What is a call to action and why does your web page need one?

Posted on 2 May, 2012 by Dermot

Call to action on your web pageYou may have heard that it’s important to have calls to action on your website, but what exactly is a call to action? This article explains what they are and why they are important, and gives some tips on creating them.

You have probably visited many web pages which don’t give you any options on what to do next. They’re a dead end, forcing you to either leave the site or go back to the previous page. At best you’ll have the option of clicking a menu to take you to another page on the site.  If your site has pages like this you need to add a call to action to them now – all pages on your site should have a call to action. Read more →

Categories: Website design
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Responsive website or mobile website: which is best?

Posted on 22 March, 2012 by Dermot

It is estimated that by 2013 more people will use mobile devices than computers to access the internet. You could be losing potential customers if your website doesn’t work well on a mobile phone or a tablet.

Website owners haven’t woken up to this yet – in early 2011 less than 19% of the world’s top 500,000 websites were mobile-ready. This is good news for you because by adapting your site to work on mobiles you can be ahead of the game and more importantly, ahead of your competitors.

So how do you go about getting a mobile website? There are actually two quite different ways of doing it and each has its own pros and cons. We look at the features of each to help you choose.
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Categories: Mobile websites
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The new SEO – and how you can do it yourself

Posted on 24 February, 2012 by Dermot

DIY search engine optimisationNot so many years ago, search engine optimisation (SEO) was all about finding the best keywords for your target market, organising your site structure to suit the search engines, and building links from good quality websites. All of these are still important but there’s a whole new set of parameters to consider now. Changes in what the search engines are looking for mean that you now have to consider quality of content, user experience and how much your site integrates with social media like Facebook and Twitter. You increasingly hear umbrellas terms like search engine marketing or internet marketing which suggest that SEO on it’s own is no longer enough.

That’s not to say that SEO is less important than it was. 49% of internet users use a search engine every day and an amazing 80% of high street purchases start with research on the internet. So what’s new in SEO and what do we need to do differently?  Here is my list of five key tasks based on the new SEO I think you should carry out in an SEO and internet marketing campaign.
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Web usability principle 4: Keep it short (and use white space)

Posted on 10 January, 2012 by Dermot

Our 4th and final principle in our series on web usability is about keeping it short. This can be hard. You’ve spent ages crafting some great content and when you put it on the web page it’s way too long. The truth is your punters aren’t going to read it. They’ll scan it quickly and look for words or phrases that are useful. So make all your words and phrases useful and cut out the stuff you don’t need. Steve Krug’s book Don’t make me think which inspired these article targets two types of useless text: happy talk and instructions.
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Categories: Web usability
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Web usability principle 3: Breadcrumbs

Posted on 22 December, 2011 by Dermot

You are here image to illustrate breadcrumbsIn part 3 of our series on web usability we’ll look at another aid to navigation known as breadcrumbs. The term comes from the trail of breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel in the popular fairytale. Breadcrumbs are about knowing where you are and are a bit like the “You are here” arrows you see on maps in town centres.
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Categories: Web usability
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