Why Is It Important?

Creating strong and interesting content is an essential online marketing concept that we are already very familiar with. We take the time to regularly update our sites to make sure they provide visitors with consistent and reliable information that they can easily engage with, and associate with our brand. However, like a fine wine, sometimes it is our older content that gets better with age.

Content repurposing is a great technique to make the most out of the time and effort that you direct towards content creation. You can invest a lot more than just money into your website, but sometimes making small changes and updates to old ideas can make a big difference. If something has worked well for your company before, why not take advantage of that success and revitalize it for your new objectives?

How Do I Do It?

Repurposing content can add new value to existing work. So where do you even begin? Below we have compiled some tips and techniques that can help get you started:

Rewriting

It is always interesting to take a trip down memory lane and look at your old content. You can see the growth of your business, and how much you have changed over a period of time. However, just like most commodities, your old pages depreciate in value. They become less relevant for people searching, and therefore the worth of your page’s user experience drops. Your SEO can be modernized through simply updating or rewriting this existing content. All it takes is a minimum of 300 added or revised words for Google to view the content as “new,” so a little can go a long way. If you have dated facts on a particular page that once performed exceptionally well, updating that data can bring in new traffic. The same can be applied to old links that once led to related articles or sites. Check to make sure all of those links are still active and providing readers with the information they are looking for. If not, update them! Updated content leads to relevancy, which in return leads to more conversions because Google considers up-to-date content valuable.

Repurposing Ideas

Content calendars help you get a visual layout of your site’s plan for the upcoming months. Sometimes it is easy to brainstorm ideas for topics to cover, but we unfortunately know that is not always the case. Repurposing ideas can help fill in some of the gaps in your calendar, while also creating some consistency for your site and increasing your brand recognition. Every month our Director of Corporate Marketing, Austin Paley posts an SEO Audit on our blog evaluating a chosen website’s performance features. We also do an annual post each January taking a look ahead at some of the top online marketing trends for the upcoming year. Creating some regular content that visitors can anticipate from you can establish some consistency for your brand. A series will be something that is recognizable and easily associated with your company, and something that audiences can always look forward to.

Exploring Your Channels

Make note of trends on social media. Is there anything on your site that is relevant to a topical event? We are constantly seeing hashtags that “throwback” and “flashback,” and if it can make your old baby pictures significant, why not your old content too? Staying interactive on social media allows you to reach your audience through multiple channels, and staying on top of current events and trends makes you appear attentive and engaging. You can even search for trending topics based on specific regions on Twitter, and taking advantage of any suitable trends can be a great opportunity for your brand. Even if the content that you reference to is not from the immediate past, it is only as relevant as you want it to be. You are in control of how visible you want your brand to be, so find a way to interact with your audience when opportunities like this come up.

Piggybacking Content

Sometimes content that overlaps in relevancy can piggyback one another. You can utilize these opportunities as a chance to give your audience access to additional content, leading them to relevant pages that is housed in other sections of your site. Web Designer Vip has a number of whitepapers that provide readers with extended information on a number of very specific subjects and concepts. While most visitors come to our blog to read quick articles on a topic, we always link to one of our whitepapers as a way of leading an audience member to some relevant content that they may be additionally interested in. Our whitepapers are accessible on their own, but including them in our blogs allows us to keep them in front of our readers as often as possible. We get to kill two birds with one blog post, and it is a technique that can be applied to your work as well.

Analyzing Strengths & Weaknesses

Google Analytics can be your best friend when determining what content should be prioritized in the repurposing process. Take a look at what pages were once strong performers for your site, and revamp any ones that could use some work. Also, make a note of what themes of content do consistently well for you, and try to produce more work under that genre. This can apply to the pages that don’t do so well either. If you can see that a certain subject matter doesn’t always perform, try to avoid it. Google Analytics is a great resource to determine how your content is being received, and can provide vast insight as to where your site does the best. Having a better understanding of this information is a vital step in making your content the strongest it can be for your site, and for your overall business.

Content repurposing can make a large impact on the engagement on your site, and traffic to your business. It is the small changes and little efforts that can pay off exponentially down the road. Finding out what works best for your company and your brand is easier than ever, so take advantage of that content’s performance and apply it to your future endeavors. There is the classic saying that “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” In this case, if it isn’t broken, find a way to keep using it.

When it comes to email marketing, there’s more than one way to measure success. A multitude of metrics can indicate overall performance and present areas for improvement after the launch of a campaign. Taking a look at click-through-rates or open rates, how conversion rate was impacted by a certain email, or how much website traffic is being generated can identify the effectiveness of this kind of marketing initiative. To be successful with email marketing, strategies should be focused on fostering brand engagement and minimizing unsubscribers, all while maintaining strong branding.

Accomplishing all of the above is definitely feasible if the right strategy is created. You need extensive research, sometimes a bit of trial and error, and a thorough understanding of the audience you’re delivering messaging to. However most importantly, you need to implement a series of best practices in order to develop a strategic approach that enables you to achieve your core objectives. Here are 5 elements of email marketing that will help you make sure you’re getting the results you want:

Timing and Frequency

The timing with which you’re sending your email campaigns is one of the most important elements to focus on in an email marketing strategy. You may be located in New York, but perhaps a large portion of your target demographic is in a different time zone. The time of day when users receive emails can directly contribute to performance indicators like open-rate and click-through-rate. You can’t send the same message at the same hour to a global or national audience and expect to reach everyone. Segment your email lists based on the time zone recipients live in so that they’re receiving your emails at an hour that is convenient and appropriate for them.

If you’re looking to maximize user engagement with your emails, but aren’t sure when to send, a good place to start is by considering three core time slots—during the morning once your users are commuting or arriving at work, during the early afternoon on their lunch break, or in the evening late night once they are back in their homes. From there, think about your specific audience’s lifestyle habits and when they would be most likely to give some attention to your email. If you’ve launched email campaigns in the past take a look at the statistics provided by your email platform. For example, in MailChimp, you can see the metrics from previous campaigns and identify what time the most users were reached.

Aside from just the timing of your email, the frequency at which you disseminate your messages plays a major role in performance. The age of email blasting is over. Users have increasing email fatigue these days and won’t even open your emails if they are inundated with a plethora of emails. As a result, it is often the case that the more messages you send the less effective they will be. While your emails may have a short “shelf life” this doesn’t mean you should be sending a new one each and every day—that’s how you’ll get a surge in unsubscribers. Instead, keep your emails at two per week at most to ensure that you’re still reaching users and cutting through the clutter of their inbox. Depending on industry, sometimes two per month is even more fitting.

Subject Lines

The importance of a terrific subject line cannot be stressed enough—it’s literally the first thing the user is reading and their first “personal” impression of your brand. An effective subject line sparks user interest and builds anticipation of what the email contains. You need just enough to get the user intrigued, while still staying true to your brand in under 60 characters. It’s okay to think a little outside the box and let some creativity flow with subject lines, but keep in mind that more often than not, simplicity works best. The best subject lines find a happy medium between oozing creativity and being straight to the point of why you’re emailing a user, and make sure that it also fits your company’s branding.

The goal of a subject line is to entice recipients to open the message, but to also click through the email. For that reason, consistency as you go from the subject line to the actual content of the email is crucial. You can’t say something “clickbaity” just so that users open the message, only to disappoint them upon finding no relevancy to what they originally saw in their inbox. This instills a poor sense of trust with your brand and almost guarantees that users won’t take a desired action.

If you have an idea for a subject line but are unsure if it’s fitting with your brand, never be afraid to ask others around you for feedback. Sometimes, an outsider’s perspective can shed some much needed light onto your ideas. Similarly, segmenting your lists into two groups and testing out different subject lines provides you with hard data about what which subject lines resonate best with users. Discovering what works best with the people whose opinions you value most (your users’) is incredibly important.

Content: Visuals and Copy

Images speak louder than words, and this holds true with any successful email marketing strategy. In general there should always be more visuals than copy in an email. Users don’t want too much to read, they want to be able to quickly skim easy-to-digest content and have a full understanding of the central messaging. If you have a lot of content to offer your audience surrounding a particular subject addressed in your email, direct users to a landing page on your website where they can read the rest or review the full article. Don’t contain it all in the message.

A good portion of the copy used in your emails should be in the CTA. In every email, there is an action that you want recipients to take. Whether it’s “Buy Now,” “Request A Quote,” “Download Now,” or “Read More,” if the messaging is too wordy, the CTA will get lost. Instead, make sure these buttons are vibrant and prominent in comparison to the rest of the message, while still fitting with the design theme. Any CTA is a major component of your core-messaging, so if you aren’t concise with the rest of your wording, it may go overlooked.

Since images are vital to the success of an email marketing campaign, you want to make sure they are loading appropriately and quickly for users. Use a file optimizing tool to ensure images load efficiently. If users are waiting for an image to load, they’ll likely skip to the next email or delete the message. That being said, sometimes technology is faulty or an email service provider requires users to choose to see images and as a result images may not load. If you include relevant image alt tags on the visuals you include, users will have at least some context as to what the visuals are intended to be if they aren’t appearing right away. This little effort can go a long way with providing a good user-experience for recipients.

Recently, more and more companies are experimenting with the inclusion of GIFs in their email campaigns. Sometimes, this can be a challenging feat because not all email platforms will load them correctly, or they will load only the frame of the GIF instead of providing users with the full effect. If you’re considering utilizing this type of visual in your emails, thoroughly test it on a variety of platforms, and if it’s going to be frozen on one particular frame, make sure it’s an image that’s able to stand alone and still give users a complete understanding of what the content is about.

Photo Credit: Jason Rodriguez

Optimization for All Devices

Long gone are the days where all users accessed their inbox from the same email platform on their desktops. Today users are connected to email through smartphones, tablets, desktops, with a wide range of devices to choose from within those general categories. The way one person views an email isn’t the same way another person does, so to ensure that accessibility isn’t jeopardized for any users, a responsive design email is typically the best solution. This way all recipients on nearly every device and platform imaginable have a user-friendly experience with your email and are able to view it as intended. If you aren’t using a responsive design, investigate what devices the majority of your users are on, and ensure that the email is tailored to those functionalities and set up for that platform.

In today’s era of being constantly connected to the internet, the majority of users are on mobile – regardless of vertical. This actively growing audience is on-the-go and expects the brands they engage with to understand that. Clickable items on a mobile device should be optimized for a touch screen thumb—not a mouse—and shouldn’t require the user to do any extra work (zooming in or zooming out) to view the images in the message.

While you can focus on a certain group of users, ideally, you should be optimizing your email campaigns for your entire audience—which means whatever device they are checking their mail on. Litmus is a tool that allows you to see how your email would render on multiple devices and platforms before you send it. Give it a look through before you launch any email campaign.

Personalization

Content you provide users with through email initiatives should be relevant and provide significant value. Marketing to the user as an individual and using personalization no longer needs to be exemplified by addressing them with first and last name. Similar to a conversion funnel, an email funnel allows you to target users with more specific content as they show signs of progressive interest and come closer to becoming a customer.

If a user is in your email database after signing up for your newsletter on a specific blog post, you can segment your lists based on relevant content that they have demonstrated interest in. By personalizing emails in a step-by-step process based on relevance, the effectiveness of your messages will be much greater as the content is related to what initially caused them to interact with your brand.

Perhaps you have a newsletter sign up on your blog, and after reading an article on email marketing the user provides you with their contact information. Sending them a follow up email that addresses logo design will not fulfill their needs, and will seem arbitrary given their reason for signing up. Instead, set up a specific email funnel for users within that group. Send them a whitepaper that goes into further detail about email marketing, and if they open email they move further down the funnel, where they’ll receive another email providing them with content that makes sense given their latest read.

Effective Email Marketing Strategies

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to streamline communications with a specific audience. Regardless of industry or whether a company is B2B or B2C, this strategic marketing approach can garner immense results for brands if executed correctly. Utilize our best practices with every marketing campaign to help reach your users and foster business growth.

When it comes to website development platforms and content management systems, there are a lot of options currently available on the market. Depending on your brand’s industry, the type of products you sell, the services you offer, or even the general size of your business, certain platforms may be better suited for your needs and for achieving your business objectives.

Sitecore and Magento are two very different platforms that are used by many businesses in many different verticals on aglobal scale. Both are considered the gold standards amongst their respective competitors. While comparing the two is like comparing apples to oranges—their feature sets are incredibly different—they do have some shared similarities.

Sitecore is undoubtedly the leader in website and marketing automation, but when it comes to ecommerce, Magento takes the cake. Above all, both of these platforms are powerful tools, empowering companies to have more control of their websites than ever before. However to utilize them efficiently, it’s important to find a knowledgeable partner that has experience working with these systems. To help you better understand the basics of each platform, and to identify which solution will be most aligned with your business goals, let’s explore some of the benefits of Sitecore and Magento:

Sitecore

Sitecore is a global leader in customer experience management, providing a state-of-the-art content management system (CMS) that optimizes the user-experience for each visitor to your site. The product allows organizations to control and own the content that is delivered to prospects through a highly integrated system, offering exquisite scalability options that can fulfil the needs of all organizations. Sitecore is an enterprise product that features all elements found in a traditional CMS platform, plus an array of innovative tools that create a unique experience.

Automated Marketing
Sitecore offers marketing automation that is far more advanced than any other content management system. With Sitecore’s automation marketing suite, you can integrate other marketing channels into your CMS so that you can serve your users with content that is relevant to their needs. You’re able to optimize content for specific individuals based on their interests and behavior, in order to provide a customized experience for each and every visitor to your site. By serving your users with content that they find most valuable, conversions and business growth will increase as well.

Built in Analytics User Data
The built-in analytics program for Sitecore is incredibly powerful and provides businesses with a lot of the key insights they need to know about their audience. High-quality data is automatically stored so that you can analyze it when you’d like and determine the best tactics and strategies to help move your brand forward. You don’t have to set up any sort of tracking in order to enable the Sitecore analytics suite either – it will automatically be activated.

You can examine all aspects of each campaign or marketing initiative in one place, and use the built-in testing tools to determine what’s performing best and which initiatives are garnering the best results.

Highly Scalable and Configurable
Sitecore has extensive scalability options and endless customizable configurations available. You can truly make your website exactly how you need it to be in order to achieve your goals and reach your users. The tools within the system are all focused on generating engagement, and each one can be adapted to meet the unique needs of every business. You can choose functionalities that you are most familiar with, define utilities that you want to include, and select elements that you want to exclude. Each and every aspect of the site can be tailored to fit your needs.

Security
Since Sitecore is most commonly used by enterprise companies, the platform really reflects the much needed security measures that businesses of that size require in order to keep all their data safe. The security features of Sitecore are arguably one of the biggest reasons the platform is so helpful for businesses of all sizes. The privacy and security that the Sitecore CMS provides not only ensures that you have an incredibly secure site, but it also helps to instill trust from users in your brand.

Mobile Ready

Today, reaching users through their mobile devices is becoming just as important for influencing consumer behavior as connecting with them while they’re sitting at a desktop. To reflect this large population of users, Sitecore delivers a completely mobile-optimized system for your company, which in turn provides the assurance that users can access your site from any device they choose, without sacrificing usability.

Magento

Magento is an open-source ecommerce platform, making it an excellent fit for businesses of all sizes that are selling their products online. The program has options that can accommodate all budgets, while still being flexible enough with features and functionalities that work well for large enterprise companies, where cost isn’t as much of a concern as it may be for some smaller businesses. Because of the core fundamentals of this type of solution, nearly every business can use Magento to help accomplish their brand’s objectives when it comes to ecommerce.

Payment and Shipping
Within the ecommerce space, the importance of payment and shipping is unquestionable. For the most part, your entire business can only operate when those two crucial functions are managed correctly. Every business has preferences and requirements with how they operate, and Magento allows brands to work with a wide variety of payment services and shipping vendors to make sure they have a solution that is tailored to their needs.

Highly Advanced Ecommerce

Of all the platforms available on the market currently, Magento undoubtedly is the most advanced solution for ecommerce. The program offers features that you won’t find in any of its competitors, and has functionalities that make it easier for businesses to improve their online presence. The built-in aspects of Magento include features such as flexible coupons, promotional and tiered pricing, product bundling, and more. With most other platforms, you wouldn’t find these intricate and varied options available.

Many Extensions Available
Aside from what the program comes with “out of the box,” there are plenty of additional add-ons that can make for an even better user-experience. You can make the platform have everything you want it to, and craft a site that can do all that you need. There may be certain design elements or functionality add-ons that would be necessary given the industry your brand operates in, and with Magento you can always integrate new tools into the setup of your software.

Large Community for Support and Development

Quite possibly one of the biggest benefits of Magento is that there is an immense community for support and development at your disposal. According to data provided by Mainstreet Host, over 240,000 businesses use Magento for their ecommerce businesses, and approximately 800,000 developers are skilled in the platform globally. This number is still growing, making it easier for businesses to connect with others that are familiar with the system, enabling more and more opportunities as you become more knowledgeable with it.

Flexibility
Magento has plenty of scalability possibilities throughout the platform so that businesses can facilitate the specific user experience that they want their customers and potential customers to have. You can control the way that your site is managed so that you’re selecting a method that works most effectively for your brand. The flexibility with the program also allows room for business growth in the future. As your business changes, you can easily make the necessary alterations to your site to reflect that.

Mobile and SEO friendly
The platform uses a responsive design to ensure that your website is easily accessible from any device that your users access your website from. Whether it’s an iPhone or a tablet, the way you intended your website to appear for your customers is exactly how it will look. Websites that don’t use this type of design, or don’t create a mobile-optimized version, often miss out on potential sales because they aren’t providing a positive user-experience and the overall usability on the site is too difficult to navigate. Aside from ensuring your users are top priority, Magento is SEO-friendly too, keeping in mind how search engines read websites throughout the entire foundation of the design.

Sitecore vs. Magento: Understanding the Basics

Sitecore and Magento are truly the gold standards in their respective markets. Both platforms are highly scalable and customizable, have room for a number of available integrations, and are optimized for mobile and search engines. Both are great options for content management systems with different specialty areas, and selecting which one is right for your brand comes down to the core needs and objectives of your business. Ultimately, with both systems it’s crucial that you find a knowledgeable partner that is experienced with this type of website development to help you set up your CMS and maintain it for your business as your needs change.

Designing a mobile app and designing a mobile website can have some overlapping similarities. A lot of the best practices such as usability, cohesiveness, and conciseness are all still incredibly important, and companies should be employing them regardless of the platform they are creating. However, there are still some important design elements that stand out when creating a mobile app. Here are some of the most important design and development features that will create an optimal experience for your users, and continued success for your business.

Consider Operating Systems

Designing the functionality of a mobile app will largely depend on the operating system you choose to build it on. Each mobile user has their own device of choice that they prefer to use, so each mobile app has to be adaptable to various operating systems. When you think about programs like Gmail or Instagram, they appear slightly differently depending if you’re accessing the apps from an Android device or from an iPhone. That being said, the overall feel shouldn’t be drastically different, but it should appeal to the unique features that those devices may have. Certain navigational patterns are native to certain devices. For example, if you’re trying to delete something on an iPhone, the natural instinct is generally to slide your finger across the screen. Think about what’s intuitive for each device as far as general actions that the user needs to take while using your app. Whatever those actions may be, the design of them should reflect the intuitive action that is associated with that operation system.

Optimize Interaction for Touch

Keep in mind that users will be interacting with your app on a mobile device, not a desktop. This requires taking steps to optimize the platform for touch rather than a mouse. You want to limit the amount of hand movements and actions a user has to go through in order to accomplish a task or find information. You also want to prevent them from having to use two hands at any point in the navigation. Consider this when determining button placement, and creating long and scrollable pages instead of burying content deep within a bunch of tabs. Using “hamburger menus” can be a useful technique to organize content in a way that is recognizable to app users. You want your app to be an easy experience for your audience, and consolidating your information will prevent them from having to switch hands too often, or get distract from what the app is actually offering.

Battery Life

You always want to be considerate of how much your mobile app is going to cost a user in terms of bandwidth. You want to make your app engaging and purposeful, while keeping the design streamlined and simplified. You don’t want your app to eat up the battery life of your audience, or else they won’t want to use it. So design an easy and simple platform with all of the essentials needed for the app to be a success. However, get rid of any unnecessary animations, and lose any background activities that just don’t need to be there. This will help people get exactly what they came to your app for, without it disrupting the rest of their mobile experience.

Rewards for Click Actions

An app user has the expectation that their phone will respond quickly and efficiently to any action they try to do, so you want to make sure that your platform meets those expectations. You want to reduce the amount of clicks it takes to complete a certain action, but for each of these actions, you need to give the user some indication that something is being accomplished. For each of these actions such as clicking a button, liking something, sharing something, or refreshing a page, there should be some sort of response or feedback. These act as a reward or indication that the app recognizes something is being done, and the user can understand that an action is happening. A change in color, a glow, a noise, or an animation can serve as the equivalent of a click or a hover state on a desktop. Apps like Snapchat have the dancing ghost logo, and Twitter has a pinwheel that indicates when a page is being loaded to show users that what they are trying to do is actually being recognized. These are all little techniques that can help make the user experience natural and easy to understand.

Focus on Intuition

Instead of building a platform within the standards of web browser, a mobile app design has to depend on the guidelines of the operating system it is created on. An app should intuitively be able to adapt to the different size screens of the same operating system so that it works for all users, and the navigation patterns should be fairly identical across all platforms as well. There should be a sense of familiarity to the interactions and functionality of your app. There has to be a clear design pattern for architecture so that it is intuitive enough for first time users and still interesting for returning users. This can get challenging across different operating systems as what is a native action to Android, may not be native action to iOS. However, a universal design technique you can include is a natural path for the users to take. Place controls near the element that they will control, like an arrow or call to action that is in the proximity to show association between the two. This shows the audience that one interacts with the other and it makes sense. From the moment a user opens your app, the entire experience should be intuitive and logical in relation to how other mobile apps function. These small design techniques can be the defining factors that make that happen.

Aesthetics

When it comes down to aesthetics, there are a lot of similarities between mobile app best practices and those of mobile websites. You have to create an experience for the user that is practical for the size screen they are using. High resolution images are a must, with proper sizing in relation to the rest of the content on the page. There also needs to be large typography, with proper line height and letter spacing that allows users to consume the content from at least arm’s length. You want to avoid pinching and zooming as much as possible, so present the information to your audience in a clean and clear way that they can enjoy without having to work too hard for .

Designing a mobile app and designing a mobile website can have some overlapping similarities. A lot of the best practices such as usability, cohesiveness, and conciseness are all still incredibly important, and companies should be employing them regardless of the platform they are creating. However, there are still some important design elements that stand out when creating a mobile app. Here are some of the most important design and development features that will create an optimal experience for your users, and continued success for your business.

Consider Operating Systems

Designing the functionality of a mobile app will largely depend on the operating system you choose to build it on. Each mobile user has their own device of choice that they prefer to use, so each mobile app has to be adaptable to various operating systems. When you think about programs like Gmail or Instagram, they appear slightly differently depending if you’re accessing the apps from an Android device or from an iPhone. That being said, the overall feel shouldn’t be drastically different, but it should appeal to the unique features that those devices may have. Certain navigational patterns are native to certain devices. For example, if you’re trying to delete something on an iPhone, the natural instinct is generally to slide your finger across the screen. Think about what’s intuitive for each device as far as general actions that the user needs to take while using your app. Whatever those actions may be, the design of them should reflect the intuitive action that is associated with that operation system.

Optimize Interaction for Touch

Keep in mind that users will be interacting with your app on a mobile device, not a desktop. This requires taking steps to optimize the platform for touch rather than a mouse. You want to limit the amount of hand movements and actions a user has to go through in order to accomplish a task or find information. You also want to prevent them from having to use two hands at any point in the navigation. Consider this when determining button placement, and creating long and scrollable pages instead of burying content deep within a bunch of tabs. Using “hamburger menus” can be a useful technique to organize content in a way that is recognizable to app users. You want your app to be an easy experience for your audience, and consolidating your information will prevent them from having to switch hands too often, or get distract from what the app is actually offering.

Battery Life

You always want to be considerate of how much your mobile app is going to cost a user in terms of bandwidth. You want to make your app engaging and purposeful, while keeping the design streamlined and simplified. You don’t want your app to eat up the battery life of your audience, or else they won’t want to use it. So design an easy and simple platform with all of the essentials needed for the app to be a success. However, get rid of any unnecessary animations, and lose any background activities that just don’t need to be there. This will help people get exactly what they came to your app for, without it disrupting the rest of their mobile experience.

Rewards for Click Actions

An app user has the expectation that their phone will respond quickly and efficiently to any action they try to do, so you want to make sure that your platform meets those expectations. You want to reduce the amount of clicks it takes to complete a certain action, but for each of these actions, you need to give the user some indication that something is being accomplished. For each of these actions such as clicking a button, liking something, sharing something, or refreshing a page, there should be some sort of response or feedback. These act as a reward or indication that the app recognizes something is being done, and the user can understand that an action is happening. A change in color, a glow, a noise, or an animation can serve as the equivalent of a click or a hover state on a desktop. Apps like Snapchat have the dancing ghost logo, and Twitter has a pinwheel that indicates when a page is being loaded to show users that what they are trying to do is actually being recognized. These are all little techniques that can help make the user experience natural and easy to understand.

Focus on Intuition

Instead of building a platform within the standards of web browser, a mobile app design has to depend on the guidelines of the operating system it is created on. An app should intuitively be able to adapt to the different size screens of the same operating system so that it works for all users, and the navigation patterns should be fairly identical across all platforms as well. There should be a sense of familiarity to the interactions and functionality of your app. There has to be a clear design pattern for architecture so that it is intuitive enough for first time users and still interesting for returning users. This can get challenging across different operating systems as what is a native action to Android, may not be native action to iOS. However, a universal design technique you can include is a natural path for the users to take. Place controls near the element that they will control, like an arrow or call to action that is in the proximity to show association between the two. This shows the audience that one interacts with the other and it makes sense. From the moment a user opens your app, the entire experience should be intuitive and logical in relation to how other mobile apps function. These small design techniques can be the defining factors that make that happen.

Aesthetics

When it comes down to aesthetics, there are a lot of similarities between mobile app best practices and those of mobile websites. You have to create an experience for the user that is practical for the size screen they are using. High resolution images are a must, with proper sizing in relation to the rest of the content on the page. There also needs to be large typography, with proper line height and letter spacing that allows users to consume the content from at least arm’s length. You want to avoid pinching and zooming as much as possible, so present the information to your audience in a clean and clear way that they can enjoy without having to work too hard for it.

Creating a website is hardly a simple task. It requires extensive planning, intricate design and development work, and the right team of skilled experts to make it all possible. Each and every website is different because all brands have varying objectives and unique needs that they need to fulfill. That being said there is no “one size fits all” website design for brands that really want to use their online presence to promote business growth.

Our approach to design is often unique to each project’s requirements and scale. In the case of larger website projects, we have found that scalability, flexibility, and maintaining a consistent brand style across a large number of pages – often 10,000+ present some of the biggest logistical challenges.

An elegant solution to this is to follow an atomic design process. This is a much more modular and granular approach to website design and build. Rather than designing pre-set page templates and layouts, atomic design is the design of building blocks or content modules that can be added, duplicated and moved within a set of defined rules to create unique pages that work for each type of content and page on a site, while keeping it on-brand.

The atomic design methodology is broken down into 5 distinct phases of website design:

Atoms

In scientific terms, atoms are the basic building blocks that together make up matter. When you translate that over to a website design methodology, they serve a similar purpose. Atoms act as the basic building blocks for all of your website design efforts. While they aren’t design elements that can stand alone, together they create different elements that are used throughout your website’s layout.

In atomic website design, atoms serve as the starting point for all parts of your website design project. Without clearly creating and defining certain design elements, your project would lack consistency and cohesiveness. This holds true especially for projects that encompass an extensive amount of pages. Without defining basic design elements such as font on mobile or a paragraph style for section headers, it would be difficult to not only design but edit different pages as you continue through the design process. Atoms can include any of the following:

• fonts
• color schemes
• buttons
• form fields
• logos
• inputs
• labels

When following this methodology, a lot of designers create their atoms and compile them in a unique style guide. This holds all of the essential atoms you need so that you can pull pieces of each as you start the bigger design elements. Aside from selecting color palettes, or determining what all paragraphs would look like on your pages, designers have to think about the mobile and desktop versions of each as well.

Molecules

In chemistry, molecules represent the smallest part of any chemical element, and are made up from atoms combined together. Similarly, with the atomic design process, molecules are design features that are made up of the basic building blocks defined in the style guide—the atoms.

To better grasp how a molecule would be created in a website design, think about a simple search form. You may combine a button (atom) with the appropriate input (atom) and label (atom) to create a full-functioning search bar (molecule). Those items (the button, input, and label) together create something that is incredibly useful and essential to the functionality of the site, however if they were to act alone, they wouldn’t be as valuable.

Organisms

Organisms are groups of molecules together. What makes these organisms different from a molecule is that there are several of them, allowing the complexity to reach a new level. In website design, organisms are several molecules combined together on a section of your page.

When you think about the masthead at the top of your homepage, you can compare that to molecules combined together to form an organism. On your masthead you likely have your navigation, your search bar, and your logo all together to help your users navigate your site easily. Each of those three features could be used alone if they had to be (molecules). However, if you were to break them down even more, they likely wouldn’t stand alone, they would simply be the basic building blocks necessary to help create the other functionalities of your site (atoms).

Templates

The next phase doesn’t align as closely with chemistry as the previous sections have. Templates are created by putting together all of the organisms to create a website page. This provides you with a much deeper understanding of what the design and page will look like once it’s completed and live.

For the most part, templates are created to show structure and layout—not the specifics of what content will actually be on the page. You can see things like sizing and dimensions, but not how the actual content would fit in. Templates are designed to give a general idea as to what to expect when your site is live, and show how all of the pieces will come together to create a functioning page.

Pages

Very similarly to templates, pages are created to give an even more realistic outlook onto what each page will look like. Often there will be placeholders (ex. “content goes here”) and some imagery to provide a vivid sense of how the page will function.

Since this phase offers the most realistic and accurate depiction of what is to be expected once the website is live, this section is essential for testing and review. You can fully see how content will appear, how the site will function, how images will look next to each other, how text and photos can come together, and how the overall flow of the website and each page will appear. From here, you can make any edits necessary if you’re finding that certain functionalities seem off and the design isn’t supporting your needs as originally intended.

Scalability and Consistency

The best part of this type of website design is that you’re able to lay out exactly what to expect as you move from each design element to the next. By using the building blocks initially created together to create more complex systems within your interface, you can effortlessly focus on scalability and consistency, ensuring your project is completed to serve your users in the most cohesive and user-friendly way possible.