Lately we have heard a lot of concern from our clients about ensuring that web design is “above the fold.” This myth of designing “above the fold” was started with newspapers because they knew the biggest story splashed across the top got the most attention. Well, this is a new era of digital design and scrolling is not a fear web users have. In fact, with the mass increase of tablet owners and mobile use, scrolling comes naturally.
With Apple’s 3rd generation iPad selling out out of pre-order in just 4 days I believe it is safe to say that tablets are here to stay. The rise in popularity of these devices has retailers scratching their heads trying to determine how they can make their sites more friendly to iPad/tablet users.
Developing a iPad app or special web version of your commerce site can improve conversions from these users but it will come at a high cost. Below is a list of the top 10 things to consider to make your existing ecommerce site iPad friendly.
Seeing that it’s a new year, I thought it might be beneficial to our blog readers to spend a few minutes and write about the elusive website return on investment. Every year, billions of dollars are spent on web-based marketing strategies and/or marketing decisions influenced by the web. And yet, even knowing that they have to spend money on the web, most organizations have no idea what to expect in a return of their web marketing investment. In my experience, most organizations extremely... Continue Reading
With the constant flow of new designs and fancy new web entities like Google + over the past week, YouTube has joined in on all the fun. If you would like to follow a Cosmic Panda over a double rainbow, visit http://www.youtube.com/cosmicpanda. Cosmic Panda is a new possible design for the YouTube site from the TestTube team that features new ways to watch videos, view playlists and channels. None of the designs are drastic departures from the current YouTube layout but I personally think they... Continue Reading
The buzz on the web over the weekend seemed to about an apparent test redesign of the Google website. With the test redesign, Google will no longer be asking if you “feel lucky” (removing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button”) and may very well be rolling out some new elements, including the ability to search via voice recognition. The new homepage design was rolled out recently for Google France and later removed. In addition to those changes, Google has also tested... Continue Reading
For the purposes of this post let’s assume two things: 1. You know that mobile is the future of the web (if not, read Mobile First or just do a web search for “mobile growth”). 2. You want to take your business into the mobile space. As Tim outlined in his blog Mobile Website Development, when someone talks about mobile web there are a number of different things they could be referring to. I’m going to dive a little deeper into mobile websites. This is basically a second website... Continue Reading
This month has seen a flurry of activity in the browser market. Chrome 10 was released earlier this month, IE9 last week and Firefox 4 this week. As a web developer, I’m pretty keen to look at the latest releases of software not only for my work, but for home use as well. IE9 has been of particular interest to me since it is the Microsoft browsers, more than any others, that give us pain when building websites. IE6 is the oldest of the family and despite Microsoft itself trying to kill... Continue Reading
From time to time, we have days where the best news available is someone saving a cat out of a tree, rumors of Brett Favre’s retirement or photos of our staff all wearing v-neck shirts…but that’s not today. Over the past few days a number of major web related stories have broken that may have gotten lost in the shuffle or amongst your other RSS and Twitter feeds. Here they are: On Wednesday, Google dropped “Google Wave,” a real-time collaboration platform that connected... Continue Reading
Website pricing can range from just a few hundred dollars to millions of dollars, all dependent on the functionality and customization needed and the team of designers that you choose to work with. Agencies or web design companies, for the most part, will provide higher pricing than hiring a friend-of-a-friend because they provide strategy and consulting that many freelancers can’t.
After months of debating and talking to your team, you’re finally ready to build your new website. Now on to step two, finding someone to do it for you. You call a friend whose son builds websites and he says it’ll be $500 and then you speak to an agency who says the site will be $25,000. What’s the difference? A website is a website, right?
