If you’ve visited more than one website on your iPhone or other various smartphone, you can probably tell the difference between a responsive website and one that is not. How? Well, for starters if the site is easy to read on your smartphone, you are probably viewing a website built with a responsive design.

So, what is responsive design? As little as few years ago this term was, to say the least, on the design backburner. However, with the rise in popularity of smartphones and tablets alike in recent years, it’s a household word in the design community, so to speak.  Internet users accessing the web rose from 800 million in 2009 to roughly 1200 million in 2012 according to a recent ComScore Survey.  Statistics expect mobile internet usage to outnumber desktop internet usage by 2015.  The numbers don’t lie- if you don’t have a responsive website yet, you may want to think of changing soon.

Websites are going through some dramatic changes today.  It used to be that a company would redesign a website every year or more.  A lot of that had to do with how the website was used back then.  At that time the website was mainly a duplication of the sales materials.  Today, we have multiple devices that people are using (some that support Flash others that break when you use Flash).  The website visitor today isn’t interested in contacting the sales department right away.  They will do a tremendous amount of research online before they ever make a phone call.  Our Free white paper can help.  Click this LINK do start the download.

How frustrating is it when you get a visitor to click on an ad, follow the conversion path through the site, and just when it's time to sign up they bail on you while filling out the form. Put yourself in their shoes, would you fill out all the fields in your form and go through the entire process?  You should constantly look at ways to reduce information that’s not required, make the process user-friendly, etc.

The latest information shows a change in what users like when it comes to filling out information.  The old way was to minimize the number of clicks required by placing all the fields together on a single page.

There are several steps to a website redesign but here are four very practical and important steps that you don’t want to forget.  If your website design company doesn’t talk about these four steps you need to find a new company.  Please contact us for a PDF of our full website design and development process.

Here are the four important steps that every website redesign should go through:

Earlier this year Forrester published a report after a 12-year study of 1500 websites regarding their user experience design.  Only 3% of the 1500 sites received a passing score.  That’s just 45 sites out of 1500 over 12 years.

The author of the report said websites are falling into the same old trap that they did ten years ago.  They just aren’t thinking about usability.  Things like making the fonts easy to read, customer task flow problems and thinking more about the creative design than the customer using the site. 

By themselves these problems may seem insignificant.  However, if a site is done right

All programming languages have their benefits and have their place in the development community.  When it comes to Internet based website, landing pages, etc. it’s hard to argue with the benefits of PHP.  You can build websites in .NET, Java, Python, Ruby on Rails, PHP, CGI, Perl, etc.  You can get to the same end point; you just take a different path.

Here is a list of some of the most important benefits when looking at using PHP for your website:

Not only did consumers spend more overall, they also spent more per purchase.  The average transaction value was over $60 dollars, up 10 percent versus the same day in 2009.

For the holiday season-to-date, a total of $13.55 billion has been spent online, the measurement firm said, marking a 13 percent increase versus the corresponding days last year.  More and more people are getting used to shopping online.  It’s very likely that we’ll see increases like this over the next 5 to 10 years.

Think about the type of prospect you would like to turn into a customer.  What will they need to hear and from whom.  Some will be looking for similar situations, some will want to hear from someone that performs a similar function at another company while others will want to hear from your marquee accounts.

Try to add testimonials that will span the needs of your desired prospects.  Text is good, audio is better and video is best.

Times have changed and how we sell things has certainly changed. But when someone comes to your website, the principles still apply. Your visitors want to know "Do you have what I’m looking for?" and "Should I get it from you or someone else?" And in between, before being moved to action, they must be absolutely convinced that you have the right solution for their needs, and that you are a trustworthy company to deal with.

Most of the adaptations that you need to make to your writing have a single purpose: to reduce the visitor's amount of cognitive thinking.