Mary: Hi, I’m Mary with Tiny Frog Technologies. I’m one of our development coordinators and today we’re going to be talking with Nathalie about some ideas and tips for redesigning and branding your website. So how do you get to know a company’s branding and how do you make sure that the new design fits the brand well? Nathalie: Well normally we start off by figuring out or asking the client if they have any sort of style guide to follow. If they don’t have that, every once in a while they’ll have marketing materials where we’ll look at fonts, we’ll look at colors to make sure that all of those flow well throughout the website. If they don’t have that available either, then what we’ll do is we’ll look at inspirational sites, we’ll look at competitors and at that point, we’ll put together… Read More.
Frog Blog
How Much Does a Website Cost?
Mary: Hi, this is Mary. I’m a development coordinator with Tiny Frog Technologies and today we’re going to be talking with Mikel, our founder, about general website information. How much do you think a website should cost? Mikel: That’s a good question. We’ll actually get people that call us and without giving us much detail, they’ll say how much does a website cost. It’s kind of like saying how much does a car cost? Obviously, the range and pricing and value can be dramatic. And same thing with a website because there’s so many different factors: functionality, design, how many custom pages are involved, how many pages involved in general, how much content. So it’s really almost impossible to answer that question: how much should a website cost? But what we do when we work with clients is we have a very involved discovery… Read More.
Show Your Website Some Love
Every relationship needs love and care to survive and flourish. While this rings true for personal relationships, it also applies to your relationship with your website. Sadly, we see many clients neglect or abandon their website after a redesign, waiting until their next redesign or “vow renewal” to make changes. This February give your website some attention with one of these acts of love below: 1. A Great First Date Home Page Design Upgrade For most websites, your home page is the most important page and it’s typically the first page web visitors will land on. The top area of the home page design is your first, and sometimes only, chance to engage a web visitor. Think of the design as your first impression on a date. You want to be dressed to a T, charming, and show off your best characteristics. If the home… Read More.
Building a Website from the Outside In
Mary: Hi, this is Mary with Tiny Frog Technologies and today we’re going to be talking with Brian about having an effective website. We often hear you saying to build a site from the outside in. What does that mean? Brian: Well, a lot of times when companies design their websites, what they tend to do is get all the stakeholders together in one room and they decide what should be on the website. That seems pretty logical. But the problem with that is they’re not taking into consideration the people are going to be using a website, which is going to be the visitors of the site. So what might happen is they will then craft a site that does a good job of meeting their needs – the stakeholders needs – anything they want to accomplish but not necessarily when a visitor… Read More.
What to Do If Your Website’s Been Hacked
Hello, this is Mikel, CEO of Tiny Frog Technologies. We have a lot of clients or potential clients who come to us who have issues with their websites in terms of security. Essentially their websites have been hacked and in some cases the websites have been hacked pretty badly so it’s going to take a while to get the website back up. In that case, I would strongly recommend putting up a one-page website to temporarily hold you or them over until the website’s back up. This is something we can do and can also probably be done by your web developer pretty quickly. In some cases, if your website’s been hacked and the website wasn’t properly backed up you may have lost all your website files. So there’s a tool on the Internet called Wayback. It’s called Wayback Machine. You can actually go… Read More.
How to Create an Effective Website
Mary: What truly makes an effective website? Mikel: I think there’s a couple of things that go into an effective website: one of which is how relevant is the website for the visitors. We talk often times about making sure the website is aligned with the visitors’ needs. We like to say the website’s not for us, it’s not even for our clients, it’s for our clients’ visitors. So aligning with the visitor needs is probably one of the more important things – making sure it’s relevant for them because you can have a really good looking website and you can look at that and most people might look and say, “Well, that’s a really nice website,” but if it’s not relevant for the visitor, if it’s not aligned with what they’re looking for, they’re probably gonna leave. Second thing is how is the overall… Read More.
Top Web Design Trends of 2019
When it comes to web design, it’s crucial to stay on top of the latest design trends & technology, or your modern site could end up looking outdated in a matter of time. An outdated website can create the wrong impression of your business and scare away potential clients. We’ve compiled the biggest web design trends for 2019 to help you keep your website as modern & fresh as possible. 1. Micro-Interactions A major trend for 2019 is the use of micro-animations or micro-interactions. Our designers have been using micro-animations for a while because they can create a better user experience. On a website, you want to avoid visual bullying such as unnecessary movement that distracts and annoys a website visitor. Micro-animations are smaller effects that engage a visitor and tie into the messaging. When considering whether to add any movement to a web page,… Read More.
The Best E-Commerce Application for WordPress
Hello, this is Mikel Bruce, CEO of Tiny Frog Technologies. I’d like to talk a little bit about e-commerce websites or having e-commerce on your website. There’s countless numbers of e-commerce applications that can be either built into a website or have your website linked from there to an e-commerce application. Probably the most common nowadays, the ones that you’re probably most familiar with are Magento, Shopify and WooCommerce. We’re a WordPress company so we specifically and almost exclusively work with WooCommerce. One of the advantages of WooCommerce over Shopify or Magento – if you have a WordPress site is that WooCommerce is an app – a WordPress application – so it’s very easily fully integrated into a WordPress website. If you have a WordPress website, WooCommerce is a really good solution because the integration is much cleaner compared to Magento or Shopify. If you… Read More.
Selecting Inspiration Sites for a Web Design
Mary: Hi, I’m Mary with Tiny Frog Technologies. I’m one of our development coordinators and today we’re going be talking with Nathalie about some ideas and tips for redesigning and branding your website. So Nathalie what advice do you have on searching for inspirational websites for your redesign? Nathalie: First of all, I would say trends are changing so much on websites, to make sure that you’re looking at websites that are most recent. Maybe they were designed in 2018 or 2017 at the earliest. A good place to start is webdesign-inspiration.com. Mary: And how many inspirational sites do you think people should normally look at when they’re thinking of doing a redesign? Nathalie: I’d probably say maybe 2 to 3 websites that you really like. And things to look for would be color combinations, fonts, the graphics that are being used and then a… Read More.
How to Use Website Visitor Recording Tools
Well hello fellow web marketers this is Brian Lewis back at you again to talk a little bit more about web marketing and specifically web usability. One of the tools that we talked about in a previous session was heat maps, click maps, and move maps and scroll maps. And what we’re going to talk about in this session is another tool that’s usually bundled in with your heat maps called visit recordings. So get this, imagine being able to spy on your web visitors as they’re interacting with your page. Imagine being able to see them as they’re moving, as they’re scrolling up and down moving through the page clicking, navigating to other pages well. You can do that with visit recordings that as I said are bundled in the heat map tools. And the great thing about the the visit recordings is that… Read More.
