According to our customer survey on Ourpix, slideshows or carousels are becoming more and more popular in modern web designs. Carousels are essentially slideshow navigations, in which the content rotates vertically or horizontally (hence the name “carousel”). To rotate the navigation, users need to click on one ...

While we concede that Flash isn't going away immediately, we do believe that there are good reasons to not choose Flash when developing a site. 1. About 7% of browsers do not have Flash enabled. That's an estimated 125 million people worldwide who can't see the 1 in 4 websites that use Flash. 2. iOS is the dominant mobile browser, making up over half of that market. Since Apple refuses to implement flash, 65% of mobile browsers can't see Flash sites. 3. While Google can read SWF files, it was built to crawl HTML, limiting Flash's organic SEO potential. 4. Flas...

The goal of any design is to effectively communicate a message. Typically this means promoting a brand or selling a product. 1. Less is more. Every element added to a design increases cognitive dissonance, meaning that it makes the site's message more difficult for the customer to find. It will take some constraint, but I promise that less is more when communicating a brand message. 2. Color Palette Consistency of message is important and that includes colors. If you have a set of official colors, those should be the colors used in your website. Ideally those ...

It is no longer good enough to just have a website to set yourself apart from your competitors. A professional design is more important than ever, but how do you choose a designer? By making the following five observations, you can choose the designer who's right for you. 1. Proven Portfolio Any competent web design agency should have a portfolio of exemplary web sites to demonstrate what they're capable of doing. It should be freely available on their website, but if not, ask. 2. Standards Compliance Does your website work on all major browsers? Do you know? ...

There are two major components to a web page's code. The top or Head, is the machine readable portion of the page that provides additional information called Meta tags to search engines. The rest of the page, or the body is the part seen by us humans. The importance of meta tags is often overstated when optimizing a website for search engines. As a result, there are a lot of myths regarding meta tags. Below are five important meta tags truths. 1. Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years. It's possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it's unlikely. ...

or "Why Users Are Leaving Your Website" Regardless of its style or category, any website's success hinges on its ease of use. According to Jakob Nielsen, an eminent usability expert, "If a website is difficult to use, people leave." A website should: * State plainly what it offers. * Be easy to navigate. * Be easy to read. * Offer answers to user's questions. * Load quickly and consistently on a variety of browsers and devices. Since there is no standard on how websites should be designed, it's up to the web design agency to inf...

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of coaxing search engines in to driving traffic for specific keywords to a particular website. There are two approaches. Paid or organic inclusion. Paid SEO is the most straight-forward method, as a webmaster pays for traffic in the form of advertising. By buying Google AdWords or paying for banner ads, traffic is driven to their site. While anyone can buy ads, the trick is to maximize the efficiency of these ad campaigns by carefully controlling placement so that each click paid for is actually within the target market. With some AdWords campai...