Our thoughts, rants and inside knowlege of web design & development!
Posts tagged Website Design
2011 Small Business Marketing Budgets
Nov 24th
Small businesses are expected to continue to invest larger shares of their advertising budgets in the favour of websites over other forms of advertising according to a recent survey undertaken by Zoomerang and Growbiz Media. This shows that smal businesses will continue to push their websites aswell as direct mail, e-mail marketing, social media and print advertising.
Website Design and Ecommerce Web Design have contributed to the rise above all other advertising forms as more companies understand that the future of their business is linked to the quality of their website. It is estimated that 39% of all small businesses with fewer than 1000 staff are spending around 20% of their budgets in favour of their website and 17% of all small business plan to increase their web spenditure throughout 2011. In comparison 15% reported they will increase their email marketing budgets and 13% their social media investment.
Amazingly only 54% said they had a website design and only 13% had a website blog. Looking into the website features the majority (80%) of websites contained general business information, 45% customer service, 35% lead generration and 30% had an Ecommerce Web Design element.
This shows there is huge room for improvement amongst small business owners to More >
Blekko the alternative Search Engine which eliminates Spam
Nov 1st
Blekko a $24 million venture backed project which has been in the making for over 3 years has been launched its pubic BETA version. With this initial roll out Blekko are also releasing several new features for both mainstream and the sites super users.
Blekko is designed to eliminate spam searches using its proprietary slash tag technology. Basically the search engine checks all queries to see if they fall within one of seven main categories, health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipes and hotels. Every search that is made that is recognised to be in one of these categories Blekko technology will assign the correct slash tag and display only results that are relevant to the search.
Webmasters and Blekko super users are able to apply slashtags to their URL’s so that Blekko can read them , this is aimed at stopping spam results such as huge link farms and bad neighborhood sites which are not maintained.
Don’t panic if your business does not fall within the initial seven categories, like our main keywords: ‘website design’, ‘Ecommerce Web Design‘, ‘social media’, ‘search engine optimisation’,etc… Blekko has plans to release more as time goes on, they are just starting with the biggest traffic sites More >
Website Design For London (Soho) Design Agency
Oct 29th
We are proud to highlight one of our latest website design projects for the Soho Design Agency FTP that specialise in packshot photography for products. We recommend their services to our ecommerce web design clients that need professional images of their products for their online businesses. Having good images on your ecommerce web design makes a huge difference in the overal impression your browsers get when visiting your website making the products more inticing.
The guys at FTP had a very specific brief as the majority of their clients use big 30” screens so the reolution had to be right and the website had to fill the biggest of screens aswell as the smallest.
We acheived this by a clever piece of coding which created a scaleable background image so what ever size monitor the images look good. We also added a nice touch when you go into the website, which ever image is currently being shown as you click ‘enter ftp digital’ will fade to a blurred version and become the websiet background image.
We also implemented an advance technique to re-write the font so we could stylise it to exactly hiow FTP wanted it without the need for the user to More >
Website Design Job in Enfield, North London
Oct 29th
We are currently looking for a website designer to help out in our busy website design agency in Enfield, North London. The applicant must have design / layout capabilities and have experience designing websites (any level), brochures etc. also knowledge of computers, email and IT would be an advantage. They need to be keen and have a passion for all that is website based.
If you are the next web star or know of anyone that would like to meet our team to discuss the role please send all CV’s to production@areatrade.co.uk
We look forward to hearing from you.
Staff Member Employed Via Social Media
Oct 29th
We have received great reviews from existing clients on her professionalism and conduct and are very pleased with the way she has settled into our website design agency in Enfield, North London.
We understand that our clients are the most important element of our business and regular contact with them is paramount to enable us to enhance the website design and ecommerce web design services we provide them. Jan will also be managing the quarterly search engine promotion / statistic analysis meetings so we can educate our clients on what their clients are doing on their websites, where they come from, which keywords they use and how this information can help improve their website to return more enquiries.
Due to this success we are now looking for another member of staff to help with website design page layout, website amends More >
49% of Small Business Owners Use Smartphones
Oct 22nd
At present we are seeing more smart phones being sold than actual computers. This will the inclusion of iPads and other such mobile devices such as laptops and bluetooth headsets old technolgies such as pagers are a distance memory.
According to a recent Foresters Survey of nearly 10,000 small business owners, it seems that a huge 49% of small business owners are reported to own smartphones. The stats break down like this:
35% – BlackBerrys 33% – iPhones 25% – Androids 7% – Windows Mobile devices.
The survey also interestingly shows that even though 82% of Americans own a phone, 50% have internet on their phones but only 17% actually have smartphones. It would seem at the moment most users are opting for a cheaper model.
Viewing A Mobile Phone Website Design Versus Viewing Website Designs On PC’s
Whichever way you look at it website design / Ecommerce Web Design needs to cater for this new wave of mobile digital experience. Viewing a website design on a computer is a completely different experience to viewing the same website on a mobile device, smartphone of no smartphone.
An average time spent viewing a website on a computer is between 3 – 4 minutes (depending on the website), whereas More >
Website Design / Blogging Platform Hits 100 Million Downloads
Oct 20th
Website Design / Blogging Platform Hits 100 Million Downloads
WordPress 3.0 Thelonious passed 3 million downloads last month, and today the plugin directory followed suit with a milestone of its own: 100 million downloads.
The WordPress community’s growth over the years has been tremendous, and we want to reinvest in it. So we’re taking the next two months to concentrate on improving WordPress.org. A major part of that will be improving the infrastructure of the plugins directory. More than 10,000 plugins are in the directory, every one of them GPL compatible and free as in both beer and speech. Here’s what we have in mind:
We want to provide developers the tools they need to build the best possible plugins. We’re going to provide better integration with the forums so you can support your users. We’ll make more statistics available to you so you can analyze your user base, and over time we hope to make it easier for you to manage, build, and release localized plugins.
We want to improve how the core software works with your plugin and the plugin directory. We’re going to focus on ensuring seamless upgrades by making the best possible determinations about compatibility, and offer continual improvements to More >
Internet to Surpass 2 Billion Users This Year
Oct 20th
The total number of internet users will grow past the 2 billion mark before the end of 2010, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has reported.
Currently the world population is estimated to be 6.86 billion which means that around 30% of the population will be online next year. A further 226 million users will join the rest of us online this year, 162 million will come from developing countries which despite the fast growth still has a long way to go to catch up with the developed world.
At the end of 2010, 71% of the population in developed countries will be online, compared to only 21% of people in developing countries. Europe making up 65%, Americas 55%, Asia/Pacific 21.9%, leaving a mere 9.6% of the population online in Africa.
The ITU, United Nation’s agency for information and communication technologies, sees the introduction of broadband as the most important element in helping these developing countries “Broadband is the next tipping point, the next truly transformational technology. It can generate jobs, drive growth and productivity and underpin long-term economic competitiveness”, said ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure.
This numbers show why companies are investing in ecommerce web design solutions and ensuring their companies website design portrays them More >
404 Error pages for your Website Design & Ecommerce Web Design Projects
Oct 17th
Hitting a dead end page is pretty disappointing, you search, your find and you click eagerly expecting to see what your looking for. To be shown a basic 404 error is pretty frustrating after all your hard work.
HTTP – 404 Page Not Found Sorry, the page you were looking for cannot be found.
What Are Website Design 404 Page Errors Most clients will not understand what a 404 page is will assume your website is down, you not finished the website or you or no longer trading. We have started to implement on both our Website Design and Ecommerce Web Design projects specific 404 page designs to make this annoying little aspect a bit more fun, and to reassure / help your clients to find what they are looking for.
When Do Website Design 404 Page Errors Happen? A 404 page error will appear when a browser tries to access a page that no longer exists on your website. This can happen a few ways. If you are thinking of a Website Redesign for instance, you may have 400 pages listed on Google and if you move your website platform to say WordPress which allows you to integrate a blog and social media much More >
Happy Clients
Oct 15th
Client Spec: WordPress Website Design
“I have been sending out the link you sent me to all our friends and acquaintances and work colleagues, and the response has been very positive. They all like the look of the site, so well done. We’re happy, too, with the way it’s turned out. I’m keen to learn how to ‘operate’ it so we can add things. Thanks again.”
Anne & Paul Pulati