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Animated Web Design Bendigo, Ballarat and Macedon Ranges SMBs to Explore

Without a doubt, small and medium scale businesses need to have website to come toe-to-toe with much larger competitors. But what used to be just old plain static website, today’s online audiences are leaning more on highly responsive, interactive and, in a way, playful websites to tickle their fancy. Thus, when it comes to web design Bendigo, Ballarat, Macedon Ranges, Melbourne and other cities in Victoria’s SMBs are keen on finding groovy layouts that can deliver.

With thousands of websites seemingly selling the same products or services, the competition can be quite stiff and rigid. One needs to come up with interesting yet efficient websites that can attract online audiences. What better way for these SMBs than to engage in animated website design featuring story about their brand, products or services or company per se. With top search engines like Google crawling flash-based websites, adding such flair to your web content has now even become more promising.

Captive Marketing

So, why get into animation for your website? For one, there is nothing more captivating than telling a story about a brand, product or service like animation does. Promoting one’s brand in an overly crowded marketplace requires not just scalable or mobile-ready website. At this day and age, when it comes to web design Ballarat, Bendigo, Macedon Ranges, Melbourne, etc. SMBs must incorporate animation to make their brand more memorable. Instead of clicking and swiping, let people take a glimpse at your website and easily digest the message with one sweep.

E-Commerce

This is even more so when your business platform is anchored to the Internet. Selling products online can be a frustrating aspect in this day and age of Internet revolution. You might easily see identical items as your own with some selling it at a much lower price. So, how to do about it? Make your website easy for them to pursue. Make an animated slideshow of your products complete with 360-degree zoom features and interactive review.  This helps your target customer “know” about your product in one easy view making them decide faster.

Fast, Convenient and Hassle-Free

In the same light as presenting products for sale, the core concept of web design Macedon Ranges, Bendigo, Ballarat, Melbourne SMBs should explore must focus on three things: fast, convenient and hassle-free. Online audiences no longer rely on static websites. Their patience come head to head with the influx of convenient technologies leading them to expect the same from online businesses. People want everything to be fast and convenient. They loath the idea of being redirected from one page to another or having to read lengthy narratives on products they intend to buy. By simply adding animation to your website and retaining rich content in such presentation, you can guarantee captivating the market’s attention in due time.

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Web Design Macedon Ranges Services – Questions to Ask

Learn what questions to ask a web design Macedon Ranges company and get the best results.

You’re running a local business and want to employ the services of a web design Macedon Ranges company to promote it, and it’s a good idea because the web reaches far more people than any newspaper ad. But for optimum results, you need to ask questions and get the right answers.

Is Your Website Design Responsive?

Whether it’s a web design Bendigo company or another service, the answer needs to be yes. Much has been said about the need for having a mobile website so we’re not going to repeat it here. But while there’s nothing wrong with having separate desktop and mobile sites, it’s better if you have one website that’s optimized for all devices, so when a user goes to your site, they get to see and use what’s most convenient for them. That is what responsive website design is all about.

How Much Experience Do You Have?

The reason you’re hiring a web design Ballarat service is you expect them to do what no else can: create a polished, professional looking website for your business. Only web designers with experience can do that for you, so check their website portfolio and if you like what you see. A little bit of background checking on the credentials of the designer won’t hurt either, and while you’re at it, ask for the stats of the websites they have designed if their Google page rank has improved.

A good rule of thumb is this: the longer the designer has been around the better chances you’re going to get value for your money. A lot of website design Melbourne services come and go, so you don’t want to get stuck with a fly by night designer.

Websites don’t stay the same, and designers must be able to adapt to them. If the designer has been around for a long time then it means they have the ability to adapt to changes and are responsive, which is what you are looking for. If the designer is content with a one and done approach, you have to go somewhere else because you won’t be getting any value for your money here.

Conversion Knowledge

It’s not that hard to make a nice looking website, but a professional also knows how to make site visitors into converts by using calls to action, proper layout, interactive design and so on.

A good web design Melbourne company knows that it takes more than just pretty graphics and videos to convert people, so when you talk to the designer, ask them what their conversion strategies are. If the designer is knowledgeable about conversions and is capable of adapting to the changes taking place on the Internet, it’s a safe bet.

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Flash from Mcromedia is a multimedia and software platform for creating rich Internet applications, including animations and interactive multimedia content. With the Swish Max2 tool, you can ask a web design Melbourne professional to create a Flash website for your business. But should you?

Pros of using Flash

Flash is an excellent tool for creating animations and interactive multimedia content that loads fast in most browsers. As most web design Bendigo companies can attest, it is a “designer-friendly” authoring platform which integrates well with other Internet technologies. It is relatively efficient and is already widely used. As a platform, it has a large supportive developer community. Flash is great if want to make games, animation, and videos the core features of your website.

Cons of using Flash

For a business or customer site, Flash may not be the best solution. In fact, Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group has often been quoted saying: “Although multimedia has its role on the Web, current Flash technology tends to discourage usability for three reasons: it makes bad design more likely, it breaks with the Web’s fundamental interaction style, and it consumes resources that would be better spent enhancing a site’s core value.” According to Nielsen’s review, Flash is “99% Bad.”

Google and other search engines can’t navigate through Flash websites since search engine spiders can’t parse images and will have trouble following links that are not standard HTML links. Obviously, if your website is in Flash, you can’t have it search engine optimized (SEO). If you opt to create another version of your Flash site done in HTML, you still won’t do well in the search engine ranking since the search engines won’t be able to properly index the content. Plus, you have to pay for the cost of maintaining two websites with exactly the same content.

Flash sites can be very large in terms of bandwidth and will tend to load slowly in most older browsers. Typically, the browser “back button” also won’t work. Browsers take in a Flash site as just one page. When visitor want to go back, clicking on the the “back button” will just take them to the page on the site they were on before they went to the Flash site. For these reasons, users who want to do business on the Internet tend to avoid Flash sites and web pages with Flash applications.

Finally, a Flash website is not mobile-friendly. Flash programs are too CPU-intensive for the processors in most mobile phones to handle. Accessing a Flash website may cause the phone’s operating system to crash or the battery to give out.

Conclusion

If you’re a small or medium-size business owner, having a Flash site may not be the best way to go. If you want your website to land well in the mobile and local search engine results page, you may want to ask your web design Ballarat contact for an alternative solution, preferably one that is based on HTML5, the new standard in web development. Smart mobile devices support the new and even earlier HTML markup language.

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With web design Macedon Ranges, you can of course ask for and get video or audio to automatically play on your website the moment it is clicked on by visitors. But should you? If you are in the music or entertainment business, including gaming and electronic entertainment, having such auto-play feature may not be out of place. Also, if your site is mainly meant for children, the use of video, audio and animation may help engage the shorter attention span of your young visitors. But in most other cases, automatically playing music or video when a potential customer loads your site may be considered just plain annoying.

When not to auto-play

True, your audios and videos can be an important part of your online marketing campaign. With them, you can probably explain your products and make your call to action better than you can with text. However, putting them on auto-play mode can be counter-productive and yield negative results. It is more polite to have the audio or video off and let your visitor choose if he or she will want to engage with it.

While the correct application of video content has been proven by studies to increase on-site conversion rates, people do still would prefer that they make the choice as to whether or not they would want to click the "play" button themselves. They also would want to be able to decide on the level of volume they are most comfortable with. They may also want to read the text information on presented on your page first before they may are ready to watch or listen to what you have taped for them. Furthermore, most visitors who access your site using mobile usually tend have their own background music playing on their headphones, and yours may just clash with theirs. With a web design Melbourne, you can have these and other related considerations properly incorporated into the structural design of your website.

Don't use copy-righted material

Whether its from a song, a segment of a film or a snippet of a video game, unless you have explicit permission from the author or original creator, never ever use copyrighted material as background for your website videos. Even if you found music that's already in midi format playing on the web, you can't just assume that you can also use it for free yourself.

HTML5

HTML5 is a new markup language for structuring and presenting web content that was published late last year by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). With it, an entire website can be turned into a full-page auto-play video. Aside the auto-play feature being often annoying, an HTML5 page still loads painfully very slowly. If however you want to try out this new markup language for your site, be sure to check first with a web design Ballarat professional on the technical details. According to some experts, EMBED and BGSOUND, the two tags for adding sound to sites that presently work on most web browsers, will now be read by HTML as "invalid." In other words, you may have to have the sound elements in your website, if you already have one, redesigned.

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If you are a small or medium-range business in Victoria, getting a web design Ballarat professional to optimize your virtual storefront for better visibility in Google and other search engines is essential. When potential customers search the Internet for a product or service like what you offer, and they don’t find your company’s website, how can they buy from you?

Why local SEO

A retail outlet, a barber shop, a bakery, a carpet cleaner and just about any business that gets some or all of its customers locally stand to benefit from having a website that has been designed for local SEO. If for instance a potential customer is searching for something on the Internet, say a veterinary clinic, Google will immediately assume that the person is searching for one that is nearby and will list down all the animal clinics nearest his or her vicinity. Google will “know” where he or she is searching from based on the IP address, and if mobile is used, also from the GPS. Moreover, distance and location ranking parameters were expressly considered in  Google’s Pigeon update to its “Local Search” search engine algorithm.

How to optimize for Local Search

With website design Melbourne, it is possible to get “on page” and “off page” SEO that will help land your website in the local search engines. For instance, structured data containing such basic information as your business name, address and phone numbers, can be incorporated directly on each web page’s HTML markup.

Local and mobile searches are really often interlinked. Potential customers searching for local destinations tend to use their mobile devices to conduct their searches. Thus, websites now should also be developed to serve as mobile-friendly digital business assets. This can be done by using responsive web design Bendigo. Google too gives preference in its search rankings to websites with responsive web design. With its capability to automatically adjust to different viewports, there is less need for web “redirects.”

Another way for local search optimization is by provision of a “click-to-call button” on the mobile-friendly website. Still another way is to integrate Google Maps, or any other mapping software, on the pages itself of your website so that searchers can be guided on the easiest way they can get to your location. When going mobile and local, focus should always aimed at how to make it as easy as possible for potential consumers to get from the website to where and how they can buy from you, be that online or at your nearest physical outlet.

Content Is Still King

Although you can get a web design Melbourne that is technically capable of ranking high on the mobile and local search result pages (SERP), it won’t do you any good unless you have an equally effective content management system (CMS) to go with it. The CMS too, no matter how efficient, would be useless unless you can come up with regular engaging and relevant content for your target market audience.

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With a responsive web design Ballarat, you will get a website that will automatically adjust itself to accommodate for changes in screen resolution, image size and scripting abilities that comes with the changes in device used by your site visitors. A responsive website will look as well and remain as functional no matter whether it is accessed via desktop computer or through smartphones and tablets.

Responsive Web Design: What It Is and Why Go For It

Responsive web design (RWD) is an approach to web design that is aimed at providing an optimal user experience (UX) across a wide range of devices from the largest desktop computer monitors to the smallest mobile phones. This is done by using a mix of fluid grids and layouts, flexible images and rule-based CSS media queries depending on the kind of device a visitor uses when accessing the site.

Getting a responsive web design Melbourne or elsewhere in Victoria is becoming increasingly important since the volume of mobile traffic in the Internet now already account for over half of the total traffic. Besides, Google has boosted the ranking of mobile-friendly web pages on its mobile search results if the search was made using mobile devices. If you are a small business and your don’t have a mobile responsive version yet of your website, chances are, you may be turning away a large number of your would-be customers. According to recent statistics, mobile devices now account for 15.4% share of total digital commerce spending worldwide. In Australia, a GFK study published last year found “smartphones and tablets increasing shopping usage substantially, as desktops decline[d]” over the period covered by the survey.

Approaches to designing responsive websites

There are two approaches to the task of coming up with a responsive website design that will work optimally across all platforms. One is called “graceful degradation.” Here you start with an existing full-featured website that has already been optimized for viewing on desktop and laptop monitors. With that as starting point, you gradually prune down the features and content to make the website also fit the viewport of the smaller screens and simpler web browsers of tablets and smartphones.

The second approach is called “progressive enhancement.” Here you start small and reconstruct your website from the ground up. You go “mobile first.” With emphasis on mobile first, you start by loading only the bare essentials that would make for a satisfactory user experience (UX) on the smallest platforms. From there, additional resources are introduced on “as-needed basis” as platforms increase in size and/or capabilities. By deliberately starting at the most basic mobile UX, you will be forced to focus on what really counts - the core content and functionality of the website. When you are dealing with a smaller screen-size, lower processing power and no keyboard, you will be compelled to rethink about how you will design the website layout in a way that nothing important is left out. With a “mobile first" approach, you are forced to focus on optimizing content before you can progress to features for the presentation and styling. Once done, you can then move on to the scripting, animation, and other optional bells and whistles. Most website design Melbourne professionals prefer to go mobile first when making responsive web designs.

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Most website design Melbourne professionals have already made the shift to “mobile first,” defined by Forbes as the paradigm where application vendors consider their mobile users as the number one priority in their development roadmap. Meaning, they start the application development process by designing for smartphones and tablets first, then they make modifications later to make their design also work on desktops, laptops and other larger platforms.

Mobile First in web design

Google set the tone for the paradigm shift back in 2010 when CEO Eric Schmidt told the Mobile Wold Congress in Barcelona: “We understand that the new rule is mobile first. Mobile first in everything. Mobile first in terms of applications. Most first in terms of the way people use things. And it means … that we have a role now to inform, to educate through all these devices.” According to him, Google programmers now want to do work on mobile first before they do the desktop version.

In terms of web design Melbourne, a fully functional website would be developed and perfected for the most basic and most commonly used mobile platform first, then enhanced or otherwise modified so as to also work on the larger or more sophisticated platforms. With a mobile first emphasis, the designers start by loading only the bare essentials that would make for a satisfactory user experience (UX) on the smallest platforms. From there, additional resources are introduced on “as-needed basis” as platforms increase in size and/or capabilities.

The rationale behind this approach is that by deliberately starting at the most basic mobile UX, you will be forced to focus on what really counts - the core content and functionality of the website. When you are dealing with a smaller screen-size, lower processing power and no keyboard, you will be compelled to rethink about how you will design the website layout in a way that nothing important is left out.

With a “mobile first" approach, you are compelled to focus on the content first and foremost. Once done, you can progress to the presentation and styling. Then finally, you can move on to the scripting, animation, and other optional bells and whistles.A “mobile first” approach will also force you to come up with a website design that is “fluid,” meaning the site can come out looking well when viewed with whatever screen size or resolution that comes with any given smart mobile device. Why Mobile?

If you are a small business and your don’t have a mobile version of your website, chances are, you may be turning away a large number of would-be customers. More and more of today’s shoppers buy online through their smartphones while on the go. According to recent statistics, mobile devices now account for 15.4% share of total digital commerce spending worldwide. A GFK study published last year says “smartphones and tablets increasing shopping usage substantially, as desktops decline” in Australia.

When consulting for a web design Bendigo or elsewhere in the state of Victoria, make sure that your new website will be working particularly well with iPhone, iPad and other Apple mobile devices. Data on mobile browser usage by country, as gathered by MobiForge, shows that in Australia, Safari is ranked at No.1 and accounts for 66.88% of traffic, followed by Chrome Mobile (24.97%), Android Browser (6.39%), Internet Explorer Mobile (1.05%), and Firefox (0.4%).

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Top Advantages Of Working With A  Professional Web Design Bendigo Company

Today, a professionally designed website has become one of the prerequisites of running a business. Statistical projections predict that by 2016 more than 70% of the consumers will be using the internet as their major shopping platform. This simply means that you will be missing a major chunk of your prospective customers if you do not have a website. It is therefore high time that you consider building a professional website.

The first step in the web design process is finding a dependable web design Bendigo service provider. As far as web design companies are concerned, Australia offers countless options. The challenge however is finding a dependable and most importantly a professional web design Bendigo company.

Why is it important to choose a professional web design Macedon Ranges or Bendigo company? What are the advantages of working with a professional service provider? The word professional could mean so many things and it is important that we first define what we mean by the term ‘professional’. When we consider or categorize a web design company as a professional service provider by that we mean that this company engages fully qualified web design experts as their full-time employees, creates stunning websites abiding by the industry’s best practices, provides satisfactory web design solutions to customers regardless of the complexity of the requirements and puts customer satisfaction before everything else.

Moreover, a professional web design Ballarat company will also have vast experience in designing websites for diverse niches. So they will not have any problem in understanding your requirements and delivering websites that meet your specifications fully. Most importantly, one of the major advantages of working with a professional web design company is that you will have your websites designed and delivered in a very timely fashion. One of the major concerns that web design customers express is the delivery delays. Web design companies accept more work than they could possibly handle or accept work that is beyond their capability resulting in undue delays in the delivery of the website. If you are dealing with a professional web design Bendigo company, you will not be facing any such issues.

On the whole, the entire web design process will just be a breeze when you work with a professional company. They will handle everything to perfection including the communications with you. All the support tickets will be closed promptly providing you with satisfactory responses.

On the other hand, if you do not select your web design Bendigo company with adequate care then you will miss all these advantages and end up with a highly frustrating experience. The web design industry has numerous dependable service providers and you just need to put in adequate efforts to screen your service providers. Initially, it might look like a time consuming process but on the long run, you will reap the benefits. Your website is a very important and the most powerful marketing tool make sure you get it right the first time.