Usability and utility and not just finesse are the major determinants of the success or failure of a website. The ultimate judge of the effectiveness of a website is the user, and not the designer, so user-focused designs have become the gold standard for successful and profit-oriented web design.

This article outlines web design principles needed to create a technically and visually pleasing website. The same principles can also be applied to branding and marketing. The basic elements of a good design are shape, texture, direction, and color. When designers are creating a website they must  strive to achieve a balance of visual appeal, responsiveness, functionality, speed, and usefulness. In order to achieve this balance, there are certain principles designers must follow. These principles are explained in detail in this article.

Web Design Principle #1: Visual Hierarchy

The manner in which our eyes move from one item on a web page to the other is referred to as visual hierarchy. When designing a webpage, a designer needs to first categorize the various topics and thereafter, arrange them in order of their importance then place them in such a way that visitors first notice what is most important and move on to others in order of their importance.

A designer can create a visual hierarchy in order of the size of the most important image or content or create a hierarchy of content, from the most important content to the less important.

Web Design Principle #2: Design Intuitively

Many a time, users muddle through the content on a web page and when designing a web page, a web designer should strive to see the site from the eyes of the user and make it easy to read through so they know which way to go. The use of an intuitive and simple navigation helps increase the websites usability and make it more engaging so visitors won’t have to wonder about how to move from point A to point B.

Web Design Principle #3: Hick’s Law

This law states that ‘with every additional choice increases the time required to take a decision.’ This law holds true not only in web design but in every other facet of life.

One famous psychology study showed that when giving consumers 24 choices of scented candles rather than 8, it resulted in less purchases. The extra options made the decision on which scented candles to purchase more difficult, and many consumers chose not to make the decision. So how many choices should you have? You want to give consumers a choice, but not a difficult choice. You want one option to stand out to consumers, so it doesn’t take much cognitive effort to decide. If you are printing t-shirts for example, you will likely want to include 1, maybe 2 shades of blue, but you wouldn’t want 10 different shades of blue.

The more options you create for visitors using your website, the more difficult it is for them to come to a decision, this means you have to reduce the number of choices in order to create a better user experience. Distracting options have to be screened out to aid increased sales and better overall profit. You want to make things simple for your customers. If you need to have a lot of choices for products on your website, you can use filters to help people narrow down the selection.

Web Design Principle #4: Fitts Law

This law states that ‘the time needed to move to a target is dependent upon the size of the target as well as the distance to the target’. Simply put, the larger an object or target and the closer it is to us, the easier it is to use it.

This law can easily be applied when designing a website. Design your website so that what people are looking for is easy to find on the page, and easy to see. Make popular content standout to improve the usability of your website.

If you notice in your website analytics that a lot of people are searching for a particular topic, make that topic standout. Don’t make people scroll all the way to the bottom of a page for what they are looking for. On many popular music websites, the play button is much larger than either the reverse or fast-forward buttons beside it, these companies have applied this principle to improve their usability. This doesn’t mean you put buttons which cover half the screen; you have to use some discretion when applying this principle.

Web Design Principle #5: White Space and Simple Design

Simplicity should be the primary goal of web design. One of the most important features of a simple design is white space. White space not only unburdens users of the stress of identifying the information but makes it easier for users to perceive the information on the website.

White space helps divide the web page into several parts, which makes it easier for the user to process the information on the site and it also helps to solve problems of complex hierarchical structures.

Web Design Principle #6: Communication and Content

Visitors to your website come with a want which they want solved and this solution can be in form of entertainment or relevant information and it is important you communicate with your audience in a clear and engaging manner. This information usually can be in written form, in the form of images, videos, or audio pieces.

The visible language users usually see on a website should be formed with three principles in mind:
• Organization
• Economy
• Communication

Beside these sub-principles, the content on the website must be well-written, appropriate, easy to understand, and written with search engine optimization in mind.

Web Design Principle #7: Test Early and Test Often

This is a principle all web designers and website owners must consider. Testing the usability of the website every now and then provides important insights on complications and problems related to the website design and functionality. Asking someone who is unfamiliar with the website to visit and explain their experience can also be valuable. When websites are not tested often, certain issues may pop up on the site, which adversely affect visitors.

 Want help designing your website?

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SEO has come to stay as a strategic marketing channel for business owners, each year it evolves into a more sophisticated discipline. As brands and industries continue to appreciate the importance of SEO, there is little time for you as a marketer to rest on your laurels, you have to refine your skills sets continuously.

This article is dedicated to the best, free, and most effective SEO tools (in increasing order of relevance) any contemporary SEO marketer must have under his belt.

Google Keyword Planner

Formerly known as the AdWords tool, the Google Keyword planner pulls out Google’s monthly query volume estimates for tons of keywords in seconds. This is one SEO tool you shouldn’t underestimate if you are interested in knowing what people search for.

 Google Search Console

This SEO tool is analogous to the Bing Webmaster Tool but much richer. Formerly known as the Google Webmaster Tool, the Google Search Console provides data and configuration control for your site in Google, which really is a big deal.

Google Analytics

This tool helps you understand your visitors and how they interact with your site. It delivers data like number of clicks, time spent per session, number of repeated visits and several other statistics. None of the tools mentioned above does a job near as good as this tool.

Webpagetest.org

This free tool will test your site to determine the loading speed. Loading time is one of the variables that affect your Google website ranking, so it’s important to have a fast loading website. Often times it’s helpful to run a baseline test before making changes to your site affecting loading speed, and then test afterwards to determine the change. If you have a WordPress site check out this article on speeding up your WordPress Site.

 Google and Bing Search Engines

This is a frequently overlooked SEO tool. Google and Bing search engines are very powerful SEO tools and mastery of the functionality of these tools is an essential tool every marketer must learn. With a search for any word you can examine indexation and duplicate content, check key word ranking, analyze SERP listings and scout for link and outreach prospects. Make sure to use an incognito / private window to see search results that aren’t affected by your search history.

Wayback Machine

This tool is the most complete archive on the web and it lets you see what a website used to look like back in the day. With this tool you can crack client’s cases of missing traffic by checking what was on the site and what wasn’t when the site had better traffic because usually, when the numbers for a site change then something about that site has changed.

Keywordtool.io

This SEO tool is great for generating several keyword ideas related to your seed term, particularly long-tail keywords that wouldn’t show up on the AdWords keyword tool because of their having very low volumes. If you are looking to build a list of potential keywords particularly when you need long-tail keywords then this tool is just what you need. This tool is also very comprehensive as it generates keywords based on the autocomplete feature of Google, YouTube, Bing or App Store Search.

 Moz SEO Tools

Moz is a suite of inbound marketing tools responsible for various functions. Top pick from the Moz suite include these useful SEO tools:

Open Site Explorer – This is a backlink analysis tool with metrics on estimating link equity.
Follower wonk – Shows analytics on Twitter
Moz Local – This tool gives data on a company’s local citations and is the first place to go when doing local SEO on a site.
The SERP Overlay – This tool is part of the Mozbar. It displays OSE metrics on each search results.

Honorable mentions listed in no particular order include Screaming Frog, Bing Webmaster Tool, Chrome Developer Tool, Google Trends, GTmetrix and Hootsuite.

Want help optimizing your website?

Send us a messageCall: (530) 413-8420

Learning to Use WordPress is Easy. Well, maybe not easy, but easier than a lot of the alternatives. Many people have written extensive tutorials, documentations, and walk-throughs for WordPress.  There are 1000’s of videos on YouTube and other video sites introducing people to the basics of using WordPress, or showing how to do specific tasks. There is also the official WordPress support forum and numerous other forums dedicated to WordPress topics.

WordPress works great for all types of websites, blogs, and e-commerce sites. WordPress is a versatile, easy to use CMS (content management system). It was originally created for blogs, but has evolved into one of the top platforms for creating any type of website. One of the best e-commerce plugins for WordPress, WooCommerce, is a free and fully functional shopping cart program that automatically calculates shipping costs, accept payments, and more. There are also plugins like bbPress to create a forum, or BuddyPress t0 create a social network using WordPress.

Free WordPress Themes

There are 10,000+ themes available: free and commercial ones. There are lots of really good themes for WordPress, to make the site look and function all different ways. The commercial themes are usually higher quality and often times include better support. Commercial themes for WordPress tend to cost around $6o for each website, so are affordable.

WordPress is open source software. WordPress is free open source software, and has strong community support behind it. A lot of free software has little or no support, but WordPress has a support forum with many experts willing to help anyone they can troubleshoot their issues. Since the software is open source someone with programming skills can alter the software to function however you want.

WordPress is great for big or small sites. If your blog gets incredibly popular all of a sudden you don’t need to switch from WordPress, it is made to be scalable. A few big companies that use WordPress: Sony, MTV, New York Times, Time Magazine, and more here.

WordPress has a community working to keep WordPress secure. With about 20% of self-hosted websites running WordPress it has developed a large community of developers working to keep WordPress safe. When an update for WordPress, a plugin, or theme, is released it is easily updated by clicking the update button on the plugin page. This makes it simple to keep the software up to date and secure at all times. Automatically backing up your website daily, weekly, or monthly, to a secure cloud sever is also possible using a plugin like, “UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration”.

WordPress Post Editor

Revisions and automatic saves while working on an article.  Say you are working on an article while your cat comes by, stepping on the keyboard, causing it freeze before having had a chance to save. You don’t need to worry with WordPress because it saves drafts of articles while you are working on them. When you go back to the article editor it will say there is a newer version of the article you were editing, and gives you the option to continue working on it. If you publish an article and then check the front-end only to realize it looks terrible, you can use revisions to go back.

There are approximately 35,000 plugins available. There are plugins to do just about everything. You can turn WordPress into any type of website you need using the available themes and plugins. There are plugins for contact forms, social media integration, SEO optimization, automated backups to Dropbox, caching, sitemaps, firewalls, minifying, reducing SPAM, image sliders, mobile displays,  image galleries, user statistics, Google maps, newsletters, calendars, share buttons, and much more.

WordPress has an easy to use administrator area. You can login to the administrator area to easily edit content with WordPress. WordPress includes a decent page / post editor that allows you to edit websites without needing to know HTML. You can also easily insert images, galleries, and videos using the editor software. You can also install plugins to change the default editor, adding more functions.

WordPress Media Library

Easy media management. WordPress has an image manager that makes it easy to put images, videos, and audio into articles. All you need to do to add media is upload it to the media library, set the URL, caption, alignment, and click the insert button. You can also insert hosted videos from sites like YouTube by pasting the URL in the media manager under, “Insert from URL”.

WordPress is search engine friendly. The WordPress platform itself  was designed to be highly optimized for search engines, but with a few extra plugins it can be awesome. For SEO I would recommend, “WordPress SEO” by Yoast, which allows you to see and edit the appearance of your pages on Google searches, increasing click-through rates. A cache program speeds up your site, which is a metric used by Google to determine your website rankings. A sitemap plugin like, “Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps” will create a XML sitemap and automatically submit it to Google, to make sure they index every page of your website.

Easily add additional editors, contributors, and administrator. It’s simple to add a new user in the WordPress admin area who can help write posts but doesn’t have permission to change the theme, or make edits to the configuration. WordPress allows you to add multiple editors, contributors, and administrators, and will also email their new password to them automatically.

See WordPress Website Examples