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How to choose a good web designer
Hiring a Web designer is quite a difficult task. Your website will represent your business all around the world. Some people are smart enough to make a website on their own and if you have no knowledge about coding and other mechanisms you can always use drag and drop codes. But if you want to represent your business and want customers you need to make everything perfect
For this professional task, you will need a professional Web Designer. Before considering a Web Designer consider some important points.
You can find Web Designer on the internet as well. Many platforms on the internet will provide you this facility.
Ask Around:
Before hiring a web designer, you need to research well. As mentioned above, you can find many people online for this purpose. Use some of the paid services on the internet. There are many freelancing websites where you can find the services of your choice. But it is preferred that you find someone you know. You should ask around, ask away from your friends and relatives. It is advised to find someone you can trust with your platform and in the end, you are going to pay a significant amount of money to the developer.
Asking someone who previously hired someone will save a lot of trouble.
Resume of the Developer:
Before hiring someone, you need to check the resume of the developer completely. Also, look into their portfolio before hiring them. Their previous work will give a glimpse of their future work for your website.
Maintenance:
Many web designers promise you the continuous maintenance of your website. They can update and secure your website every month. This will helps you in maintaining your business as well.
Services:
Another thing you might want to consider in a web design firm or a web designer is the nature of their services. Some companies may provide you with better SEO tools and some may provide you with other helping tools as marketing. They market your website on their social media platforms as well.
Contract:
There is a legal contract you may need to sign. It is advisable and necessary in the order for you to save from theft and any problem in the future. You should read the contract fully and completely before signing it. It is advisable that someone professional should read it.
Importance of SEO in website designing?
The best increase in traffic to a site happens when there is a good balance between good design and great content. A good web design should take care of all the branding aspects of the product or company to project the brand identity. But it is the combination of good design and great SEO that brings about the best inbound marketing results.
When creating a site, one should remember the way we browse for a product or service. We look for five to ten options. Before we make a purchase, we need to feel comfortable with the product or service mentioned and need to get the maximum information possible. But first, the site has to be listed ahead of the competitors and ranked above the rest to appear preferably on the first page when the key words are searched. It is vital to be in the first pages of searches because otherwise, chances of prospective customers seeing them will be considerably low.
Good SEO content is a balance between good content and overdoing the keywords. Imperfectly done SEO will lead to the search engine ranking the site as a spammer. This happens when too many keywords are filled in to the content. The importance of content being original and relevant to the topic is very much real. One should also make effort to add good visuals or videos that are relevant to the topic being discussed. This will help the crawl algorithms of the search engines to easily pick the site and rank it.
A good SEO should have cross links to within the site and to pages outside the site. The site should also present fresh content at regular intervals. It should present content that is relevant to the visitor – presenting the product or service they are looking for in a structured and well presented way. It should answer their possible queries and doubts. A good Content Strategy has to be developed in order to integrate with search engine optimization smoothly. If you have any doubts on how to create a great website for your product, business or service using WordPress, please feel free to talk to me, Denny Jacob. I would love to help you create a great site that has great SEO elements that help your site gain the best search engine rankings.
What makes one a good WordPress Web Designer?
A good WordPress Web Designer or Web Developer must have the necessary technical competence. He should have the basic technical skills that will act as the foundation on which the site will be built. A good developer will continually hone their skills and learn the new developments in the field.
It means that one should have a mindset for constantly learning. Those who are stagnant get stuck with the same techniques and designs. As everyone is aware, web technologies and designs are areas in which there is constant up-gradation. New versions of WordPress keep appearing and a good designer has to be adept to adapt to it. HTML5 and CSS3 have brought possibilities that were unimaginable a couple of years back.
A good WordPress professional has a wide repertoire of abilities and experiences in using plugins. He should be aware of all the possibilities of the design to aid E-commerce and E-marketing. He will be able to juggle with various projects which will be in various stages of completion at any given time. This calls for a lot of planning skills as well as confidence in being able to pace the jobs according to the time available.
WordPress experts have to deal with clients and get to know their minds and what they want their sites to do for their business. The various tasks have to be broken down into parts and each component will need to be done, perhaps separately, at various times. Each may require a different deadline and working time.
A good WordPress designer will have to be able to sell his design to his team as well as the client. He will have to explain its features and demonstrate what it will do. It will also involve a bit of marketing as clients for the projects have to be found and prices will have to be negotiated. There can be outside elements like hosting and security issues.
Advantages of WordPress?
WordPress is the world’s most popular Content Management Software for creating websites. It has not become that popular without reason. First of all, WordPress is inductive and this makes it generally pretty easy to learn it. Since the programmers had already put in a lot of effort, WordPress is easier to customize and be online faster. The site can be easily populated with pictures and content and the site can be up and running very soon.
Managing a WordPress site is even easier if one has an Internet-connected computer. This is because WordPress is browser-based and one can easily add the required content or make changes within a couple of minutes. It is simply easy even for a layman who has no understanding of even HTML or uploading content using FTP Software. Unless too many plugins are used, the site can be kept up to date and running without much effort.
All the content for a website can be easily posted and positioned on the site at predetermined places. Being module based, the content structure can be easily be manipulated. The powerful but simple code that runs WordPress makes it easy for search engines to pick up and the keywords for listing the site higher in its chosen category. With each page of the post having option to add meta tag keywords, description and title, the site page can be optimized for specific keywords. This makes the search for the keywords very sophisticated and perfectly optimized for the search engines to pick up.
Another important feature is that the site can be made to look and feel like your brand requires. The customization is possible and all aspects of your branding look requirements can be incorporated into the site. As the engine has created a sophisticated blogging capability inbuilt, it is easy to add blog posts to any site made with WordPress. It is also easier to link to social media sites – which gives your site greater reach with your target audience and helps to make your business a grand success.
Why Responsive Design is Important
The algorithms of Google factors in website’s presence, making having a responsive site a major factor in improving a site’s ratings. Thus it is absolutely vital for your website to have a responsive design and to be easily accessible on a smartphone. Not only are there nearly 3 billion mobile phones and devices across the world, most Indians browse the internet through their mobile phones. So to put it simply, if your site does not have responsive design, making it suitable for viewing on mobile devices, its ratings in search engines will automatically decline. So it becomes extremely important for companies to have their presence through mobile phones. It is the only way to reach a wider audience and sell their products.
The challange of a responsive design is to maintain and have a similar appearance of the website in different devices including different browsers, OS, devices of various sizes and types. The factors that come into play are click becomes touch, pixel resolutions vary, markup needs to be optimized and many others. Other challenges include the fact that the text should be readable without having to zoom. Also there must be spaces around the buttons for tapping it. The scrolling should be entirely vertial too.
The responsive design has to keep in mind the way users behave and how they browse a content. This grows out of the kind of device that the person is using and its screen size. Browsing a site on a hand-held device is easier and can be done from anywhere. This gives an immediacy to the task of searching and finding as well as the response is more immediate, leading to sales. Today it has come to such that more people feel comfortable with bowsing with a hand-held device.
The best part of a responsive website is the seamless viewing that it provides of the websites that one is browsing. The page is automaticalled sized and every element in the website is automtically proportioned to the size of the page seen within the device. Some of the images and videos are resized relaively to keep it within the limitations and make viewing seamless. The coloumns get spread out one below the other, without loosing any element in the page.
Some of the factors that have to be kept in mind are the navigation using touch. This switchover from mouse clicks to touch is a task that has to be done carefully. Another aspect is keep ing in mind the speed at which an image or a video or even an advertisement gets downloaded on to the page. Unnecessary graphics are avoided to speed up the display of the site on smartphones.
Every business that has some sort of e-commerce, should immediately go in for a responsive site redesign. This will help in keeping the business ahead of the competition and be more successful online. If you have any doubts or requirement, please feel free to contact Denny Jacob, a leading WordPress Designer in Kochi.