Unvieling Best Website Navigation Trends

In the past few decades web marketing has changed rapidly, that has also impacted on traditional website design and bought it to a whole new level.

These days, web marketers are more into easing usability of a website that can help enhance user experience, speed-up information search and digging deep to come up with more and more website menu styles and usable navigation solutions that aid users to browse through website and help in information search.

Innovation in website design is heating up website design trends and designers are experimenting ways to come-up with simple navigation systems for a better user experience.

So if you are creating a website, we’ve got you covered. There are number of some great website builders available online that offer just the right menus designs. Here are a few examples of some trendy website menu styles

Vertical side menus

What a clean nicely aligned example of vertical side menu Arbour has set on its homepage. With options running along the left side of the webpage that not only unclutter your website but also provides simple navigation to users.

Vertical menus are best in-trend menu style that won’t befuddle your viewers, often more popular for blogs the idea is now seen across the web to enhance user experience.

Horizontal menus

This menu is also the best option if you have a long list of submenus or dropdowns under each main menu category.

These default traditional choice menus are not yet outdated. Hanging-on-the-top website menu styles guide your visitors that don’t want to fiddle around.

Horizontal menus works best when you have long list of sub-menus for each main menu category.
Look how neatly B&O play has aligned the menu on top

So, if your website has more sub-menus, you can relentlessly go for horizontal navigation. There are many great online website builders that offer spectacular horizontal menu designs to choose from.

Bottom Navigational Menus

Are you into an out-of-the-box thinker and want to present audience with something they might not have thought of? Then these bottom page menus will work best for you because these navigation menus have bought sophistication in website design trends.

Look at this French art director Pauline Osmont’s website, she has created flattering, yet simple usable navigation on the bottom of her website.

To make this menu style stand out, add a pop of colors to it.

Floating Navigational Menus

Floating anchor menus are in fashion these days. Cyclemon has used floating anchor to best describe its product range according to customers taste and choices.

These menus provide simple navigation for the long-scroll sites, allowing users to jump to various sections on the website when they click on menu and yet the menu keeps floating throughout which save time to go to the top of the page if the visitor needs to select another option.

Many website builders now-a-days offer floating menu designs. So, if you are willing to carry this menu style, you can easily find usable navigation templates on WordPress, Wix, Glu7 etc.

Conclusion

Website design trends are changing with a rapid pace and these emerging navigational menu designs are only a part of the change. Either you are looking to build your website (hyperlink Glu7) or already own one; you must go with the flow to keep your web presence in the limelight.

7 STAND-OUT-FROM-THE-CROWD WEB DESIGNS FOR 2016

When we talk about website design, there can be two distinctive elements, innovation and following the trends. Since who don’t like to seize the opportunity that trending and people are loving it? And do you know the first quarter of the year is best time to implement these changes before everyone else does, and since it’s only February, we’ve still got plenty of time.

So don’t you want to know some of the website design trends that are going to hit the internet later this year?

Create Variety 

The first thing to consider here is that website cannot be fixed in a mold. Since responsive designs, WordPress templates are gaining popularity because of their responsiveness. You don’t want to be left behind. But this still doesn’t mean you should follow exactly the industry’s trend.

Don’t stress, there’s always space to stand out from the crowd and stay diversified.

This doesn’t mean at all that you need to swap and adjust different designs for creating differentiation. Perhaps, you can think out of the box and see what can be different yet effective for your user experience keeping in mind you don’t miss that spark.

Look at Alexbuga website and how exceptionally it offers unique navigation like a new design trend.

Fluid backgrounds with tinted overlay where the video is still playing in the background is another distinctive website design. Look at this MediaBoom website.

CSS3 animations, grids, distinctive layouts and unique fonts along with other design elements can create vast possibilities for web designers, yet not sacrifice usability.

2016 is the year where designers are going out of the parameters of traditional website design practices and coming up with design trends that are easier to navigate, distinctive and desirable by audience.

Handmade Illustrations

HD images and stock photography have been noticed much in 2015 and most website designs are now inclining towards their use. Web designers are looking positive over the idea of using extremely customized handmade illustrations, sketches and caricatures this year because a customized piece of art is more kind of speaking for itself. 

Look at these uniquely made paintings, sketches below

Boompa 

Mel Kadel

Esteban Muñoz

These days, website designers are also going for more of a trendy hand written typographies for navigational menus. 

Artificial Intelligence

A lot of websites offer an online chat for questions and queries. Still, it is really hard for the operators to respond to all messages on time and time is the most important factor in people’s lives today, because people want a prompt response as you never know where and when they might need assistance.

Have you heard about Microsoft’s’ Cortana, Gmail’s Smart Reply and Facebook’s M that UI designers have put on purpose for us, where they instantaneously respond, are timely and as helpful as your closest friend can be. 

Yes! These are not humans but sophisticated form of artificial intelligence that is taking over the web.

So now you have these AI bots that remember all the calendar events, remind you of important dates like anniversaries, birthdays, and sending email responses on your behalf during holidays when emails are coming at furious pace, help you find files on your PC, suggest holiday packages and even sending greetings to the one you care for.

These programs have totally eradicated to find any difference between man and machines. These AI assistants are changing people’s life and making a great impact in the way people interact online.

Similarly, you can also instill artificial intelligence in your website design to so that your audience can get answers/solutions/suggestions on-the-go and on time.

Microinteractions

Each time when you upload a status, hit like button, log-in or sync data there is a microinteraction involved.

These interactions are unnoticeable and require little unobtrusive effort from the users.

Animations

Animations are nowadays not only restricted to storytelling, but they are a source of audience engagement, interaction and creating user experience.

Look at this wonderful parallax scrolling in Cyclemon website

Avalaunch Media shows quick history of social media simply by hovering mouse on the specific date 

IRIS Digital has some interactive loading animations with a background sound

Try adding unobtrusive, simple and swift animations in your website design showing sync between all the elements and creating a unique user experience if your web design is based on storytelling focus on thematic consistency.

Conclusion

The above defined practices are the forecasted design trends for the year 2016. But one important thing to consider here is that your website design need to be mobile-friendly because people nowadays are navigating websites on the go.

So, no matter what mix of these design trends you adopt, you need to be focused for the mobile version as well since we cannot overlook the fact people are mobile savvy. There are a lot of website builders available online like WordPress, Wix, GoDaddy, Glu7 and others. But ask me and I would recommend GLU7 and WP personally.

5 Requirements of a Business Website

Every business wishes of having a business website for good credibility and successful business growth. In this digital era, nobody would recognize your business without a proper website. Many businesses have their own websites but they don’t focus much on basic elements of a business website which can help them get clients.

Here are five essential requirements for a good business website:

• About us page
• Contact information
• Mobile responsiveness 
• SEO friendliness
• Business blog

1. About us page

About us page holds importance for every website but it especially holds extreme importance for a business site because it needs to convey a complete and a detailed description about their company. It becomes easier for the customers to have a better knowledge about the company and convert into more loyal customers when a site features an ‘about-us’ page.

2. Contact information

It is a requirement to provide authentic physical address and contact information to clients in order to keep them in touch. Business phone number, email and contact forms are prerequisites for getting better business lead conversions.

3. Mobile responsiveness

Mobile responsiveness is one of the core requirements of a business website. A responsive website is now a necessity for better user engagement and traffic.

4. SEO friendliness

Every business website should be search engine friendly because without SEO no one would get to know about the site. Both local and global businesses need to align their sites with SEO. The site should provide meta information with catchy title and description and other necessary elements to get indexed and appear in search rankings.

5. Business blog

It is highly essential to have a proper business blog to provide resourceful information about the company. Blogging is the best way to interact with customers and it is utmost important for business to have a live blog to keep customers be updated with latest business information.

Like what you read? Check out these useful blogs as well.

http://www.glu7.com/blog/

http://www.wix.com/blog

10 REASONS VISUAL CONTENT WILL DOMINATE IN 2016

Visual content always has a potential to pull attention of readers by its charismatic appeal. The value of visually appealing content is ever increasing and it will continue to have steady growth in the year 2016 and beyond.

Following are ten profound reasons why visual content marketing will dominate in 2016.

• Instant brain communication
• Infographics
• GIF images
• Visual storytelling
• Videos
• High conversion rates
• Social media friendliness
• Blog and social media posts 
• Future of content marketing
• Increase more traffic and customer engagement

1. Instant brain communication

Visually appealing content has an instant communication signal processing to human brain with faster understanding of information than simple text. It is 60x powerful and effective in comparison to normal plain textual content.

2. Infographics
Info-graphics provide a wider audience appeal by its colorful and dynamic content presentation for readers. It is really engaging and it increases traffic and lead conversions.

3. GIF images
Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images are also becoming a solid appeal for users for visual content marketing. These images offer wonderful purpose of readers’ engagement by adding colorful animated images in the content to make it visually sound for readers.

4. Visual storytelling

Visual storytelling is an excellent technique for boosting brand image and gaining readers’ attention. It provides superb entertaining and meaningful animated video story of short duration for providing some value to customers.

5. Videos

Videos provide a dynamic sense of appeal and attraction for visitors. There can be product, home page or landing page videos for website to bring more traffic to site and increase visitor retention.

6. High conversion rates

Visual content has an 86% higher user-conversion rate by for compared to simple text content. It engages users by making it easier for them to understand the information. Slide Share, Instagram and Pinterest have exponential traffic and conversion rates for visitors.

7. Social media friendly

Visually interactive content is more social media friendly because it gets more shares, likes on Facebook. The post with videos and images are more sharable and get much more traffic conversion.

8. Blog post and social media post

Visual content marketing is a wonderful trend in content promotion for users. Blog post added with images gives more value to readers than a normal post. It creates enormous interest and curiosity in readers to read visually attractive post with more time on content. Similarly, social media posts with images and videos hold extreme appeal and charm for readers with more sharable content.

9. Future of content marketing

Visual content is the future of content marketing because it enhances the worth of content into more readable and sharable form. Every content marketer is implementing visual content strategies for tremendous traffic and conversion opportunities. 

10. Increase more traffic and customer engagement

This is the most prominent reason for domination of visual content in 2016. Visual content has remarkable appeal and user engagement which increases time on site and decreases bounce rate.

For more trends on content marketing, check out this blog.

Eight Elements To Incorporate To Make Readers Love Your Content

It takes a great amount of effort to create a content which people will love. Content marketing is an excellent technique to promote content by increasing the content’s social reach . It also requires a lot of research for creating content that delivers something to the readers. 

The main thing is to know and understand the interest of readers. This really makes things easier for content writers to develop and publish a well-crafted content that adds value to audience.

Here are eight expert tips on creating likable content:


1. Understand the audience
2. Produce in-depth content
3. Engage audience
4. Write quality content
5. Repurpose the content
6. Create readers’ interest
7. Real value content
8. Get feedback

1. Understand the audience

It is utmost necessary for writer to clearly understand the taste and interest of audience. This makes it very convenient for writer to develop content according to audience’s preferences. Different readers like different content format for instance infographics, blog post and articles etc.

2. Produce in-depth content

It is also becoming a trend to produce longer and in-depth content for readers. The content must provide authentic and insightful information that creates interest in readers to stay more on the website. The maximum content count should be 1,500 words for a blog post and 3,500 words for an E-book.

3. Engage audience

Audience engagement is the most important factor in content development to engage readers. It should be the skill and expertise of a writer to develop an entertaining content that involves and completely mesmerizes readers.

4. Write quality content

Content quality is the basic element in content development and writing original and unique content. Quality content has a characteristic to get viral instantly with more shares and visits. It takes a lot of time and effort to develop a valuable content for readers.

5. Repurpose the content

Repurposing content is the process of making old content useful and readable. It is a wonderful technique of making valuable use of old, forgotten content.

6. Create readers’ interest

Creating readers’ interest is a basic purpose of good content to capture complete attention of readers and keep them coming back.

7. Real value content

An excellent way to craft great content is creating real value for readers. The content must give something to readers and develop interest and engagement of the audience.

8. Get feedback

Feedback is the only way to encourage writers to write more valuable content for readers. It is good to ask for feedback, whether negative or positive, to realize the strengths and weaknesses in content.

New to content marketing? Get more handy tips on content marketing by checking out this post.

THE RETURNS ON SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

We cannot deny of the benefits internet has put at our disposal by connecting people around the world. One of the many benefits is it has offered businesses mass globalization.

The expansion of the customer-base is the beginning of a new race where marketers are rushing in to reach both their potential and current customers and present their offerings. Here comes the internet marketing magician, SEM – search engine marketing – and a proven, cost-effective way to reach target audience.

A research suggests that around 90% of online searches are done by people sitting at the end of buying of cycle. SEM put your company’s ads on search engine results page based on your set keyword price depending on the popularity of the keyword.

So, if you’re a new into business or internet marketing, these SEM basics will aid you escalate your business and trigger your company’s revenue meter.

Here are some benefits of SEM integration in your marketing campaign:

SEM Seizes Attention
When people are searching for something over internet, they are exactly aware of what they want. That is the reason they use keywords on search engines. Meaning your ads are placed right in front of the person who might be looking for something similar to your offering without pushing your product to your customers.  

SEM-The Low Cost Leader
SEM has proved to be one of the most cost effective mediums to reach customers recommended by marketers these days compared to other traditional marketing strategies. Since search engine traffic has tight targeting that increases audience reach, turning them into customers. SEM also provides an in-depth detail through Google Analytics that how successful your marketing campaign is.  

SEM Increases Brand Identity
High visibility on search engines delivers a message that your business is successful and liked by people around the world. Another benefit of SEM is when people see your website repeatedly during search; they are more likely to remember your brand. So, the next time people think of buying, your brand name will flash in their mind first turning visitors into your potential customers.

So, your next move should be to use search engine marketing tool and bring your business in the knowledge of all those people sitting at different places around the world, mark your presence and earn that chunk of revenue that was missing until now.Find more information on digital marketing strategy here.