Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

When preparing content for your website, it’s important to remember that writing for the web is very different than writing for print. You need to get your point across quickly and engage your readers before you lose them.

Here are some quick tips to get the best results from your web copy:

Write Compelling Headlines
Always start with a relevant, attention grabbing headline - it can make the difference between the user feeling compelled to read more or choosing to ignore your page. Use sub-headings to define different sections of your content and help your readers locate the information they are looking for.

Make it Short, Sweet and Scannable
In general, people don’t really ‘read’ on the web, they ’scan’. Web readers are impatient - they want quick and easy access to the information they are looking for. Write succinct paragraphs and use bullet points and lists to break your content into scannable chunks.

Emphasise important words
Use Bold and italics to draw attention to important words. This helps improve the ’scanability’ of your content by ensuring the user is drawn to important words.

Use a Conversational Style
Keep it personal and avoid the marketing hype, it doesn’t go down well online. Write as though you were talking in person to your reader.

Build Trust
Establish trust and credibility with your readers by featuring testimonials and case studies. Have you read about the psychological phenomenon of Social Proof? Simply put, it’s when people form their opinions based on the opinions of others. Testimonials can be a very powerful tool for your website.

Use images
The old adage ‘A picture tells 1000 words’ is still true - but don’t go cliché. Photos of smiling, happy business people are overused and ineffective. Consider including some professional photos of your staff, customers, premises or products instead. You can also source suitable and low cost imagery on stock photography websites such as istock.

Consider Layout
Although multi-column content layout is common in print material, single column layouts work best on the web. Web layouts should be clean, simple and uncluttered.

Mobile devices are so popular nowadays that the traffic that mobile search brings can no longer be discounted. Because of this plenty of websites now offer mobile versions of their website. If you already have a mobile site though you should make sure that you stay informed about the changes/improvements done by search engines in relation to mobile search to ensure that your mobile site is optimised for mobile search.

One of the improvements in mobile search that you can expect Google to focus on in predictive search. We know this because of a paper published by two Google employees, Maryam Kamvar and Shumeet Baluja, titled Query Suggestions for Mobile Search: Understanding Usage Patterns. The paper revealed that:

* users rely heavily on query suggestions, and that;
* users will accept a correct suggestion quickly

Because of these findings Kamvar and Baluja concluded that:

1. Mobile search results should show as many suggestions in a small list as possible
2. Suggestion lists should show a constant number of suggestions (thus maximise space usage compared to instances wherein only a couple of results are suggested)
3. Suggestions viewed 3 times should NOT be displayed as a suggestion again and should instead be replaced with another suggestion
4. Suggestions that result in lots of key presses should be replaced

While these findings and conclusions mostly are the concern of search engines (since they’re the ones who have to figure out a way to implement the changes) web designers and SEO will do well to prepare for the upcoming changes.

For web designers what this means is that they should ensure that the mobile site is designed for efficient navigation so that the number of key presses are reduced once the user arrives on the website. This means concise content and an efficient information architecture.

For SEOs what this means is that they should ensure that mobile pages are optimised for really relevant keywords. You wouldn’t want to be listed for not so relevant keywords because if you get listed 3 times without being clicked on by users if Google listens to this paper’s conclusion it would mean that your site would be replaced by another suggestion. Another reason why you should be more careful in keyword selection is that you would want users to be directed to the exact page they want to be in or at least just be a couple of clicks away. Again as the research suggests links that lead to an increase in key presses will be replaced by a link that does not lead to as much key presses.