STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD

Animation

From a full 3D product reveal, to a simple loading icon, animation comes in all sorts of sizes and shapes. Even small animations on the page as you scroll can bring life and vibrancy to your website.

Breadcrumbs

A breadrumb is a type of secondary navigation scheme that reveals the user's location in a website, for example Home/Products/Computers. You can usually find breadcrumbs in websites that have a large amount of content organised in a heirarchical manner.

Call to Action

Whether it's call your office, buy that funky shirt or fill out your questionnaire, your web site needs to have a strong and clear call to action. Even if you're not selling on line you want a site visitor to do something even if it is as simple as liking this post... please!

Dynamic Content

Using Dynamic Content allows content to be entered once and then appear on multiple relevant pages. This provides users with relevant content and makes sure all your pages are up-to-date all while streamlining the administration of your website.

Error Pages

In a perfect world your website never has an error, but on that rare occasion that you delete a page and some one had it book marked or your forgot you had it linked on another page it's essential to have a 404 Error page which tells the visitor that the page can no longer be found.

Forms

A flexible form allows you to gather important information so your first conversation with a potential new client can be more meaningful. Making them dynamic so that they change based on the answers given streamlines the process to give the best user experience.

Google Maps

While Google Maps are a staple on most sites, customising your map with your branding helps blend it into your site. Keep an active credit card on the Google Account to stop map errors and complete your Google My Business to maximise search traffic.

Hero Banners

With a world of websites out there your hero banner is the first thing to greet visitors and has only seconds to grab their attention. Whether you use video, animation or images, make sure your hero banner is high quality, interesting and uniquely you.

Infographics

A picture paints a thousand words which is why infographics are a powerful way of communicating. More than just a graph a well designed infographic draws attention, conveys useful information and is incredibly shareable.

Jump to (also known as an anchor point)

The inifite scroll is a big turn off for readers on your site, make sure long pages have an easy way to jump to key information. Using a drop down or chapter list, the 'jump to' can be incoporated in many ways. Don't for to a add a 'return to top' button for those wanting to go the other way!

Keywords

Your websites keywords need to be the ones people use in search engines when they are searching online. So know the sorts of words and phrases people search for and make sure you include them in your text on your website. Placing them in headings gets you more search engine kudos!

Landing Page

Got too many things going on? Use landing pages to create different entry points into your site. Make a landing page to focus on each service you provide or on each brand you sell. Fill it with great information and keywords for the search engines to use as new doors into your wesbite.

Mega Menu

Often used for ecommerce sites, a mega menu takes over a large part of or the whole screen. The display will show lots of sub-categories and will often include additional information that might include pictures or written descriptions.

Newsletter

Collecting email addresses for a newsletter sounds easy... but before you whack a subscription on your website think about the information you'll need. What to personalise it? You'll need a name. Services differ in each city? Grab that location. Lots to discuss? Interest options might be needed.

Optimisation

40% of people abandon a site taking more than 3 seconds to load, and conversions reduce up to 7% with a 1 second delay. More than just compressing images, optimisation involves reviewing technical items like code bloat and load orders to streamline and speed up your site.

Portfolios

Demonstrate what it is that you do and how well you do it by using real life examples. Ranging from a simple display of previous work to more indepth case studies that outline problems and solutions, portfolios help build confidence with readers and show off your mad skills!

Quotes and testimonials

Quotes and Testimonials lend credibility to your brand. Don't stick them on a page on their own, spread them through out the website so people will see them in places that matter. Never forget if you 'get someone else to blow your horn and the sound will carry twice as far'.

Responsive

These days 55% of all internet traffic comes through mobile phones which have screens in allsorts of shapes and sizes. A responsive site resizes and reorders your content to provide an opitmal user experience. So important is responsiveness that some sites are designed to appear on a phone first and then expanded out to desktops.

Search Functions

While not neccessary for all sites, information-heavy sites need to have a good seach function. Showing snippets of text in the results is just the begining of search functions. You can weight the categories of text to show information that is more important aswell as categorize it to further help user find the answers they need.

Three.JS

Three.js is a JavaScript-based WebGL engine... What you need to know is three.js allows you to create interactive 3D graphics. While used a lot in games and cool animations interactive 3D models are an amazing way to show of physical prodcts such as clothing, giving users full control to look at from every angle.

URLs

While it might seem obvious that websites have URLs there are things you should think about. Using relevant terms and structures help with your SEO efforts, keeping them as short as possible and making sure they don't have spaces and other characters are better for sharing.

Videos

While nearly 92% of web users watch video each week there has to be carful consideration given to videos on websites. Great for telling stories, long or uncompressed video hosted on a website can create issues with hosting and slow down a website creating a negative impact on SEO. So while video is a great way to engage users be carful how it is implimented.

WCAG Compliance

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are a list of guides to help ensure your website is accesible for the most people. These guidlines include advice on content creation and colour usage through to allowing people to tab through websites if they can't use a mouse. While there are three level of compliance mid-level is the most common level aimed for.

XML Site Map

XML is short for extensible mark-up language and an XML site map is a website essential. This sitemap is what Google uses to map your website. Want to see yours? Type in you website url and at the end add /sitemap.xml .

Yourself

As your online billboard it's essential to make sure your website is unique to you. Use a custom design instead of generic templates, ditch stock photos for a custom photoshoot and write in your own voice. That way your website will live and breathe your brand.