1 SIMPLE TRICK THAT WILL BOOST YOUR WEBSITE CONVERSIONS

Websites these days are taking hero images to the next level, embracing mega-images that fill whole screens. Sites ranging from ecommerce stores, to political sites, to Google Analytics itself are all using this device.

Huge images certainly deliver a visual impact, but that’s not why site owners love them; mega-images consistently deliver higher conversion rates.

Whether it’s a website dealing exclusively in sales, or one that’s just looking for sign-ups and site-visitor information, increased image sizes have been positively correlated with increased conversions. Naturally this has gotten the attention of big brands and e-commerce sites alike. It’s not about making things look cool, it’s a design decision aimed at making more money…

MAKE YOUR IMAGES BIGGER

Marketers have known for several years that using images, particularly images of humans, gives a site a conversion rate boost. Some well-known brands are now starting to catch up to this reality. By using mega-images, big brands are reasoning that they can improve the already good results of using high-quality images on their sites.

McDonald’s’ homepage shows off new menu items with huge images, but they go further on the product pages: to display the juicy tastiness of its burgers, the site displays them life-size.

On its homepage Walmart uses mega-images in its slideshow that introduces shoppers to various categories and sales on its website. These mega-images are useful because they grab the attention of site visitors to whatever specific offer or sale the company has going on at the moment.

This Google Analytics page is the best example of one of the most prominent brands ever switching over to this design approach. For each type of specific Analytics product — be it premium or for mobile — the company uses a distinct mega-image that also doubles as a clever testimonial from a real user of the service.

As you can see, mega-images today have a strong foothold in the design world, and it’s not just because they look special or different. There’s some strong data to back up the claim that they boost conversions…

HIGHRISE GETS MASSIVE SIGN-UP INCREASES

Highrise is an app created by Basecamp that lets people keep track of all their contacts in an efficient way. The company always knew that it could do better with regard to the number of sign ups on its Highrise landing page. The problem was that Basecamp could never specifically nail down just what was causing its conversion rate numbers to stall. They decided to perform A/B testing across a number of different factors, everything from the length of the landing page to typography to images.

When the company decided to use a mega-image on its variation page, things drastically improved. While the original design simply featured a series of modest images, the variation was dominated by one feature above all else: a humongous mega-image that took up the entire background of the landing page.

This variation featuring the mega-image ended up out-performing the original landing page’s conversions by a stunning 102%! Talk about a remarkable change.

To be fair, while the mega-image page wasn’t the only design element that was changed — other changes included less info about the company and different colors — but it was by far the most striking.

Even a big brand like Dell can endeavor to do so much better when it comes to site conversions. An old Dell landing page already had some of the best practices of optimization in place, such as easy-to-read bullet points and a short, simple form. However, the image on the old landing page was small and didn’t really grab site visitors’ attention. The company wanted to increase lead generation since there’s always bigger and better.

When Dell redesigned the landing page, it opted for a drastic redesign that featured a humongous, background mega image. By making this mega image the background of the entire page, Dell succeeded in making it one of the more prominent elements of the page. The results? The new landing page enjoyed a 36% increase in leads and a 27% drop in bounce rates.

MALL.CZ INCREASE PRODUCT IMAGE SIZES WITH SUCCESSFUL OUTCOMES

Chances are that you’ve never heard of Mall.cz (unless you live in the Czech Republic). Mall.cz is the 2nd-largest e-commerce retailer in the Czech Republic, and it benefited from increasing the image sizes of its products. While not exactly mega-images proper, this case study proves that even a small increase in image sizes is good for a business’ bottomline.

The original version of product pages on the site featured smaller product images that were often overshadowed by intrusive text that made pages seem too cluttered. The company decided that it should experiment with bigger images; so its redesign centered around blowing up the products’ image sizes while hiding the text.

After some experimentation, it was determined that small increases in image size boosted conversions by almost 10%! That’s an impressive boost to the conversation rate, all thanks to increasing the size of the site’s product images.

BIGGER IS BETTER

It‘s an old cliché that clients always ask for their logo to be bigger, but trials by leading companies with huge research budgets, demonstrate that when it comes to images, bigger is most definitely better.

To be sure, it’s not just a matter of aesthetics. When you blow up images to the size of mega images, you’re also ensuring that your site visitors get to explore every small detail of your product, announcement or testimonial. In this way, mega images are also very functional and practical, as they make it easy for site visitors to see exactly what they’re trying to buy or sign up to.

We’ve all shied away from large images since the rise of the mobile web, and the potential for slow download speeds, persuaded us to err on the side of caution. However, it’s clear that far from hindering a site, increasing image size actually improves conversions; if you can make your images mega-images, taking up as much of the screen as possible, you’ll maximise your conversions.

WEB DESIGN

We are a professional web design company with an experienced  team of creative professionals.  We create outstanding designs for  Websites. Our team is adept at implementing the latest web standards and programming techniques.Pixotri technology is a  creative house developing quality web designs, E-Commerce solution. SEO services and Gaming development .

Contact us for your web design requirements  email-info@pixotritechnologies.com Visit our website: www.pixotritechnologies.com

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What makes website design startup Webydo different from Wix or Squarespace

While Wix dominates the DIY space, new companies such as the Tel Aviv-based Webydo, which just garnered $5 million in new funding, take a different approach

Following the success of DIY web template companies, new companies have surfaced in recent years to provide designers tools that promise a fully code-free web design experience. Companies such as Wix and Squarespace cater to individuals who often have no experience with design. These are the mom and pop type DIY luddites who have succumbed to the necessity of having a website.

While Wix dominates the DIY space, new companies such as the Tel Aviv-based Webydo, which just garnered $5 million in new funding, take a different approach.

“These B2C solutions, Wix and Squarespace, are wonderful for amateurs as they provide a fast, fun, and easy way to create one website, but they are not suitable for professional designers who have many clients and hundreds of sites,” Shmulik Grizim, the co-founder and CEO of Webydo, told Geektime.

Professional freelance designers and agencies must provide their clients with pixel-perfect, custom-tailored websites that effectively establish their clients’ businesses online presence. Moreover, designers’ ability to provide high quality products is part of their business model and what differentiates their service from a DIY approach.

After witnessing first-hand the dysfunctional relationship between designers and developers within the context of a given project, Grizim and his partner Tzvika Steinmetz decided to dedicate their efforts to solve and ultimately disrupt the way websites are created.

“Since the ’90s, the web was all about code creation. But now we have powerful code generators that do that for us. What we need to think about is the visual storytelling, the compositions, the user experience,” Grizim said.

As for the direction of the industry, Grizim predicts a glorious and creative future.

“I believe the web is turning into a creative medium. We spend more and more hours online and we expect our experience to have everything other mediums like TV, cinema and print provide us. We want a rich human experience online, not just data. We need designers to become what film directors are for cinema. I think the whole industry will focus on designers.”

WEB DESIGN

We are a professional web design company with an experienced  team of creative professionals.  We create outstanding designs for  Websites. Our team is adept at implementing the latest web standards and programming techniques.Pixotri technology is a  creative house developing quality web designs, E-Commerce solution. SEO services and Gaming development .

Contact us for your web design requirements email- info@pixotritechnologies.com Visit our website: www.pixotritechnologies.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xSWDsTYC8

2015 Guide to Responsive Web Design

Responsive design is rapidly becoming part of the essentials in web design for 2015. It is a web design technique that provides users with an intuitive and functional website version for all mobile devices. The reliance on mobile phones and tablets, in addition to laptops and larger desktop screens, is increasing exponentially. Web users are beginning to expect websites to adjust to the screen of access and, if it does not, the result is often a very frustrated user. The good news is that responsive design is not as complicated as it sounds and can be implemented in a number of ways. We have prepared a quick cheat sheet to help you on your way to responsive design success.

The most simple form of Responsive web design is a website that changes its format to correspond to the screen of the device it is accessed from. However, the tool can also provide the opportunity for web designers to tailor content to different users; for example, by accessing the user location a website can tailor information to them on a geographical basis.

If you need convincing that the year to make responsive design a priority is 2015, the use of Google analytics can be very persuasive. After subjecting your website to the analysis, you can see directly how many users are accessing your website via cell phones by selecting ‘Audience’ and then ‘Mobile’. With more iPhones being sold than babies born in New Zealand, we can almost guarantee it will be more than you imagine.

To make the move to responsive design there are two main paths you can go down; creating an adaptive website with multiple fixed width layouts set for common devices, or, using multiple fluid grid layouts to achieve a truly responsive user experience. There are positives and negatives for both so it is important you weigh them up before making a start. The positive aspect of multiple fixed width layouts is that you can have more control over the web aesthetics on each sized screen. However, in using fixed-width layouts your website will not have the ability to respond to changes in browser size. If you have ever had to have two windows open at the same time you will understand the struggle, which leads us to the more comprehensive version of responsive design; using multiple fluid grid layouts. Fluid grid layouts work on the basis of proportions rather than the more traditional pixels, which enable the content to change according to browser size as well as adapt to mobile devices. Web content is given a percentage of the browser or screen to take up and as the size of the viewing window changes, the content continues to take up its assigned percentage of the browser. The percentages can be calculated with a simple algorithm: target/ context = result, or total pixels/ content pixels = percentage.

As browser size is an issue that mainly arises with desktop screens and laptops, a savvy way to implement responsive design can be to have fluid grid layouts designed for computers and fixed width layouts for mobile devices. Although, in saying this, there is a huge range of devices currently on the market, with more and more arriving all the time. It becomes almost impossible to keep up, which is why it may be better to let your website do the work for you, responding to new devices through the use of multiple fluid grid layouts.

To ensure your entire website is responsive it is important to think about your images also. Creating fluid images, images that resize within the confines of a fluid grid. This is easily implemented via the CSS code: img { max-width: 100%; }. This simple line of CSS code will ensure that the images on your website will never appear stretched or pixelated, giving a clean and professional impression.

For 2015, a ‘mobile first’ approach is what is recommended. As the title suggests it is an approach where web designers focus on producing a smartphone experience then move up in the scale of devices, from smart phones up to desktop screens. This is because mobile web browsing is very likely to eclipse that of desktop browsing if it hasn’t already, therefore they are your target demographic. Smartphones have more capabilities than their desktop predecessors, so you can design for the likes of a touch screen in the first instance, instead of as an afterthought. Smartphone screens are only capable of display the core of your website, no sidebars, adverts or social media buttons. It is much easier to start simple and work up.

You may be asking yourself, if we are starting with a ‘mobile first’ approach then perhaps we should be creating an application instead, and this is indeed something to consider. Our advice would be that a responsive website may be the better option in terms of universal compatibility. This is because the application world is fickle; with apple and android in a neck and neck competition, some applications may be exclusive to either iOS or android. Having a responsive website guarantees that all devices that have access to the Internet will be able to use your site, with no more fuss about which brand to side with.

If you’re thinking this is all just a bit too much work and algorithms just aren’t your thing, then not to worry. There are some excellent front-end frameworks (Foundation and Bootstrap are good ones) that you can employ to create your responsive website. Their grids have incorporated responsive design and have done the work for you. The result is an immediately responsive website.

We hope this has been of help to the web designers out there looking to 2015 as a year of change. We think moving towards a responsive website is sure to benefit both the user and the Beneficiaries.

WEB DESIGN

We are a professional web design company with an experienced  team of creative professionals.  We create outstanding designs for  Websites. Our team is adept at implementing the latest web standards and programming techniques.Pixotri technology is a  creative house developing quality web designs, E-Commerce solution. SEO services and Gaming development .

Contact us for your web design requirements email- info@pixotritechnologies.com Visit our website: www.pixotritechnologies.com

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Google champions responsive Web design in page ranking update

Google has deprecated the desktop Web. It's still here, but for Google it just got less important.

At least that's the implicit message in Google's recent mobile search update. The company is now judging how "mobile-friendly" a site is and is using that metric to weight search results served to mobile devices.

This is the third update in Google's slow push for Web developers to start building mobile-friendly sites. First, Google announced that it would start calling out sites that used Flash and at the same time rewarding mobile-friendly sites. Initially, that was just a little label next to search results on mobile devices that told viewers the site was "Mobile-friendly."

Now mobile-friendliness has moved from visual alerts and promos to affecting actual page rankings.

Web developers were apparently confused enough by the change that Google posted a lengthy FAQ along with its announcement last week.

Here's what the company says: "The mobile-friendly update will boost the rankings of mobile-friendly pages... in mobile search results worldwide. (Conversely, pages designed for only large screens may see a significant decrease in rankings in mobile search results.)" In other words, sites that work on mobile will outrank sites that don't when all other things are equal.

So what does a site need to do in order for Google to consider it "mobile-friendly"?

The company's guidelines suggest that the site start by avoiding any content that requires Adobe's Flash Player. That will probably sound obvious to most developers at this point, but don't forget that old YouTube and other video embeds were probably done with <object> tags, which means Flash Player. Google suggests updating to the more modern iframe embed method that's the default on most video hosting sites today.

The other three main criteria in Google's definition of mobile-friendly are making the site readable without zooming and ensuring that content doesn't need to be scrolled horizontally (in other words, the site scales to fit on mobile screens). The last one is something that will make anyone with large hands happy: sites need to place links far enough apart so that the desired link can be easily tapped. Fat fingers love white space.

Responsive Web design

There has been a trend sweeping the Web design world for several years now that does all these things and more. If you follow Web design at all, you know that Google more or less just outlined the central principles of what's known as responsive Web design. Responsive Web design means building websites that function well across devices, even if they look a bit different on each device.

Technically, responsive websites use CSS @media queries and some other techniques behind the scenes that are based on Web standards, Google doesn't really care how sites do it, however, just that they do it. A site could build out a separate mobile site, use responsive design, or some hybrid form of server side adaptive design; all of those are considered mobile-friendly, but the guidelines themselves could have been lifted from the classic article that started it all, Responsive Web Design.

Google has a mobile-friendly test page where you can see how your favorite sites do. Ars gets the mobile-friendly label, but it's worth noting that the mobile-friendliness of a page is just that—the page. While the Ars homepage comes through with flying colors, if I embed a Rick Astley video in this article using an object tag, this page will not be considered mobile-friendly and might drop in search results. That means a lot of rickroll videos that were embedded back when the object tag was the main method could be dropping out of the rankings.

Also worth asking: what if a page isn't mobile-friendly, but it's still useful? What if I, the user, am willing to suffer through the horror of scrolling and pinching my fingers to read tiny text in search of some obscure new information on the Voynich manuscript posted on forum pages that are not, alas, mobile-friendly?

Fear not, my crypto-curious friend. According to Google, mobile-friendliness is only one ranking signal among many. As Google puts it, "If a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank high if it has great content for the query."

Still, if there's a page with great content that's desktop only and a page with great content that uses responsive design, the second page will presumably outrank the first.

The only real ray of hope in there for developers who still haven't embraced some form of responsive design is that this change only affects mobile search results. Desktop searches and rankings are unaffected. So if your site doesn't work on mobile, you'll only lose, roughly speaking, 35 percent of your traffic.

Now if only Google would start warning me about sites that are just going to hide their content with a "download our app" ad banner that's so big I can't even close it on a mobile device. Surely that's not mobile-friendly?

WEB DESIGN

We are a professional web design company with an experienced  team of creative professionals.  We create outstanding designs for  Websites. Our team is adept at implementing the latest web standards and programming techniques.Pixotri technology is a  creative house developing quality web designs, E-Commerce solution. SEO services and Gaming development .

Contact us for your web design requirements email- info@pixotritechnologies.com Visit our website: www.pixotritechnologies.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xSWDsTYC8

Google Ventures On How To Design A Killer Website

What do buying coffee beans, making an investment, and choosing a doctor have in common? They’re all forms of shopping. In each case, customers follow predictable processes for finding, evaluating, and narrowing options. If you understand your customer's shopping journey, you can design your product with the right messages in the right place. And that can guide customers towards selecting your product over competitors, and more importantly, guide you to building a product that’s a perfect fit for your customer.

At Google Ventures, shopping funnels have become a secret weapon in our design work. We’ve used them with startups as varied as Blue Bottle Coffee, One Medical, and CircleUp. Once we know the questions that customers ask and in what order, we design the messaging and functionality to match. Here’s how creating a shopping funnel that syncs with your business can serve as a roadmap for great design.

How People Really Shop

Right after the dotcom bust, I took a job as a researcher at Walmart.com. Over the next several years, it was my responsibility to study how people shopped for everything, from electronics to apparel, from furniture to engagement rings. I began to see what I call "shopping funnels" everywhere. Now at Google Ventures, I often conduct research sprints prior to our design sprints. It turns out that the most efficient and effective way to organize the results is often in the form of a shopping funnel.

Purchase funnels, customer journeys, and decision trees aren’t new ideas. But at Google Ventures we apply them to things that people don’t usually think of as "shopping" (such as finding a physician or choosing an API). Any kind of shopping is really about a series of choices. And I’ve found that most shopping funnels are very simple, often no more than five steps.

Depending on the product or service, the details of shopping funnels vary considerably, but I’ve noticed a general pattern in consumer decision-making, and it goes something like this (if you think back to your last big shopping decision, this may sound familiar):

1. Discover: Gather options and establish criteria

Customers first encounter your product when they’re still looking at competitors. They’re asking questions like "What’s available? What are my requirements and criteria? What sites are credible sources for information?" Unless they have a lot of previous experience with products like yours, customers first have to get the lay of the land and learn the lingo. And if you’re targeting newbies rather than experts, you may need to help them get over that hump. Bringing important details to the forefront that help them determine their evaluation criteria. Then understand how customers perceive your product compared to your competitors. You can see how customers look at your and competitor sites by doing quick and dirty user research. For your domain, figure out what kinds of images, tone, messaging, and visual design signal the appropriate level of expertise, reliability, and trust.

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2. Select: Make a short list

Next, customers choose a set of options that meet their initial screening. With the pool refined, they start looking more closely.

3. Dig in: Drill into each product

Once customers consider your product worthy of consideration, they’ll drill into the details. "Does the product or service meet my criteria?" Make it easy for customers to filter and compare options based on the criteria that matter most to them. Your job is to figure out which details help them narrow their options, and then make those details dead simple to find.

4. Validate: What are people saying?

When customers are close to a purchase decision, they look for outside confirmation or red flags. "What do the reviewers say? What do my friends say?" Search for reviews of your own product to see what your customers are seeing. Adding customers’ logos or third-party reviews, ratings, and testimonials to your own marketing can be a huge credibility boost. iTunes shows Rotten Tomatoes reviews (good or bad) right on each movie page. For some products, fostering an active community on your site or on related forums (such as Reddit or Stack Overflow) reassures potential customers that they’ll be in good company.

5. Try: What’s it really like?

In many instances, customers want to try a product or service before they really commit. By kicking the tires, they can decide whether it makes sense for them—"Does it fit my habits, lifestyle, or the way I do my work?"—and whether it’s any good. If it’s not feasible for your customers to try it themselves, explore ways to give them an accurate preview of how it looks and works in real life.

Design by Shopping Funnel

We’ve used shopping funnels to design the websites of all types of companies. For example, Blue Bottle Coffee wanted to improve their online store and make it better match the excellent hospitality of their cafes. Their shopping funnel revealed exactly how a customer makes online coffee bean purchase decisions: taste is more important than origin.

WEB DESIGN

We are a professional web design company with an experienced  team of creative professionals.  We create outstanding designs for  Websites. Our team is adept at implementing the latest web standards and programming techniques.Pixotri technology is a  creative house developing quality web designs, E-Commerce solution. SEO services and Gaming development .

Contact us for your web design requirements . email-info@pixotritechnologies.com Visit our website: www.pixotritechnologies.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xSWDsTYC8

5 of this year's vertical scrolling trends

What trends are we seeing in parallax and vertical scrolling websites this year, and what does it mean for the future?

Vertical scrolling bubbled through from burgeoning fad to mainstream trend in 2014, and with awesome advertising, prime portfolios and crafted content all benefiting from single page scrolling, it's now certain that the technique is here to stay.

Be inspired by these 50 great parallax scrolling websites

That was the year designers took control of the technique, pushing the boundaries of what could be achieved. We've come a long way from Snow Fall – the New York Times microsite that kickstarted the trend in 2010.

What's left for vertical and parallax scrolling as we move through 2015? As it turns out, quite a lot. The maturity of the best work will be tempered by some of the perils that come with popularity – but this is a technique that won't be going away. Here are five vertical scrolling trends we are already seeing this year, and we expect to see more of...

01. Lots of really bad scrolling sites

From dancing bananas and the <BLINK> tag to Flash, every time the web gets animated it ends in tears. There's a danger that vertical scrolling could go the same way. Creating parallax sites is already much easier than it was just two years ago. There are libraries and tools that enable amateurs to assemble scrolling sites with the smallest amount of coding knowledge.

While that all helps to push innovation forward, it also opens up the floodgates for lots of annoying, amateur parallax design. We don't just mean badly executed work either – but work that uses vertical scrolling tropes simply because it can.

As Matter editor Bobbie Johnson said of the New York Times article that started it all: "Almost every example of 'snowfalling' that I've seen in action puts reading second to the razzle-dazzle... While the multimedia elements provided atmosphere, in all honesty they didn't mean much."



For a year or two we'll have to deal with a lot of web design content that puts style before substance. Does that mean vertical scrolling will have the same ultimate fate as blinking text? We think its more a case of 'it'll get worse before it gets better'.

02. A mobile-first approach

Vertical scrolling should work well on mobile by default, but that hasn't been the driving principle behind it to date. That has to, and will change in 2015 – not least because the way that users consume online content is changing.



Year zero for this transition was 2010; the introduction of the iPad. While there were Android devices in 2009, the iPad defined this new space so immediately and completely that it now seems impossible to imagine a time before it or its smaller sibling, the smartphone.

Tablet PC ownership leapt from 30 per cent of the US population in 2013 to 44 per cent in 2014, with the curve predicted to continue its rise next year. Meanwhile, around 58 per cent of US adults now tote a smartphone. The UK loves its phones even more, with 61 per cent smartphone ownership – concentrated in the lucrative younger age groups.

And yet, most vertical design has – so far – been a showcase for websites. Partly, that could be explained away as waiting for CSS rules used for parallax effects to migrate to mobile. But designers can no longer ignore that mobile content consumption is a huge market.

The metaphor works on mobile so well that the best stuff going forward will be mobile first; responsive, simple and chock-full of content rather than bells and whistles.

WEB DESIGN

We are a professional web design company with an experienced  team of creative professionals.  We create outstanding designs for  Websites. Our team is adept at implementing the latest web standards and programming techniques.Pixotri technology is a  creative house developing quality web designs, E-Commerce solution. SEO services and Gaming development .

Contact us for your web design requirements . email-info@pixotritechnologies.com Visit our website: www.pixotritechnologies.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xSWDsTYC8