Web Development Archives - Page 3 of 4

How to Lose that Website Weight Fast!

Well, once again summer is over. The days are getting shorter, the nights a bit chillier. Soon, all you’ll feel like doing is curling up on the couch with a stack of blankets and a stash of treats. But with indulgent holidays on the horizon, now seems like a good time to remind you to watch your weight. Your website weight, that is. Website obesity is becoming an epidemic of sorts. And while...

The Nonprofit’s Guide to Picking the Right WordPress Theme

I built a custom website from scratch, once. I don’t recommend it. For one, it was extremely time-consuming. For two, it wasn’t user-friendly — there was a lot of code to potentially mess up. For three, well, I already mentioned the time-consuming part, right? If you’re running a nonprofit, you don’t have time to also be your nonprofit’s dedicated web designer...

Top Non-Profit Blogs We Love

Driving traffic, improving SEO, establishing thought leadership — we all know blogs are good. But it’s challenging to put a good blog together, and blogs for the nonprofit sector can sometimes be more challenging than others. Why? There’s generally more information to organize and present. A typical nonprofit sector blog has a lot of categories, a lot of feature stories, and a...

Smaller Website Images = Bigger Returns. These Compression Tools Can Help.

True story: Last week I was on a small retailer’s website, my cart loaded up with goodies. Ready to buy, I walked through the checkout process, finally hit “purchase” and… nothing. It just hung there, loading. After a minute I got impatient and tried refreshing the page, which sent me all the way back to square one. So I retraced my steps through checkout only to have the...

Is Your Low-Contrast Design Costing You Clients?

Web design trends come and go. Do you remember the 2000s, when websites were textural? Backgrounds looked like torn paper in a scrapbook. Text tended to be blocky and bold. Call-to-action buttons were so glossy they looked wet. Drop shadows erupted in every direction, trying desperately to make graphic elements pop up off the page. A few years ago, designers decided that look was over, so they ran...

Is Your Website Ready for Mobilegeddon?

Stock the (virtual) pantry. Batten down the (cyber) hatches. Mobilegeddon is coming. Yes, it’s true. On April 21st Google will begin using mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor in search results. For now, this algorithm change affects searches conducted in any language on any mobile device worldwide — but I’d venture to guess that desktop search rankings won’t be too far...

Nine Common E-Commerce Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Untitled (Shopping Cart) by Doug Aitken The phrase “shopping cart abandonment” might make you think of a lonely cart sitting in the middle of a vast, empty parking lot. And while that’s quite a sad thought, it’s not quite as sad as the real meaning of the phrase: when online shoppers add items to their carts but leave before they begin or finish checking out. In other words,...

Eight Top Tips to Optimize Mobile e-Commerce

A design that fits every device — a key priority for your online store. // Image source: designtickle.com Good news! Mobile e-commerce shot up 31% in the first quarter of 2013 — compared to 20% growth for all e-commerce, and nearly 4% for in-store. That’s a significant gain, and it underscores the building momentum that mobile retail shopping. But here’s the bad news: you’re...

Does Your Website Have Shopping Cart Abandonment Issues?

I’ve done it before, and you probably have, too. Maybe you’ve clicked through a company’s sale email and found a new favorite shirt on deep discount, but you can’t find anything else you like well enough to bring the total up to get free shipping. Maybe you just found that same tool set on a competitor’s website for less. Maybe you had second thoughts about the page’s...

At What Rate Does Your Website Bounce?

Contrary to reason, the term “bounce rate” has nothing to do with balls or trampolines. Nor does it have anything to do with bars — but feel free to ask a bouncer what his “bounce rate” for the evening is and see how long it takes him to add you to his numbers. No, in the world of websites a bounce rate is the number of people who visited the first page of your website...

How Page Load Time Impacts Your Bottom Line

We’ve all experienced it: you typed in a URL or clicked a link, and you’re waiting… waiting… still waiting for a page to load. Seconds feel like minutes. And odds are, within a couple seconds, you’re trying to decide – do you want the content enough to wait for it? Or do you hit the back button and go elsewhere? Page load time isn’t a new concern in the...

You’ve Changed. Has Your Website?

Have you really looked at your website lately? You can refresh your wardrobe. You can refresh your browser window. You can refresh yourself on a hot day with a cold drink. Is your website in need of a refresh? Websites are funny things. We hustle and sweat to put them together, we worry over every word of copy, we put a spit polish on every detail, and then we push them out into the world where...

Locations

Orange County
4590 MacArthur Blvd., Ste. 500
Newport Beach, CA 92660

Santa Barbara
7 W. Figueroa St., Ste. 300
Santa Barbara, CA 93101

Follow Us