A new year is upon us and with it a plethora of updates and algorithm changes to make you second guess your ranking methods. From Google’s surprise, mid-december Maccabee update to the FCC’s net neutrality repeal, 2017 was full of web-related shifts. So to help, we’ve compiled a list of some the best SEO & digital marketing articles covering the 2018 trends to look out for.
With the increase in smart speaker sales like Alexa and Google Home, there may soon be a shift in the way people search online. Though the impact of new voice search related keywords is unsure, it seems likely this’ll be a factor in the coming years.
Google’s continued focus on user friendly experiences means featured/rich snippets or knowledge boxes are becoming the norm. In fact, back in 2015 Ben Goodsell reported that the CTR on a featured page increased from 2% to 8% after it was placed in an featured snippet. And the number of these featured snippets in search engines has only grown – meaning that optimizing for them now could mean a huge boost in organic traffic.
Following the trend of users searching mostly on mobile, Google announced in November that it planned to move towards indexing the mobile versions of sites first. This means that Google will consider the mobile version of your site before the desktop version when ranking. So more than just having a responsive site, it’s key to have a truly mobile friendly version.
For anyone doing SEO, the 155 character limit is all too familiar. However, the frustration of crafting a tempting summary with a targeted keyword in the limited character length is about to be a thing of the past. Google recently boosted their snippet limit to 300 characters!
Youtube is the second largest search engine after Google, and the growth in video search is only projected to continue. After all, watching a video is more engaging than reading text. And the use of visuals, voice, and written text to explain ideas is a lot easier for people to understand.
America’s favorite shopping season is right around the corner and with it a barrage of online bargain shoppers. Is your site ready to handle the Black Friday shopping rush?If the answer is anything but yes, you may want to consider a quick preparatory revamp.Why? Because the year-end holiday season is not only the best time to meet your annual sales goals, but a great time to capture new customers. Following Thanksgiving, Black Friday and the last two months of the year are prime for gift-giving; people are shopping for themselves, their family, and their friends. Not to mention, over the last eight years, Black Friday retail e-commerce spending alone went from$534 million USD to $1970 million USD – and it’s only expected to rise again this year. Which means optimizing your site for online sales now can ensure your business is ready to roll this holiday season.So how can you prepare?The first step is to decide which holidays you want to run promotions on. Once you’ve determined that and set up a promotional calendar, you can move on to polishing your website and online holiday marketing strategy.To make it easier, we’ve compiled a checklist to help get you on your way.
Check Your Server Traffic Capacity. Black Friday weekend is sure to draw a lot of traffic to your site, especially if you are running promotional deals. So making sure your server can handle the influx of customers is likely to make both their and your experience easier. Check your server capacity before the season starts at LoadImpact.com or Blitz.io.
Create Landing Pages for Your Black Friday Deals. If you plan on setting your customers up with some awesome deals, it’s important to make sure they know what they are and where to find them. Landing pages on your website specifically made for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotions can help alert your customers to all the seasonal discounts you have on offer. Going the extra mile and creating a banner for your deals to be displayed on every page, will also help ensure no one misses out!
Make sure your website is mobile friendly. The share of mobile sales on Black Friday in 2013 went from27% to 48% in 2016. And with more and more customers turning to their phones for online shopping, having a site with responsive design is more important than ever. Don’t know whether your site is mobile ready? Check it out with Google’sMobile-Friendly Test. And if you still can’t figure it out, let us take a look!
Test and troubleshoot everything. Even with the best promotions, the holiday shopping season could still be a complete bust if your customers aren’t able to make purchases from your site. Whether it’s a broken link or simply a slow loading page, it’s important to make sure you’ve tested the durability of your landing pages and made sure your promotional coupons are working fine.
Make the checkout process as seamless as possible. Simplicity is key. Customers like it when they can make a purchase with the fewest clicks possible – and obvious clicks at that. So spend some time ensuring your website has a user friendly interface with clear add/delete item and checkout buttons. And if you need a little help, let us know.
Have your Shipping and Returns Policy for the shopping season in fine print. To prevent any future misunderstandings or complaints, it’s best to have your holiday season shipping and returns policy listed on your website where customers can easily access or see it.
Track EVERYTHING. To make sure you’re getting the results you want and your leads are converting into sales, keep a detailed track record of every change you’ve made to your site and how it has affected your conversions. A great way to do this is through tracking yourGoogle Analytics andFacebook Pixel data.
Marketing Yourself Right
Now that you have your website ready to go the next thing to tackle is your marketing strategy. To start, look at your past marketing data to see how your business performed during previous years. This will make it easier to plan a marketing strategy as you’ll have a better idea of what worked and what didn’t.Once you have that data, you can start to plan for the future holiday season. And the following tips will help you put your best foot forward!
Research your customers. A good marketing strategy starts with great research. For example, do you know 100% who your customers are? Have you created buyer personas? If you haven’t, check your Google Analytics demographics to ensure that the personas you have in mind match the factual customer data retrieved by Google. This will help you market to not only your current customers, but all potential buyers as well. Still unsure? Take a look at this helpful B2B Buyer Persona Guide for a more in-depth look on how to make your customer-data work for you.
Create a winning PPC Campaign. Pay-per-click is one of the best ways to reach targeted customers. If you have optimized your campaign with the right keywords, your ad should appear at the top of Google’s search results. However, if you did not have the time to get your SEO and keyword targeting in place, PPC can help! For example:
Shopping Ads is one of the best ways to get your products in front of your customers, because its CPC is much lower when compared to a Text Ad, and it can get you better conversion rates. You can also target local customers with Google’sZip Code Targeting.
And if you are already running PPC campaigns, the holiday season is a good time to start a remarketing campaign. Reach your customers who are actively searching for your products, or are loyal to your business with remarketing campaigns.
Utilize social media for customer insights. Your social media channels can be a treasure trove of information. Places like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are full of consumer opinions on products and services. And not just on products they currently use, but items they are interested in buying. Put this information to use by –
Promoting your Black Friday deals on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook.
Creating product hype and awareness by offering special discounts to your followers.
Closely monitoring comments or mentions on your social channels and responding to any customer queries and feedback promptly. You can even make use ofsocial listening tools to listen to what people are saying online about your brand or products.
Creating your own hashtags for the holiday season. You can stick to the regular hashtags of #BlackFriday and #CyberMonday, of course, but you can also create hashtags specific to your business. If you do, make sure you plug them on all your marketing channels- website, social media, and emails.
Using Facebook Dynamic Shopping ads, which are a great way target customers who visited your website and added a product to their cart but never followed through with the purchase.
Start an email campaign targeting current customers. When it comes to gettingresults, email marketing is still very effective. Triggered emails like those to customers that abandoned full online shopping carts, still tend to bring in more customers than many social media campaigns. To get the most out of your email campaign –
Categorize your email lists. Segmenting your emails into specific customer lists based on products they’ve looked at or purchased is likely to get you more email open rates.
Personalize! Include the name of the subscriber and offer specific promotions based on their location.
Create and manage your email workflows in advance. This will ensure that every email is catered to the customer receiving it, and be less work for you in the long run.
Leverage your current customer base through exclusive deals. Not only will this help build anticipation for future Black Friday deals, but it will show your loyal customers that there is some advantage in following you.
Create a countdown timer for your emails to promote urgency.
In the End
No one knows your customers as well as you do and any website adjustment or marketing campaign should be planned with them in mind. However, we hope these tips will help get you and your site on your way to holiday-ready! And if you still have questions, let us know!
By now many of us have earned our stripes in web surfing. We’ve experienced a countless number of websites, and are savvy enough to know which sites are well crafted and which could use a serious face-lift – usually within the first five seconds of a visit. But what is it that makes a website “great?” Below are eight features many high-performing websites currently employ that put them at the top of their rank.
1. High Quality, Authentic Images
Humans are visual creatures. Think back to the last time you sat through a presentation where the speaker went on for seemingly forever without any graphics or visuals to break through the monotony. You may have absorbed some of the information, but chances are you walked away without having gained anything more than a headache.
This same principle applies to websites. Throw large columns of text at a user when they’re not expecting it (i.e. not a blog post) and they will leave your site without even a basic understanding of what you were trying to communicate. Studies show that users only read about 28% of the words on a page. Add that in with the fact that humans process images 60,000 times faster than words, and the best way to quickly express a message becomes obvious.
Not just any image will do, however. The best performing images for a website follow a few guiding rules:
High Quality: With faster internet speeds comes more capability of loading high resolution images. Low quality, pixilated imagery will make your site appear dated and untrustworthy.
Authentic: Gone are the days when users would be appeased by staged stock images of smiling business people shaking hands. We know they’re fake, your users know they’re fake, and they no longer represent real businesses made of real people. It’s recommended to use images of your own team, office, and products to boost authenticity.
Closely Related: That beautiful image of a sprawling scenic overlook may be eye catching, but if it doesn’t do much to describe what you’re selling, it won’t be an effective use of browser real estate. Images on your website should be companions to your content and remind users why they’re there.
2. Consistent Brand Voice
Though not limited to website design, a well thought-out brand voice is an important part of engaging users. All of your content on your website should follow the tone of your brand and reflect the core values of your business. Users will come to recognize your brand by various factors:
Tone: How do you want to communicate with your users? Consider your audience and the way that they use your site. For example, a financial institution may want to use a tone of voice that comes across as being professional and cordial, whereas a toy store can speak more whimsically.
Buzzwords: What kind of language will resonate best with your users? The types of words you might use for a gym will differ greatly from those used for a spa. Think of the types of keywords a user might search for, or what will draw them in.
Conciseness: How quickly should the user be taking in your content? If you want to draw your viewers in with a well-crafted aesthetic, you may need to pad your copy with the appropriate amount of wordage to paint the right picture. However, if you want your users to quickly flow through your site and into a purchase or action, you’ll want to keep your copy short and sweet.
Once you have your brand voice, be sure to keep it consistent on every page of your site. This will keep your business recognizable and put users at ease.
3. Fast Loading Times
Have you ever clicked on a link to a website and hit the back button in frustration when it took too long to load? Users today have grown accustomed to fast load times and don’t want to wait. About 50% of all web users expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, and 40% will completely abandon the attempt after 3 seconds.
This means that if your website is slow to load, you will only be gaining at maximum 60% of the traffic that you could get. There are many factors when considering the speed of your website:
Image sizes: Remember those high quality images we talked about? Unfortunately, images can have large file sizes that will bog down the performance of your site. Consider keeping the number of images on your site down to raise site speed, or use a program to optimize their size.
Hosting: Your site speed may be completely out of your hands if you’ve chosen an inexpensive hosting plan. Though cheap, oftentimes you are sharing a server with many other money-conscious business owners, which will slow down your site’s performance. If it’s your hosting that’s the issue, consider upping your plan.
Optimization: There are several ways to improve your site’s overall speed from the backend; too many to name here. If your site is slow, consider asking a web developer to optimize all of your settings.
4. Simple Navigation
Have you ever gone to a store for something basic like toothpaste and been completely overwhelmed by the number of choices you have to pick from? Suddenly, a simple errand has turned into a confusing situation. Users feel the same about website navigation; give them too many choices and they will give up and leave.
This phenomenon, called the paradox of choice, deems that the more options presented to us, the more likely we are to become overwhelmed and not pick anything at all. In web design, 7 navigation links is generally considered the maximum number to hold, with 5 being the more optimal number. When choosing navigation links for your site, consider the purpose of your website and which ones would be absolutely necessary for a user to have a positive experience. If your site is very large and requires a multitude of navigation items, consider using a mega menu.
5. Mobile First
Mobile-friendly websites are no longer a nice feature to have in 2017; they’re absolutely necessary. More people are browsing the web on mobile devices than desktops, pulling in at a ratio of about 56:44. This means that if you’re not catering to your mobile audience, you’re missing out on over half of your potential!
Creating a great mobile experience is more than just having a responsive website, however. Mobile first design means exactly what it sounds like. Rather than designing based on a desktop monitor and shrinking it down for mobile, modern websites are now being designed first for mobile to create the best possible experience. Some factors that make mobile an entirely different medium from desktop:
Screen ratio: Many phones and tablets are designed to be held horizontally by default, meaning the screen size sits at a completely different ratio than most Desktop monitors. Side-by-side columns on desktop screens become far too narrow on mobile devices. Simply stacking the columns on top of each other for mobile is not the best solution either. After all, which column is more important/should be on top? Mobile first design addresses this issue before it even arises.
Screen size: Mobile devices have far less screen real estate than desktop monitors. Thus, making a desktop first design and paring it down for mobile often becomes a task of cutting out content that isn’t necessary. Mobile first design forces designers to first consider what is important for the user to have, preventing unnecessary content in your desktop view.
Touch interaction: Unlike most desktop monitors, mobile devices can be tapped and pinched, adding another dimension to the user’s experience. Rather than adding these features as an afterthought, mobile first design ensures that the entirety of the site is easily accessible to mobile users.
6. Engaging Micro Interactions
Micro interactions are those little experiences we encounter on the web that serve a single purpose, such as a checkmark showing us that we filled in a form field correctly, or a confirmation that an order went through. These interactions are so common now that most of us barely take notice, but their effectiveness is anything but miniscule.
Micro interactions serve to delight, engage, and deliver positive reinforcement to users to let them know that they’re performing the correct actions. Imagine hitting “send” in an email app and not receiving any indication that the button had been clicked or the email had been sent. How can you be sure that your email went out? Small indicators, such as the button changing color when clicked, the browser sending you out of your draft and into your inbox, or a notification alerting you that your mail has been sent tells the user that they have done everything correctly and that their job is done. Other examples of micro interactions include:
Play buttons turning into pause buttons when clicked
Form fields highlighting with a colored border when clicked
Load animations indicating that content is being loaded
Links changing color when hovered over to indicate that they can be clicked
7. Frictionless (In the Right Places)
Friction in web design refers to anything that stands between a user and their desired action. For example, a multi-page form before ordering a product, or a pop-up intrusion when reading an article. Generally speaking, friction on a website is frustrating for users and can drastically reduce conversion rates. Web users are in a hurry and want to consume content quickly – why stop them from doing what they came to your site to accomplish? Friction can be reduced in multiple ways, including:
Reducing the number of form inputs. Do you really need to ask for a user’s phone number, middle name, etc?
Clear call to actions. Users don’t want to have to search all over your website to find what they’re looking for. Identify what users most want to accomplish on your site and make it easy for them to access.
Make your header sticky. Users are now used to scrolling, however it can be frustrating to have to scroll all the way back to the top of a page just to access the navigation. Keep your header always in view for easy, seamless navigation.
Though friction prevents users from doing what they want, it is not necessarily always a bad thing; in fact, there are times when you want to add friction to create a better experience, as it makes users stop and think. Experienced web designers know when to apply the brakes on a user’s journey, such as making a user confirm before deleting something. Accidental clicks are a real occurrence, so asking a user if they’re sure they want to delete something before it disappears for good can prevent frustrating experiences.
8. Expert Usage of Color
Have you ever wondered why so many fast-food restaurants use red and yellow for their logos, or why so many businesses paint everything with blue? Design isn’t just about making things look nice; a good designer understands the psychology of color and how best to employ them on a website. Each color can evoke an emotion from users. (Keep in mind that these meanings can vary from culture to culture.)
Red: The color of passion and aggression, red is full of energy and can evoke a sense of urgency.
Orange: This color is a mixture of red’s passion and yellow’s optimism, creating an upbeat hue that expresses playfulness. It is also the color of impulse, and thus is often used in “buy now” buttons.
Yellow: Bright and fun, yellow expresses happiness, sunlight, and a cheery tone.
Green: The color of both money and the earth, green is used to express wealth and environmental consciousness.
Blue: This color evokes trustworthiness and professionalism, making it an excellent choice for many businesses. However, blue can also express sadness and moodiness, so be careful.
Purple: Wisdom and royalty come to mind with purple, making it a good choice for businesses that want to express reverence or knowledge.
Black: Though not technically a color, black evokes luxury, making it excellent for expressing wealth.
In Conclusion
Though none of the features listed above are absolutely necessary to craft a high-performing website (I’m looking at you, Craigslist), they are important to keep in mind when considering the performance of your own site. If your numbers are down or you’re looking into a redesign, keep these tips in mind and you’ll be well on your way to an excellent website in 2017.
Miva Retro ReadyTheme Customization: Tailored To Your Needs!
Miva users know that Miva is the ecommerce world’s best-kept secret. With Miva now offering responsive ReadyThemes free with every license, it’s easier than ever to put a functional, beautiful skin on your Miva store. In fact, most of our clients agree: Miva ReadyThemes really nail it after just a little customization.
Bee Bald Man Care Products sells skin care products for the head. Their products offer incredible value for bald and non-bald men alike. But men aren’t the only ones who love Bee Bald; women use their products, too. Bee Bald has a developed a great brand. Clearly, they needed a great website to match.
When Bee Bald came to us for a redesign, we knew that the Miva Retro ReadyTheme was perfect—well, nearly perfect. Bee Bald founder Dennis Fisher wanted to make a few changes to the theme. He had some ideas on how to optimize this theme for his business, and we were happy to help. The fact is, a pre-loaded theme is rarely a perfect fit for a business owner’s vision. Every business is unique, and themes are designed to please a wide user base. Bee Bald needed something unique. We agreed that Dennis had some great ideas to take his online store to the next level.
So how did we take the Bee Bald store to the next level? Let’s dive right in.
Dennis liked the Retro ReadyTheme overall. “As a template, it was great,” he says. “But it’s not all things to all people.” Specifically, he wasn’t happy with the theme’s homepage layout. The stock layout was functional and looked great, but that functionality didn’t quite fit his product line. We adjusted the homepage product offering template, replacing the stock configuration with a product carousel. We also tweaked the colors and the copy to match Dennis’s specifications.
As you can see, the resulting Bee Bald homepage looks stunning. Dennis has developed an amazingly cohesive brand—one that really sells his product to his niche. Clearly, Dennis’s design decisions were one key part of building that awesome brand. Honestly, we think a lot of marketers could take a cue from Dennis.
It’s obvious that a great ecommerce design appeals to online shoppers. However, a great design coupled to a cohesive brand also makes a great impression on other businesses. In Dennis’s case, as he hammered out relationships with distributors the old-fashioned way, his website turned into a stellar asset. Dennis could throw someone a link with confidence, knowing his website design would showcase the excellent quality of his product line.
Responsive Web Design: Critical In Today’s Ecommerce Market
Ouch. Looks like non-responsive design. (Original photo courtesy of Jan Vašek; modified by 216digital.)
Dennis was getting a lot of mobile traffic on his old site, but mobile users weren’t converting. Dennis thought that mobile users were leaving the site because it wasn’t resizing to the small screens of phones. We agreed—and the same is true for all non-responsive sites today. If you’re not serving pages optimized for mobile devices you’re losing sales.
For ecommerce store owners, mobile website design isn’t an option. It’s a necessity.
The Retro ReadyTheme is fully mobile responsive out of the box. However, when you add custom extensions to a responsive theme, you have to ensure that the customizations look great on mobile, too. Dennis needed a store locator module for his site. We integrated a powerful store locator module into the new Bee Bald site—but we knew that that alone wasn’t enough. We made sure the store locator module was fully mobile responsive and integrated into the look and feel of the theme. That way, customers could find a Bee Bald store on the go—and they wouldn’t be distracted by a clunky store locator experience.
Bee Bald looks great on mobile.
We believe it’s the little things that count, so we also tightened up the overall look of Dennis’s Retro ReadyTheme installation. These incremental changes added up to a great overall brand impression—on mobile and on desktop.
The Cleveland Connection: A Local B2B Partnership
photo by: Rick Harris
An entrepreneur often wears all the hats. When Dennis started gearing up for the launch of Bee Bald, he was learning about the ecommerce world from scratch. Since the technical aspect of ecommerce was so new to him, he realized only shortly before launch that he needed to make changes to the proposal he’d submitted to his developer. The developer was local to the Cleveland, OH area, but they weren’t quite prepared to deal with the nuances of changing a Miva project on the fly. While Dennis’s relationship with his original developer had showed initial promise, he began to realize it wasn’t till-death-do-us-part. He needed a dedicated Miva developer.
Enter 216digital. Justin Sims, our lead web developer, took over Dennis’s project. When we asked Dennis to reflect on his experience with us, we could hear the genuine appreciation in his voice. “Justin did a terrific job,” Dennis said. “He was accessible and responsive. He helped streamline the process.” Now that’s an aspect of responsive web design that you don’t hear about every day—responding right away to a client’s needs and concerns.
In the process of working with us, Dennis learned a lot about Miva. We didn’t keep any secrets from him. Dennis can now perform many store updates himself, meaning we’re billing him less. A lot of companies wouldn’t do that. Why give away the secrets that build value into your services? We simply don’t see it that way. Dennis is our client, and it was our job to build the best ecommerce tool we could for him. Dennis was equipped to learn Miva, and we were happy to teach him.
The Bottom Line
At 216digital, we have a passion for all things Cleveland. Cleveland beers, Cleveland sports teams, we’re 216 all the way. (That’s the area code around here, by the way.) It was exciting to help a Cleveland-area entrepreneur achieve his business goals.
Of course, our clients come from all over. If you aren’t from the Cleveland area, we’ll show you the Cleveland work ethic as we create a stellar ecommerce site for you. So, when you’re ready to start that next project, remember 216digital. With 15 years of experience as a Miva certified partner, we can make your Miva ReadyTheme nail it!
Miva Suivant ReadyTheme Customization: The Sky’s The Limit!
If you use the Miva shopping cart platform, or if you’re looking to start a Miva store, you’ve probably heard of Miva ReadyThemes. These themes offer beautiful, functional styling right out of the box. However, they look even better with a little customization. Here at 216digital, we regularly customize Miva ReadyThemes for our clients. One of our favorite recent projects was a redesign via ReadyTheme for D’Andre New York, a seller of fine shearling coats. In this post, we’ll talk about that project and explain the Miva Suivant ReadyTheme customization that we performed.
D’Andre New York: A Great Product Deserves a Great Website
D’Andre New York sells fine shearling coats. These jackets feature beautiful, understated styling. Since they’re made of real wool, the moisture-wicking property of the material gives the wearer natural climate control. That means shearling coats can be worn comfortably in summer or winter. With this natural flexibility and their finely-tailored lines, shearling jackets are the pinnacle of outerwear style. Of course, high quality comes with a price tag. Shearling jackets typically range in price from $1000 to $3000.
D’Andre New York’s target customer is affluent, style-conscious, and expects high quality. If the product itself delivers on all these—which it certainly does—then shouldn’t the website that sells the product display that same excellence? That was our reasoning, and Tatiana, owner of D’Andre, agreed. She wanted a redesign of her website, something that would showcase the beauty, durability, and value of her shearling products.
D’Andre’s Legacy Site
D’Andre New York’s old site had excellent functionality, and it had served the business well for years. However, the site was built in the days of low-resolution screens, and it looked a little small on today’s larger monitors. Worse, the site was built long before the mobile responsive revolution. It was awkward and cumbersome to use on a mobile device. With more and more customers shopping and purchasing products directly from their phones, D’Andre stood to lose out on potential business. With each sale worth a few thousand dollars, D’Andre needed to convert every prospect who came their way.
D’Andre New York’s legacy site in mobile simulation. Get ready to zoom and scroll!
It wasn’t just the resolution and lack of mobile responsiveness that worried us. D’Andre sells a fine product to an affluent market. We believed that D’Andre’s old site didn’t quite convey the level of luxury and comfort that wearers could expect from a shearling jacket. We thought the site ought to display the excellence that D’Andre’s shearling coats provide. Clearly, it was time for a redesign.
Miva Suivant ReadyTheme: Almost Ready To Rock And Roll
Miva ReadyThemes give Miva store owners beautiful, functional online stores right out of the box. But as with all cookie-cutter solutions, ReadyThemes leave a bit to be desired in the details. A little customization takes a Miva ReadyTheme to the next level. D’Andre New York had chosen the Miva Suivant ReadyTheme. We agreed that this theme was perfect for a retailer of fine shearling jackets. It just needed a few tweaks.
For starters, the Miva Suivant ReadyTheme has a large header. This isn’t necessarily a problem—except that by default, that header anchors to the top of the screen when the user scrolls. It’s not too noticeable on desktop, but on a mobile device, that pinned header eats up a lot of real estate. For every client using the Suivant ReadyTheme, we routinely recommend customizing the header. In D’Andre’s case, we changed the header so it wouldn’t stick to the top of the screen. We reasoned that users know where the header is. They know to scroll up if they need to use the navigation bar. This change significantly improved the user experience of D’Andre’s new website.
The header wasn’t the only tweak that the Suivant ReadyTheme needed. With the ongoing evolution of SEO (search engine optimization), Google now values good content more than ever, and many web users find value in useful, informative content. Blogs and magazines can display the entirety of a piece of content without compromising other organizational goals. However, in an ecommerce setting, selling product is critical. Too much content on a product or category page could keep the all-important buy buttons hidden from site visitors. Yet content is critical for SEO! What’s a webmaster to do?
For all our clients doing customized ReadyThemes, it’s a simple fix. We custom-code an option to display the first 150 characters or so of the content, followed by a “read more” button. This gives us the best of both worlds: 300+ word content for SEO purposes (and for those readers who want to educate themselves fully), and product imagery and buy buttons still displayed above the fold for users who are close to making a purchase. For D’Andre New York, this solution was a no-brainer.
Optimizing D’Andre’s Onsite Content
Speaking of content, it’s one of the most important components of branding. Content that doesn’t convey the right brand impression negatively affects marketing. In the case of D’Andre New York, we recognized at once that Tatiana’s great luxury brand needed content that created an opulent, luxurious impression. With Tatiana’s permission, our SEO content writing team began writing new copy for the D’Andre website.
Our process was simple. We researched other luxury brands, such as Rolex and Mercedes-Benz, to get a feel for the appropriate voice and tone. We settled on two points of focus for D’Andre. For Tatiana’s women’s collection, our content revolved around the word “elegance.” For the men’s collection, we chose the word “achievement.” These words matched D’Andre’s brand perfectly. With these two ideas in place, the rest of the content flowed. The result was a unique, memorable brand identity in all D’Andre’s onsite content.
Image Optimization: A Key Element In Ecommerce Marketing
Customers want to see what they’re buying. In the case of D’Andre’s fine shearling coats, customers want to see not only the overall look of the jacket, but also the elegant details of accents and trim. With D’Andre’s old site, product images looked small on larger screens, preventing customers from getting a complete picture of the jacket they were considering. Every product image on the site existed in two separate files: a tiny thumbnail version, and the full-sized version. Since the thumbnail had to be created manually in an image editor, and since both images had to be uploaded manually, the old system required double the work on catalog updates.
Enter the Miva Image Machine. This state-of-the art functionality dynamically creates multiple image sizes from one image file, eliminating the need to create thumbnail sizes manually and upload them separately. The Image Machine also allows alternative images. These show up as thumbnail images below the main image on a product page. Users can click on any of these alternative images and view the full-sized image in a popup. This allows store owners to provide multiple views of a product, giving customers a sense of what the product looks like from different angles.
The Bottom Line
We saw at once that Tatiana’s company offered a great product. We wanted to improve the overall value of her brand by optimizing the impression her company made on web visitors. With a little Miva Suivant ReadyTheme customization, Tatiana’s redesign was ready to go, clearly communicating the luxury and style that customers could expect from D’Andre New York.
It was a pleasure to work with Tatiana. Through deep market analysis and ongoing communication, we formed a partnership with her to improve the marketability of her brand. We think you’ll agree—the new D’Andre New York website looks beautiful, fully matching the luxury and elegance which D’Andre offers its customers.
If you’re considering a responsive Miva design for your ecommerce store, get in touch with us today. We specialize in Miva design and development, and all our work is fully mobile-responsive. Whether you need tweaks to a Miva ReadyTheme or a ground-up custom design, we’ll turn your vision into a reality. Drop us a line, and let’s start talking about your next big thing.
In case you haven’t heard, having a responsive website is going to be a bigger part of web design moving forward. The common practice in the past was for mobile versions of sites to be given their own subdomain. Essentially, you had two websites with duplicate information and you had twice as much work when you needed to change something. This doubles your development and maintenance costs. It also caused problems when your site was listed in search engines. Now, you could prevent a mobile version of your site from being crawled and listed as a duplicate in search results, then just serve up the mobile version of the site when a mobile browser was detected. However, Google prefers to know exactly what they are serving and a redirect like that is considered bad practice.
Sites with a “mobile version” also had their limitations. They could only support two screen resolutions: desktop and mobile. Using a tablet, you usually ended up with an over sized smartphone version of the site, or you could end up with a desktop version that was still too small. And if you used the built-in browser on your gaming system, all bets were off. It can be tremendously frustrating not only from the side of usability, but also from a design perspective. Good responsive design practice fixes all of this.
Google is trying to unify search results and they have been striving for a consistent user experience across all platforms. For the last few months, websites have been eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label within Google Search results if they use a responsive design. The criteria it uses are things like avoidance of flash and other uncommon software on mobile devices, legible text without zooming, automatic horizontal sizing which is scalable to whatever size screen, and “finger friendly” spacing of links.
This is all great for the end-user, but in the future it could have a big impact on you. Google has been experimenting with the mobile-friendly label in their Search ranking. Sites without a responsive design could be penalized and dropped down the list. It could literally undo the years of hard work on SEO and marketing just by adding a criteria that your site isn’t prepared for.
Luckily, we at 216digital are experts in responsive design and can quickly and efficiently create a responsive version of your website. If you’d like to read more about the mobile-friendly label and responsive design, Google has provided a few resources to help educate you further and we’ve linked them below.
Implementing a responsive web design can have a tremendous impact on the overall custom experience your site offers. As consumers rely more and more on phones, tablets, and other mobile devices to stay informed, stay connected, and shop, it’s more critical than ever that your site utilizes a design that is easy to use on any device. Customers will look for every reason to exit out of your webpage, and if your website is difficult to navigate from a phone, they won’t stay long enough to buy anything and they won’t recommend it to their friends. That’s why making your website as user friendly as possible will work to your benefit, and 216digital is here to help you make it happen.
The mobile view a user experiences on 216digital’s site.
Here we’ve gathered together some reasons why you should seriously consider making your website responsive:
1. Make sure your customers don’t tap dance: One of the most frustrating parts of using a website that isn’t optimized for mobile devices is the tapping and zooming you have to do to get to the content you want. To make things as easy and enjoyable as possible for your customers, you’ll want to make sure that your website’s images and content are properly presented and don’t require the customer to manipulate their device in some awkward fashion in order to make use of it.
2. Make sure your website rankings don’t suffer: Google Webmasters recently released an article stating that “We see these [mobile friendly] labels as a first step in helping mobile users to have a better mobile web experience. We are also experimenting with using the mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal.” This means that your website could be hit hard in the coming years if it isn’t mobile friendly. Future-proof your website and don’t be left in the dust!
3. Always think of the customer: Responsive web design isn’t just for customers using smaller, handheld devices. It should also scale-up and conform to fit the screens of larger devices, like televisions, that customers might be using through their gaming systems or other peripherals. By keeping the quality of your customers’ experiences a priority, you’ll be sure to have a website that will respond to all of their needs, no matter the device they are using.
4. Leave the reading glasses at home: If your website isn’t optimized, many times the text is either much too large or way too small to be read easily. And, remember, your customers might be using a larger screen, like a TV, but sitting further away and still not able to read what’s on your site. The whole point of your website is to make it effortless for your customers to breeze through checkout when they decide to buy your product. So, if the site’s text is too small to read, that complication will not bode well for your bottom line. Making sure your text is readable is crucial to success.
The desktop view a user experiences on 216digital’s site.
216digital is here to simplify this whole process for you. Responsive web design is not only helpful, but in light of the ever-widening array of web-enabled devices available to consumers, it’s become absolutely essential. Nonetheless, it can also be time consuming and cumbersome to learn, which is difficult while trying to manage your online business. Let 216digital take responsive web design off your list of worries. Our team of expert designers knows exactly how to build your website to respond to whatever size screen your customers are using, so that you can entice them, no matter the device. Check out some of our work—we think you’ll like what you see.
