Archive for the ‘Responsive web design’ Category
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September 14th, 2023Is It Worth To Hire A Web Design Company?
September 1st, 2023A Complete Guide On Website Redesign Services
June 22nd, 2023Everything You Need to Know About AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
June 29th, 2018Often times you come across a symbol just beside your search results whenever you run a cursory search on your mobile phone. Ever wondered what that is or should your site even have it? Well, that my friend is an AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages.
What is AMP?
For those of you who are unfamiliar, AMP is an open-source project from Google that helps facilitate the creation of really fast-loading mobile pages. Though this program was initiated by Google, it is not owned by Google but share a wide range of supporters such as Bing, Pinterest, Twitter etc.
How AMP works?
AMP usually works by stripping away a large portion of the webpage’s original content (that is being searched by the user) in order to optimize the page for mobile viewing. As a result, there is literally no time gap between jumping from the search page to the webpage. It is because of these similarities in the working process that some even claim that AMP is a direct response to Facebook’s instant articles from Google for providing its followers a platform to read articles quickly without leaving the Facebook page.
What can AMP do for your business?
Have you ever tried loading your site on mobile? What a silly question, of course, you have but are you really happy with the loading speed? My guess is, you aren’t. And why would you? Loading a site on desktop takes an ample amount of time even with a fast internet connection but loading a site in mobile on simple data plans? I know, it drives me crazy too.
Benefits:
So, now you know why AMP is important for your business website, still not sure? Maybe this will help you convince.
- It’s super-fast, though it may force you to delete certain codes along with implementing some specific development practices to help you achieve that speed.
- We all know how the speed of a site helps in determining the ranking factor, so if your pages are AMP-lified, they have a much better chance of ranking higher in Google mobile search results. It will go a long way in improving the SEO efforts of a website.
- If your site loads faster than the competitors’, visitors are more likely to come often to your site along with prolonging their stays and leaving you with a better chance to make the sale.
- Even the major non-Google sites such as Bing, twitter etc. are starting to show AMP version of pages in their search results whenever available.
Drawbacks:
Since we are talking about AMPs in general, it would be wrong to mention only its benefits without referring to its drawbacks, however few they may be.
- AMP projects support ads too though it is not at all advisable to implement ads on AMP run pages as it will severely limit the potential to bring in revenue.
- AMP also supports Google Analytics but implementing it on AMP run pages requires a different tag which, in turn, takes a lot of time to collect and analyze data.
AMP-lifying your website will require you to develop a new mobile theme for that site, if not, at least make your existing theme AMP-compatible.
There’s another major drawback to integrating an AMP strategy, as you know it requires you to strip down the HTML, further affecting the styling and the webmaster’s ability to incorporate branding into the web pages and as a result, can make your AMP pages look ugly, I mean really ugly.
But the important thing is, if you possess the time and resources to properly implement AMP strategy (including setting up attribution and customizing it correctly), then there is simply no reason left not to go on with it.
What to expect from AMP in 2018?
As we move further into 2018, Google too has been slowly and steadily furthering and expanding the reach of AMP. Where earlier, it was only restricted to recipe articles, news, how-to content, posts etc., nowadays, apart from superfast loading speed, lighter and faster versions of ads are available (all thanks to the integration of AMP into ad formats). But that’s not all, let’s see what 2018 has brought for us-
- Google has integrated ‘AMP stories’ (fancy way of storytelling keeping mobile in mind) into SERP (Search Engine Result Pages).
- Now, traffic from AMP pages can be displayed as ‘organic search traffic’ in analytics tool, rather than referral traffic, as in past.
- As I mentioned earlier, AMP pages, though fast, were often ugly looking but with the help of new customization options and some added functionality, pages look a lot better.
- Google is also working on displaying publisher’s URL instead of Google’s URL in the search results.
- Google has also introduced AMP framework for email which will be available to all users by the end of this year.
Closing Thoughts:
Ok, that was everything you need to know about AMP and whether or not its suitable for your site. But remember what I said earlier, if you have the time and resources, then there’s simply no reason left not to do it. Also, it may not be around forever but as long as it is, it only makes perfect sense to reap the benefits it has to offer while you still can.
Responsive Web Design to Increase Traffic and Conversions
June 16th, 2018In today’s digital age, the importance of user experience can never be undermined, not when more and more searches are being performed on mobile phones and other hand-held devices as compared to desktop or laptops. The need for a mobile-friendly site these days has skyrocketed like never before which also plays a crucial role in a business’s overall success.
This has further led to the migration from the basic design to a more responsive one, the only change the retailers need to make in order to improve the customer journey and ultimately increase conversion rates. So, what does it mean to have a mobile-friendly site? Basically, becoming mobile-friendly means choosing a responsive web design over a dedicated mobile site.
What is a responsive web design?
For those of you who do not know, a responsive web design is a development technique that aims at creating a website that can easily adjust itself to the size of the user’s screen. It will enhance the user’s browsing experience tenfold through flexible and responsive web pages that can fit into any device accessing it.
What is the strategy behind a responsive web design?
As we know, our web design strategy can have a huge impact on our site’s overall ability to rank in search engines also known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Therefore, the key here lies in developing a web design strategy keeping SEO in mind. What it basically means is ensuring that your web design doesn’t, in any way, have a negative impact on your site’s search rankings.
What are Google’s thoughts on responsive design?
Often times in the past Google has hinted at building responsive sites that work fine on all the devices but in 2015, it started penalizing websites that were not responsive enough along with rewarding those that were created with a responsivity for search engine result pages. Not only this, Google also updated its algorithm that automatically makes mobile-friendly sites rank high in the SERPs. In other words, sites that are non-responsive will eventually see their rankings drop.
Moving on, let’s have a look at how upgrading your website to a mobile responsive design will help you reap the many rewards SEO has to offer.
How can responsive web design help increase traffic and conversions?
- Encourage Social Sharing
This is a lesser known fact about responsive design that it was created to make social sharing easy especially for mobile users. Its also important to know that unlike social media that has a direct impact on SEO ranking, social sharing doesn’t so much in that aspect but it has something better it can easily help you grow an audience, which is another, more indirect way of increasing the search rankings.
- Lowering Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is something that is related to spending time on a particular site, or to speak more frankly, how quickly the visitors leave the site or backtrack. Maybe it won’t matter to you but Google does keep a track of user behavior in relation to entry and exit point for a website and interpret these short dwellings as the information that you provided wasn’t relevant to the user’s needs. On the contrary, a responsive web design not only enables you to put relevant content but also display it in a mobile-friendly manner.
- Offering Better UX
When it comes to spending a considerable amount of time on site (an offspring of improved user experience) or repeat customers or increased conversions, responsive design easily wins on all fronts. Thanks to its user-friendly design that makes reading and navigating the site that much easier. We have to understand here that the design elements of a website play a crucial role when it comes to providing a great customer experience which, in turn, is the result of positive reviews, traffic and a rise in branded searches.
- Fighting Off Piracy
This point is for those who have decided to follow down the path to a separate mobile site which may seem like a good option at the time. However, the problem comes when the Google crawl bots mark it as a duplicate content which almost always leads to lower rankings in search results. This happens because of the similar content on the desktop and mobile site even though the URL is different. But one doesn’t have to deal with duplicate content issues while using a responsive web design due to a single URL regardless of the device being used.
- Reduced Downloading Time
We all know how page loading times are an established and known factor. Therefore, every site should be optimized to load faster in order to rank it well in search engine results. And that’s why Google always recommend using mobile responsive sites. So, if your website is a responsive one, it will ordinarily load faster and, as a result, provide more positive user experience and a boost in conversions.
Summing Up:
An important part of the user experience comes from the way you present your website to your visitors. So, if your website is, by any chance, unresponsive, outdated or just unsuited for mobile use, you are missing some great opportunities to convert visits into sales. And remember this, if you don’t provide a responsive website to your users, someone else will.
We become Best Web Design Company 2017 in Los Angeles
April 25th, 2017Clutch recently named us as one of the top web design companies in the LA metro area. This is the second year in a row that Clap Creative has received such an award from Clutch.
Clutch is a DC-based research company that evaluates and publishes reports on the leading IT and marketing companies across dozens of US cities and countries. Analysts at Clutch do an internal assessment of these companies by looking at their previous experience, service offerings and industry awards, among other criteria. The biggest differentiator of their research process is that they interview a handful of each company’s clients and publish their comments on their site for business buyers to see.
In their official press release announcing the top LA web design companies, Clutch Senior Analyst Eleonora Israele stated:
“A company’s website is often a buyer’s introduction to a product or service. The leading companies in our research have proven their ability to create websites that truly reflect their clients’ companies and make them stand out from their competitors.”
We worked with Outcome Tutoring, a college tutoring company, to build a website for their business with an online booking tool that allows students to see each tutors’ availability and schedule a session. Once the project was completed, their founder said the following:
“The website that Clap Creative developed automatically made us into a more sophisticated company. We were initially just completely bare bones, all hustle, and all grind. Now we have a complete, functioning website. Because of that level of sophistication, we also have a lot more viewership of our site and more bookings. With bare bones, people won’t trust your company as much. Now that we have a way to let people know that we have a good, functioning company, they trust they can spend their money with us. Our client return rate is much higher now.”
We’re thrilled to have made the list for the second time, and can’t wait for a third one next year!
Cricket All Stars 2015 – One of our best pieces of work!
October 14th, 2015
At Clap Creative, our designers and developers are always committed to delivering world-class website designs along with cutting-edge web applications. So far, we have created various amazing websites, exceeding our clients’ expectations.
Another feather in our cap is the cricket All Stars website and we have just fallen in love with this website. It’s not just because we are hardcore cricket fans, but there are amazing features integrated into the website, making it our best portfolio website of 2015.
And Its Best for a Reason
First of all, we are really proud to say that our client, Leverage Agency, were really impressed with our work. And for good reason! Cricket All Stars is a tremendous showcase of the new web dynamics, be it designing, ticketing, responsive site to name a few. It allows people to book their tickets online for the upcoming cricket series in the United States. This site is developed on Bootstrap 3, PHP and the shop (upcoming) is based on Magento and provides utmost convenience to the people who are die-hard cricket fans.
Fast, Feature Rich and Intuitive – That’s Cricket All Stars for You!
We make sure our websites have fast loading time so that the users don’t switch to other websites. All the icons, content and graphics are clear and understandable to make the perfect first impression. Navigations are clear and accessible. All the necessary details are mentioned on the homepage, including the teams playing, player information, venues, timing, and everything one is looking for.
If you want to get more information about the players, you just need to click on the picture of your favorite player and there you get a sneak peek into the life of your idol. Also, there is a yellow color icon placed ‘Book Tickets Now‘ that allows the user to book the tickets with just a few clicks. The website is completely responsive so it looks good on each and every screen in the world. There is a signup form at the bottom, users can either sign up through their emails or through social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter, etc. With these features, we just aim to provide a wonderful experience to the users.
Get Immersive Cricketing Experience
We understand that people are always eager to know about what their favorite cricketers are up to. That’s why we have added a section where users can read the latest tweets of the players. This can be called a ‘cricket encyclopedia’, since we have made every best effort to add all the necessary features and icons that can help people stay up-to-date about the latest cricket events.
For newbies, we have added a section Cricket 101, where all the relevant and necessary information about cricket techniques are mentioned. Facebook, Twitter and Email icons are placed on the right side so that people can share the videos, tweets or any other information with their friends.
In short, it is a fully functional, accessible, interactive, search-engine friendly website with flexible grids and creative styling. Just visit the website and feel the difference.
So, you see, we have a great contender for our ‘Best Website in Our Portfolio 2015’.
What are the secrets of creating award-winning design?
August 17th, 2015When it comes to conversions, the design of your website plays a far more crucial role than you think. You can utilize any strategy in the world to boost conversions, but if your website design looks like crap, all your efforts will go wasted.
Design is not just art. It is also marketing. Here are the secrets of creating an award-winning website design.
Visual Hierarchy
Visual hierarchy is the order in which the eye perceives what it sees and is very important for creating a great web design.
Some parts of your website – calls to actions, forms, etc – hold more importance than others and you want these parts to get more attention than less important ones.
Are all the 10 items in your website menu equally important? Where do you want your site visitors to click? Put the important links under spotlight.
Your business objective decides how the elements will rank on your website. Without a specific goal, it’s hard to know what to prioritize.
Hick’s Law
Hick’s law says that as the choices increase, so does the time it takes to make a decision.
The more choices you give to your website user, the more difficult it will be to choose one, or worse choose anything at all. So in order to deliver a more enjoyable user experience, we need to first remove choices.
To create an award-winning web design, the process of removing distracting options has to remain consistent throughout the entire design process.
In the era of countless choices, consumers need better filters. If you sell a wide variety of products, add better filters to allow easier decision making.
Fitt’s Law
Fitt’s law says that the time required to reach a target area (for instance, call to action) depends on the distance to the target and the size of the target.
Meaning, it is easy to reach an object which is bigger and closer to us.
But it doesn’t mean that a button should be designed so big that it takes half the screen. It will become much easier to click a tiny button when it is given a 20% size increase.
The size of a button should depend on its expected use. You can analyze your stats to find out the buttons people use the most, and make such buttons bigger (easier to click).
For instance, there’s a form on your website you want visitors to fill. At the bottom of the form, there are two buttons: “Submit” and “Reset.” Most users will hit ‘submit’. Hence, this button should be kept bigger than ‘reset’.
White Space & Neat design
White space is the portion of a web page left “blank”. It’s the space between graphics, visuals or margins.
This “empty” space is an important element of website design. It allows the elements in it to exist at all. White space defines the implementation of hierarchy. The hierarchy of color, images and information.
A web page without white space, stuffed with graphics or text, is at the risk of appearing cluttered, and is typically hard to read.
Adequate white space makes a website look ‘neat’. While simple and neat design is important for sending across a clear message, it doesn’t mean fewer content.
A neat website design makes the best use of the white space in it.
Conclusion
It is important to design a website for the user and have clear business objective in mind. Using these web design secrets you can achieve award-winning results.
10 PSD to Responsive Tips that Every Front End Developer Needs to Know
April 10th, 2015Responsive design has become the latest trend-setter in the web development industry. With the dominance of HTML5 and a new level of Cascading Style Sheets – CSS3, website developers emphasize on making a responsive website using the ‘Media Queries’. However, sending files in for PSD to HTML conversion can have a big impact on how accurately the designs will be converted without any bugs.
In the PSD to HTML conversion industry, there are numerous Photoshop designs. Some of them are very easy to work with but some have increased the standard PSD to HTML production time. Not every Photoshop designer is worth the money.
Here are some Photoshop tips that every front end developer needs to know for time and cost-effective project completion.
Leave the Layers Intact
In order to keep the file size smaller, many designers merge the layers. This technique works well in print design, but in PSD to HTML conversion, the developer needs to have all ”the effects” such as graphics, textual or adjustment layers intact. This is crucial because all these attributes carry important information for the whole website development, such as font families, font sizes, colors, line heights, text transformations, etc.
Tip: Make sure, while delivering the design files, you leave your layers intact, in order to preserve all the vital information for developers.
Organize your PSD
Well-structured and organized PSD files can be easily converted to HTML. Wondering Why? Because, nicely organized PSD files are highly beneficial for both a coder and layout designer’s perspective. Productivity increases leaps and bounds if files are structured coherently.
Tip: Always keep the PSD files neat, tidy and highly organized with relevant names. It will surely keep productivity high and expenses low.
Keep Design Consistent
Always try to keep design elements consistent across the layouts of your website, including your buttons, both header and footer, rounded boxes etc. Any exceptions will undoubtedly lead to extra time to convert the HTML or CSS code, and will eventually increase the development time.
Tip: Keep your designs consistent to make them look professional and reduce the development time.
Place Elements on Grid
Design grid is a vertical set of guidelines that makes your further job much easier. Utilizing the grid allows the designers to place the much desired website elements in proportional and balanced space and get the proper feel of design. Off grid element placement establishes extra steps in PSD to HTML conversion.
Tip: If you use grid for design, make sure you keep the elements inside the grid and aligned (even if you aren’t working in the explicit grid).
Prepare Rollovers
When preparing your design, you must focus on the functionality of links and all call to action elements. It has become a part of the standard practice to add rollover states to the elements such as buttons and images, in order to distinguish them among the action states.
Tip: Make sure you don’t forget to design the rollovers and define time, if you don’t want to spend more time creating them later when you start working with live templates – this will increase your production time.
Provide Consistent Hands-off Materials
The hands-off documents like: PSD, fonts, JPG previews and even PDF specification write-ups, which are delivered to PSD to HTML conversion team, should contain final versions of the designer work.
Tip: Make sure you keep all hands-off assets consistent, including font sizes, font families and design elements.
Consider Fonts Rendering Differences
When using modern fonts, consider the differences from browser to browser. Font anti-aliasing and tracking may be displayed differently in Photoshop and in the browsers.
Tip: If you are concerned about how your font may seem on live website, check it out in various browsers before you opt for one specific.
Avoid using Blending Modes
Remember, blend modes used in Photoshop are nearly impossible to recreate in CSS. They are meant to produce amazing effects and shorten the time of image processing. However, eventually they don’t get the desired results. Thus, they are good to use for preview, not for PSD to HTML conversion.
Tip: Your PSD files should be and use just normal blending mode.
Consider Content Flexibility
Some designs allow only a fixed amount of text space which doesn’t allow adding more text. Sometimes it might work, but in most cases you need to add more text on the live website. So, always think about content flexibility.
Tip: Always keep content flexibility factor in mind and assume the possibility of increasing or decreasing the amount of text.
Design Layout for Common Resolution
Common browser resolution is a very specific subject, however, with responsive approach the screen resolution becomes less important. But, if your design isn’t responsive than the most common screen resolution is 1366 x 768px.
Tip: If your design is not responsive, make sure you pay additional attention to the screen resolution and do not make it wider than 1300px.
You must follow all the above mentioned PSD to HTML conversion tips to build as a great HTML developer.
