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Tag: mobile website

Three Mobile Friendly Website Design Tips

Every day, 92.6 percent (4.32 billion) internet users use a mobile device to browse the web among the 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide. A lot of people use mobile devices to access the web, that’s why you need to have a mobile friendly website.

User experience is the most important part of every site when it comes to converting, it also has a factor with how Google ranks your site. Here are five mobile-friendly website design tips for creating a great mobile web design.

  1. Pick a mobile-responsive website or blog theme.

A website plays a vital role in your site as it is the preconfigured framework that defines how your website looks. Mobile responsive themes are pre-coded for both optimal desktop and mobile navigation.

Much of the work of a website would depend on its visuals and design. A good design on your website that serves its purpose and matches with your brand identity should impress your visitors and be a deciding factor for them to stay longer on your site. It also serves as a way to set you apart from competitors.

Mobile-friendly WordPress sites are the new norm, but despite how common they may seem, it still creates a beautiful and responsive site. Make sure that you also have an effective website landing page as it is the most vital foundation of lead generation.

  1. Simplify your website content.

When creating copy and design elements for your mobile website, the important rule is to simplify everything. Making a website look sleek and reducing navigation confusion helps in achieving an effective site.

The website that we create, from articles, business plans to user interfaces are all important. Simple actions like putting your focus on essential elements for your website’s success will eventually pay off. Get rid of unnecessary pages, pop-ups, and design ideas, and opt for the quick and simple.

  1. Prioritize site performance.

Ultimately, having a fast-loading site can benefit both you and your customers. Page speed has been useful for a long time in terms of how your sites are ranked in Google desktop searches.

Good responsive website designs adjust to the screen of the viewer whether they are reading from a desktop computer, a tablet, or a phone. The first step is to simply see how fast your site currently loads — if all is working correctly, you might not even need to do anything else. You can evaluate your page speed with a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

The majority of visitors prefer viewing websites via their smartphones and this has brought into popularity the concept of designing mobile-friendly versions of websites.

As more and more people use their smartphones or tablets to access the internet, site designers have to adjust to address those usage patterns. Is your site ready for your mobile visitors?

With 25 years of experience in the industry and as a certified Digital Agency in the Philippines, iManila is ready to help you with your website development, hosting, digital

marketing and technical support needs. Inquire now and message us today!

Essential Elements for Website Success this 2021

What makes a successful website? In this day and age, having just a website is not enough. You would need a website that is effective, optimized, and visually appealing. An ineffective website can be a waste of time and money for any business. 

Luckily, we have laid out in this article some essential elements to bring out success for your website. Take inspiration from these to bring out the best in your website this 2021. 

Know your goals

This is one of the most crucial steps to having a website. Websites do not serve the purpose of having one just because everyone has it. Websites should be designed to cater to the goals that you want for your business. Ask yourself the outcome you expect from your website visitors when they go into your site. 

Once you have figured this out, this is where you can build a strategy. This is the only time you can start to think of the things such as what name, title, logo, or tagline your website will have. Take the time to also read through our recent blog to know more about online business resilience this 2021 And must haves for a successful digital workspace in 2021.

Clear navigation

A website is only good if your visitors actually understand it. This highlights the importance of having site navigation that is clear and straight to the point, which will help users explore your site much faster and see the content that they are looking for. Good site navigation is also one of the best practices of good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as it helps search engines index your website pages easily. 

Good home page 

In this day and age, people are having shorter attention spans. This becomes a challenge for marketers as this means you need to capture users’ attention in the shortest possible time once they reach your website. For a majority of visitors, the home page is where they will first set their eyes on your site. In this short span of time, 90% of visitors already make a decision about your website with just one look at the homepage. 

A good homepage for your website should contain everything that visitors need to know and it should clearly state what your business is offering or doing differently than your competitors. Making sure that your logo, tagline, promotional messages are impressive and direct-to-the-point are vital in making visitors stay longer on your website. 

Mobile-Friendliness

A majority of visitors prefer viewing websites via their smartphones and this has brought into popularity the concept of designing mobile-friendly versions of websites. Good responsive website designs adjust to the screen of the viewer whether they are reading from a desktop computer, a tablet, or a phone. This means that text, images, and other elements are not compromised just because the viewing screen is different. 

Visible call-to-action

Going back to your website’s goals, what you want your customer to accomplish in your website should be clearly displayed in your call-to-action. This can range from “buy now” or to a request for quotation, or to contact you through your contact numbers. 

This is where website visitors become a business lead or conversion, and call-to-action buttons should act as a guide on how to get there. A good call-to-action design should make itself clear to your visitor even if they are not seeking it out at first, and should convince them to click that button to take the next step to purchase your product. 

Aesthetic design

Much of the work of a website would depend on its visuals and design. A good design on your website that serves its purpose and matches with your brand identity should impress your visitors and be a deciding factor for them staying longer in your site. It also serves as a way to set you apart from competitors and make you stand out from the pack. 

It is important to know key elements that make websites a success. These serve as good foundations for what you want your website to be. Even for those with little, to no experience in making websites, knowing this information is a great way to better think of a strategy for your business and identifying how a website can contribute to its success. Set your business for success in 2021 with iManila!

Having a partnership with the right website development agency can help make your website goals into reality. iManila is a full-service digital marketing agency ready to help you with your  website development, hosting, and digital marketing needs. See what a business like iManila, with over 25 years of experience in the industry, can do for you and your business. Contact us now to learn more! 

What you need to know about E-Commerce Marketing

The digital world is now officially a huge part of our daily lives with the new normal that we are promptly facing. The pandemic has made everyone realize that we all have to adapt to living online. We are now living at a time wherein e-commerce is beneficial to every business and consumer.

A lot of changes have happened in the past few months, a lot of lives have changed, some businesses have closed, while different people and communities have been struggling financially. This crisis has tested us but one good thing that has come out from it is how we have adapted to living our lives online.

Let’s begin by first defining what is e-commerce marketing. E-commerce marketing is about driving brand awareness and call-to-action for consumers to buy your products and avail of your services. You have to successfully cater to your buyer’s preferences and work your way around it effectively to reach your target market and to effectively make sales conversions through online platforms whether it be through your website or through social media.

Here are some ways to make the most out of e-commerce marketing:

  1. Build a strong bond and loyalty.

One of the most essential tasks that you should focus on is the strong bond and loyalty towards the consumers. The benefits of customer relationship strategies should be well taken care of and be established. Nowadays, consumers develop a relational approach that relates to customer loyalty.

There is a lot to take into account for an effective service type to build on customer bond and loyalty. For your brand to succeed it must have a sustainable competitive advantage that increases customer retention and attraction to your brand. For as loyalty increases, the volume of purchases and customer referrals also increase.

Once you’ve developed a strong bond with your consumers, a lot of marketing benefits will follow such as, the good ole’ word-of-mouth marketing, good reviews, testimonials, and even case studies. Once successfully done, your e-commerce store will be filled with people that are engaged to your products and services, thereby increasing the level of brand awareness and driving more sales.

  1. Customize and personalize your e-commerce site.

Consumers are more likely to buy from brands that they can remember. The best brands are usually remembered through different promotions and unique offerings. Every consumer is always satisfied when they have a personalized experience thus it makes them feel special, helping improve their shipping experience.

In a traditional retail store, we would always visit stores that make us feel known and special through its store employees. Brick and mortar stores are designed to attract customers while products are laid out to grab attention. The same goes for e-commerce stores, where buyers should be made to feel welcome and should have a positive user experience from the homepage to the inner pages.

Customized and personalized e-commerce sites make the users’ experience and purchases faster and easier. It is all about treating every person who visits your site as an exclusive customer. Tailor fit your site to reflect the unique needs of every buyer in a way that they will feel like they are part of the brand’s journey.

  1. Establish and capitalize on user-generated content (UGC).

To make it big online, you have to cut out and push through ahead of your competitors. Brands should always keep on trying something new and staying in trend to remain and be known as number one. One way to stay influential is through user-generated content. User-generated content allows marketers to let their consumers do the talking for them. It is about allowing people to advertise your product for you based on their own experiences and feedback.

  1. Provide an Add-to-Cart option.

An e-commerce site is not without a shopping cart. It’s almost similar to the traditional shopping cart, but this time around, everything just works with a click Having a well visible shopping cart allows buyers to control what they want to buy and allowing them an easier access to proceed to check-out to purchase the items on their cart.

Most importantly, a visible add-to-cart option on your website lets users know that they can get what they need with no fuss. It is also important that upon checking-out, users are aware of your company’s return policy, delivery procedures and options and that when needed, a customer support representative is available to answer any concerns.

  1. Create a responsive and effective web design.

Having a responsive and modern web design is an important aspect of an e-commerce website. The design should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on the adjustment to the screen size, platform, and orientation.

Follow the rule that “less is more” but also don’t be afraid to use a different mix of artworks, designs, and images. All of your e-commerce strategies will only work well when your website has a responsive design, is easily viewable, and can be accessed with the use of any gadgets. Finally, always make it a point to organize your content, keep the words simple and make sure that your website can be easily navigated regardless of age or gender.

Not sure where to begin with your e-commerce marketing? Having the right agency partner can help you establish your business goals and thrive in the “new normal”. iManila can develop the best, user-friendly, modern and easy-to-use e-commerce website for your business. Let’s talk or check out our website at www.imanila.ph to learn more.

Debunking the Most Common Website Myths

It is always a milestone for a business to have their own website as it’s a great way to expand their online presence. It can be exciting, but there are also a lot of myths about having your own website. 

We’re here to debunk those common myths and help you get on the right track to having the best business website possible!

Once you have a working website, you’ll attract visitors

Getting the website working and online is only half the work. What happens here is that there is a mismatch in expectations with business owners with how websites can give them the results they want. 

The truth is that it takes time, resources, and skills to attract website visitors. There are many factors to consider such as search engine optimization, paid search ads, video ads — in short, a lot of promotional means to get the right amount of traffic to your site. Once you put in the action then effort, that is the only time you’ll be seeing an increase in your website traffic. 

If your website looks good, you will start getting sales

Closely related to the previous one, while a well-designed website may be grabbing the attention of your visitors, it doesn’t necessarily equate to a sale. 

It is true that to attract new people and to give visitors a good user experience you would need a beautiful website, but at the end of the day, it’s still the quality of your products and services and brand reputation that weighs more. If all you are offering is aesthetic but your products or service fail to follow through on its promises, it will fail because people will be able to see through it. A business first and foremost must focus on its own products before worrying about aesthetics and appearances. If you are focused on delivering the right value to your site visitors, your site would work its magic even without the over-the-top designs. In short, your product should speak for itself, your website is merely a tool in helping your message get across to potential customers. 

Once your website is up, the work is done

This again is a mismatch of expectation as websites need ongoing attention much like any other business that needs to be nurtured and maintained. 

Website maintenance is a thing and part and parcel of this is renewing your domain registration on time, protecting your site from any potential threats such as viruses or cybercrime, keeping your design up to date in line with current trends, and investing in promotion to keep the site visitors coming. 

Your website needs to have all the features the other websites have 

There is a misconception that more features means your website will be better. While you may get a lot of inspiration by viewing websites of other brands, you may start to notice some of them have certain elements such as carousels for their headers. But again, it is always important to know the value of each decision as these can hinder your customers from properly navigating your site and getting them to do what you intend them to do. 

For websites, simplicity is key. The bells and whistles would not matter to your customer if they can get their business done on your website in the most direct and simple manner. It is always about the value that the customers get from your products or services. If you are thinking of having a certain feature, know that if it wouldn’t add anything of value to your customers then it’s better left out. 

What’s next?

For different people you may ask, websites may mean different things for them. However, it is important to know what it is that your business really needs as everyone has different approaches. Each business works differently. It is nice to research more about how you can create the kind of website that suits the purpose you intend it to and helps you achieve your business goals. Starting with debunking these common website myths, we hope to be able to guide you in creating your dream website. 

Getting the right experts on board can help ease any worries you might have about building a website on your own. Rest assured that you can find the right partner in iManila, who has been in the industry for over 24 years. Learn more about how we can help you build your website and how we can make it work for you. 

MOBILE FRIENDLINESS RANKING FACTOR: Why You Need to be Mobile-Responsive

 

MOBILE FRIENDLINESS IS NOW A THING — It is common knowledge to most marketers that Last April 2015, Google search has expanded its mobile friendliness algorithm known as “Mobilegeddon”. This update from Google has marked the beginning of a shift of focus from desktop to mobile searches and has affected a lot of websites that are not mobile-responsive. Some of the affected may have experienced a decline in their Google SERP ranking or even to the volume of their monthly traffic.

What is Mobile Friendliness?

There are 75.4 million unique mobile users in the Philippines, comprising 74% of the nation’s population. Almost everyone these days considers themselves to be “tech-savvy” with the advent of the internet allowing even the simplest devices to do an amazing amount of tasks.

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Let’s face it, with a market as large as that, you probably want your brand to be etched on the consciousness of these users.  This is exactly why it’s time for your website to go mobile.

Opting for a mobile-responsive website or the mobile friendliness of your website enables it to be sent instantly dynamic as it fits symmetrically on any screen size, minimizing usability issues such as links that are not clickable, images taking forever to appear, scrolling problems and lagging issues.

Simply put – a mobile-responsive website enhances user experience.

Want to know how to make your website friendly? Say hi to one of our account executives, or leave us a message on our contact form.

Mobile version vs Mobile-Responsive

On the off-chance that you live under a rock, you might probably be more familiar with the term “mobile version”.

Mobile version is different from mobile-responsive. The former means developing a version of your website customized for mobile users and uses a separate URL commonly beginning with “m” (such as m.facebook.com). It’s like having two unique websites with one dedicated to desktops and another for mobile devices.

The latter, on the other hand, automatically resizes the content of your website based on user device allowing for optimum user experience.

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Post-Mobilegeddon Updates

Aside from the ‘mobilegeddon’ released on 2015, other updates released were Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which launched in February 2016, and ‘mobile­first indexing’, which Google has been working on for quite a while now.
The AMP or the Accelerated Mobile Page Project is an open source initiative of Google launched in October 2015. This update works towards increasing the performance of the mobile web, loading web pages instantly, even with rich content or ads.

 

AMP is not a mobile ranking factor, however, its objective is to improve the functions of mobile websites with stripped-down versions of web pages. This enables users to read and scan your content with ease, improving your website’s traffic and in time, improving your SERP ranking. Google AMP lets publishers focus on great content while depending on other components like image carousels and social plug­ins for high performance and great user experience.

 

Another recent update is mobile­first indexing. Google has been adjusting their algorithms to primarily use mobile versions of website content to rank pages, understand its structured data, and show snippets from those pages on their SERPs. Here are some of the recommendations of google about dealing with the mobile­first indexing update:

  • Stay on your responsive site or dynamic serving site on desktop and mobile version;
  • If the two versions of your website’s primary content are different, you should make your structured data uniform, make your mobile website crawlable, and maintain canonical links unchanged;
  • Verify your desktop and mobile website versions against Google Search Console;
  • Launch new mobile sites only when they’re ready, to avoid any unwanted effects on your desktop sites that may arise from faulty mobile ones.

What is for business online?

Businesses that rely heavily on traffic and leads coming from online sources should prepare to change extensively, otherwise, their potential sales will be flushed down the drain. Below are the advantages of making your website mobile-responsive:

Know more about the benefits of a mobile-responsive website or its mobile friendliness by calling our sales executives or by sending us a message through this LINK.

It strengthens your website’s optimization.

With Google recently releasing an algorithm specifically targeting websites that aren’t mobile-responsive yet, now would be the best time to do so. Having a mobile-responsive site brings more traffic to your website which then opens doors to increase sales and revenue. A great search rank on desktop and mobile would be beneficial for your business because that’s brand awareness reaching your market through multiple channels.

It saves you time and money.

With a mobile-responsive website, you can focus your resources instead in building and creating new campaigns and content instead of developing a separate website for mobile devices.

It keeps you ahead of your competition.

There are a lot of businesses who have yet to invest in this new kind of technology because, well, it’s new; and new is a mystery few have the courage to explore.

Going mobile-responsive automatically puts you ahead of the curve because you’re already building your rank up while others are still flirting with the idea.

It provides an optimum user experience for your consumers.

With smartphones and tablets continuously increasing in terms of usage, giving your market the ability to browse through your site with ease is one step to earning their trust. Because everything is organized and made faster, potential clients are more likely to explore your website than leave it the moment they see the home page. Your site will have perfectly scaled images and readable texts so there’s no reason to not give it a chance.

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Sources:

  1. Straightarrow.com.ph
  2. Webmaster.googleblog.com