Pre-Launch Website Checklist For Designers

Website Designing is a long and complicated process as they need to stay connected to different people during the whole process of development of a website. Like this starts from meeting the client’s and understanding their views about the site and making it come alive. Certainly, to handle this logging process and delivering it perfectly it’s important that none of the steps is missed or skipped out. This is the scenario where one would know how important the checklist be. Not only in a professional way but also in the personal day to day life, it’s a saver. With the list, it’s most likely that we don’t miss any of the important tasks and miss out the perfection just by one minor mistake.

Below are listed down the 7 checklist points which designers shouldn’t miss before the launch of any website.

1. Industry Standards

There might be different views of the client and what actually is the industry standards currently. A website designer is responsible to mold the ideas of the clients to fits them into the industry level. Having the best designing ideas would work if there is no relevancy with the industry and its standards.

2. Layout

The layout of the website should match the screen sizes of the devices which the end-user is using. Basically, the design should be compatible with all the devices which are also known as the responsive design of the website. The business may lose a lot of users due to not having a responsive website.

3. Browsers

Making the website compatible is one thing but browser compatibility is another factor which cannot be ignored. There are devices which have the default browser for any of the search query. Overlooking the browser compatibility indirectly deflects the user from coming to your website.

4. Favicon

Favicon is the small icon similar to the logo placed at the web browser which is nothing but the graphical representation of the website. Having a favicon on the website is to improve the user experience while browsing the website. This comes under the minor thing to do which has a large impact on the users.

5. Color

It is important to maintain a color scheme on the overall website by designers. Not doing this may lead the users to break the flow of the process and also deflecting them from the goal. Also, the colors should match the industry-standard whether it’s a service provider or a product delivering business.

6. Error Pages

Due to some technical errors, there might be conditions which show up the error pages like 404. There should be properly designed pages for such situations. The error pages don’t divert the user and tend to leave the whole website instead of just a web page.

7. Important Elements

There are always certain elements which are important for your website which consists of about company, discounts, offers, highlighted products, etc. These are some information which needs to be seen by the user and understand the motive of the site in the first sight. Try keeping these types of information on the first fold of the website, means without a single scroll.

These tips will certainly help to deliver the professional website to the client by website designers.
To get the best websites in the industry, CodePlateau Technology will help to do it. Reviewed as the best web designing company in Pune, by their clients.

10 Tips To Improve Your Websites User Experience

A website is a face to any business in this digitalized world. For any customer, website is the first and easiest way to collect more information about the business. On the other side for any business, a chance to impress the users in a single glance. This first impression on any user is very important, as upon it the decision of converting a user into a customer is dependent. Nowadays, mobile has become the most and commonly used device by any user. Due to this even businessman are investing more in improving the user experience. So, they can extend their customers list from the new users browsing their website through any device.

Below are the tips to enhance the user experience for the website

1. Above the Fold – Keep all the important content above the fold of the page. Not keeping the important content would misguide the user and have greater chances to leave the website. Let people understand what you want to showcase within the first view of the website.

2. White Space

– It is the blank space given at the sides of the website. This has a lot of importance in terms of designing perspective. This white space gives the viewer an open space to think and also gives a good effect on the elements. Too much content and elements can confuse the user and indirectly forced to leave the site.

3. Loading Speed

– People get a variety of options to their single search that’s why the waiting tending for any site to load is very less. According to the statistics, having a loading time anywhere between 2.4 to 3 seconds on mobile and desktop is ideal. Beyond that time, you start to lose your conversation rate.

4. Maintaining a Flow

– For instance, if your ultimate goal is to get contact details from the users visiting a website, then maintain proper flow. This flow should be simple enough and understandable easily by any non-technical person too. Don’t distract the user in between the flow buy showing them different other offers or products.

5. Responsive

– Users are not limited to any particular nowadays. For greater number of conversions make your website fit to all the screen sizes and resolutions. Making it compatible lets the users navigate, browse and get the required information from any device.

6. Call to Action

– In some of the cases, users struggle a lot to connect the business services. This led to the loss of conversation due to a simple designing flaw of not highlighting the call to action button. Make this button bold and clear enough to get the attention of the users.

7. Use Images

– Let your images speak out the motive than by words. Users avoid long and plain text and prefer the images. This also helps the longer engagement of the user when images are used in the site.

8. Social Sharing

– Content or images are more frequently share by the users on their social media platforms. Don’t miss this opportunity of free marketing for your brand. Just add the social media sharing buttons on the site and keep a track to count the sharing.

9. Contact Details

– Let your contact details be easily visible to the users while they are totally satisfied with all the information and want to get connected with you. Update the details on a regular basis so you don’t miss out your customers anymore.

10. Design for Users

– Last but certainly not the least important point is to design with a perspective of the user. When you design according to your choice you might lose a larger quantity of the users from converting them to the customers.

These are the important and most useful tips a designer shouldn’t miss out while creating a website. And for all the professional designing and development services, CodePlateau Technology is one of the recognized companies in Pune.

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.

Things To Consider When Building An E-Commerce Website

From relying on mega online e-commerce websites like Amazon and E-Bay many companies are now focusing on building their own e-commerce sites to directly try and tap their customers. In the last couple of years, we’ve seen a significant rise in the number of websites that are selling products online and with good reason. If you have some products you’d like to sell, it’s better to focus on developing an e-commerce website from scratch. You’ll have more control over the products you sell, the customers you are targeting and you have greater control over the pricing of the products. But if you’ve decided to build a website or are thinking about getting a professional e-commerce website development team, here is a checklist that you should be aware of.

Guidelines for E-Commerce Website Development

1. Understand the customer and product
Don’t build a website simply because you want to have an online presence without the customer base of the product that will sell online. There are plenty of products that have a higher propensity to sell offline than through online sales to ensure that you’ve made the right choice in going ahead for an e-commerce website development. If you need additional advice you can always get in touch with the best website development company in your area.

2. Choosing the right platform
Once you’ve decided to come online the next question becomes which platform to use and there is plenty of e-commerce website platform to choose from. You can either go with Hybris, Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify or even consider building your website from scratch using HTML, Java, and CSS. What you need to keep in mind, especially if you have a sizeable user base is to make sure you have
– A functioning customer relationship management tool to handle all their requirements
– A payment gateway integration to make paying for your products simpler
– Strong backend which can support your frontend activities
– Mobile responsiveness for all pages

3. Website Hosting Provider
Once you’ve decided which platform you want to choose the next choice to be made is the hosting provider you will go with. Now you may think that all host provide the same services, but in our multiple years of experience in website development and web design, we’ve seen that some services, although priced identically, have vastly different service levels. If you need more details on hosting providers for your website please feel free to get in touch with us.

Here are some things to keep in mind while selecting your hosting provider
– Speed is of the essence. Google rewards sites that provide data to the customers faster with a better ranking
– Choose a hosting provider that will make sure your site is available to the customer at all times. There should be zero or very marginal downtimes
– Since you will be dealing a lot with sensitive customer data, privacy and security or a concern. Make sure you choose a hosting provider that keeps your site protected at all times
– In case there is any issue you want to make sure that your hosting provider is there to support you at all times. Choose a host that has good service staff to support you.
– You might be starting off small but you should be able to build your website as you go so scalability in terms of server size, space, and reliability are always important

4. Choosing what you want your customer to see
Another important aspect of an e-commerce website development project is to make sure you know exactly what pages you’ll be showing to your customers. How easy the website is to navigate? Are the images too cluttered? These may not seem like important factors when building an e-commerce website but they are all very relevant not only to your customer but to Google as well.

Conclusion
If you use e-commerce platforms like WooCommerce and Shopify you might be able to develop an e-commerce website yourself, but without the help of professional reliable web development and design company, your website won’t have the much-needed fascination to the public. If you want someone to professionally build your e-commerce website, get in touch with us today.

Importance Of Web Designing In SEO

There are a lot of naysayers that don’t understand the link between a Web Designing and SEO process. While these two may seem complimentary to each other they need to work hand in hand if your business is to succeed. It is no longer about “if you build it they will come”, it is actually more on the lines of “if you build it well, they will come”. Here our take why website design is very important for your websites to search engine optimization.

5 Reasons Web Design is important for your business

1. Better Web Design More Visitors
Your website design will depend on the customers you would like to attract to it. For the younger generation a simple website without a lot of bells and whistles won’t be suitable while if you add too many “new age” features in your website and your customers are from an older generation they might not enjoy it as much. Now if you wonder what does SEO have to do with this remember that a lot of your SEO ranking has to do with the customers you can attract to your website and how long they stay on your website before moving on.

2. Site Speed
Another important aspect of SEO is how fast you‘re able to provide the required information to your customer. The quicker they receive the information they more they’re willing to stay on your website. Not only does the speed on your website matter for technical SEO, the speed at which the user can locate all the relevant information while on your website is another important aspect of how loyal of a consumer he becomes. Site speed itself is an important parameter that Google judges in ranking your website in its search.

3. Navigational Ease
Another important factor that could decide your website SEO is the ease with which users can find the information they’re looking for. I touched on it briefly in the last point and while they may seem contradictory to one another, how fast your potential customer can find the information he’s looking for can go a long way in ensuring that he keeps coming back to your website anytime he has any trouble with your particular skill set and needs answers. You’ll be steadily increasing your brand loyalist and reducing your dependency on paid ads to grow your fan base.

4. Professionalism
Another reasons companies rely on trusty web design companies in Pune for their requirements is because a well-designed website gives an air of professionalism to their brand. According to research, a customer is more likely to choose a business based on the quality of their website. A higher quality website gives an assurance to the customer that the business is to be trusted and they can do business with them.

5. Changes With Time
As with most things your customer preferences will change over time. As your audience matures so will their choices. If you are planning to grow with the company, it then becomes imperative to be able to change as per their needs. While the keywords you target will most likely not change you can always aesthetically revamp your website to continue to make it more attractive to your prospective customers.

Conclusion
Don’t let people tell you that web design and SEO are not linked because as we’ve discussed it above they very clearly are. If you are looking to build a new website for your organization or overhaul your existing website to match the needs of your current customers, you’ll need the services of a professional web design company in Pune that knows their way around both SEO and Web Design. If you‘d like to know more about how we can help you change your website to get more customers, get in touch with us today.

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.

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.