Logo

Your company logo is needed so that visitors know that it is your company website that they are on. Make sure your logo is visible at a small size and that the colors are in RGB (digital colors). If you have an old logo, it may be time for a re-design by a professional design agency. If you have an illustrative one or one with a lot of detail, you may need to simplify or have your logo visible embedded in your top image. Be aware that if you have it embedded in your top image it could mean for future images your logo must be visible or you will have to forgo sliders or videos where the logo isn’t there. Logos in the header are often hyperlinked to take the user back to the home page. 

Navigation Menu 

Whether you have individual links to each page, a mega menu, or a hamburger menu, you need to have a way for users to navigate your website. Usually access to a navigation menu is at the top. There are some exceptions to the rule like side menus, but those are usually reserved for apps where users will swipe to access the navigation. Before designing your website, it is ideal to have a sitemap where you can figure out how many pages you need and how they will be maneuvered. This will inform what type of navigation to use. 

Call To Action 

You want to encourage users to take the next step in the sale process. CTAs that are usually at the top-right of your webpage are:

• Company phone number
• Email Us Icon/Link
• Contact Us Page
• Request a Quote Page
• Support Link

Search Bar 

A search bar is needed if you have a large website with a lot of products, services, or information. Distributor websites will have a search bar at the top of their website so users can type in the brand they want, and it will directly pop up. The users will not have to go into layers of webpages to hunt down what they want. This will prevent clients from giving up on your website and bouncing out. A simple search bar can improve click-through-rates and improve the user experience of your website. 

Ecommerce Icons 

 If your business is ecommerce, then you need icons your user can use to complete the purchase and continue for future purchases. These icons are: 

• Login/My Account icon
• Add to Cart icon 
• Add to Wish List icon
• A Like/Favorite icon
• A Share icon 

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Reward Customer After They Complete a Task 

Offer a discount code or free shipping to customers that sign up for the first time or spend X amount of dollars. This creates a positive experience and rewards customers for giving up their personal information to your business. Customers will feel they are gain a bonus in addition to the product. Create trust and build a relationship between your company’s brand and the client. Building on that trust will help increase revenue and purchase conversion in the long run because your company will be helping the client make a valuable choice. 

 Add a “Last Item Left” Label 

Exclusivity and scarcity motivate customers to decide quicker on whether to make the purchase. If an item is never coming back or not coming back for a long time, they may want to purchase the item right away, so they feel like they own something rare and unique. Most CMS websites such as WordPress call it a “Ribbon” feature that you add to your product, and it will show up at the top corner of your product image. Say something like “1 left” or “gone Oct 15”. 

Send a “Item Left in Cart” Email    

Sometimes clients like to gather products but purchase them later. This can lead them to forget what they have in their cart. Send a reminder email 2-3 days later, notifying them that they have items in their cart. A lot of email campaign plugins on websites allow you to automate this task, it is called a trigger workflow. Depending on the type of plugin, it might ask something like this: send abandon cart email every _______ days. It will also allow your business to track your web visitors’ actions. This is helpful info for when coming up with a marketing strategy to keep user retention. 

 Partner with an Influencer 

An influencer isn’t just a young famous rich person, it can also be anyone with knowledge authority. Take a local boutique shop for example. If a travel blogger gives a raving review about how much they admire your hiking boots, reach out to see it they would like a free pair in exchange that they wright an article exclusively about those boots and send to their readers. This can help increase web traffic and brand awareness. Keep in mind a lot of followers doesn’t mean those followers have purchase power. Develop a social media marketing plan to include market research and specifically target potential clients that would be interested in your product and are able to purchase it. 

 Offer Free Trial Periods 

This tip is more for software or subscription-based services. Some products clients like to try before they buy. Keep generic tools free but provide one advanced feature that make your product special and different from the competition. Don’t make too difficult to cancel. Have turn-off auto-renewal payment available in their settings. Some companies make the mistake of putting cancelation too deep in the app or website account settings and this ends up frustrating the client leaving them never to return. In addition, have a survey that you send to gain feedback on how you can improve your product. This will encourage brand loyalty and make them feel included in the creation process. 

Update your E-Commerce Website with these features. Call 248.528.360

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1. WordPress is Everywhere

WordPress is used by more than 60% of all the CMS websites and more than 35% of all the websites in general. This indicates how strong and flexible the platform is by supporting a huge chunk of the internet’s websites. 

2. Open Source, Free & Super-easy

WordPress is an open-source content management system. It is available for free for everyone to download and install. You need to pay for themes, plugins, domain name, hosting services, etc., but the platform essentially does not put any extra burden on your pocket in terms of building a foundation. The upgrades and updates are also free, which is important for keep your business relevant and SEO-friendly. 

3. Effortless to Set-up and Manage

WordPress is extremely easy to setup and manage. One can easily access it from anywhere and anytime by hosting the website online using cloud hosting services. You can also create an account on WordPress and link all your existing websites to one platform. All these websites can be accessed and managed from a single login. The user-friendly interface makes website management simple with a hierarchy of menus and sub-menus reduces the cognitive burden. 

4. Endless Customizability Support

WordPress is its immense customizability. Highly flexible, it suits both static and dynamic websites. Manage your WordPress website yourself or hire experts to maintain. An endless supply of themes and plugins available for WordPress enables endless customization. Most importantly, WordPress websites are highly compatible and adaptable to different types of screen sizes, thus boosting responsiveness and mobile friendliness.

5. Themes & Plugins for Every Need

There are hundreds of themes and plugins that make it easy for businesses to enable various functionalities on the website and fulfill various goals. These items are commonly used by many blogging, eCommerce, and other kinds of website owners. For example, many users integrate Google Analytics to monitor and track their website data, some use Yoast SEO for their search engine optimization related needs. The plugins can also be activated and deactivated as required and themes can also be chosen and adjusted as per requirements.

6. Super-smart Content Editor & Manager

WordPress has multiple content editors like block editor, Gutenberg, and classic editor that are all super easy to use and highly functional with no code knowledge required. This makes the content creation process more efficient and flawless. Scheduling and publishing blogs posts or other posts is also extremely easy. Add blogs from other platforms as RSS feeds using plugins like RSS Aggregator and others. 

7. Powerful Media & Gallery Manager

Media of any content adds to the overall aesthetic charm of the website. With WordPress’ smart media management, image optimization functionalities, and in-built settings it helps optimize media and boost the page load time. If needed, you can use plugins to automatically optimize the images when the page loads for a website. Users can also edit the media on WordPress itself and create a gallery of images, videos, and audio clips. 

8. Effortless Task Management for All

WordPress allows users to upload files with a drag and drop function making it easy to edit posts, pages, tags, or categories in bulk. Adding SEO information and other data related nuances is also very easy along with interlinking pages and managing other information. Beginners can make use of all the support; experts can tap into the customizability features and make the most of it. WordPress also does not require huge bandwidth and can be installed and run on even limited resources. The same goes for creating and publishing posts on WordPress as well.

9. Support for Custom Categories & Tags

The world’s best CMS is perfect for blogs, eCommerce websites, e-learning platforms, dating websites, and a whole wide range of industries. It supports custom categories and tags that makes it suitable for creating large and nuanced websites with extremely detailed navigation features. Create an extensive hierarchy of segmented pages and posts on your business’s website and add as much detailing as needed.

10. Easy Spam & Cache Management

Caching is an important feature and WordPress makes it super easy with the smart plugins and functionalities. The most popular ones include WP Fastest Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, WP Rocket, etc. These plugins will speed up the site and boost load time. WordPress also makes it easy to protect your site against spam. Users can monitor comments and reviews, filter out spam, and keep their websites free of any unwanted material. Many WordPress hosting, security and maintenance related services and tools available online or used by web and marketing agencies to help. 

11. Social Media Integration & Marketing Support

In today’s world, any brand is incomplete without a robust social media presence and audience. WordPress have plugins available for social media integration and sharing. Users can encourage social sharing and inspire reactions, engagements, etc. for blog posts, images, and products. Email marketing and contact form related plugins can help you build your subscriber and emailing list too. 

12. Google & SEO friendly

WordPress is as Google and SEO friendly! Many features and functionalities that can power your website and make it more search engine friendly, thereby ensuring higher ranks and good visibility to your target audience. You can also get SSL certification for your website and add a layer of security and authenticity. This in turn, will further strengthen your website’s image in the eyes of Google.

Some additional important features: 

• Plugins for sitemap management: Help Google understand the hierarchy of your website pages and files and mark the important ones.
• Easy permalink management: Easy to structure the permalink and optimize it on WordPress with inbuilt features and settings.
• SEO plugins: WordPress has many SEO plugins that can help you optimize your website for better ranks, visibility, and traffic.
• Code-compression: Google hates long unstructured code and considers it as malicious. This is not an issue on WordPress as it has code-compressor plugins that can compress codes from HTML, CSS, JS, etc.

13. Easy Back-ups, Restorations, & Updates

Updates and backups are a part any website longevity. WordPress updates are free and super-easy to implement. It is also easy to manage backups and restore website data. Leave these tasks to the hosting and maintenance services if needed. They can manage regular security checks, install updates, and facilitate regular data backups and one-click restorations. While minor and easy, these can pile up when you are business running the rest of your business. 

14. Strong Knowledge Base, Support & Community

WordPress has a strong and huge global community, free from any monopoly and every user can interact with other users, developers, etc. There are endless forums and communities dedicated to discussions related to WordPress and it is easy to connect with these circles and resolve any issue or query. The internet is also full of ample literature and informative pieces on WordPress. Thus, whether you or a professional maintains your website, they are do not get stuck and can get all the required help for achieving anything on the platform. This can also save on cost. You can resolve issues quickly, instead of having your website down for a long time and hurting profits. 

We build our websites on WordPress and can create an amazing custom websites for your business. Call 248.528.3600

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1. Who are you?
   • How did your company start?
   • What is your story?
   • How was your product or service created? 
   • Write a small synopsis about you company & link to the about page. 
2. What are you an expert in?
   • Include a FAQ
   • Include preview and a link to blog 
   • Talk about your market and how your product or service affects it
3. Who do you serve?
   • Research demographics and competitors 
   • What images and language create relatability? 
   • Include keywords from SEO plan into content 
4. How can I (the visitor) benefit from your services?
   • What problem is your product or service solving?
   • Use emotion and practically 
   • Example: lotion makes you feel good and gets rid of your dry skin
     • I can purchase online, or I am informed on how to find way to contact your business
5. What do I do next?
   • Strategically place calls-to-action at the top, middle, and bottom on home page
     • Examples of calls-to-action:
       • Call Now
       • Purchase 
       • Contact Us
       • Find Out More
       • Order Now

Update your home page. Call 248.528.3600.

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1. 3D Design

Tech and software capabilities are advancing year by year. Many designers are experimenting with 3D illustration and moving away from flat vector illustrations. With 3D illustration you can add depth and dimension. Incorporate this style into animations, typography, photos, and previous flat illustration to create a compelling attention-grabbing graphic for your digital marketing materials. 

2. Maximalism

Oversaturated the senses with bold color combinations, contrasting patterns, layered images, and repeated motifs. This trend leaves little white space with dense design with dramatic detail. Last year minimalism was the popular trend. If your brand relied heavily of minimalism find an agency that performs brand audits to see if you should continue to stick to minimalism or if you should re-brand with maximalism in mind. 

3. Simplified Logos

Many companies are stripping back from excessive detail and complex design elements in their logos. The lack of detail helps to appeal to new audiences, appears approachable, and is easier to apply on many different mediums from packages to websites. Use 2-3 colors max, basic shapes and easy to read text as a staring off point for a new logo.

4. Minimalist Retro

This is trend is perfect for nostalgic brands that rely on magazine or editorial style layouts and interesting packaging. Old-school fonts, muted color palettes, warm tones, soft shadows, and natural textures are elements that give a brand a vintage feel. 

5. Abstract Surrealism

Brands that encourage escape from reality and rely on a futuristic aesthetic fit perfectly with this trend. Fantastical illustration, evocative images, bizarre landscapes, and dream or nightmare-like designs elevate the brand on a whole new level. Apply these items to your digital marketing materials to really pop off. 

6. Dreamy Muted Gradients

Gradients that give off an ethereal fuzzy look and feel use soft pastels and grainy textures. Social media or app logos along with branding and presentation designs rely on these elements for visually pleasing aesthetic that isn’t too overpowering. If your brand wants to give clients a calm laid-back feeling, consider incorporating a gradient into your print and digital marketing material. 

7. Embracing Simplicity

It is always refreshing to go back to the basic simplicity of life. During the pandemic, many people took the time to apricate the small things in their life. Consistent basic geometric shapes, limited color palette, and line art are an excellent choice for classy brands that want to be warm and inviting.

8. Colorful Minimalism

Monochromatic palettes and maximum white space are popular for minimalistic brands that want to add a splash of excitement. Use large blocks of color, giant text, and imagery with spotlights of color. These designs really stand out on Pinterest boards and crowded social media spaces. 

9. Non-Fungible Tokens

While controversial due to its environmental footprint and concerns with copyright, the space for creators and buyers is growing. One step forward to fix the concerns is that NFTs now provide verifiable proof of origin and allow only one person to own them, increasing the artwork value. This good news for creators who worry about their creations being replicated without permission. Keep an eye out for NFTs fixes and plan for marketing projects to become artwork collectables in this space.

Call 248.528.3600 today to incorporate these trends into your marketing trends.  

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 Visual Look: 

User expectations are high. Any graphics that look dated (not to be confused with nostalgia era style) leaves a negative impression or an implication that your info is dated. This can lead to your business being skipped in their decision-making process. Keep up with visual trends and if you have a hard time determining how to incorporate the current trends, consult with a professional designer or digital marketing agency for help.

 Navigation:

Function and readability are very important when it comes to the navigation of your website. The navigation should act as a guide for users. They need to know where to find the correct information. Create a sitemap or have a professional create one for you highlighting which keywords lead to which page of your website.

Intuitiveness:

This is where you must peer into the future a bit and anticipate your users’ needs. Place call-to-actions strategically throughout your website. These buttons or links are especially important when it comes to new visitors. This will help guide the sale if they are unsure upon arrival. 

Branding:

Visual content and written content must be cohesive. Your brand is your business’ voice, image, and reputation. Let your website tell a story. Include compelling graphics about how your product was discovered and made or how your service works and the satisfying results. If you have client ratings or testimonials, include them on your website. Also, don’t be afraid to include your worst ratings and include a “how we are fixing that” section.

Design or re-design your website with us. Call 248.528.3600. 

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• 50-60% is WordPress’ share of the global CMS market
• New York Observer, New York Post, TED, Thought Catalog, Williams, USA Today, CNN, Fortune.com, TIME.com, National Post, Spotify, TechCrunch, CBS Local, NBC, and more all use WordPress. 
• Roughly 500+ new sites being built daily in the top 10 million websites on the web (compared to Shopify’s and Squarespace’s 60-80). 
• WordPress powers 14.7% of top 100 websites in the world. 
• 17 posts are published every second on WordPress sites around the world. 
• 37 million global Google searches for “WordPress” are made per month. 

Let us help you build your WordPress website today. Call 248.528.3600

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Fun, Optimistic Designs 

Unique or abstract shapes & colors with images of people happy or hopeful. This is much needed during the pandemic where depression is on the rise. Lighter typefaces and interesting fonts as opposed to dark and bold fonts can also help create a sense of positive emotions. 

Black & White Color Schemes 

Doesn’t this contradict the first point? Kind of, the first point applies to many businesses, but if your business sells something serious the first point may be inappropriate. Black & White color schemes can create stark beautiful designs without overwhelming your audience. Adding subtle liquid animation on the hover can create a sense of calm and encourage interactivity. 

Bold & Experimental Typography   

This trend is more popular in fashion and magazine businesses. Large serif and san serif fonts create impact. Experimental fonts can also allow you to be unique and stand out from other similar businesses. Add animation or flex options to create a more dynamic feel to your web design. With this trend make sure you test on mobile, not all experiment fonts translate. You may have to play with characters and font colors.

Oversized Pointers 

When you move your mouse or trackpad the pointer grows over clickable elements of your website. These are like magnifying glass that gives your audience a sense of discovery and encourages them to look at your whole website. 

Three-Dimensional Design Elements 

Real-estate, architectural, and businesses selling products are adding a 3D flair to their websites. Shadows, animations, and layer effects or combining all three are ways to add a multidimensional look to your website. Adding videos with model renders or photo illustrations can also help you tell a story. 

Almost Brutalism 

Brutalism by itself can be too overwhelming for some websites but adding a lighter edge easier-on-the-eyes serif or sans serif font can soften the otherwise harsh “yelling” feeling it usually gives. The text carries the design with minimal visuals and colors, so make sure ample space is between elements to keep it legible. 

Scrolling Text Elements

Readability is important, but there is no reason why they can’t be dynamic as well. Short calls-to-action, keywords, or phrases with oversized fonts scrolling slowly left to right can create visual interest. It can also allow your audience to stay on your website longer as to read what the whole word or phrase says. This reduces bounce rate which is great for SEO purposes. 

Glassmorphism 

Corporate websites or perfume businesses may want to consider this look.  By adding transparency, frostiness, or glossiness that look reminiscent of glass to elements on your website you can create a clean style.

What to add any of these trends to your website? Call 248.528.3600

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