Monthly Archives: October 2015

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It has just turned Fall 2015, 3/4 of the year has passed, and we have seen many new developments in modern website design emerge.

The era of cluttered pages, information overloaded and packed with information are generally passing. The new focus has been on greater User Interface (UI) simplicity. Below is an overview of a handful of new hot trends we anticipate that we’ll be seeing more of as we enter 2016.

Since 2005, a decade or so ago, it was typical for various websites to basically have the same sort of general experience. There has always been diversity in color logos, images and typography, but aside from that most usually have the same menu across the top and/or down the side, and sub-menus contained in rectangles so that we can easily navigate the site structure.

Progressively, over time, UI web designers and layout artists have experimented and evolved designs. Each year new trends have emerged that have taken layouts and designs to new levels. Over the past year, we have seen some new trends emerge, which create dynamic & compelling user experiences.

The best web designers are now combining tried & tested elements with new creative techniques. The following trends and concepts, shown with screenshots, are presented individually, but these ideas can be combined in interesting & intriguing ways – and be the new layout methods for 2016.

A. Full Screen Video Splashes

While minimalistic designs are the new vogue, full screen videos and dynamic backgrounds are more often filling the void; a quick look from the visitor can be worth a hundreds of words, and quickly sets the intended mode of the website experience.

Advances in HTML5 are enabling brands to use videos in a way that wasn’t previously possible. Here is how Apple has used this to market its new Apple Watch.

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The goal of generating new content is firstly getting as many eyes as you can get onto. Simply, the more the better. The more popular your content becomes also means more people coming through your website; which means more exposure of your brand, and therefore increasing revenue over time.

Content campaigns typically encounter, at one point or another, a leveling out of visitors per day; even when introducing new topics and consistently good/original material. Basically it is difficult to get as much exposure for your content as you would otherwise like.

If you are recently starting out, the reality is, no matter how much your would like to believe otherwise, original and great content won’t maximize the number of readers all by itself. At some point there needs to be some kind of initial spark, for attracting first rounds of visitors; who can then spread the word on their social media pages. Providing this ignition spark requires extra work on your part.

However, we are outlining a handful of effective methods (below) to help you fast-track on your new content marketing efforts.

If you follow these steps periodically, the greater the compounding effects will be.

Whenever you post a new piece of content, pursue these some of the following ideas to expand its reach and increase your blog (and brand) exposure:

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Google, as the main search engine on the internet, is in competition to provide the best listing of results for each particular search query. To perform this, Google, and other search engines, calculate various parameters of each unique webpage. One such recently critical parameter is the reputation, and trustworthiness, of a “backlink”, which includes the quality and uniqueness of the surrounding content.

Along with the advent of search engines, since the beginning of the public internet itself, the stage was set for the emergence of different manipulation strategies being developed by SEO-consultants and webmasters to achieve better ranking results. So for many years, an uncountable “tonnage” of irrelevant or ‘low-quality’ backlinks paved the way, temporarily at least, for webmasters to reach higher rankings.

But each new algorithm update progressively changed the rules of the rankings.

Regarding artificial or ‘spammy’ backlinks, with their “Penguin” update Google decided to get tough against backlink manipulations. Initially, they decided not to pass “link juice” (which can be considered as “ranking credit”) through spammy backlinks. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of websites across the board and all around the world, would up penalized because of bought, irrelevant or poor-quality backlinks that were laid-down in the past. The more the link spam – the higher the penalty was.

So how can you remove “Toxic Links” From Your Backlink Profile?

Let’s first examine – how badly was your site penalized?
If your position in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) has or is dwindling and you’re not yet sure why, it most likely involved a penalty. To reclaim valuable web traffic and therefore increase business, the best thing to do is to simply move forward. Listed below are the items and the process that you will need to follow, how to clean up your backlink profile, and ultimately how to achieve grace with Google, and possibly some of the various other search engines as well.

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As part of establishing your business online, generating leads from an online source is vital. It is necessary to create an engaged list of email subscribers.

In recent years, a large percentage of internet marketing professionals, have been predicting the demise of conventional email marketing, due to the sudden popularity of social media. However, it is a generally known fact, that 3/4 online business operators, still consider email marketing to be essential to their business.

Other studies reveal that:

· 9 out of 10 consumers use email at least once per day.
· More than half of mobile purchases are influenced by email.

These figures clearly paint the picture that maintaining an email list should be a part of your online marketing agenda.

To attract mail-list subscribers, you need to offer something of value to entice them to enter in their email addresses. Free blog subscriptions are just not enough anymore.

Besides a standard newsletter, here are some creative ideas to help out :

A. Offering special content through digital downloads

A digital download is usually, but not necessarily, a free giveaway that provides them additional content, typically a PDF e-book. A quick web search will show the available stand-alone applications and plug-ins for applications like WordPress for offering digital downloads.

Another form of email list opt-in incentive is the “free user toolkit”. A toolkit is a bundle of useful tools that your subscribers can benefit from. It can include things like worksheets, spreadsheets templates, recipe books any free items you choose. You can bundle all of these items together; offering it as a .zip or .rar archive file. It is more of a tempting than a simple eBook.