Design Ollin

Web Design & Development

How to Pick a Domain Name

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Your domain name is your online identity. It’s the first thing people see when they visit your website, and it’s what they’ll remember you by. That’s why it’s important to choose a domain name that’s memorable, easy to spell, and relevant to your business.

Here are a few tips for choosing a great domain name:

  • Keep it short and simple. The shorter your domain name, the easier it will be for people to remember and type.
  • Use keywords. If you can, try to include keywords in your domain name that relate to your business or industry. This will help people find your website when they’re searching online.
  • Be creative. Don’t be afraid to get creative with your domain name. A unique and memorable domain name will help you stand out from the competition.
  • Avoid hyphens and numbers. Hyphens and numbers can make your domain name look cluttered and unprofessional.
  • Check for availability. Before you register your domain name, make sure it’s available. You can use a domain name checker to see if the name you want is available.

Once you’ve chosen a domain name, be sure to register it as soon as possible. Domain names are like real estate: the best ones get snapped up quickly.

Here are a few additional tips for choosing a great domain name:

  • Do your research. Before you choose a domain name, it’s important to do your research and make sure it’s not already in use by another company. You can use a domain name search engine to do this.
  • Think about your future. When choosing a domain name, it’s important to think about the future of your business. If you plan on expanding your business into new markets, make sure your domain name is flexible enough to accommodate that growth.
  • Get feedback. Once you’ve chosen a few domain names, ask friends, family, and colleagues for their feedback. This will help you get a sense of which names are most memorable and appealing.

Choosing a great domain name is an important part of building a successful online presence. By following these tips, you can choose a domain name that will help you achieve your business goals.

Improve your website’s usability, and avoid legal problems.

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Website accessibility is the practice of designing and developing websites that can be used by people with disabilities. This includes people with visual impairments, hearing impairments, mobility impairments, and cognitive impairments.

Accessibility is important because it ensures that everyone has equal access to information and services online. It is also the law in many countries, including the United States, the European Union, and Australia.

There are many benefits to making your website accessible. For one, it can help you reach a wider audience. People with disabilities make up a significant portion of the population, and they are increasingly using the internet. By making your website accessible, you can tap into this growing market.

Accessibility can also help you improve your website’s usability for everyone. Good accessibility practices can make your website easier to use for people with disabilities, but they can also make it easier to use for people without disabilities. For example, using clear and concise language and providing high-contrast text can make your website easier to read for everyone.

Finally, accessibility can help you avoid legal problems. In many countries, there are laws that require websites to be accessible. If you are found to be in violation of these laws, you could face fines or other penalties.

There are many things you can do to make your website accessible. Here are a few tips:

  • Use clear and concise language.
  • Provide high-contrast text.
  • Use images with alt text.
  • Make sure your website is compatible with assistive technologies, such as screen readers and braille displays.
  • Test your website with people with disabilities.

Making your website accessible is the right thing to do. It is also good for business. By making your website accessible, you can reach a wider audience, improve your website’s usability, and avoid legal problems.

10 Reasons to Use SEO for Your Business

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the ranking of a website on search engines. This can be done by optimizing the website for relevant keywords, creating high-quality content, and building links to the website.

There are many reasons why you should use SEO for your business. Here are 10 of the most important ones:

  1. Increase website traffic: SEO can help you increase the amount of traffic to your website by improving your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). This means that more people will be able to find your website when they search for products or services related to your business.
  2. Improve brand awareness: SEO can help you improve brand awareness by getting your website in front of more people. When people see your website listed in search results, they are more likely to remember your brand and consider doing business with you in the future.
  3. Generate leads and sales: SEO can help you generate leads and sales by driving traffic to your website. When people visit your website, they may be interested in learning more about your products or services. If you have a well-designed website with clear calls to action, you can convert these visitors into leads and sales.
  4. Save money: SEO is a relatively cost-effective marketing strategy compared to other methods such as pay-per-click advertising. Once you have optimized your website for SEO, you can continue to generate traffic and leads for free.
  5. Build trust and credibility: SEO can help you build trust and credibility with potential customers by showing that your website is relevant and authoritative. When people see your website listed in search results, they know that you are a reputable business that offers quality products or services.
  6. Reach a global audience: SEO can help you reach a global audience by making your website visible to people all over the world. If you optimize your website for relevant keywords in different languages, you can attract visitors from all over the world.
  7. Stay ahead of the competition: SEO is an ongoing process that requires regular maintenance. By investing in SEO, you can stay ahead of the competition and ensure that your website is visible to potential customers.
  8. Measure your results: SEO is a measurable marketing strategy. You can track the traffic to your website and the number of leads and sales that you generate from SEO. This information can help you to optimize your SEO strategy and improve your results.
  9. Get more out of your website: SEO can help you get more out of your website by driving traffic to it and converting those visitors into leads and sales. If you have a website that is not getting much traffic, SEO can help you to change that.
  10. Improve your website’s ranking: SEO can help you improve your website’s ranking in search engine results pages. This means that your website will be more visible to potential customers and you will be more likely to generate leads and sales.

If you are looking for a way to improve your website’s visibility and generate more traffic, SEO is a great option. By investing in SEO, you can reach a global audience, build trust and credibility, and stay ahead of the competition.

Need a professional to help with your SEO? We can help.

5 Mobile strategy questions

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5 questions to ask yourself about your mobile strategy

More than half of web traffic comes from mobile. Despite these numbers, mobile conversion rates are lower than desktop.

Why? Research suggests many fails to prioritize mobile properly because they don’t know that their current mobile plan is doing its job. This could likely cost them customers. Visitors who have a negative experience on a mobile website are 62% less likely to purchase or comeback in the future than if they have a good experience. No matter how well planned and executed their marketing campaigns are.

Here are five questions to take you through making mobile the center of your company’s digital transformation.

Is a mobile strategy a priority?

It’s not enough to assign one person’s duty to manage your mobile strategy. Enhancing the customer experience must be everyone’s responsibility.

Leadership needs to invest in the right technologies. Marketing and analytics teams need be continually measure and optimize for new revenue opportunities. Developers need to be up to speed on the latest mobile development tools and techniques. Designers should be intimately familiar with mobile UX best practices and work closely with developers to create the best possible experience.

You can’t improve your company’s mobile site performance until you’ve established specific KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). For example, is your mobile conversion rate getting better over time, and is it in line with your mobile traffic? If 70% of your customers hit your mobile website each month but only 35% complete the purchase on their phones, you have a problem.

Here is some advice
Have your team regularly test your mobile page speed on Test My Site, where you can easily compare it with last month’s performance

Is your site performance up to speed?

The average mobile web page takes 15.3 seconds to fully load, and more than half of visits are abandoned if a mobile website takes more than three seconds to load.4 In retail, we see that a one-second delay in mobile load times can impact conversions by up to 20%.5 If you don’t have a team dedicated to optimizing your customers’ experience, you could be driving users to faster competitors.

Fast pages start to load in under one second. Test My Site, our mobile speed testing tool, can help benchmark your mobile site performance and let you know where you’re lagging.

Are you using the right solutions?

Optimizing aging legacy systems may hold back your team over the long haul. Modern web technologies like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Progressive Web Apps (PWA) allow you to create engaging sites that look beautiful and load instantly on every platform. Both technologies help enhance the user experience and neither requires special skills to implement.

Modern mobile technology can also alleviate another obstacle — the checkout process. Often mobile shopping carts require too much text input. Simplifying the checkout process by using platforms like Google Pay can help streamline the process and boost conversions. The closer you are to a one-click purchase experience, the better.

Tips for success:

Connect with your tech to review your current systems and explore opportunities to adopt new technologies.

Are you continually testing?

The only way to know what your customers really want is to give them multiple options and see what performs better over time. Continuous A/B testing is a hallmark of nearly every successful internet company. For example, every day Booking.com runs a thousand A/B tests, and Amazon changes its prices more than 2.5 million times a day.

Tips for success:

Help build a culture of testing in your organization from the top down with tools like Google Optimize.

Are you thinking like a customer?

There’s no substitute for hands-on testing under real-world conditions. Not everyone has access to a fast 4G LTE connection, and speeds vary depending on location and other factors. Your team should be stress-testing your mobile website frequently and recording the results.

Experiencing the site, the way your customers do will reveal their pain points far more effectively than simply poring over data. Then ask your team: Is this what customers really want? If not, it’s time for a change.

Tips for success:

Regularly challenge your team to complete typical customer tasks, like “find and buy the perfect winter coat” or “find the answer to a question within 30 seconds on our mobile site”

With more options than ever, people demand a mobile experience that’s fast and friction-free. Ensure you’re meeting customer expectations — and your mobile growth goals — by leaning into these principles and investing where it counts.

Mobile friendly good news

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When I’m surfing the web on my phone, the words “go to full site” make me weep into my extra-foam cappuccino. I know I’m doomed to a fate of zooming, scrolling, and praying my fingers hit the right link—if the site even works.

 

Is your company’s mobile site quick to load? If not, don’t be surprised if its ranking plummets on Google search results. In July of 2018, Google’s algorithm changed so that slow-loading mobile sites would suffer the consequences. While this has been a call for action for quite some time, Google uses loading speed as a metric for mobile search result ranking.

If your site is already mobile optimized, congratulations! More traffic for you. If not, be warned: your site may be sinking into oblivion.

Surviving #mobilegeddon

Google’s mobile-friendly spawned the panicked #mobilegeddon hashtag, but the process is good news. Mobile traffic already exceeds desktop traffic, and mobile-optimized sites triple their chances of conversion rates of five percent or more. Mobile-friendly design was already critical, and now Google is driving the point home.

The tactic also affects apps. Google considers data from indexed apps in its search ranking, giving users of those apps a better view into their app content. This is great news for developers trying to pitch app improvements.

How to build mobile-friendly sites

Not sure how your site will fare? Google’s mobile-friendly test is a good place to start. Once you’ve established a baseline, there are three ways to boost your results:

  1. Responsive design: Uses a single HTML source that renders differently based on the display size.
  2. Dynamic serving: Delivers different HTML for different devices but uses the same URL regardless of the device type.
  3. Mobile website: Uses separate URLs for different devices.

Responsive design

Responsive design is Google’s recommended approach and by far the most popular method for mobile-friendly website design. Because a responsive design can adapt to all screen sizes, your site will be easy to read and navigate on a 27-inch monitor or a five-inch smartphone. Responsive sites also perform better, so users get a better experience all around.

This flexibility also future proofs your design. Because the size of the template is based on the screen size and not the device, a responsive site can adapt to new technologies like watches or glasses.

From a search perspective, having a single URL makes it easier for Google to crawl your site. And having a single code source simplifies site maintenance and reduces the likelihood of SEO errors.

Dynamic serving

Dynamic serving is similar to responsive design in that a single URL delivers content suitable for different devices. However, there are important differences:

  • Dynamic serving requires detection of the user device—a notably error-prone process.
  • You must maintain a separate code base for each device type, increasing the likelihood of errors and complicating maintenance.
  • Deploying a separate mobile site may not meet users’ needs. For example, tablet users may find that neither the desktop site nor the mobile site meet their expectations.

In spite of these disadvantages, Google still considers dynamic serving to be mobile friendly.

Mobile website

Creating a separate mobile site is a decidedly old-school approach that isn’t recommended. Maintaining a separate, mobile-only website is a real pain, and it forces Google to inspect two versions of your content.

The user experience can be lousy, too. If a mobile user lands on the desktop site, he or she is likely to leave the site rather than search for the mobile version. Who wants to go through all that zooming and scrolling?

If that weren’t bad enough, mobile sites are only optimized for specific screen sizes. If the user has a screen size you didn’t expect, things can get ugly. For example, a phablet user may find your desktop site too crowded and your mobile site too empty.

Back to the good news

The good news is that Google’s mobile-friendly helps clear up any remaining uncertainty about the best approach to web design. If your website isn’t already responsive and mobile friendly, now is your chance to convince your boss that it’s time for a change.

If you need hints to help you get started, Google has a list of common mistakes for mobile sites. And don’t forget that responsive design is only one factor to consider. Lots of other factors, including site speed, play an important role. Now, please go explain to your boss that I can’t bear to see “go to full site” one more time—my cappuccino is already too watery.

Do we build with Flash?

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There are several reason we don’t design on Flash.

  1. It does not work on all computer browsers. (install is required)
  2. It definitely does not work on mobile phones or tablet browsers.
  3. Designing in Flash cost more.
  4. Flash web sites are not easy to update.
  5. Security issues.

The people at Adobe software safety revealed a fix for a flaw for Flash. You might not use Flash actively – you might not even realize it’s on your computer (desktop computer, that is,) but there it might very well be. This could be good news for Apple computer users as this bit of malware seems affect mostly Windows. Maybe. Very likely, but not certainly.

Adobe security bulletin where they number it Bulletin ID APSB18-19. They said this week that there’s an exploit for the software CVE-2018-5002 in Flash, and they’ve tagged this vulnerability PRIORITY 1!

In short, when you get an email with a certain attachment, and open said attachment, the code… takes over your Office documents. Or something along those lines. The exact wording from Adobe is: “these attacks leverage Office documents with embedded malicious Flash Player content distributed via email.” Another bit of good news is that this exploit has only been used in “limited, targeted attacks against Windows users” so far.