where the customers can see it immediately upon entering. Make it stand out from the rest of the content. Many websites use sliders to display their value propositions and you could try the same. Although, I always say different is better.

7. Be Unique
Speaking about ‘different is better’ make sure your web design is set apart from the competition. If you need inspiration you can always try and see some of your competitor websites. If you don’t find anything too fascinating that’s actually good news. Now you can try and combine different elements from various websites and make it your own (as long as it follows a single overall theme)

Conclusion
While all this may seem simple it really does take a professional eye to look at the details and make sense of all the pieces to help them fit together. If you need help building your brand, please do get in touch with us right away and we can get started on your web design and brand building strategy.

Web Development Trends to Follow In 2019

We’ve already stressed enough how important a website can be for your business. Meeting your business goals, reaching out to potential new customers and all the other benefits that come with a well-developed website. Web development companies always have to stay updated with the latest web development trends that take precedent each year. Today we’ll be looking at the top web development trends for 2019.

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7 Tips To Get Started With AMP Stories For Your Business

We’ve all witnessed the boom of Snapchat stories. So much so that other popular social media applications were soon seen mimicking the feature. Although Snapchat was the first to introduce the feature to people and popularize it, it is actually Instagram that brings in the most users to the stories features. Now we’ve seen a lot of other applications try and attempt the stories feature to varying amounts of success such as Facebook which has seen the most disappointing turnout. Now the latest company to jump on the bandwagon is Google introducing the AMP stories.

As per Google AMP stories are an immersive visual content format that is fast and open, built specially for the users.

What Are AMP Stories?

It’s a feature built by Google similar to Instagram stories that help content creators build short-term, visual content for their viewers. However, unlike stories features in other apps, Google AMP stories will be featured in Google’s search results.

If you take into consideration that more than 75% of all user time is spent on their mobile phone you can clearly see why Google is pushing for mobile first content.  Since the whole concept of AMP was to push mobile first AMP will display an array of search results in the form of swipeable feeds. You can swipe right or left depending on whether you liked the story and would like to see more sources for the same information.

AMP stories also make it easier to share the information you’ve just received at lightning speeds. Google is hoping to capitalize on the format and draw users who are more accustomed to using other apps.

What Are The Components That Make AMP Stories?

Unlike traditional AMP content, you don’t have to rely merely on text anymore. You can include graphics, animation, videos and more. This is highly beneficial for content creators. AMP stories are made of 3 main components that you need to absolutely master if you want to rule the search engine game.

–    The story itself

–    The story page

–    The story grid layer

The story is the main content itself while the story page is the location when your content is based on. The grid layer contains all the elements that make up the page and the story.

So you must now be wondering how to get started with AMP stories?

 

7 Steps To Use AMP Stories On Your Website

  1. Code The Page

Now I’d like to say it’s easy for all companies to get started with posting AMP stories on their web pages but it isn’t as simple as that. Before you begin you need to code the regular pages of your website to AMP pages.  Use the following canonical tag on the original story

<link rel=”amphtml” href=”http://www.example.com/blog-post/amp/”>

If you want the entire AMP code set you can download it from the following link: https://github.com/Automattic/amp-wp

https://www.ampproject.org/docs/getting_started/create/basic_markup

Add the code to your WordPress page like you would for any other plug-in and you’re done with the first difficult step. In our opinion having a professional web design and development company in Pune to help you setup AMP pages will save you from a lot of future problems. You wouldn’t want the data on your website to suddenly disappear, do you?

  1. Run A Sample

Before you get started with the main content you need to check if all your settings are in order. Running a test project goes a long way to check this. For this, you’ll need a test server.

To be on the safer side of things you should use a secure layer with the test server to protect yourself from any data breaches. Once your local server has been set up, try using the link https://localhost:8000/article.html

Check the layout the design and if everything looks spot on you can move on to step number 3

  1. Create Cover Photos

Your stories can have multiple components but one single cover page. This cover photo should ideally represent what lies within the stories. To create a cover page, assign a unique ID for your cover to the first page:

<amp-story standalone>

<amp-story-page id=”cover”>

</amp-story-page>

</amp-story>

If you’ve worked with Photoshop at any point in your career you’ll know that cover photos need to be built using layers with each one built on top of the other.

The first layer will have <amp-story-grid-layer> element in the <amp-story-page>

There will be other attributes that you need to use to ensure conformity such as “fill”, “responsive”. Here is an example of what an ideal code will look like as provided by the AMP tutorials

<amp-story-page id=”cover”>

<amp-story-grid-layer template=”fill”>

<amp-img src=”cover.jpg”>

Width=”xx”, height=”xx”

Layout=”responsive”

</amp-img>

</amp-story-grid-layer>

</amp-story-page>

You can use multiple layers by adding the “vertical template” rather than the “fill template” as mentioned above.

  1. Additional Pages

Once you cover page is set up you can start to add other pages to your AMP stories.  You can find the code you will need to enter (based on which template you choose to use) on the AMP site. There are several other resources available to help you better code for AMP stories.

Of course, if you think you need professional help you can always get in touch with the best web development company in Pune.

  1. Glitz it Up with Animation

There are multiple animation elements you can use on your AMP stories to get the Wow! Factor. However, unlike social media apps, you can’t just drag and drop the elements in your AMP stories. You will need to code them in. There are plenty of animation presets already available like “fade-in” “fly-in-right”, “pulse”

  1. Close Out Story

You’ll need to effectively close out your story and provide your consumers with additional links from your content or related content. This last screen is known as the “bookend”.

  1. Validate Your AMP File

Before you upload the pages you will need to validate them using the Chrome Devtools Console. Remember if AMP pages are not validated they are not considered as AMP and do not give you any advantages. There are 2 methods of validating AMP files the other being using the AMP validator browser extension.

 

Why Should Businesses Use AMP Stories?

The golden rule of any business is to stay ahead of the competition. AMP stories are the next big wave to give you an edge over the competition. Also, it is now known that users are more accustomed to seeing short-form visual content which can be seen by how much more popular online streaming platforms have become. Good storytelling leads to better attention-grabbing of the users.

Using Stories To Push Products:

Who says that traditional marketing metric cannot follow good storytelling guidelines? In fact, 92% of consumers surveyed by the SEO-Journal responded that they wanted their advertisement to tell a story rather than just hit them with facts.

Reducing Page Load Times

Speed is good. The faster you are able to deliver the right content to your consumers the better. They’ll be invested in the conversation and look forward to it more. This undoubtedly leads to a lower bounce rate, higher conversion rates and not to mention you’ll also receive a slight boost in rankings courtesy Google. But that’s only if you work with the right web development companies in Pune like CodePlateau who are accustomed to delivering AMP pages to their customer.

Getting More Creative

Because of the way AMP pages are built you have more opportunities to experiment with creative styles. The design is an important element when it comes to potential customers picking your product or service over the competition.

With AMP pages you can add a whole lot of features and that can add a certain oomph to your content. While you’re at it you should also push your viewers to your AMP content until they become more accustomed to it. Links, buttons to promote your AMP stories in your content won’t hurt.

Better Rankings

As I’ve mentioned before AMP pages help with search engine optimization. If your website ranks well on all parameters important to Google it’s obvious they’ll be willing to give you a push up the results.

 

Conclusion

In this fast-paced world, your competitive advantage lasts only for a few months, maybe even less depending on the rate of technological innovation. If you want to get ahead of the competition you need to try and grab every advantage you can. Getting the best web development company in Pune, CodePlateau, to help you build and design attention-grabbing AMP stories and pages for your website is the right move to make right now. If you need more information about AMP stories or need some assistance in your web development needs, get in touch with us today.