Watch out for these 6 website design trends in 2018

As 2017 draws to a close, it is time to sit back and analyze the trends that had a hit and those that had a miss. Website design is quite alike to fashion in that it is ever evolving. As the New Year emerges, newer web design trends and concepts can be expected to unseat the old ones. If you wish to maintain your edge over the competition, paying attention to these trends and incorporating them into your website is imperative. The following website design concepts are poised to rule 2018:

Simple and Responsive Website designs: The usage statistics for mobile browsers far surpasses that of desktop browsers. Hence, adopting a mobile-first strategy and developing web designs that are optimized for the smaller smartphone screens will become mainstream.

Text and Typography: Text size and font style matter a lot in the era of smartphones. Bold headers and casual fonts is the new norm. Finding the middle ground between cartoonish fonts such as Comic Sans and formal ones such as Times New Roman is the new challenge and the ones that are easy on the eyes are going to be the trend.

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Interactive Videos: Today brands prefer to welcome all their users with a short introduction video as soon as they land on the website. This is a great way of reducing bounce rate and getting users to learn about the brand without much hassle. This trend is expected to last well into the foreseeable future.

Subtle Animations: Sharp transformations and blocky transitions are viewed with cringe these. Hence, incorporating animations that are subtle and intuitive is the trend now. Thanks to better handling characteristics of browsers, this is now possible with more ingenuity to come.

Chatbots: AI-powered ChatBots have a prominent role in driving customer engagement and solving grievances. With every subsequent interaction, chatbots get smarter and can completely replace customer support teams as time progresses.

Voice Commands: Today voice commands based usage is highly popular with several apps and websites incorporating Natural Language Processing (NLP). Voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant will redefine how we access and search for content on the web.

Bring these elements to your website by hiring experienced web designers from Openwave. We are a leading website development company and can help you integrate the latest website design trends. Call our business team and set up a meeting!

Important Considerations to Make While Building a Hospital Website

It can be a challenge to build a website for a hospital or to redesign one. A hospital is inherently an organization with a large number of specialized departments. Gathering data about from these departments can be a challenge as hospital employees usually don’t have time to sit around and chitchat. Also, hospitals tend to have a lot of internal politics – everyone wants to feature prominently on the website and get one up over the other departments. 

If you – as an admin or a designer – are undertaking the task of building a hospital website, here are some tips that will help you streamline the process:

Focus on building up your brand

What differentiates your hospital from the rest? You should focus on building up your brand on your website and tell your story to improve your image and get patients to trust you. 

Research is important

Before writing content, do some research by interviewing patients and your medical staff to find out what they expect from your website. Your website should also support your business goals, whatever they are.

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Organize your content in a way that is most useful to patients 

While hospitals are organized by departments, patients will often use websites to search for their particular condition. If possible, organize your website in a way that is most useful to patients.

Provide useful services 

A website can provide a range of useful services to patients, like prescription refilling, online bill payments, and a quick way to connect to hospital administration. 

Plan for the future

What is your website going to look like in 5 years from now? You need to play for the future by incorporating social media into your website and regularly updating it. 

 Too many cooks spoil the broth 

While every department may want the ability and modify the content on your website, this often leads to an uneven experience for users. Consider hiring a specialist to do it for you.
 
Clearly, building a good website for a hospital is a monumental task, especially as users expect it to offer as good an experience as websites they surf regularly (like Facebook). It pays to hire experienced professionals developer who’ve done it before to handle the process for you – it will save you a lot of time and money in the long run.

Quick Fixes for Making your Website Mobile Friendly

These days, more than 50 percent of all browsing is done on a smartphone as compared to a PC, a laptop or other internet ready devices. Google has taken note of this trend and is planning on ranking down websites without mobile friendly content on their search engine listings since 10th Jan 2017. If your website isn’t mobile ready yet, it’s time you work on it or risk losing on a lot of visitors.

You don’t need to be a web developer or expert programmer to get your website mobile ready. Here’s our brief guide to help you get your website mobile ready in some simple steps:

Write Catchy Headlines

Large headlines tend to look bad on mobile screens. You need to write short but catchy headlines to give your visitors an idea of what your content or website stands for.

Don’t Use Popups

We’ve all been there, browsing our favorite content on our cellphones only to have a giant popup block it. We recommend that you avoid using popups. Full-screen popups contribute heavily to bounce rates.

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 Make Sure Your Content is Engaging

It’s not enough to have a good-looking website – your content has to be engaging too. Write short, precise sentences and make small paragraphs that look good on smartphones. Avoid being too wordy. Mobile browsers usually have short attention spans. Try to separate your content by interesting subheadings wherever possible.

Optimize Your Videos and Images

 Slow loading times contribute heavily to bounce rates and the pictures or animations on your website are often the culprits. Optimize your videos and images to get them loaded quicker on your website.

Check if you are Mobile Ready

Finally, use MobileTest.me to see if you’re mobile ready. It lets you browse your website on some virtual smartphone models. You can iron out kinks, if any, at this stage.
 
If you’re still struggling to get your website mobile ready, there are many experienced developers Malaysia out there who can help you out at an affordable rate. You may also look into getting an app built for your website – everyone is doing it these days, and it’s almost a given that the best websites also have mobile apps.

How is a Successful Business Website Made?

Your website is the calling card of your business. It is where a lot of prospective clients will go to get a feel for your business and, as such, you need to put your best foot forward to improve conversion rates.

Here are some steps to follow while building a website for your business:

What is your website going to do for your business?

First, you need to decide what your website is going to do for your business. Is it supposed to help you net clients or is it where you’re going to sell products and services? Design your website accordingly.

Picking the right CMS

There are several CMSs out there that can help you build a content and feature-rich website. However, each content management software solution has its drawbacks and strengths. WordPress is free, for example, but not suitable for eCommerce businesses. Magento, on the other hand, is very well suited to eStores.

Getting your website hosted

Choose a web host depending on the amount of traffic you think you’ll get. If you’re unsure, you can sign up for shared web hosting with an option to get dedicated hosting in the event your business takes off.

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Use templates and plugins to make it attractive

WordPress offers a large number of free templates that can help you build a clean, gorgeous website. Plug-ins, both paid and free, will help you add functionality to it.

Organize and Create Content for your website

Finally, you need to organize your website and create content for it. Organization involves writing or placing content in such a way as to make it search engine friendly.

Regular updates are vital

Unique content and constant updates are what will keep your visitors engaged. A dead website makes a bad impression and isn’t very useful either.

The process may sound complicated, but it is quite simple. You can have a decent website up and running in no more than a couple of days if you do everything yourself. It takes a lot of industry experience and technical knowledge, though, to make an outstanding website – it may be worthwhile for you to hire the services of a seasoned web developer to work on yours.

4 Common mistakes to remember when laying out a quality Website

Many people have a wrong assumption that the website isn’t important for their business success. What they focus on is the informative content. Although, “Content is king,” imagine if you put a doll in an ugly box, would you bother to open it up? This post explores some of the common mistaken beliefs among entrepreneurs about web design.

Building a Website is easy to do:

Creating a simple website might be child’s play, but developing a seamless one takes hours of coding. It’s more than just understanding the color patterns, keeping up on the latest trends and correctly using white space. So, if you want a unique website, your design process must involve complex programming.

Fill every inch of the Website:

Don’t ever clutter up your site with too much stuff. If you cover every inch of your site with messy content, visitors will be overwhelmed. So, please leave some white space on your site. 

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Developed a website! Traffic will increase automatically:

Don’t indulge in the illusion that you have just developed a website, so thousands of visitors will come flooding in. This thought is like you are conducting a party and not inviting anyone, but still expect people to pay a visit to your home. How can it? To make the website go viral, use effective digital marketing and SEO tactics.

Build once, run forever:

Many people have this silly assumption! They think that once their site is completed, it never needs to be updated. The web is always changing, so website needs to be regularly updated to remain compliant with best practices and emerging trends.

If you are serious about designing a quality site for your business, you have to consider engaging a professional web designer. It not only saves your valuable time but also improves your business processes and product sales.