<p>Malcolm Gladwell&#39;s bestselling book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, has a provocative thesis. Contrary to commonsense, which warns against &quot;snap judgments,&quot; Gladwell argues that, often, our automatic, largely unconscious way of making decisions throughout the day is a fairly reliable way to navigate life in the modern world. &quot;There can be as much value in the blink of eye,&quot; writes Gladwell, &quot;as in months of rational analysis.&quot;</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You better believe that visitors to your website are judging your brand&#39;s competency within seconds.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You better believe that visitors to your website are judging your brand&#39;s competency within seconds. Actually, some studies suggest it takes as little as 50 milliseconds (1/20th of a second) for a visitor to decide whether to stay on your site or click away.</p>
<p>Well-designed websites, constructed with the user experience (UX) in mind, have the ability not only to keep visitors on your site, but to build the kind of rapport that leads to long-term loyalty. Poorly designed websites, on the other hand, are the digital equivalent of a brick-and-mortar store with stuck doors, broken windows and leaky pipes dripping puddles on the floor. Cue the horrified customers running to your nearest competitor, which, on the Internet, is only a few clicks away.</p>
<p>Here are some of the most important principles for improving your own site&#39;s UX design and, ultimately, winning over audiences to your cause.</p>
<h2 id="design-for-an-overarching-objective">Design for an overarching objective.</h2>
<p>What&#39;s the number-one thing you want visitors to your website to do? Design for that. If you can&#39;t answer that question, you&#39;re likely not ready to make a website. Truly useful websites make it abundantly clear what they&#39;re about. Consider the most-visited website in the world, not to mention the history of the internet, Google&#39;s homepage.</p>
<p>It doesn&#39;t matter that Google offers dozens of goods and services at this point in 2020. Google&#39;s original and still-core product reigns supreme on their site: a lone search-entry blank and the buttons to activate it surrounded by plenty of white space; all other options are minimized and pushed to the margins.</p>
<p>Good UX design funnels visitors toward a clear action, whether that be buying a product, signing up for a service or reading a breaking news story. Websites without an overarching objective often suffer an identity crisis and end up putting their visitors through the &quot;paradox of choice&quot; - the feelings of frustration and fatigue that come from having too many options at your disposal.</p>
<h2 id="write-for-how-the-internet-reads">Write for how the Internet reads.</h2>
<p>The Internet has fundamentally altered how we read. Reading a book from cover to cover may have once been a popular proverb about thoroughness, but, given the vast wealth of info on the world wide web, no one&#39;s got time for that. The speed of information-retrieval has replaced the virtue of thoroughness.</p>
<p>Nowadays, instead of reading, we scan. Eye-tracking studies have revealed that Internet-users read in an F-shaped pattern, mostly scanning headlines, subheaders and the opening sentences of paragraphs as a means to compensate for the overwhelming amount of information available online.</p>
<p>Smart UX design will accommodate such behaviors by frontloading the most important, topical, &quot;load-bearing&quot; information words toward the beginning of headlines and lead sentences, along the left-margin, where users are hoping to find them. Additionally, user-friendly websites will avoid long blocks of text in favor of shorter, easier-to-digest paragraphs with frequent breaks.</p>
<p>Chunking your content, making use of bullet-point or numbered lists and using white space to visually separate content allow visitors more &quot;jumping-in&quot; points as they furiously scan for what the information they&#39;re after.</p>
<h2 id="invest-in-compelling-visuals">Invest in compelling visuals.</h2>
<p>Remember earlier when you learned that visitors will judge your website in less than a second? A lot of that has to do with the visuals. For many visitors, if the visuals disappoint, then the site as a whole disappoints.</p>
<p>As humans, we&#39;re wired to be visual creatures, favoring our eyes over all other senses, with more than 50 percent of the cortex - the surface of the brain - dedicated to processing visual information. Given our cognitive biases, then, it&#39;s no wonder that we prefer beautiful, image-driven websites to less aesthetic ones.</p>
<p>Even within visual information, we have a clear preference for pictures over text. Our brains process images 60,000 times faster than words, which is why we can&#39;t resist looking at the pictures before reading. It&#39;s just easier on our brains. Knowing this, it&#39;s important to invest in high-quality photography or videography that helps tell as much of your website&#39;s story as possible, saving words for where pictures fail.</p>
<p>But visuals go way beyond pretty pictures. Consistent typography, color schemes, icons, negative space and clear hierarchy between elements are other aspects of visual design that shouldn&#39;t be disregarded.</p>
<h2 id="clock-your-page-speeds">Clock your page speeds.</h2>
<p>It&#39;s not just that people don&#39;t have patience for reading anymore. We don&#39;t have patience in general. For better or worse, the Internet has cultivated a culture that has come to expect instant gratification. When it comes to your website, that means that approximately 40 percent of your incoming traffic will give up if your site takes longer than three seconds to load.</p>
<p>Page speed is the average time it takes for a page of content from your website to load. It&#39;s also important because, for many search engines, it&#39;s one of the factors that determines how well your site ranks in search results. Many helpful sites exist that will give you a measurement of your website&#39;s page speed for free.</p>
<p>There are a host of things you can do to rev up your page speeds, though many of them require a decent amount of web background to execute. For example, you could enable file compression, optimize your website&#39;s code, reduce the number of page redirects or leverage browser caching to cut down on page-load times. Another tactic is to make sure the file sizes of your website&#39;s images are no larger than they need to be, though not at the detriment of featuring high-quality images, given their importance as mentioned above.</p>
<h2 id="dont-forget-about-mobile">Don&#39;t forget about mobile.</h2>
<p>Certainly, you&#39;ve experienced it before: a website that hasn&#39;t been optimized for mobile. It takes forever to load, the text is illegibly tiny, the images are improperly formatted and buttons, menu options or hyperlinks are nearly impossible to click with regular-sized human fingers.</p>
<p>The sad part is that mobile traffic has made up more than 50 percent of all web traffic since 2015. That means that roughly one out of every two people visiting your website are likely viewing it on a smartphone. Is the experience visiting your website going to be as user-friendly for them as for someone visiting from a laptop?</p>
<p>The biggest difference between smartphones and computers is that smartphones favor scrolling through vertically stacked content whereas larger computer screens allow for greater variety in how a user navigates through a website.</p>
<p>There are two main design approaches for mobile-friendly websites: responsive or adaptive. Responsive design resizes the elements of your website to fit the resolution of the user&#39;s device. Adaptive design is like having two different websites - one for computers and another for mobile. The former approach involves less work web development work overall and works across a range of screen sizes, while the latter has the potential to provide the best experience on mobile, particularly if that&#39;s where the majority of your web traffic is coming from.</p>
<h2 id="feeling-out-of-your-depth">Feeling out of your depth?</h2>
<p>Get in <a href="/contact">contact with us</a>! If the thought of redesigning your site for optimized UX induces a headache, don&#39;t panic. We&nbsp;can give your organization&#39;s website the makeover it needs.</p>
<p>This article was written by Mitchell Terpstra, an Entrepreneur NEXT powered by Assemble expert. If you are looking to take the NEXT step in your business then we encourage you to check out Entrepreneur NEXT powered by Assemble.</p>


Bad web design is bad for the user experience and SEO.

Bad Web Design Isn't Just Annoying - It Costs You

<p>If you are putting together a solid marketing strategy, don&#39;t forget about adding images to your website. We cannot deny the importance of photos in the here and now. According to statistics, articles containing photos attract a lot more views than the ones that are posted without images. Without any doubt, images are quite attractive and make your website full of colors. In this article, we are going to talk about some common mistakes that you must avoid when hosting images on your website. Read on to find out more.</p>
<h3 id="1-reduce-image-size">#1: Reduce Image Size</h3>
<p>Most visitors don&#39;t wait more than 3 seconds for the images to load on their laptop or desktop computers. And they don&#39;t wait more than 5 seconds when using their mobile phones. So, if your images take longer than 5 seconds to launch on these devices, you may lose a lot of prospective customers.</p>
<p>So, what you need to do is reduce the size of the images to 700KB maximum. Using an image compression service like <a href="https://compressimage.io/">compressimage.io</a> is easiest way to reduce file size, without effecting quality. This will allow images to load much faster regardless of the device users are using.</p>
<h3 id="2-descriptive-file-names">#2: Descriptive File Names</h3>
<p>A default filename for an image might look something like: IMG_1234.jpg. The problem with default filenames is that they tell Google anything about your content. After all it’s just a bunch of numbers and letters that offers no real information or meaning.</p>
<p>It&#39;s best to answer the question: What are we looking at? Google reads your image filenames to make sense of the content and this small factor can help you out in a big way. It’s also a good idea to use keywords in your image filename because this tells Google that you want to rank for this term.</p>
<h3 id="3-add-alt-tags">#3: Add Alt Tags</h3>
<p>When adding photos, don&#39;t forget to add alt tags. Alt tags are added to images in HTML, to describe their content and context on the web page. The alt tag also appears within the image container when the media file can’t load or display properly. If you want your websites to achieve higher rankings in major search engines, make sure you add an informative description.</p>
<p><img src="/uploads/alt-tag.jpg" alt="A screenshot of an example of an alt tag" title="Alt tag example"></p>
<p>The description should be in English for all of the photos. And don&#39;t make the mistake of adding too many keywords or phrases as it will hurt your search engine rankings.</p>
<h3 id="4-use-the-right-file-extension">#4: Use The Right File Extension</h3>
<p>Make sure your website contains the right type of image files. These days, you can create images in different formats to cover your needs. However, the most common extension is JPG, JPEG, and PNG these days. The PNG is an ideal choice if you want your photos to maintain the quality regardless of how many times you edit and save them.</p>
<h3 id="5-dont-use-distorted-images">#5: Don&#39;t Use Distorted Images</h3>
<p>Image distortion is another common problem that you may face as for as editing images is concerned. Make sure that your images are not stretched. You should always work with the original version of your desired photos. In Photoshop, you can use the preview feature to make a comparison between different versions of the photos.</p>
<p><a href="http://EzineArticles.com/?5-Mistakes-to-Avoid-When-Adding-Images-to-Your-Site&amp;id=10537032">Article Source</a></p>


In this article, we are going to talk about some common mistakes that you must avoid when hosting images on your website.

5 Ways to Optimize Images on Your Site

<p>WordPress is the most used open-source CMS or Content Management System, used by more than 75 million websites now. The CMS is free to install and use, has a simple and easy to manage interface, is highly flexible, SEO-friendly, and comes with thousands of in-built themes, plugins, and extensions. The huge community support of WordPress is also a reason why developers prefer using this platform for website development especially when it comes to building engaging and secure e-stores. And this myriad of benefits of the platform has made business owners choose to work with a WordPress developer over the other available web development platforms. </p>
<p>Here are the reasons why WordPress stands out to be the best choice for website development. </p>
<h2 id="wordpress-is-an-open-source-platform">WordPress is an open-source platform:</h2>
<p>WordPress can be installed and used for free. There are no costs associated with installing, downloading, and upgrading it. Also, the source codes can be easily accessed at any point in time. There are thousands of free plugins available in WordPress as well. Furthermore, WordPress involves less setup, maintenance, and customization costs as compared to the other CMSs like Joomla and Drupal. </p>
<h2 id="wordpress-is-seo-friendly">WordPress is SEO-friendly:</h2>
<p>All business owners desire to see their websites on top of the search engines and have a high ranking. WordPress is an SEO-friendly platform, which ensures a high ranking of the websites on the SERPs. It also means you can get an optimised site with this CMS. Also, the clean coding structure of WordPress, high-standard codes, responsive, and logical web design features of the CMS make the search engines have a higher level of preference for WordPress. With this platform, you can give each and every page and post of your website a unique meta tag, meta title, meta keyword, and meta description, thereby, allowing more precise optimisation. </p>
<h2 id="customization-is-easy-with-wordpress">Customization is easy with WordPress:</h2>
<p>WordPress is a popular CMS and one of the main reasons for this is its easy customizability and high flexibility. The customizable themes and the other customizable features of the CMS also allow WordPress developers and designers to create and also modify the layouts and themes as per the business needs. </p>
<h2 id="huge-community-support">Huge community support:</h2>
<p>WordPress has got huge community support and this makes it a favourable choice for the developers. Whenever the developer gets stuck with any challenge or complexity during the WordPress development process, there&#39;s always an expert from the community to help the developer to resolve the issue. </p>
<h2 id="availability-of-a-wide-range-of-themes-and-plugins">Availability of a wide range of themes and plugins:</h2>
<p>The availability of a wide range of themes and plugins in WordPress also makes it a great choice. There are plenty of both free and paid themes and plugins that developers can use as per the business needs to enhance the site functionality and to offer a more personalized experience to the site visitors or customers. And the best thing is that most of the WordPress themes are responsive and customizable as well. And there&#39;s a plugin for almost every functionality a good website would need. The plugins make it easy to implement the required functionalities to the site. Developers can just pick the right plugin and can install and activate it for use. </p>
<h2 id="a-simple-host">A simple host:</h2>
<p>WordPress can be set up easily on any web host. Most of the hosting plans need single-click installation or are pre-installed. This also means that customers get full freedom to choose the host for the website. They can find the fastest and affordable hosting provider of their choice and can even set up the same for their WordPress websites. </p>
<p>Apart from these, WordPress is a highly secure CMS, which again makes it a reliable option for eCommerce businesses. And with these benefits, the platform stands out to be the best choice for website development especially for building eCommerce sites. </p>
<p><a href="https://venti.codes">Venti Web Design &amp; Development</a> is a dedicated developer that is ready to build the website you need today. </p>
<p>Article <a href="http://EzineArticles.com/?Reasons-Why-You-Should-Choose-WordPress-For-Website-Development&amp;id=10538826">Source</a></p>


WordPress is the most favoured web development platform especially when it comes to eCommerce site development. Here are the major reasons to choose a WordPress developer to get your site built.