Unless you are an expert, outsourcing your business’s web design is a positive move, but choosing to hand over the public perception of your business to another person or agency is always a difficult step to take — will they understand your brand? Will they portray the image and ethos that you want to demonstrate? What if they miss the mark?

There are several ways that you can help your web designer understand what you want to achieve with your project, and being precise and clear isn’t something you should shy away from. Web designers would much rather be given a strong brief from the outset than waste hours designing a site with only a vague idea of what is required.

Give examples

To start with, open conversation with your designer by offering examples of sites you like the look of. Give a clear brief and be specific with regards to the features you need on the site. As your website begins to take shape, view it with a critical eye — the little things that bug you right now will be more apparent later down the line.

It’s all in the design 

Your font, colours and branding may look amazing on your packaging, but not fit well on a website; if this is the case, feed this back to your designer — they are working within your brief and so implementing the aspects of design you have provided. Suggest alternatives; discussion and brainstorming are tried and tested ways to spark creativity, and your designer will be open to discussing strategies and new ideas. A decent agency will take your vision and implement it into something that works, tweaking along the way as and when you feed back to them.

Set your emotions to one side — you may like particular colour palette, but will your target audience respond positively to it? It’s these people you need to keep in mind throughout the process, letting go of any attachment you may have to a particular colour or pattern. Don’t tell your designer you don’t like something; give positive alternatives; for example, I would like that headline to be in a larger font, or, can we draw attention to the image on the right?

With these pointers in mind, you and your web designer will be able to work together to create something that not only reflects your business but also appeals to your target audience.

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That’s why SEOs should collaborate with website designers to make sure that everything is correctly designed in favour of website visitors and search engines.

Here are a few tips on how these two teams can collaborate with each other.

1. An easy-to-read website design

A website design that promotes readability is one of the most important elements for SEO professionals — especially if it is for a content-heavy website that relies on sharing useful information with readers.

An easy-to-read website design then directly and indirectly affects metrics, such as bounce rate, dwell time, average page on time, average session duration, etc. These metrics send positive (or negative) signals to search engines and may have a meaningful impact on the search engine results pages (SERP) rankings of the web page.

It is important for SEOs and designers to work together to design an easily navigable and readable web page design. For example, avoid using light-coloured text on a darker background, or placing blocks of content in unfamiliar and weird places.

2. A mobile-friendly and responsive design

More than 50 percent of traffic comes from mobile devices. After Google’s introduction of a mobile-first index, mobile traffic has gained even more importance.

If a website isn’t designed with mobile in mind — if it is not mobile-friendly and responsive — SEOs will have an extremely tough time to rank it higher in the SERPs. Apart from the higher rankings, your website takes a massive credibility hit if it can’t be accessed properly on mobile devices. You can’t alienate more than 50 percent of your potential website visitors with an unresponsive website.

3. Fast loading speed

The loading speed of a website is one of the most important search engine ranking factors. It is so because a slow-loading website not only has a negative impact on the site’s search rankings, but a slow-loading site also frustrates visitors and encourages them to quit your site.

Lastly, a slow-loading website also negatively affects the site’s conversion rate. Amazon found that every delay of only 100 milliseconds may cost the company up to 1 percent in sales, and it may suffer a revenue loss of up to $1.6 billion.

SEOs cannot improve the loading speed of a website without the help of designers. There are many variables at play simultaneously on a page that determine its loading speed. From large media files to unoptimised code, there are many factors that may require fixing by designers and SEOs.

Use tools, such as Pingdom and Google PageSpeed Insights Test to check the loading speed of your website.

4. 404 error pages

404 error pages are the ones that your website visitors see when they land on a broken URL. Ideally, a website should not have any 404 error pages, but they are practically impossible to eliminate. Therefore, the next best thing is to design a custom and intuitive 404 error page that would help retain visitors and assist SEOs.

The first reaction of most online users is to quit the site when they encounter a 404 error page. The idea, therefore, is to create an interesting 404 error page that has relevant information for them.

The following design elements might help:

• A clear copy and message that indicates it’s a broken link.
• Links to the most important, popular, and commonly visited web pages on your site.
• A functioning search box that the website visitors could use to find specific content before leaving your site.

5. Pop ups

While pop ups may be important in certain situations, search engines do not like intrusive pop ups at all. SEOs and web designers have an important job to make sure that pop-ups — if any — aren’t obtrusive and frustrating.

For example, a pop up should never greet users when they land on a web page. Most users would just quit the website right away. Even if that’s not the case, search engines penalise websites with pop-ups that take priority over user experience.

Conclusion

Without website designers, SEOs cannot be successful. Use the above-mentioned tips to make sure you are giving your website the best possible chance to rank higher in the SERPs.

The post How SEO & web design can work together for better search rankings appeared first on Hatchit Design.

1. Pick an interesting topic that your target audience would find useful

While creating an infographic often seems the most daunting task, picking the right topic is half the battle. Understand that not every infographic gets traction and traffic. You need to have a topic that is focused, interesting, and useful for your target audience. If it is something that your readers are interested in, the infographic is more likely to get the traction and attention you want it to. Instead of going with the more popular topic, pick something that your audience would appreciate and find useful. Identify a problem for a specific group of people and solve it.

2. Make it easy to view

Next comes one of the most important and difficult parts of creating an infographic: its design. The infographic needs to have the right colours combinations. The choice of font and font size also has a lot of impact on its readability. Following is a small part of an infographic. As you can see, there are two major problems with it:

1. The font size is too small to be read easily.
2. The colour combination is making it even more difficult to read the text.

Apart from the colours, the infographic also must be of an appropriate size. While you may want to go big, you should not overdo it. The infographic should not be more than 8,000 pixels. Besides, you also want it to be of a relatively smaller size for those with poor internet connections. Lastly, make sure to add ample white space. Otherwise, the infographic will become too convoluted. Here is an example of an infographic without sufficient white space.

3. Write an attention-grabbing headline

Next comes the part where you grab your reader’s attention with content and text, and you start with an attention-grabbing headline. Just like an ad or a blog post, the headline of an infographic should hook your readers and encourage them to read further. The headline should be sort, to-the-point, promising, and interesting. 70 characters is a good length. Too long, and you won’t be able to keep their attention. Too short, and you might not put everything in it that you want to.

4. Write a blog post to accompany your infographic

Once your infographic is ready, it is time to publish it. Make sure to write a small blog post to accompany your infographic. Remember that you are trying to simplify a complex topic with your infographic. Having accompanying text will help you achieve that purpose more efficiently. Moreover, a keyword-rich blog post may also help your infographic in the search engine results pages (SERPs). With more opportunity to include relevant keywords, you give yourself a better chance to rank higher in the SERPs.

5. Use every social channel you have

This goes without saying, but you must always use all the social channels you have to promote your infographics. Infographics are more likely to go viral. Therefore, make sure to use every social channel and relevant forum when promoting an infographic.

6. Reach out to influencers

If you believe your infographic solves a major problem and is clearly superior to other infographics in your niche, you should reach out to influencers who might find it interesting. Niche influencers are always looking for good content to share with their audience. One tweet from them can help your infographic gain a lot of virality and traffic.

7. Submission to different infographic websites

There are several infographic websites that you can submit your infographic to. These websites include: Visual.ly, Visualistan, Killer Infographic, Daily Infographic, etc. Many popular publications use these infographic sites to find interesting and useful infographics for their content. If your infographic gets picked, it may help increase your authority, credibility, and ranking in the SERPs.

8. Guest blogging

Lastly, do not forget to re-purpose your infographic and use it for guest posts. By linking back to the original article and your website, you can gain targeted traffic and valuable back links. Another technique is to create a different accompanying blog post and use that to pitch your infographic. New, exclusive content is always preferred in the guest blogging world.

The post 8 tips for creating better infographics & driving more traffic appeared first on Hatchit Design.

Get a Call to Action
What is a Call-to-Action? Well, quite simply it is an element on a web page that encourages a website visitor to take action. This could be clicking a button that links to a contact page, or filling a form in for some sort of incentive; perhaps a free download. Either way, the Call-to-Action is there to catch the attention of your website visitors and to direct them to complete that important action which converts them from a visitor to a lead!

Make it EASY for your visitors to get in touch
As with any sales situation, you must make it easy for your ‘prospect’ (or customer) to say ‘yes’ or decide to contact you. There are so many ways that your prospective customers to contact you in this day and age, you may as well take advantage of all of them; phone, email, mobile, social media, etc. Include your phone number and email address in your header, in a sidebar or on a banner on your website page. Add a link to your contact page with a contact form! Add icons that link to your social pages. How about adding a ‘Request a Call Back’ form/button too?

Install Google Analytics
This fantastic tool from Google not only gives you visitor statistics, real time reports and conversion analytics. You can also take a look at your ‘visitors flow’. This clever tool lets you see how long people spent on your website, which pages they visited (in chronological order) and (more importantly) the page they were on when they left your site. You can then analyse the problem page to see what might have caused them to leave!

Responsive Web Design
We all know the importance of mobiles and tablets when it comes to web design, yet too often we see websites looking terrible on an iPhone, iPad or other smart device. Get a good web designer who will optimise your website to look beautiful on ALL screen sizes and devices. You can’t afford to lose a huge chunk of traffic because of incompatibility issues, or having a non ‘mobile-first’ (as Google calls it) website.

Check & Test EVERYTHING often
Unbelievably, we regularly come across websites that have styling issues, coding errors and buttons that don’t work. We’re all human, and we all make mistakes but it helps to regularly check all of the pages on your website to ensure everything is working correctly.

The post Web Design – 5 tips to converting appeared first on Hatchit Design.

Start thinking like your audience
The best place to start when thinking of the design for your website it to start thinking as if you were in the shoes of your target audience. What will they be looking for from your site? What information will they need to see? What features will they benefit from? What images should your website feature?

Include your menu
The food menu is a vital piece of information for any restaurant and your customers will want to be able to view it on your website to get an idea of which dishes they want to order and how much they cost. The most user friendly way of doing this is to have your menu integrated into the design of your website. When given its own page customers will be able to easily find it on your site and browse through quite easily finding all the information they require. Some restaurants simply upload a PDF file of the menu, but we don’t generally recommend this.

Contact Page
It is imperative that your website contains the contact details of your pub or restaurant along with opening hours and location with a Google map where possible. This is all important information that your customers will need to know.

Online Booking Form / system
Most restaurants find it far quicker and easier for both themselves and their clientele if their customers are able to book a table online. The process for this feature should be kept quick and simple and only take them a few clicks to complete. We can either integrate third-party booking systems or affordably build your own booking solution.

Reviews
Love it or loathe it, we live in an age where businesses can quite literally live and die by their reviews. Make it easy for customers to review you by joining respected review websites such as TripAdviser, Google and social media, such as Facebook.

Photos, photos, photos!
Taking professional photos (or having professional photos taken) of all the dishes on your menu will really sell your food – and restaurant – in the best possible light. Remember, people eat with their eyes.

Use social media
If you have social media platforms and your customers go to the effort to follow or like your profiles, the very least you can do is keep your profiles updated on a daily basis. Post photos of dishes, special offers, events and general restaurant pictures so your potential customers can get a feel for your restaurant or pub.

The key to good restaurant and pub web design is to keep your site engaging for your audience which will help encourage them to want to visit your pub or restaurant and also keep them coming back to your website again and again. So if you feel that your restaurant or pub is in need of a new or updated website then please contact us today on 020 3637 4885. If you prefer, you can get in touch via our contact form here!

The post Top tips for restaurant and pub web design appeared first on Hatchit Design.

Here are a few technical and not-so-technical tips that we follow when creating a website and taking into account the requirement for mobile-first browsing:

Design with Mobiles and Tablets in mind
What is a Call-to-Action? Well, quite simply it is an element that calls a website visitor to make an action. This could be clicking a button that links to a contact page, or filling a form in for some sort of incentive; perhaps a free download. Either way, the Call-to-Action is there to catch the attention of the person browsing a website and to direct them to complete that important action which converts them from a website visitor into a lead!

Use Percentages in your CSS
Using percentages for divs and containers in your CSS will allow your columns and other elements to shrink and stretch with the screen size. For example, your header div may be 100% width, your main content may be 70% and your sidebar 30% width. Then combine the width percentages with a max-width value in when using pixels.

Use Media Queries
Media Queries allow you to target specific sized browsers with CSS to only be processed by them. For example, you could set a CSS rule for a screen size of 320px or less which makes your font size bigger and easier to read on a small screen.

Make images flexible
Again, use CSS to target images for when they are being viewed on different devices. I usually set images to 100% width when being viewed on Mobile device screens. This means they are easier to see and click on.

Remember the sizes
As a general rule of thumb, I target up to 320px width for Mobiles; 768px max for Tablets; 1000px for Tablets in landscape mode and anything above for laptop and desktop computers.

Try and use SVG images
SVG images are a new thing. SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics, and make for crystal-clear images on a website that can scale up or down in size without losing clarity or sharpness. SVG is ideal for more simple images, however for images containing more detail, best to stick to PNG.

I hope the above gives you some insight into designing for Mobile and Tablet devices. If you are looking to have a new website built, or perhaps need clarification on the above points then feel free to contact us on 020 3637 4885 or via our contact form! We look forward to hearing from you!

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Why do you want/need a website?
Have a good understanding of why you need your website. Write down a list of the reasons and keep this handy during the production stages so you can keep focused and make sure your website is made with the initial purpose in mind. For example, if you have products to sell, your website will be focused around e-commerce and selling, so think about setting up a PayPal or Stripe account for taking payments, or perhaps a merchant account with your bank and also get all your terms and conditions of sale sorted out too, along with the more obvious content, such as good quality product photos, product descriptions, pricing and any other details needed.

If you are a business that provides services, then your primary website goal will be to feature your services in a brochure-style website. Make sure you create good quality content that explains your services well, with your unique selling points displayed on the homepage / about us page for example. You will also need good quality images on your website too, so always best to source these and get all information together before meeting with a website designer.

Information you will need to gather includes:

• Contact information.
• Social media links.
• All imagery/photos.
• Your logo.
• Product information (project images, pricing, description, weight, variants).
• PayPal or Stripe (or merchant account) details.
• Website text content (for about us page / other informational pages).
• Hosting account details (for putting your website online and email addresses for your business – if you don’t have a hosting account we can help)
• Domain Name registered (we can help with this too if required) or login details to your Domain Name provider if you have already registered it.
• Any legal documents, including privacy policy, cookies policy, terms and conditions of sale and delivery information (for e-commerce).

What type of website should you get?
Once you have determined what the purpose of your website is, you can now decide what type of website you want. A great option for most e-commerce stores is to use WooCommerce. WooCommerce makes it easy for users of all abilities to add products and maintain the website, whereas Magento is far more advanced and is best suited to complex e-commerce websites with many products. WordPress is, in our opinion by far the best option for all businesses. It is also very easy to maintain, and is great for Google too (Google loves WordPress and this helps with rankings).

There are many different possibilities for websites and it is important to choose the correct one for your needs. Using the same examples as above, if you want to sell products online then an online shop (e-commerce site) would be best for your requirements. A business offering services would go for a brochure style website.

Talk to your web designer
Good communication is key. When you start working with a web designer to build your site, try to be as clear as possible about what vision you have. Try to describe in as much detail as possible how you want your website to look, and use diagrams and sketches to help with this. Writing a brief before you first meet with your designer is a good idea as this can be left with the designer to read over and come back with any further questions. Being clear in all areas really will help to avoid any delays in completing the project by having to keep going back and forth with your designer to make unnecessary amendments. If you are very vague about what you want, your web designer will do as they see best, which may be completely different to what you had imagined.

Keeping these points in mind should get your web design project off to the best start. If you want to talk to us about your website design project then please contact us today for an informal chat about your project on 020 3637 4885, or you can contact us via our contact form and we will come back to you!

The post What to consider when having a website built appeared first on Hatchit Design.

If you are in need of a new website or a revamp to an existing site, then we would be delighted to help! To give you an idea of how we work, below is the process that we follow with each of our clients:

Proposal
An initial conversation with you will give us an idea of your requirements which then allows us to create a proposal which provides detailed information about our company, summarises the goals of your project, includes our quote and outlines our terms and conditions.

Consultation
When you have agreed to everything in the proposal the next stage is to send over our briefs, which helps you to frame your thoughts/wants by answering a number of questions.

Design
Once design/visual requirements and preferences have been discussed during the consultation, we get to work building the website, taking into account colours, layouts and more.

Development
The development of the website takes place once we have received all content for the website. This includes logo (if you have had this designed already), images, text content, social media links, contact details and more.

Testing
When the whole website has been built, we then test all the pages. We also include you during this phase and ask you to test the website too, helping us to identify and fix any bugs (if any!)

Launch
When you are happy with the website, it will then be launched so it is live on the World Wide Web for everyone to see!

Marketing

Having a great website for the world to see is one thing, but if the world can’t find it then that is a problem. We always recommend and offer our online marketing solutions, proven to increase website visitors, enquiries and sales. We can arrange a meeting / chat to talk through the options.

If you are in need of a new website or online marketing solutions, then please contact us now to have a chat over your project and ideas!

The post The website design process appeared first on Hatchit Design.

Size/Shape
We believe a business card really needs to fit into a wallet or purse otherwise it might get lost in a jean pocket or the depths of a handbag. The recommended standard size for a business card is 85mm wide x 55mm high.

Material
Business Cards are usually printed on various types of Card (obviously), but there will be options over the weight. People generally agree that the heavier the card, the better it feels it your hand. It’s also becoming increasingly popular for these cards to be printed on wood and plastic. We recommend no less than 400gsm (ideally 450gsm) for business card weight.

Coating & Embossing
If you have the budget, there are many more options, for example; spot UV adds a high-gloss highlight to certain parts of a business card, embossing gives your cards that 3D effect, which is also a popular feature or ‘soft touch’ cards have a unique soft feel.

Colours
It may seem obvious, but your business cards really need to reflect your business branding. We always recommend including your brand colours on your business cards.

Content
After you have decided on the above options, it can be easy to forget that the main goal of your business card is to give people your contact details. Remember to include the important info, including:

• Name
• Position
• Contact number
• Email address
• Office address
• Social media addresses
• Website address

We hope the points above have given you a little insight into what is achievable with business card design and printing. Get in touch if you’re interested in our business card design and printing services.

The post How to design a great Business Card appeared first on Hatchit Design.

Simplicity is key
Remember the letterhead is the identity of the document, not the content itself.

Branding
The letterhead needs to reflect the company’s branding including the logo, fonts and colour scheme.

Include the right details
The most important goal of the letterhead is to tell the viewer who it’s from. But you may also want to consider including your Social and website addresses, telephone number (extension if necessary) and email details. Remember it may be a legal requirement to display your identification number, for example if you are designing for a Charity.

Design for bad printers
The design may look incredible when printed professionally, but it may look awful being printed out of a budget one. Simple designs are best for avoiding this issue.

Don’t overdo it on colour
You don’t need to include the spectrum, and using too many colours may draw attention away from the letter content. This rule tends to apply in other areas of design too.

Include accreditation logos and qualifications
If you have professional qualifications or belong to organisations, include these along the bottom of the letterhead.

If you are in need of a graphic design or print, please feel free to get in touch with us!

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