Nowadays, most people know what SEO (search engine optimization) is and how it helps a business successful. There are some strategies that worth spending time to update them.

Google has made that site speed matter in search rankings since 2010. The faster sites not only get better on search rankings but also improve user experience. You can test site speed with Google Page Speed Insights

There are few ways to speed up your site:

• Optimize images – compress images and crop images to correct size
• Reduce the number of plugins
• Minify CSS and JavaScript

Having a mobile-friendly site impacts your SEO. Recently Google adds a “mobile-friendly” label to mobile search results for better user experience. The mobile-friendly means a user can view the website’s content without to zoom in or horizontally scroll to read. You can see if your website passes Google’s mobile-friendly test.

I’ve gathered some important data about online searchers’ expectations:

• Local searches lead 50% of mobile users to visit stores (Search Engine Watch)
• 72% of consumers expect brands to have mobile-friendly sites (adweek)
• 48% of mobile visitors who visit a site that is not mobile-friendly felt that the company just didn’t care about their business (Reach Local)
• 9 out of 10 mobile search users have “taken action as a result of a mobile search, with over half leading to a purchase." (Search Engine Land)
• Studies show that by the year 2016, mobile searches will overtake PC searches for local search (Reach Local)
• 3 out of 5 consumers search for local businesses on their smartphone (Reach Local)

These are some reasons why your website should be mobile-friendly.

From Google webmaster central blog

For optimal rendering and indexing, our new guideline specifies that you should allow Googlebot access to the JavaScript, CSS, and image files that your pages use. This provides you optimal rendering and indexing for your site. Disallowing crawling of Javascript or CSS files in your site’s robots.txt directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content and can result in suboptimal rankings.

Google announced that HTTPS would now become a ranking signal. That means websites use secure, encrypted connections may get a boost in Google rankings.

But there are costs to enable HTTPS for your website.

• Host with a dedicated IP address
• Buy a certificate
• Activate the certificate
• Install the certificate
• Update your site to use HTTPS

Color increases brand recognition by 80%, and 85% of shoppers place color as a primary reason for why they buy a particular product, according to a infographic from KISSmetircs. It is essential to choose a color or a combination of colors for your brand.

• Red – exciting, strong, energizing, fast

• Choose a color that best describes your brand’s personality.
  Brand’s personality is like human’s personality. Choose colors that represent your brand’s personality; your brand is strong, sophisticated and mysterious; adventurous, optimistic and self-confident; or idealistic, creative and inspiring.

• Know the impact of colors to consumers.
  The research shows colors have a significant impact on the logo and the brand.
  

  The study revealed that blue logos invoked feelings of confidence, success and reliability; green logos invoked perceptions of environmental friendliness, toughness, durability, masculinity and sustainability; purple logos invoked femininity, glamor and charm; pink logos gave the perception of youth, imagination and fashionable; yellow logos invoked perceptions of fun and modernity; and red logos brought feelings of expertise and self-assurance.

• Consider cultural interpretations.
  For example, blue is the most preferred color across cultures. Red is the color of happiness and celebration in China, often seen red is being used in New Year or wedding. Black associates with death in Thailand.

• Branding color quiz
• Why color matters
• Color design and psychology for branding
• How the psychology of color influences consumers

According to Stanford University, the study shows 46% of people judge the credibility of a business based on the design.

It's not enough that you just have a website but you must have a professional-looking design. Since many people now search for information online before making a purchase, your site may be the first chance to make a good impression to potential customers.

Why does responsive design matter? A responsive website is designed to fit any size of screen when someone is using to view your website (desktop, tablet, smart phone, etc.). Here why responsive design matters to your business.

• The number of smartphones globally used will reach 2 billion in 2015. The number of smartphone users is growing each year. If your website is not responsive, you risk losing a big number of visitors to your site.
• Google released the mobile friendly update on April 21st. The update will potentially give a ranking boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results.
• Responsive design provides the better user experience for each device. The better your website pleases visitors; most likely they will come back again.

If your website do good jobs for all of above reasons, but you don’t have good content. That will be huge impact to your website.

• Write for fast reading. People tend to be in research mode when they are reading online; use one concept per paragraph, make sure the key idea is at the beginning, and remove redundant words.
• Have content that relevant to your business.
• Provide useful information and images that visitors expected.

Your website is part of your business. You may use it as one of your marketing tools and with some other reasons. It should give you the best results to your business.

Logo design is not just creating an identity or brand, but it needs to be scalable, memorable, versatile, and appropriate.

Some rules that I always stick with when designing a logo.

Regina Airport Authority is a non-profit corporation which operates Regina International Airport under a 60-year lease from Transport Canada. Their mission is to manage and operate their airport in a safe, secure, efficient, commercially viable and environmentally responsible manner.

Screen shot of existing log in page.

I’d like to have the login page looks similar to their current website. So I took one image and incorporated it to my new design. In order to turn it to the nice background image, I made it blur with Photoshop Gaussian Blur. And I decided to center all elements. Then added color to username, password, and login boxes with their logo color scheme. The rest of the content, I wrapped with slightly transparent white background.

Screen shot of first design.

Screen shot of second design.

A logo is one of the most important aspects of your business. It is not just making a good first impression. But it represents your business on every medium like your website, business cards, letterheads and etc. If done well, a logo can boost sales and recognition.

If your logo created by someone who doesn’t know about logo design. Your logo may use clip art or created with raster graphic like photoshop. And you don’t have other formats beside jpg or png, so you should consider having a new logo. A good logo should be created by a vector-based like illustrator, which allows for reproduction in all media and all sizes.

When a logo tries to add too many details, it becomes fuzzy and unreadable in a small size. A logo should be simple and easy to read in all sizes.

You want your logo to be unique and memorable. Do not use fonts or elements that overuse. A clichéd or generic logo won’t make your logo stand out from the others.

Businesses evolve over time, your brand and logo should reflect that. It may be time for a new look of your growing company.

Typography effective in web design can be the significant impact to engage or turn away your visitors.

Writing for the web needs to be different from writing for print. According to Jakob Nelsen's study, we tend to scan content on the web and search for the information we want, which is not the same way we read books or magazines. There are some rules help to improve writing content on your web pages.

Place the most important part of web writing at the very top of your web page.

• People can quickly scan and decide if they want to read the rest or not.
• They don’t like to read all the way to the bottom of the screen.
• If you place the most important points at the end, most of them may miss it.

Your website is going to be viewed from people around the world with all levels of English knowledge. If you write to lower level audiences understand you have done well.

Try to use list if you can because

• Easier to scan
• Users do not need to read every word but still understandable
• Short and get to the point

You want your audiences to interact with your pages, give them a definition for the link. Let them know what it will be on the end when they click link not just “click here.”

Keep your pages short and concise. If your content is very long, better to have sub section and write as a stand-alone page.

Chances are your business has a website. To increase visibility and reach more potential customers, make sure your website has these following key elements.

It is general practice to include a page designated for your contact information. Company’s address, e-mail, map, and phone number should be easy to find on this page.

A call to action or CTA is a banner or button helps users what to do next. They can be used for downloading a file, get contact information, request quote, or buy now. With effective call to action, you can urge users take action on your website.

After reading experiences with your products or services, potential customers will be more likely to move forward with your brand. The key to add testimonial is quality not quantity. If a customer gives too long testimonial, quote the parts that sound best.

A properly optimized site can expect increased traffic to your site. Write content that is relevant to your site or topic, and include keyword in the title. Get more info about Search Engine Optimization.

West Air Sweden is a cargo airline based in Gothenburg, Sweden. It operates scheduled and ad hoc freight charter services for FedEx, DHL, TNT and UPS. West Air has been using SMS Pro's Web-based aviation safety software since the end of 2013.

Screen shot of existing login page.

What I would like to change was login form style and color. First I added the grey background to style the form. I also wanted to add color and an element to emphasize it a little more. Then I thought if I have an icon it should work too. So I created the key symbol with illustrator and placed it next to the form title; it helped to gain more attraction. Next, I started to work on the font and size by having larger size for the elements I wanted to emphasize and rearranged their locations. Then added color to it, looked pretty good!

I decided to use the large picture to be background for both login form and content. Then I had login form on the right side of the page. For the content, I changed the font color to be white on the black-transparent background.

Screen shot of first design login page.

Screen shot of second design login page.