Smashing magazines

It’s a common sight: designers bashing SEOs and vice versa. We all have been seeing this happening for a long while now. And it’s probably not going to end any soon. It might get pregnant and more heated in a year or two, though. Unless, of course, both sides realize that they finally need to go along, that clients don’t give a crap about their altercation and are interested in one thing above everything else: a website that’s great usability, appearance and at the same time ranks well. What’s The Fight All About? We all know the issue: Web designers (or developers) claim that rankings are not everything, that SEOs often use aggressive techniques to manipulate rankings and can most probably guarantee snake oil more than anything. SEOs, on the other hand, claim that Web designers often make their life difficult with poor coding and have little to no knowledge of SEO; that neither design nor content is everything – other things matter too in making a … [Read more...] about Web Design vs. SEO: It Doesn’t Make Much Sense

Web design is fundamentally about visual communication. The most effective designers can keep their viewers’ attention long enough to communicate a message. Companies have been making a big change lately as to how they communicate their messages online. Gone are the sites with walls of black text on a white background… and nothing else. And that’s a good thing. We’ve determined that most people aren’t inherently good at processing plain data, which is why 82 percent of people won’t bother to read a massive block of text word-for-word. However, almost all humans are designed to think visually – 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text. That’s why you need to incorporate visual best practices to ensure that your viewers get the most visual experience possible on your site. According to Web Design Ledger, the biggest visual concept of all is contrast. Contrast … [Read more...] about Contrast in Web Visuals: Why You Looked at This Title First

“Describe your product. They’ll buy.”– that is about as likely as whistling and expecting a dinosaur to come out of the woods, longing for a pat on its head. Dinosaurs won’t come tumbling out, and it’s about that hard to woo customers. You’d need to sell your products — but everything you know about selling needs to wait. On the web, something else takes precedence: It’s called “connect”. As Mark Macdonald of Shopify.com suggests, start by finding your buyer persona. Figure out what makes them tick. What are her problems? What keeps him ranting about the niche your product is relevant to? You are likely to find insights by thinking about this. Once you do that, it is time to get to work. Expert Writing Is The Key. Expert = Not Clever. Just Effective. Avoid flatulent, useless, and seemingly irrelevant phrases, as Mark suggests. Here’s a look at what Apple does with the iPad Air. Instead of ranting about powerful … [Read more...] about Turn a Product Description into a Great Product Story

On Thursday, February 26th, 2015 Google announced that it would be changing it’s mobile search algorithm. Barry Schwartz covered the announcement on Search Engine Land and not long after the term “mobilegeddon” had been coined. The term refers to the Armageddon of non-mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results as of April 21st, 2015. In just under two months anyone with a website has had to measure their mobility and if necessary, adapt to mobile-friendliness in order to maintain their search presence with mobile users. Forget Panda, forget Penguin, mobile-friendly is arguably one of the biggest updates in all of search history – Google’s announcement affects mobile search results worldwide. Creating a mobile site, adapting your mobile content strategy and having mobile on your radar is no longer a choice. Complying to this announcement in a few short weeks means assessing your website, your content and your content strategy. With little … [Read more...] about How to Adapt Your Content Strategy for Mobilegeddon

What would you do if your web pages could load four times faster with six simple steps? You would login to your site and start walking through these steps, of course. That's exactly what I did. On February 23, 2016, Google introduced AMP listings into its mobile search results. So, what is Google's AMP, anyway? According to the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project, "The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open source initiative that embodies the vision that publishers can create mobile optimized content once and have it load instantly everywhere." In normal people terms, this means when you search for a news search term, Google will show you carousel that highlights stories on AMP-enabled websites. The big difference now, thanks to AMP, is that when you click on one of the news search term links in the carousel, the article will load instantly. It might not sound exciting at first, but publishers are swearing by it. "In early tests, we found that AMP pages load four times … [Read more...] about Does Google AMP Affect SEO?