Last week we introduced Office Hours, an opportunity for YOU to ask all your burning questions about web development, SEO, social media and more without a consultant’s price tag. Each Friday we will post a video on YouTube answering one of your questions in greater detail.
For Episode 101, we got a great question from Facebook about WordPress plugins. Mike has three things to keep in mind when choosing any plugin.
Are All Plugins Created Equal?
Join Us Next Week!
Thank you to all of those who submitted questions to us for this week’s Office Hours. If we didn’t get to your question THIS week, we will soon. Plus, we are always taking new questions!
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Is Flash Dead?
Simple flash movies can enhance your website in terms of its overall entertainment value. However you might not have known that search engine ranking bots more often than not fail to recognize flash movies and by having one it might cause the entire site to be read as a blank page. That in turn takes your page off search engine results and you don’t want that to happen.
The Incredible Importance of Function
I was speaking with one of our designers the other day who told me “form follows function” for any website and I had to agree.
Sure, I may not be as technically versed as the other members of the Black Dog Team, but as a surfer of the World Wide Web, I am certainly not inclined to visit a website that isn’t functioning properly. Let me qualify that statement: if one of the websites I regularly visit isn’t working, I may hit F5 a few times before I finally give up. BUT, if I’m visiting a site for the first time and it doesn’t load either right away or properly, I give up right away.
Think about it: function must be especially critical with an e-commerce website. You could have a shopping cart and checkout that looks great but when people are typing in their credit card number do you think they care how stylish the font is? No way! They care about the level of security and whether or not they can backspace a correction without being directed to a previous page [that one drives me crazy!].
Use Color to Affect User Behavior
One of the hottest topics of discussion in web design lately is how colors can affect the behavior of users visiting a site. Think about it – when you see an icon that says “Click Here” what color is it? I’m going to guess it isn’t gray. While you create your online business presence you’ll want to consider what colors make your visitors click or look away.
Research has shown that the more vivid the color of a link is, the more likely they are to click on it. Bright colors are more likely to be noticed while greyer or mid-toned links are likely to be ignored. Let’s go back to that “Click Here” icon I asked you about earlier. It was yellow, wasn’t it? Or red? Or orange? Our willingness to click a link seems to be related to our natural curiosity about bright colors.
What Makes a “Good” Website?
Hint: It might not be what you think.
It used to be that animation and gadgets made a website “good” but we’re noticing that the definition of “good” in terms of web development has changed. Now the trend leans more towards organic websites that are functional and contain valuable information that a prospect might be looking for. The key is to be more user-friendly than eye-catching.
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