Posts Tagged business web design
Seattle Web Design – Top Features for Business Websites
Posted by Rory Martin in Web Design and Development on October 21, 2014
If you’re about to set up a website for your business for the first time then you really want to start considering the features and options you want on the website. While you can discuss your needs and any good local web design team will be able to tell you what you need, it’s also a good idea to decide what you want and why before you go. Here are a few of the things that Seattle web designers agree are the best features for business websites.
Great UX
UX is probably the most important thing to integrate into your web design. UX or User Experience refers to design that specifically makes it easy for users to visit and navigate your site. This means clean design, simple menus, and easy navigation. While it may mean skipping some of the bells and whistles, it does mean a better site.
Contact Information
If you want to look professional to local visitors then you want as much contact information available on the site as possible. The best way to go is to put some information in the header or footer and create a dedicated page with everything visitors need to get in touch.
Integrated Social Media
Visitors want to see that you’re an established business and the easiest way to show them that is to link in your social profiles. Showing a Facebook profile or Google Plus followers is the easiest way to convince modern web users that your site is established and trustworthy. Because many online shoppers actually research using social, many will actually click through to your business page and perhaps even like the page, which makes your social marketing that much easier.
Graphics
The web is quickly becoming a very graphic driven place, and using graphics on your website creates a modern look. While you might be prepared to put up a few pictures of your products and perhaps a few stock photos, you should also consider creating graphic centric pages that center around an image. This makes your website cleaner, more modern, and simpler for viewers.
Mobile Ready
Whether you choose to go mobile friendly with a specific mobile website or with a responsive design, you need mobile friendly. An study showed that some 40% of Seattle smartphone owners use their phones to research businesses and products before shopping, even when out shopping, meaning that if your site is not mobile friendly, you could loose customers.
As a business, you want a website that is simple, easy to use, and informative. If you’re operating a web shop, you also want to make sure that your site is secure, offers secure protocol protection, and that it loads quickly enough to allow users to access and research products from their phones. Other than that, most of your services and pages might be unique to your business.
Want to know more about what goes into a great website? Or want to talk with professional Seattle web designers about building your perfect business website? Contact us today at 206-355-0894 to get a free estimate.
Major iPhone upgrade coming this summer for Seattle Web Designers too
Posted by Rory Martin in Web Design and Development on March 17, 2009
Apple unveiled a slew of new features — more than 100 in all — in the third major revision of the iPhone’s basic operating system. Among the enhancements demonstrated at a special media event at its Cupertino headquarters on Tuesday were many of the functions users had been clamoring for — in some cases for nearly two years. Among the highlights:
- Cut, copy and paste across applications for Seattle Web Designers at www.rorymartin.com this is awesome!!
- So-called “push notification†— for example, of breaking news or sports results
- Multimedia messaging service (MMS) for sending pictures or voice memos in instant messages
- Landscape viewing when the iPhone is turned sideways in most applications, including Mail
- The ability to search Mail, Calendar and other applications for key words
- Improved calendar functions
- Stereo Bluetooth for wireless earphones
And much more. At the end of the 90 minute presentation, senior vice president Scott Forstall (who stood in for the ailing Steve Jobs) was rattling off features faster than reporters could type: Notes Sync, audio/video tags, live streaming, shake to shuffle, Wi-Fi auto login, Stereo Bluetooth, LDAP, iTunes account creation, YouTube ratings, Anti-Philshing, Call Log, Parental Controls, Media Scrubber, OTA profiles, VPN on demand, Languages, YouTube subscriptions, YouTube accounts and Encrypted profiles, auto-fills…
“Many minor features add up to a major change,†was Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster’s take-away message.
Apple also announced a raft of improvements — including more than 1,000 new APIs (application programming interfaces) — in the so-called SDK (software development kit) that programmers use to create applications for the iPhone and the iPod touch. Chief among them:
- Peer to peer connectivity to allow multiplayer games with people in close proximity
- Support for turn-by-turn navigation and other sophisticated map applications
- A subscription model that allows subscriptions and micropayments by the item ($9.95 for an electronic book, say, or a more $0.99 for a more powerful weapon in a shooting game)
- The ability to interact with hardware accessories such as speakers or glucose monitoring kits
A beta (preliminary) version of new SDK is available to developers for free download today.
iPhone 3.0 with all the added end-user features won’t be available until sometime this summer. It will be free to owners of existing iPhones and will cost $9.95 for the iPod touch. Some of the new functions — for example Stereo Bluetooth and MMS — won’t work on the first generation phones.
Apple also announced some App Store milestones:
- 25,000 apps available for download (the actual figure is now more than 28,000)
- 800 million apps downloaded
- 17 million iPhones sold through Dec. 2008
- 13.7 million iPod touches (for a total installed base of more than 30 million App Store-ready devices)
- 800,000 downloads of the original SDK
- 50,000 developers — 60% of them new to Apple
- 96% of the apps submitted are approved — although not fast enough to satisfy some developers
See Jon Fortt’s Big Tech here for a live blog of the event. Apple’s press release is available here.
Apple closed Tuesday just under $100, up nearly 4.5% for the day. In the past 15 days it has gained more than $16 a share.
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