Tag Archives: Web Development

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Analyze Website Traffic Using Google Analytics

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There are often situations where either we or our clients want to know the ways through which they can track the performance of URLs they have been redirecting to a different page. If we are running a marketing campaign, the task of measuring the performance of a landing page or tracking conversion rates and tracing our redirects could provide a wealth of information to push the traffic on our business goals.

But the problem is Google Analytics is not able to track what redirect traffic comes through, rather it only gives the raw traffic numbers to the page without tracking if any URL redirected people to it.

Use of Google Analytics: The process of using Google Analytics to see the traffic sources of a specific page in our Google Analytics account is so easy.

To start, we have to Log into the Google Analytics account and navigate to Behavior > Site Content. From there, we can choose whether to view the traffic sources of all our website’s pages or the exit pages.

Here is the process to view the traffic sources of our site’s landing pages which is important as these are the pages which many visitors will land on first while visiting our site.

The next step would be navigate to secondary Dimension > Acquisition > Source/Medium. Here we will see a list of our website’s landing pages complete with the source of our site’s traffic which is the place where visitors were before clicking on the website and also the medium, which is the ways how our visitors arrived at the site.

Creating segments in Google Analytics to view traffic sources: By using the segments feature in Google Analytics, we can track the traffic stats of a specific web page. This method is more advanced and will give us a more detailed look at the traffic sources of specific pages on our website. The Google Analytics Behavior report only provides us a collective view of all our traffic sources by breaking it down into direct, organic and referral traffic.

Although this is helpful but Google Analytics segments can break our traffic sources down even further such as we can also see when the site’s traffic comes from paid traffic sources or social media sources.


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All about Website Wireframe Kit

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The task of designing a website demands for a highly expert web designer and developer as it is a dynamic and ever changing process. If we are starting work with a new client without first presenting our capabilities and concept of art of the requirements, it is definitely going to end up in a quite huge mess. Clients always change their minds and here, wireframes kits play an important role.

It is great to use wireframes as they can help us in creating designs and their concept even before start working on actual work. They are so accessible and easy to use through which we can have readily presentable designs available for our clients within an hour. This better helps the client in understanding the kind of design he is looking for so that they could finalize their final idea by closely working with the wireframe to understand the website.

Look at some of the reasons for using wireframes for our websites:

  • Wireframes have the grayed out appearance through which it is easy for the client to focus on the layout and structure without being distracted by the colors or copy.
  • It gives us the opportunity to provide several very different layouts to the client to choose form so that if they scrap a wireframed layout idea, the loss will be significantly less than a fully designed layout.
  • Designers are free to complete focus on user experience and flow before choosing typefaces, colors, images and other design elements. If a design looks great but does not well, it is not a success at all.
  • It can also be iterated quickly and if the client wants any significant changes to combine elements from different versions, we can implement them on the wireframe more quickly than revising a design.

In simple words, wireframes are basically grayed out layouts that can show our recommendations for the elements to be included on the design. These wireframes do not convey any actual design details as they generally consist of gray boxes but they are focused at presenting the layouts of different features.


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Use Twig and Timber for Next Website

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There is no doubt that WordPress is a great platform to manage our content on our site as well as for other works on website. It is the most versatile platform proof of which is that currently it acquires more than 23% of the internet as we know it.

The wordpress themes industry is getting pretty large and every day we see many new businesses pop-up, offering their own themes and now one more has been added to these trends which are Twig and Timber.

Twig: It is a PHP based templating system which allows us for writing faster and cleaner codes across all the sites we build. It is also easier to use and focused on more complex development tasks or can even take a brand new CMS when the project or client demands for it.

Timber: Timber is that plugin which is responsible for uniting wordpress with Twig. Along with the advantage of using Twig, it allows us to separate the PHP from our HTML templates. It gives us a more comfortable environment for developing themes.

Pros of using Twig:

  • Fast: Twig is able to comply down to plain optimized PHP code. In comparison to regular PHP, the overhead was reduced to the very minimum.
  • Secure: Twig has the sandbox mode in order to evaluate untrusted template code. Due to this, twig can be used as a template language for applications where the users can modify the template design.
  • Flexible: As the Twig is powered by flexible lexer and parser, developer can define its own custom tags and filters as well as create its own DSL.
  • Easy to Learn: The syntax is easy to learn and along with this, it allows web designers to get their job done faster without getting in their way.
  • Extensibility: Twig is flexible enough for all our needs even the most complex ones due to the open architecture, we can also implement our own language constructs for creating our own DSL.
  • Unit tested: One thing that Twig is fully unit tested and its library is also stable and ready to be used in large projects.
  • Documented: Twig is fully automated along with a dedicated online book and a full API documentation.

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Responsive Web Design Trends

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Today’s generation is the mobile friendly generation and to reach to maximum customers, numerous web design companies are offering responsive web design as a part of their services so that users can reach to them whenever they want easily. Responsive web design is basically that design which function smoothly across all the devices like desktops, laptops, phones or tablets etc.

To make our reach to the competitive market, it is important to design website in such a way that keeps responsive web design in mind.

Here is the list of top trends in the field of responsive web designing that are making our website appearance more beautiful:

Vector Graphics: This concept is becoming more and more popular to use instead of raster graphics. There is only one difference which is that scalable vector use points on a vector map for building a certain design while a raster graphic is just a plain old image by using pixels on a bitmap. They provide the benefit of being resized without losing visual quality which is crucial to seamless responsive web design.

Hidden Menus: Hidden menus are the most essential and popular trend in an effort to keep things simple. We are seeing a trend in which minimal home pages are becoming popular and users must click a menu icon for revealing the website’s navigation options.

Single and Long Scrolling Home Pages: This concept sounds like an amazing trend in responsive web designing. It is like a website with one page and includes nearly entire content on that single page. These types of sites have a navigation bar at the top of the screen but the only difference is that by clicking on these options, users are taken to a location already on this page.

Card Based Design: They are the simple and prominent way to organize information into the pattern of a grid. In this trend, pieces of information are organized into cards in a visually appealing way with a distinctive image or block of texts. They are essential for the responsive web design due to its ability to rearrange its structure as per the user’s screen size.

Minimalism: The above trends are about increasing simplicity but minimalism is the trend which falls under the new idea of web design whose goals are to reduce clutter, focus on efficient user experience and simplify the best we can.


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Make Your Website Accessible with these Tips

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There are a millions of users out there and if we want to attract more of them to our site, there are some necessary steps which we must follow to ensure that site are being used by everyone. For this, accessibility is important which is not difficult to implement. All we need to understand the underlying issues which can make a site hard or impossible to use by certain people.

Here are some tips to apply and mistakes to avoid for making the site accessible:

Choose CMS that is supportive to accessibility: As there are many content management systems are available there to help us in building our website but we must choose a CMS that suits our needs and make sure it is accessible also. After that, we have to consult the theme’s documentation for notes on accessibility and tips for creating accessible content and layouts for that theme.

Use heading correctly: We should put our focus on using the correct and strategically heading (h1, h2, etc.) to navigate the well organized and easily interpreted content by screen readers. We should also make sure to adhere to correct order of headings and separate presentation from structure by using CSS.

Proper alternative texts for images: Alt text should be used for the images so that screen readers users could be able to understand the message conveyed by the use of images on the page. It is crucial for informative images such as infographics. The alt text should contain the message we want to convey through that image.

Give links unique and descriptive names: Whenever we include links in our content, we should use text that is able to properly describe where our link will go. Use of “Click here” is not a good idea as it is not descriptive and ineffective for the screen reader users. The most unique content of the link should be shown first.

Design forms for accessibility: If our form fields are not labeled properly, the screen reader user does not have the same cues available as the sighted user. For this, each field in our form should have a well positioned and descriptive label.

Use tables for tabular data: We should use tables for page layouts as they add additional verbosity to screen reader users. Whenever a screen reader goes through the table, he is informed that there is a table named ‘X” number of columns and rows and distracts from the content.


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Disabilities Matters for Accessible Website

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In the present scenario, every business owner owns a website for his business so that he could reach to the maximum people as much as possible and also the users prefer approaching websites if they want to get any information about the particular business. These web users are a very huge group of people due to which internet span the globe and allows people to communicate and interact their perspective or opinions across ages and nations.

However there are some differences between the users which are not in terms of location or languages, rather they have lives that are complicated with lifelong disabilities but these extra challenges do not stop them from availing the benefits of being connected to the digital world.

For this purpose, accessibility is necessary which can be added to web functionality by means of tools, additional software or special training as disability might be an obstacle but there are some ways to navigate the web.

Disabilities on web:

Cognitive Issues: It is a condition that affects the brain functioning and processing of information. This can be a learning disorder where letters or numbers are switched and difficulty in retaining memories or short attention span. This lack of concentration can make it extremely hard to focus on completing task while using the web. One way for dealing with this is to avoid pages with long block of texts and the information should be broken up with numbers of bullets. Captioned pictures are also a good idea to maintain interest in site.

Sight Issues: Visual conditions of the users can affect our web usage and accessibility. Although it is common to wear glasses for some users while browsing the web, but it is also a sign of a mild visual disability. It also includes low vision which is a struggle to see the content or text on screen. So the web developers must be careful about writing their codes to display the content and text. Also make sure that our site has a uniform appearance across browsers.

Hearing Issues: Having difficulties in hearing is not only limited to being a consequence of listening high volume music or T.V. while some hearing loss can be corrected with hearing aids or sometimes there is a complete loss of sense. For those who can still hear but have difficulty in perceiving sounds, there are website modifications that amplify foreground noises and separate them from background sounds.


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Graphic Design Vs Web Design

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Although the web design and graphic design both are totally different concepts but still people often get confused in between these two. They both are considered as “Art Designer” and their work is misunderstood due to the involvement of art skill and creative ability. Besides, they both use almost same design tools and can do the jobs related to the web design or graphic design.

Here are some key points which are helpful for us to get the difference between these two:

Web Design: The concept of web design is associated with different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. It also includes different areas of web design, interface design, authoring including standardized code and user experience design along with search engine optimization etc.

Graphic Design: Graphic design mainly deals with the process of visual communication and problem solving which are using one or more of typography, photography and illustration. The graphic designers are responsible for creating and combining symbols, images and text to form visual representation of ideas and messages.

Difference:

Colors: In terms of color, these two are completely different. The graphic design takes use of CMYK color mode due to rely on printing and this color used is more focused on visual impacts and visual flow guidance. On the other hand, the web design uses RGB as per the special imaging mode and it is more focused on the teasing out the relationship between the information structures.

Fonts: Generally the choice of font is more freely in the graphic design as there is no necessary to worry about the implementation of the final effect. But in the web design, it needs to be more comprehensive in order to avoid the pressure on the server by the output due to the small choose scope. With the development of technologies, this gap naturally narrowed.

Graphics: The graphic design has more performances in the use of graphics in comparison to the web design especially for the product websites. Along with this, the graphic design does not need to take the final effect into account and in terms of size of unit used in design; the graphic design uses physical sizes while web design uses pixels.


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Social Media Content Calendar

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As we know that social media is an efficient and all time promising tool for increasing traffic on our blogs and sites so why we are posting updates only when we are online? It is the perfect reason to start a social media calendar. Through the use of third party scheduling and social media management tools, we would be able to manage multiple social media accounts and always have content going online at different times.

This is a great idea to make sure that our older content is always getting a fresh and consistent flow of click activity. It can help us in visualizing all our planned posts for the next weeks or months ahead.

How to Prepare Social Media Calendar:

Step 1: Categories: At the time of creating our sharing schedule, it helps us with a list of post types that we would like to share on a regular basis especially if we are sharing several types of updates such as:

  • Conversation starters
  • Blog Posts
  • Quotes
  • Re-sharing
  • Images or videos etc

Step 2: Categories Placement: After having the categories, we have to decide the time to share the content such as blog posts might be share don Tuesday and videos on Wednesday.

Step 3: Regular Updates: This is one of the most fun and exciting part of the social media calendar which come up with all the content we will be sharing in the coming months or weeks and if we write our updates as far into the future, we can have them for our entire category.

Step 4: Special Events: As we know that the year is full of special events in addition to the regular posts so it will be great if we would plan ahead for them so that we can make sure not to miss them as well as create more excitement and opportunities around them. We should write our posts for those events so that we could diminish the rule of forgetting or missing one. There are some special events we might consider covering such as:

  • Holidays especially which are relevant to our industry.
  • Product Launches
  • Announcements
  • Met ups etc.

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Presentation Ideas for Website Designing

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If our website is giving a visually stunning presentation to our users, it would surely leave a remarkable and positive impression on them whether we are using it for marketing product or introducing our services or communicating any information to the visitors.

Nowadays, most of the web owners provide a mass of solutions and methods for delivering quality information to a wide audience on demand such as Flash, PDF, Videos, photo slideshow etc but the only thing they should keep in mind to keep the presentation compelling, easy to access and compatible with multiple devices to have the big impact.

Here are some guidelines for ensuring memorable and unique presentation:

Short and Sweet: We must focus on avoiding too much fluff of our presentation and get only that stuff which really matters. The idea of speaking and narrating will lead to bring majority of our communication personally. We should use presentation slides in order to highlight the key messages and topics by using as little as possible.

Style Carefully: If we focus on the pleasing design and focused layout, it can be helpful in defining the overall purpose of our presentation. We could be able to direct the user’s eye on the targeted place as we design each slide. We must choose that background which provide sufficient contrast and do not compromise with text.

Bold Typography and Proper Hierarchy: At the time of designing a process, we must ensure that our website should be readable on all kinds of devices. We can go for a small number of complementary fonts for their weight and style along with some effects such as gradients or shadows for helping in setting them apart from the background.

Illustrate our Point: If you do not have proper space for explaining something in texts, we can choose the charts, info-graphics, photography and art. We can also add emphasis to the topic with a little humor.
Provide Control: We should also focus on providing control to users in moving between slides and pausing our presentation. Slide show style generally involves a set of controls.


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Reasons Why People Leave Our Websites

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One of the most important parts of having a website is to attract more and more visitors and make them retain to our site. Once we have the visitors on our site, we will want to keep them around for a while instead of seeing them instantly leaving our site and going somewhere else.

If we want to retain more and more visitors to our site, then the task of increasing the page views and time on the site is really important and ignorance of these could cause visitors to leave. Here are some major reasons due to which people are leaving our site:

Inaccessibility: The task of accessing our site regularly is really important for the designers and developers. If a site is inaccessible to our users, it will make them leave the site no matter how great our site is. If they are not able to access the site, then they have no other any option besides leaving. We can create an accessible website through the different browsers, internet connections and different needs from users so that it could be attractive and effective.

Frustrating Navigation: If the visitors have the difficulty in navigation through the site to find their desired information, many of them will leave the site. In order to make things easier, navigation should be given more thoughts and attention in which pages are most important. In addition to this, navigation should be logical and intuitive. Big sites can use a sitemap in order to help visitors who want to use them.

External Links: Nowadays almost every website includes links to other websites and blogs are especially are full of external links. The each link has a purpose and they are really helpful in making our site more valuable and useful for the cloths. But the fact is that some visitors will leave because of these links and never return. This is not a bad thing for all the time but it is something that we should consider.

Advertisements: These are the main source of income for many of the websites as well as blogs but they cost the site some visitors. The only purpose for the advertiser who is paying to these banners or text link on our site is to achieve exposure and generate clicks.