Website Development

Alright, web design devotees and confused creatives, gather ’round! We’re about to embark on a journey through the often misunderstood lands of UX and UI design. It’s gonna be more enlightening than that time you finally figured out the difference between “your” and “you’re”!

But first, let me spin you a yarn from the trenches of design confusion. Picture this: It’s 2014, and I’m at a job interview for a “UX/UI web designer” position at a hip tech startup. The interviewer asks me to explain the difference between UX and UI. Confident in my knowledge, I launch into a detailed explanation about how UX is all about making things look pretty, while UI is about making buttons work.

The result? A look of horror on the interviewer’s face that I hadn’t seen since I tried to explain Bitcoin to my grandma.

Turns out, I had it completely backwards. And thus began my journey to truly understand the difference between UX and UI design. A journey that, hopefully, will save you from similar embarrassment in your next job interview or dinner party conversation.

So, how do you tell the difference between UX and UI design? Well, grab your favorite caffeinated beverage (or a glass of wine, I don’t judge), and let’s dive into this design dilemma!

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What’s the difference between UX and UI design?Read More »

Whether you are an SEO beginner and need simple SEO tactics or are a seasoned pro, Google Search Console has to be regarded as one of the most effective and powerful SEO tools you have available, and better than that, it is free.

Of course, there are many marketing tools and many variants of the ‘correct’ SEO strategy that can be paid for, and some of them are regarded as ‘must-have’ by a large proportion of SEO experts, but anyone who doesn’t use Google Search Console, is missing a trick.

To clarify any confusion, Google Search Console was previously called ‘Google Webmaster Tools‘ so you may have heard of, or even used it when it had its old name.

Its main role is to help monitor how your website appears in the search engine results on Google, and if there are any problems, to help you identify and sort them.

Those errors can come under many categories and require different actions which can include fixing broken backlinks, submitting sitemaps, or correcting technical errors that have arisen on your website.

As for SEO, Google Search Console offer huge opportunities for you to fix or optimise your website, and here are some of the ways that it enables you to do so.

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How To Use Google Search Console To Improve Your SEORead More »

Any dentist who wishes to have a new website created for their dental practice to show off their skills in dental implants, emergency dentistry and teeth whitening – does not necessarily need to know all the fine detail with respect to the technical aspects of building a website. However, it would serve them well if they did have some knowledge of what specific elements constitute a good web design.

The advantages of this would at first allow them to discuss what they want for their website with more clarity, and thereafter be more able to assess how well the web designer had met those objectives. Moving on from that, knowing how web design can impact search engine rankings, is also a huge plus.

If you happen to be a dentist who is, in fact, currently planning a new website, and with that last point about how web design can impact search engine rankings in mind, here are some of the key elements of effective web design to consider.

Ensure Loading Speed Is Minimal

If you have ever clicked through to a website then had to wait any more than a few seconds for it to load, what went through your mind? Most likely it was not wanting to waste your time, and you probably clicked away to find a quicker loading site. Well, that’s exactly what visitors to your website will do if it takes too long to load.

Loading speed is a vital consideration for any website owner that wants good rankings so you must ensure that your web design takes account of this. Too many initial functions and large files are usually the cause, so ensure these are eliminated or at least minimised.

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Improving Your Dental Practice’s Google Ranking With Effective Website DesignRead More »

If you are not using email marketing as part of your marketing and sale strategies, then we have one simple question to ask you, ‘Why not?’.

Hopefully, the reason is that you simply were not aware of the benefits of email marketing, rather than not believing it can work. We assure you email marketing does work, and in fact, it works wonderfully well for businesses, large and small, and at a global or a local level.

To reassure you if you have doubts, or to educate you if you have not seen what the benefits of email marketing are, here are seven of the most significant which can make the biggest difference to your digital marketing campaign.

Simple To Implement

Of all the online marketing tools or strategies that you might wish to start, email marketing is one of the easiest. At its very simplest, all you need is two email addresses: yours and the person you wish to email.

As a business you’ll obviously want to do it professionally,  so you will use an autoresponder service that allows you to set up your campaigns, run them and measure them, and it does so via one single log in.

Campaigns Can Be Set Up In Advance

The autoresponder service that we just mentioned is one that allows you to create a series of emails and have them delivered at a time and date that is predetermined by you.

What that means is that in a single afternoon you could create all the emails you wish to send, but instead of you having to physically press ‘Send’ for each and every one to go out to your subscribers, the autoresponder does it for you automatically.

That means you could be earning requests for information or sales from the emails you send out, literally whilst you are asleep.

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7 Benefits Of Using Email in Your Marketing PlanRead More »

Dark Reading has a thought-provoking post up about the popular buzzphrase “insider threat”, and, to the point, how it really doesn’t make sense as a term. The post advocates for a more fine-grained approach:

• rogue employees – This is actually the darkest prospect, and yet entrepreneurs fear it the most while it actually happens the least.
• security loss through incompetence – now we’re talking!
• just plain leaks – through, for instance, trusting a third party and then their incompetence exposed you to risk.
• outside attacker penetrating inside – really, every outside threat aims to become an inside threat.

Experience has proved out time and again, that under-trained or careless employees are the greatest threat vector. For every “Hollywood hacker” trying to get into your site, there’s a hundred receptionists setting their password to “1234”, a hundred associates using a malware-infected Windows PC to send mail, a hundred security guards who aren’t watching what they should, and a hundred coders who left a gaping exposure to XSS in your web page. It’s ridiculous to treat malicious attackers and mistakes all the same way.