How To Build Great Landing Pages

A great landing page is the most prominent feature of a successful online presence of a brand. Your PCC ads and offers might be the pieces of perfection, but in the absence of a great landing page in your web design, your brand is going to suffer. Being a professional web designer in Brisbane, I strongly recommend flawless and powerful landing pages for my clients. In this article, I will be sharing some secrets behind developing a great landing page, which would be of much help for the web designers struggling with its development.

Goal 1: Organized & Clean Design

The appearance, feel and overall structure of your web design greatly affect the effectiveness of the landing page and the way it drives conversions. The key goal of the landing page is to make it as simple and easy as possible for the visitors. Hence, it is important that all the components of the page are cohesive towards conversion motive, whether it is making a purchase, filling a form, downloading an eBook or signing up for the newsletter.
A great landing page design smartly uses color and appealing images. Certain button colors like green or red are considered to boost landing page conversion, however, you need to make sure that there is a powerful contrast between background and the colors. There are a number of button attributes to be tested to make sure great landing pages. Testing is usually done for color, positioning, and size.

Goal 2: Try To Be Minimalist

Make sure you are developing a clean landing page with clear, natural navigations and there are no distractions like pop-ups. A great landing page gives all the essential information required to encourage visitors to make a purchase, but nothing extra. If you give too much information, it might overwhelm the visitors, pulling him to shut the site. Hence, keep it quite simple and give only the necessary information. The information you put on the front and in the center should be scannable, with bullet points and sufficient white space.

Goal 3: Header Should Be There

A great landing page must be having a strong offer and be compelling enough to explain its value in a very concise and clear way. The heading and subheadings on landing page give a great chance to promote your offer value. Mostly, an effective landing page contains a heading of the offer, with subheadings for its further explanation.

Goal 4: Trust Signals

Great landing pages use a lot of trust signals, which can show to visitors that your offer and brand are reliable and valuable. The trust signals can be of varied forms like testimonials are the most common form, leveraging word-of-mouth marketing to affirm visitor with brand endorsements from previous and current clients. Sometimes, it can be done through “like” counters, which leads to more subtle endorsement trough “Likes” and +1s from different social media sites.

Goal 5: Mobile Friendly / Responsive Design

With mobile usage increasing every year, it’s best to ensure your landing page is mobile friendly and responsive. This means that the user experience will be ideal on both mobile and desktop.

I hope these simple but really important tips can help you develop a great landing page design for your business.

Top 5 Features of a Well Designed Website

A well-designed website takes care of all important aspects of the purpose of a website. The main purpose of a website has always been doing business one way or the other. So, a good design website should be suitable technically, visually and commercially for achieving the business objectives. Top 5 features of a well-designed website are given below.

1. User Friendly

The internet users have become so demanding that they don’t wait for even a single second to read what you say. They focus on the solution of their problems described in a simple and intuitive way. Therefore, the website should be very user-friendly so that the user can find some value and stay with some time on your website. The user-friendly website should have the following main features.

  • Eye-catching user interface
  • Fast page loading time
  • Easy to navigate forward and backward on different pages easily
  • There should be a perfect website layout in which useful information and links should be placed on the specified locations, such as a search field, contact link, support link, and others.
  • Social media sharing links should be available to share information with friends.
  • Should have entertaining content with useful information

2. Search Engine Friendly

Every website should have full features that can capitalize on the power of search engine optimization. There should be proper scrutiny of the errors or mistakes that can damage the authority of the website on search engines. A search engine friendly website should have:

  • No dead links to generate a ‘404’ error
  • Prudent use of JavaScript, CSS and other animation tools that are not suitable for search engine crawlers to index in the search engine results
  • Fresh and updated content to increase the authority of the website

3. Business Friendly

The main purpose of a good design website is always to achieve business goals. So, any useful website always takes care of all factors that contribute to the successful achievement of the business goals. The major points of a business-friendly website are given below.

  • Solution-oriented approach to the customer problems
  • Should have clear and easy to read content
  • The website should be multi-browser and platform compatible
  • Should be mobile compatible to support all types of modern Smartphone, tablets, and laptops
  • The checkout process should be very easy and simple to follow
  • Link to contact information should be located at the prominent position on all pages

4. Contemporary Design

The first important thing that leaves the first impression on the visitors as well as on the search engine bots is its design. So, the design should be chosen in such a way that it is not only contemporary but also very suitable for technical purposes. The latest designs should follow the present-day web site design trends and industry best practices. A creative and trendy design attracts and retains visitors more effectively than the generic website. So, the design should be modern and trendy for a good website.

5. Social Media Friendly

It has been found that many people share different links, images, products and services through social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and others. So, a web designed website should have social media sharing links so that any person that visits your web pages can share the information with his/her friends. The social media sharing links should be placed at a prominent location on every page of the website. Linking to your social media accounts and also sharing posts from your website on your social accounts will form part of your social media marketing strategy.

If you take care of the above mentioned main features of a well designed website, you would end up with a perfect website suitable for achieving your business bottom lines.

Top 5 Security Plugins for WordPress

Keep your WordPress site secure with these security plugins

A gigantic share of about 26.4% of the global websites accounts for WordPress powered websites. As far as the content management system based websites are concerned, WordPress stands top on the list with over 59.4% of the entire websites based on CMS platforms. To augment the features and capabilities of WordPress based websites, over 40 thousand plugins are available in the marketplace.

The WordPress platform is developed with solid security capabilities, but that does not guarantee that the websites based on the WordPress platform are 100% secure from hackers. To cope with the security concerns of WordPress designed websites, hundreds of security plugins have been introduced. This article is an attempt to figure out the top 5 security plugins to choose for your website.

Connect to WP Admin via a VPN

For even more security, WordPress users can use a VPN service when connecting to WordPress. This will prevent any unwanted stealing of passwords or other sensitive user data.

Please note. The first step in keeping your website secure is by always having a secure password. Consider the use of a password manager if you choose to use a complicated password. Secondly, choosing a quality WordPress hosting company with good security is recommend.

1. Wordfence

Wordfence-Security-WordPress-Plugin

WordFence security plugin is one of the top-rated security plugins in the marketplace. The number of downloads of this plugin has crossed the 15 million mark. The active install counts over a million. The average customer rating is about 4.9 stars. The latest version of this plugin (6.1.8) has numerous features that make it one of the premium security plugins are given below.

  • Intuitive GUI interface with real-time scanning results
  • Threat auto-blocking capabilities
  • Supports 2-step security via mobile SMS
  • Available in both free and premium versions
  • Provides detailed information on the origination of the attack
  • Improves website performance substantially due to its caching features
  • Able to scan open-source plugins, themes, and other installed software tools
  • Able to recover the infected website

2. All in One WP Security & Firewall

This security plugin is very popular for its rich features and capabilities. The download count is more than 2 million with over 400 thousand active installs. The latest version (4.1.0) has been rated as 4.8 stars by the satisfied users. It has numerous security features as given below.

  • Robust security augmented by the reliable firewall capabilities
  • Many industry-standard security features incorporated
  • Supports security points grading feature to assess the level of website security
  • Separate security rules for basic, intermediate and advanced purposes
  • Very intuitive and easy to use interface
  • Password strength assessment feature
  • Powerful security against brute force login attacks
  • Supports the list of brute force locked users along with their IPs

3. BulletProof Security

Bulletproof-Security

With a high rating of 4.7 stars, BulletProof Security plugin qualifies itself as one of the best security tools in the WordPress marketplace. This plugin has been downloaded for more than 2 million times with over 100 thousand active installs. The latest version of this WordPress plugin (.53.7) has numerous features as listed below.

  • Offers a complete solution, such as login, firewall, and database
  • Supports idol session logout ISL feature
  • HTTP error and security logging
  • Database back features
  • Real-time monitoring of files and databases
  • Available in both free and premium versions
  • Support for auto-restore and quarantine ARQ IDPS

4. Sucuri Security

Sucuri Security is a comprehensive security platform for WordPress based websites. It is very well known for its multi-featured security capabilities. It offers four layers of security, such as integrity monitoring of files, remote scanning of malware, activity auditing and security hardening. Its current version (1.7.17) is rated at 4.6 out of 5 stars. This professional-grade security plugin has recorded over 1.3 million downloads with over 200 thousand active installs. The major features of this security plugin are given below.

  • Multi-level security approach
  • Supports add-on security firewall
  • Immediate security notifications
  • Quick remedial actions after any hacking activity
  • File integrity and blacklist monitoring
  • Professional grade activity auditing
  • Very powerful security hardening capabilities
  • Powerful scanning engine to accomplish remote scanning
  • Supports customized security hardening to safeguard your valuable data

5. iThemes Security

iThemes-Security-plugin

iThemes Security is the new name of ‘Better WP Security’. It offers numerous ways to protect your website from security threats. The current release (5.5.0) is a highly rated WP plugin with a score of 4.7 out of 5 stars. The current number of active installs of this plugin is over 700 thousand. It has been downloaded for over 7.2 million times across the globe. The main features of this plugin are given below.

    • Offers 30 different ways to secure your website
    • Available both in basic and pro versions
    • Powerful password strength calculator

Supports Google reCAPTCHA and two-factor authentication and password age features

  • Tracks user activities
  • Blocks malicious users who have already tried to break into other websites
  • Super security for Brute Force Attacks

Based on the features and capabilities, the above-mentioned security plugins stand far apart from many other security plugins in the marketplace.

Top 5 Contemporary Web Design Trends 2016

Check out these top 5 web design trends when designing your next website

The concept of web design is highly influenced by the available web technologies and innovative ideas. Both of these factors are prone to swift changes. Web technologies are improving at a very fast pace nowadays. More efficient, robust and effective technologies and human creativity are changing the trends of web design very fast. Some of the most contemporary web design trends are given below.

1. Material Design

The material web design is a new concept of visual language to convey a meaningful message through 3 dimension material, like light, material, and shadow. It uses innovation and possibilities of science and technology into the design of a website.

Every material is depicted in x, y and z dimensions with the help of cast shadows, lights, and material. The standard thickness used for a single position along the z-axis is 1dp. Different light sources, such as key light, ambient light, and combination of the both are used to create meaningful shadows. This design is getting more and more popular nowadays across all domains globally.

2. Responsive Design

The responsive design is very critical in the present day modern era, where people use multiple devices and platforms to access the websites. The responsive design is that one, which has full flexibility and capability to load smoothly on all types of devices both static and mobile devices. Use of responsive design is the fundamental need of the day because mobile is taking over the legacy devices to access the websites. A good responsive design can be created by following certain standards, like percentile image, limited or conditional use of CSS & JavaScript, the use of response and server-side RESS and others. It is becoming a web standard that follows all performance-related rules of a website.

3. Well Heeled Animation

The proper use of animation in different styles creates a great user experience (UX) on the website. The movement of the content on a website always brings immediate attention to the visitor. There are many other benefits of rich animation on the website, like easy learning, quick understanding, entertainment, and deep impact; so people use it extensively on the website. There are certain disadvantages of excessive animation used on the website too. For instance, slow down of the website, less SEO ranking, and others. So, it is always recommended to prudently use the animation and the backend technologies behind the animation.

4. Iconographic Design

In the past few years, this web design is getting more and more popular across all domains of websites. The hamburger icon is extensively used to display the menu. There are many big websites and applications that use a hamburger icon instead of a huge list of menu items. Meanwhile, visual icons for different purposes are also extensively used in the present-day web designs. The icons bring many advantages for the website, such as great UX, entertainment, easy to understand icons, and lightweight icon to work with and many others.

5. Cards Layout Web Design

The ‘cards’ web design is also becoming a new trend in the present day web marketplace. In the card’s design, multiple cards or patches are used to segregate the multiple zones, areas, and topics of the website. The cards are easy for the readers to figure out the required information. The cards design can easily incorporate the desired animation without messing up with other useful information on the page. Owing to these salient features, this type of web design has become one of the hottest web designs of the year.

A website cannot be solely developed with the help of just one design features; you can incorporate more than one trend into a professional website. Other than these five trends, there are many other website design trends that are also becoming popular in the marketplace.