7 Essential Technical Skills You Will Need If You Want To Become A Web Designer

7 Essential Technical Skills You Will Need If You Want To Become A Web Designer

Posted on by Kalenet Webdesign

For anyone contemplating a career in web design, we trust you are aware that there are several technical skills that all successful web designers must possess. Without these skills, not only will you be compromising your ability to create websites, but we would go as far as to say that you will unlikely be able to create a website worthy of being published.

These technical skills can all be learned, first by studying and understanding the specific theories and details of them and then using that foundational learning to start using them practically. This is likely to be done by practising with them first before using them to build a portfolio of completed websites. As for what these seven main technical skills for web designers are, they are all outlined below.

Website Coding (HTML, CSS): It should come as no surprise that website coding languages such as HTML and CSS are first on the list. Not that modern websites are built by writing line after line of code as they once were, however, knowing how these codes work and being able to alter website pages by editing their HTML and CSS code will be invaluable to your web design career.

Programming Languages: In addition to HTML and CSS, there are other programming languages that web designers should have a decent working knowledge of. These include Python, JavaScript, C++, and Swift and they are used to create much of the functionality that a website’s design calls for. Of the four mentioned, Java is the one used most often.

Content Management Systems (CMS): Content is an essential part of any website, or at least it is if the website has any chance of ranking or converting. A CMS is what allows web designers to initially include content, and subsequently, the website owners to add content. Examples of CMS include WordPress, Joomla, HubSpot, Drupal, and Wix.

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eCommerce Sales

3 Ways to Increase eCommerce Sales

Posted on by Kalenet Webdesign

When it comes to the ecommerce industry, websites like Shopify have been making it awfully easy for people to start up their own businesses in the field of ecommerce web design. Maybe you are also thinking about starting your own ecommerce company as well. It only makes sense if you want to make money through the power of the internet. An ecommerce store makes the most sense.

The thing is that just setting yourself up an ecommerce store is not going to cut it. If you want to make some real money off of it, you need to generate some significant sales. To do that, you need to know how you can market your ecommerce store so that you can sell your wares to become successful.

We’re going to look at x ways to increase your ecommerce business sales in this post to help you foster a successful business. Let’s get started.

  1. Paid Traffic Generation

One of the best ways to boost the sales you can make through your ecommerce business is to get some good traffic flowing to your website. How will you do that? Through paid traffic, of course. If you are thinking that getting paid traffic to your website is going to require you to spend more money than you will make from it, you would be so wrong. There have been cases where people invested in paid traffic but couldn’t break even on their investment. There is a reason for that.

If you utilize paid traffic properly and avoid newbie mistakes, you’re pretty much golden. You need to approach paid traffic by pacing yourself. Spend small amounts to test the waters before you jump in. Experiment with multiple campaigns on a small scale to see which one gives you better results. Once you’ve found your pick, tweak it to make improvements and voila. You will not only get back what you’ve invested, you will make more on top of that.

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Website Design Ideas: Testing

Website Design Ideas: Testing

Posted on by Kalenet Webdesign

Most things that are complicated in business require testing. That may be as simple as the local supermarket testing different promotional offers during different weeks to see what cuts through. Or it may be as complex as a commercial electrician performing circuit board testing on a highly specialised pieces of equipment that controls the signals on a busy freeway.

In the digital world, testing is just as important. Enormous companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon all employ thousands of engineers and other staff to do constant testing on their websites, apps and services to squeeze out every bit of efficiency that can.

A/B Testing

But there is another, less commonly understood form of testing that these businesses undertake. It’s called A/B testing. And it is an incredibly powerful tool. Without testing, businesses are just guessing what website layout, offers and landing pages work best or will appeal the most. So the process of designing a website is less scientific and more driven by gut feel and experience.

There is a better way. And that way is A/B testing. A/B testing is very simple. It basically involves having two different versions of the same web page. That allows a small change to be made to one (the tested page) and one to be left as the original (the control page). That way, the effect of a particular change can be observed and measured as different users interact with the page.

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Spending Money on SEO

Is it Worth Spending Money on SEO?

Posted on by Kalenet Webdesign

In short, yes, SEO remains the most profitable digital marketing stream in the world, especially if you have a decent budget to use on it. As digital marketing specialists slinky.digital will tell you, it doesn’t return immediate results like other digital marketing streams usually do, which means that you need to think of your SEO spending as a long-term investment above all else.

With this in mind, I decided to take a closer look at the things that are worth spending money on when it comes to SEO and the things that you should be careful of.

What Should I Spend My SEO Budget On?

Ultimately, the answer to this question will largely be dictated by the size of your budget, the type of website that you have, and your own SEO experience. Some of the most effective ways to spend your SEO budget include:

On an experienced SEO professional – In reality, I’d almost always recommend spending your SEO budget on a professional with experience and training. They will be able to identify gaps in your SEO strategy, work on solutions to these gaps, and help you maximise your long term return on investment.

On guest posting – If you’re a good writer, then I’d recommend thinking about spending a bit of money on guest posting. In general, guest posts include a link back to your website, helping build your backlink profile. If you pay to place guest posts on high-quality websites, you will find that these backlinks help improve your SEO rank a lot.

On website optimisation – A lot of people forget about this part of SEO. If you’re not already working to optimise your website’s code and back-end infrastructure, then you should at least think about it. Ultimately, the better your website is written and the faster it loads, the better the user experience will be, and in turn the better your SEO rank will be.

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Top SEO Trends

Top SEO Trends in 2019

Posted on by Kalenet Webdesign

If you’re in any way familiar with the world of SEO, you will know that it’s a constantly changing field. Every time one of the major search engines update their algorithms or makes changes to their search engine ranking process, search engine optimisation best practices also change.

It’s therefore important to stay up to date with the latest best practices so that you can keep your website at the top of the results pages for relevant keywords. With this in mind, I’ve put together a short list of the top SEO trends in 2019 which you can use to inform future optimization decisions. They include:

Understanding User Intent

Google’s search engine algorithms are becoming increasingly advanced, and they have reached a point where they are able to understand what sort of things someone is searching for when they use a specific keyword.

With this in mind, you need to make sure that your content for specific focus keywords and phrases is inline with the things that people are actually searching for.

For example, if you’re trying to rank for a key phrase like “How to get to the top of the search engine rankings”, you need to make sure that your article explains this clearly.

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Choosing The Best Comment Plugin For Your WordPress Blog

Posted on by Kalenet Webdesign

When it comes to creating the perfect WordPress website or blog, there are two key things that you have to master if you want to be successful. The first of these is content. You need to have high-quality content which interests people, otherwise there won’t be any reason for people to visit your website.

The second thing that you have to master is audience engagement. If you can somehow build a little community of people who regularly comment on your posts and articles, and who are likely to share your content on social media, then you will be well on the way towards website success. With this in mind, there are a number of different comment plugins that you can add to your WordPress website. Most of these are free, and can be set up very easily. Consider the pros and cons of the following, and add at least one to your own website:

Disqus:
Disqus is one of the most widely used comment plugins in the world. One of the best things about it is that it isn’t limited to WordPress. It runs on its own platform, which is a little like a social media platform, and lets people connect and engage with each other across a range of websites and blogs, especially if they have a few in common.

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Maintenance WordPress Site

5 Tips For Building A Low Maintenance WordPress Site

Posted on by Kalenet Webdesign

WordPress is the world’s most popular website builder, with over a quarter of the internet’s websites currently using it. It is simple, requires no coding or developer experience to use, and allows websites to be built with minimal costs.

However, WordPress site maintenance can take up a lot of your time, especially if you aren’t an experienced developer. Maintenance is very important to make sure that your site remains in optimal condition for search engine crawler bots, to prevent broken links from popping up too often, and to make sure that your page load speeds stay fast.

If you don’t have a lot of time to spend on maintenance, then you need to design a low maintenance site. Below are our top five tips for building a low maintenance WordPress website:

  1. Find a decent host:

Different hosting providers work differently. In general, you should stay away from cheap ones with a poor reputation, as they can cause your website to load slowly, can lead to data loss, and can have a lot of downtime. Try and find a low maintenance hosting provider who offers instant restores, one-click backups, and other features.

  1. Don’t use too many plugins:

Things like plugins and toolkits can stop working or work differently with different updates, which means that you should choose your plugins carefully. Only use those which are essential, and do your research before choosing which ones to use.

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Maintaining Your WordPress Site

Top Tips For Maintaining Your WordPress Site

Posted on by Kalenet Webdesign

Some sort of online presence is extremely important in the modern world of business. Many small businesses choose to take their services partly or entirely online, and they therefore need to build themselves a website. WordPress is the world’s premier website building platform, and is used by small business owners and web designers throughout the world to create their own sites.

However, as a business owner, you will probably have limited time to spend maintaining and updating your website. It is therefore very important to make sure that you try and create a low maintenance website which isn’t going to require hours of work a week to stay up and running. Our top tips for maintaining your WordPress site efficiently include:

Limit Your Plugins:

Plugins are great. The allow you to do things which you otherwise wouldn’t be able to, they can simplify otherwise complicated actions, and they can streamline your website and make it more user friendly. However, plugins can also cause your site to run slower, and they can require regular maintenance as you update your website. Limiting your plugins to those that you really need will help reduce the amount of website maintenance you have to perform.

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eCommerce

What will eCommerce be Beyond 2018?

Posted on by Kalenet Webdesign

2019 will see the global ecommerce giant Amazon hit the quarter century mark for its birthday. With almost 40 percent of the whole ecommerce industry being the playing ground for Amazon, it is estimated that it will only grow larger and larger within the coming years.

Despite the fact that Amazon has been around for almost 25 years now, the company and the ecommerce industry in general is still quite a nascent field in the larger scheme of things. In fact, Jeff Bezzos, the CEO of Amazon still says that every day is Day 1 at Amazon.

Even with the advances in technology making the ecommerce industry boom, there is still a lot of success to be had in this industry. A lot of market opportunities await going forward. Here is a look at what ecommerce will (most probably) be like beyond 2018.

Multichannel Ecommerce Enables Buying Everywhere

Multichannel ecommerce will make buying possible anywhere in the world a lot easier. Through the decoding of all the nuances and answering the “who, what, when and why”, multichannel ecommerce industry is all about striking the fine balance between the different avenues that ecommerce companies will be exploring to market their wares. Multichannel retailing is going to allow ecommerce companies to prosper by allowing purchasing from literally anywhere.

Mobile First

With more and more of the world moving mobile, it only makes sense that the ecommerce industry is also going to see a big impact of it. With the prospect of Shopify moving towards proactively taking a mobile first approach and offering mobile payment options to their customers, the sales they will make are going to skyrocket.

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Branding With WordPress

Branding With WordPress – Theme Selection

Posted on by Kalenet Webdesign

When it comes to website development for small businesses, it is extremely important to make sure that your site and any other online content is clearly branded. Before you start building your WordPress website and  online presence, you need to sit down and think about your brand, what you are trying to convey, and how you are going to do that. WordPress theme selection is one of the best ways to make sure that your website is branded how you want it to be, as different themes are able to convey different meanings.

What Is Meant By Branding?

Branding – especially in a digital sense – is about building and developing your brand so that your website visitors and customers have a clear sense of who you are and what your vision is. Branding can be done in a variety of ways, including:

  • Your WordPress theme selection, which can contribute to the overall impression that people get when they visit your website for the first time.
  • Your website design, which is very important to complement and add to your theme.
  • Your content and writing style, which can create subliminal messages in the mind’s of your readers, causing you and your business to appear in a certain way.

When branding your online content, it is important to remain consistent across platforms. For example, you need to make sure that you use the same logo and design scheme across both your website and your social media pages.

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