We know you are all very keen on seeing Webeden upgrade it’s software to support HTML5, and I can assure you we are trying our hardest to get a reliable system to you as soon as possible. We do realise that we are massively behind schedule, however with every new iteration of our software throws up new issues that need to be addressed before making it avalible.

Where are we with the development?

At the moment the priority is to get a fully working version of Version 6 (the current Version is 5) up and running. Once this has been done then we can continue working on providing existing customers the ability to upgrade their old V5 sites to V6 sites.

So when will the upgrade be available?

This is the million pound question. We expect it before the end of June 2013. We realise that this is drastically later than planned, however we wanted to provide you a fully working version of the software as opposed to a very limited beta version of the software.

We understand that the delay will be a disappointment for some of our customers. However we want to offer our loyal and valued customers a solid and stable piece of software that matches the easy of use you have all enjoyed with Version 5.

We will of course keep you updated with any further developments and news.

Please note that at the time of writing this article the dates are correct, however they are only intended as a guide and are subject to change.

With the online landscape as crowded as it’s ever been, competition to stand out, get recognised, properly engage an audience and keep them coming back, is stronger than ever. But without the bottomless pockets of mega brands who can afford to continually experiment with the latest web design technologies making their sites able to sing and dance as they wish, are there ways of having a similarly dramatic effect simply by applying some basic psychological principles?

Why adopt psychology-based Design

When designing for the web, considering the psychological drives of a target audience is not commonly a high priority. It can however have surprisingly positive effects on how users will utilise a website, how engaged they will become and how frequently they will respond to calls-to-action.

By paying attention to how visitors will naturally wish to engage with information and providing them with an online environment which appeals to their conscious, and sometimes unconscious, inclinations, they will be happier and far more likely to perform the actions you want them to, whether that’s getting in touch with you, buying your product, or referring their friends.

Building Trust

In order for website visitors to do what you want them to do, they first, on some level, have to trust you. Trust however, doesn’t come easily, especially with rolling news stories of identity theft and various unruly digital scams. To those who know little of how the Internet really works, it remains a black scary hole and suspicion is rife. Often designers overlook this as they’re so used to conducting business online. Creating a website that puts visitors at ease can be done through a combination of design techniques and the nature of language used on the site.

Familiarity and Recognizable Patterns

When landing on a web page, there are certain standardised things people expect to see right away.

• Purpose i.e. what the site is there for; to inform them on a particular subject, to sell them a product or service etc
• Navigation – the ability to move from the page they’re on to another of relevance

If these things aren’t visible, they will likely get the impression they’ve ended up in an unfamiliar environment that doesn’t make sense to them (and therefore, isn’t trustworthy).

While text can help with discerning the purpose of a site, all design features must complement and reinforce the message being delivered. As an example, a company selling energy efficient homes would be unwise to use any dark foreboding colours or plain drab images. In order to reinforce a message of healthy living and environmental responsibility, a clean, modern-looking site with bright, natural colours, accompanied by well-considered, life-enhancing images will instil trust and understanding before a single word has been read.

Steering too far away from fundamental user expectations, commonly in a misplaced effort to be different or ‘cutting edge’ can actually be detrimental to success.

Psychological Triggers

Psychological and emotional triggers are a valuable tool in influencing visitors to take the actions you want them to take. Triggers include things like guilt and fear, but also a sense of belonging and appealing to commonly held values. Well worded text can be full of emotional triggers and, with graphic elements serving as a support system for those triggers, user engagement and interaction can be dramatically increased.

Images to Reinforce Concepts

With many well priced, professional online image libraries available, there’s no excuse for poor or misleading images on a website. Images can either help or confuse visitors. A well-chosen image can put visitors at ease, making your intent and/or professionalism clear. A poorly-chosen one can disorientate them. Why follow this with a picture of a dog on a skateboard? Exactly.

Colour Psychology

The psychology of colour is one of the more complex subjects in design psychology and therefore could be the subject of its own in-depth editorial. Needless to say, colours used in a website can have a very significant impact on how visitors perceive it and they must, at all times, act to reinforce any page’s core message.

Below is a basic list of colours and their meanings-

• Red
  Fiery and passionate, representing both love and anger
• Orange
  Associated with energy and warmth
• Yellow
  Represents happiness, joy and also cowardice
• Green
  Signifies nature, growth, and renewal
• Blue
  Signifies calm and loyalty. Often associated with corporate images.
• White
  Signifies purity and innocence
• Grey
  Neutral and balanced, but also conservative and draining!
• Brown
  Signifies stability and reliability

Reading Patterns

The majority of sites have logos in the top left corner due to people commonly reading a website in a “Z” pattern. Always look to place the most important content within this reading pattern area.

Create a Focus

Every page on a site should have an obvious focus, whether that be to sell a product or to inform a visitor about a particular subject. The page design needs to emphasise this focal point, ensuring visitors are clearly made aware of what they’re doing there.

The power of White Space

One of the biggest marks of an amateur site is having too much information on each page leading to visitors feel overwhelmed and claustrophobic.

Allowing white or negative space on a website can be an extremely powerful tool which, when combined with properly styled and proportioned elements, can far more successfully direct visitors attention and encourage a desired action.

Using the (psychological) force

For every designer, whether brand new or long established, understanding the basic principles behind human behaviour and incorporating them into a website design will bring rewards. Whether creating a website aimed at hardened agile consumers or fact seeking groupies, by doing all you can to ensure users have a rich, engaging and seamless experience , not only will you maximise the potential of them returning but also ensure they will tell their friends.

With the release of Windows 8 there have been changes with the way you install Flash on Internet Explorer. Basically Flash is now preinstalled on the operating system and you do not need to update it via Internet Explorer. (You still need to if you are using Firefox and Flash is preinstalled and updated automatically in Chrome). More details can be found here on the Adobe website.

In just a few short years, Twitter has grown from the indulgent preserve of ego-maniacal celebrities, into a core means of communication with customers and clients at the heart of a business. It allows interaction and feedback in a similar way that Facebook does but with a more casual, free-flowing method in a more openly public way.

Making it work for your business

Customization

Once an account has been set up, you need to make it yours. Egg on your profile pic (the default icon for users) is a great way to get ignored. If you already have a Facebook business page, then using the profile picture from that promotes a unified brand identity, otherwise keep it clear and unique – initials or a simple logo are good choices, screenshots of your website homepage reduced to 73px square less so.

Twitter also allows customised backgrounds and header images. Backgrounds can be huge to allow for widescreen monitors, but large backgrounds will be lost on smaller monitors. The key area is the left hand side of the background. A good average background size is 1280px x 800px, with any important info or text in the left most 66-194px.

Customised header images are possible with the new layout but remember to keep the contrast with the image and text so your location and website are clearly visible. For Photoshop users, Design Shack has an excellent template for the Twitter header.

Integrate Twitter

Integrating your account into other social media – Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest – is an efficient way of cross-pollinating social feeds, so don’t forget to tell your Twitter followers about your Facebook page and vice versa.

Bear in mind if these are linked then how often you tweet becomes increasingly important. A new update every thirty minutes will clog up news feeds and get your fans ‘unliking’ and ‘unfollowing’ you, but it’s equally important to reach your followers with at least one tweet a day.

Tweet on the Go

The rise of smartphones has meant updating Twitter has become much easier and more time efficient. On the bus, in a taxi or whilst having your lunch are all easy places to type 140 characters, but the real bonus is incorporating phone cameras. Finishing a project, construction, design, meal – anything with a visual element can be tweeted instantly. Non-smartphones can also tweet via SMS – set it up by going to your Twitter account ‘settings’ menu and selecting ‘mobile’.

Be very wary of tweeting under the influence, especially if you have both personal and professional accounts, not everyone has the American Red Cross gift for PR disaster recovery…

Was the now infamous tweet by one PR professional, which stayed up for around an hour before Red Cross intervention:

Fortunately humour and understanding meant the damage was limited – brewery Dogfish Head even encouraged people to donate to the Red Cross using #gettingslizzered, but it’s easy to imagine someone ‘tired and emotional’ after a break-up or watching their team lose doing something much worse. Bottom line, if you drink, let others tweet.

What to tweet?

Blending business, industry news and humour are key to gaining followers.  Sign up to Google Alerts to keep up to speed with industry news based on your profession or geo-location. This will help you keep a ready supply of useful information for followers on quiet days. As well as work updates and images from your company, it’s worth remembering the human element too. This is social media, so if something funny, interesting or beautiful has happened then share it, just be sure it is one of the above and not the 17^th photo of your lunch!

Interacting in the Twittersphere

Don’t just tweet into the void – start a conversation! Whilst it’s good to be tweeting regularly, it can be better to try and speak to somebody rather than just shouting into a torrent of updates or talking to yourself in the corner. Asking questions and replying to the tweets of others are likely to do more for you than just a statement on its own. This can be a particularly effective way of posting links to your main website and generating higher click-through rates. Don’t forget to check when people follow you and give them a follow back –like all social situations, good manners go a long way!

Here at Webeden I have seen The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of websites. While a large number of customers use Webeden to build personal sites, the majority of our customers use Webeden to build sites for their businesses. If your site is for a business, large or small, there are a number of things you should keep in mind when building your site.

Here is a check list of simple changes you can make to your site with minimum effort but maximum impact.

1. High resolution images

There is nothing worse then having low res, blurry images on your site. To maximise impact and to give your site that “professional look” it is worth investing some time and/or money into some decent images. Also optimising the images using image editing tools such as Photoshop will help with the loading times of the images and reduce the impact on your memory allocation in your file manager. You can get great high quality, low cost images from many online image libraries. Why not visit Webeden Images for all your stock image needs?

2. About us section

When you are building a site you have to think about it form a users perspective. The whole reason they want to have a look at your About Us section is that they want to know more about you and your business. So do exactly that! Include information regarding the key players in your business. I’m sure that they have a wonderful back story to tell and your viewers want to know that you are real genuine people. Consider adding their CVs or a link to their Linkedin profiles.

3. A decent map

Where are you based? When I’m dealing with a new company I always look up their address on Google Maps why not use the HTML Snippet tool to insert a Google map on your site. Ideally make it big enough so that the viewer doesn’t have to navigate away form your site to zoom out an pan around. Also consider putting an image of your front door next to it, great for visitors who may want to come down and see you.

4. This ain’t 1995

Avoid making your site looking dated. Take a look at the old Amazon website compared to the current one.

So avoid using highly saturated colours (unless that is the point of your site/business). Create a simple clean layout that can be easily navigated. Invest in a decent logo and branding for your company.

5. Contact details

Make it easy for your customers to contact you directly. Include individual contact email addresses and phone numbers. Avoid using web forms as most people like to keep a record of emails that they have sent out. Why not link the email addresses on your site so it automatically opens the viewers email client when clicked?

6. Be comprehensive

Your site should give all the information about your company they want to know. Understanding your customer is key. Make your site in clear language and straight to the point. Your site should show every service and/or product you provide in no more than three clicks. Don’t take anything for granted as the general public are a fickle bunch.

Hello fellow website builders. We know you have all been eagerly awaiting the HTML5 update to our software however the date for the release of the Beta has now been pushed back to the New Year and we are really sorry about this. The reason being for the delay is that the initial tests that the tech guys have been doing have thrown up a number of issues. While they have been tirelessly working around the clock to resolve this they do not want to rush out with an update that is still full of bugs. While we cannot give you a definite release date for the Beta, the tech team have assured us that it will be in the first few months of 2013.

Again we cannot apologise enough and we really appreciate your patience.

Getting your business ranked high in internet search engine results is very important. But you don’t necessarily need to pay for it. You can do it yourself.

It’s not so dark if you open your eyes…

Just mention Search Engine Optimisation and you can guarantee someone will follow up with ‘SEO is a dark art’. True, there are plenty of shady characters peddling SEO skills, and certainly some ‘black hat’ SEO techniques (more on those later), but SEO really just needs a little time and some knowledge of how search engines work.

We’ll use Google as example for this article as it generates over 90% of search engine traffic worldwide and also because what works for Google will generally work for Bing and Yahoo as well.

The reason it’s an art form of sorts is the fact that, although you can do things to increase your chances of ranking well, the algorithm Google uses is never fully revealed and regularly updates. Google is trying to achieve better results for human users, so while it’s important to be aware of technical aspects, never forget about the person in front of the monitor at the other end. Interesting and informative content will always be at the heart of high-ranking sites.

Let’s start with the areas you most control…

Meta data is one area where you have complete control. It is additional information within the HTML coding of a page, used by search engines to help categorise a site. It includes page titles and meta descriptions, which is the text people see in their Search Engine Results Page (SERP), as well as Meta Keywords.

Imagine each page is a book in a library, or better yet a dissertation. Titles like ‘home’, ‘about me’ or ‘contact details’ might make sense to someone navigating your site, but mean almost nothing as a search result on their own.

So what meta data do I put in?

Google wants good page titles because it makes their search engine function properly, so they provide access to Google AdWords with every Gmail account. In

AdWords you can use the Keywords Tool to find out what people are searching for based on location, language and device.

Once you have a couple of popular keywords that accurately describe your page, you can put them in. The best practice is:

Primary Keyword, Secondary Keyword | Brand Name

For example, a company selling leather bags might have this page title:

Leather Holdall, Leather Satchel | Leather Bags R Us

Unless you’re an internationally recognised brand, you’ll do better to put the keywords first because that’s what the users are looking for. Google only shows the first 70 characters of a title, although it reads more, so get the keywords in first.

Resist the temptation to put loads of keywords in the title. This is known as ‘keyword stuffing’, a black hat SEO technique that Google will punish you for. It’s also bad for users who want concise, relevant information.

Because each page of your website has different content, page titles should be different too. This improves your visibility in searches, as well as making titles more relevant for specific pages.

Meta Matters

Meta Keywords are the hidden keywords used to help Search Engines categorise a site, but following years of abuse with people using Black Hat SEO and adding popular but unrelated keywords, they are ignored by Google. Meta Descriptions, however, are important. They provide a concise description of a website that shows up in the majority of search engines. Google has confirmed that they are not a factor in ranking, but this is where the human factor comes in.

Again keep them brief and relevant – general opinion is that 150-160 characters is best. Some prefer a 120-character description that displays in full, others use longer descriptions that Google will pick search terms from and highlight in bold.

Fig.1 – ‘Leather Bags’ search. Next uses a longer description that Google shortens and highlights, Scaramanga uses a shorter description to ensure the whole message is shown.

If you do not enter a description, Google picks the most relevant content from the page to use as a description. You may find this satisfactory, but well-written and compelling advertising copy can make a huge difference to the person choosing a link from pages of results.

Building Backlinks

Now that people can find your site, you want them sharing your site or backlinking.

Hopefully your website has such good content this will be happening automatically, content is king and always will be. However you can help to get things started.

Listing your site on free directories like Yell and Hotfrog allows users to find you, as well as generating traffic to your site and improving your ranking.

You may also want to consider signing up to Click Submit.

It’s worth submitting content to forums and online organisations relevant to your site. Check the policies of these groups as some may restrict posting links, or ban them altogether.

Above all, avoid buying links or exchanging links. This is another black hat SEO technique and can easily lead to your site being removed from Google altogether.

Fresh content tastes better to Panda

Remember that content is king? Around 18 months ago Google released its Panda update, followed by Penguin about six months ago. Since these updates, Google prioritises fresh, original content on pages in line with its best practice guidelines, while penalising repeated content like a human would.

Having a newsfeed or case study page allows you to update your site with your latest developments, as well as potentially giving you article submissions for link building.

In summary

Don’t try to trick the search engines and always try to think from a website users’ perspective. What would they want to see? What content is appropriate and useful for them? You will rank highly in search engines eventually for the correct keywords if you label your site clearly, give images appropriate names and don’t stuff your site with keywords in the hope of getting listed.

Build it (with unique and compelling content) … and they will come.

I think that all our Webeden customers are aware that our tech guys have been furiously working on an HTML5 version of Webeden since January 2012. Good news is that they are nearly there. We thought we would just keep you updated on the planned roll out schedule for this massive, and much anticipated update.

Why would I want to publish my site in HTML5?

HTML5 does not do everything Flash does. However it does seem that it is the future of Websites and it’s about time that we moved with the times. Publishing your website in HTML5 will make your site look great on not only desktops but tablets (yes, including iPads), plus the ability to view the full version or mobile optimised version of your site on mobile devices.

So when is this all happening?

While we had hoped for a September released, our techies have been a bit late. We hope to have the first release in December with updates to follow in January and February. We appreciate all our customers patience and can fully sympathise that delays can be frustrating.  Due to the massive task the development team have taken on we are really pleased with their progress and are really happy with the update, and we know you will be too.

19th December (target) – HTML5 Beta

Brand new templates available allowing you to publish sites in HTML5 or Flash. Updates will include improved shop, image, text, links, menu, and gallery tools, plus loads of new stuff yet to be announced.

Late January/Early February – HTML5 Live

All new sites created with Webeden will now by default be published in HTML5. Blog tool will be reintroduced at this point. The date of this update will be dependant on performance and feedback received at the Beta stage.

January/February – HTML5 Upgrade Beta

This update will give you the ability to convert your older Webeden sites form Flash to the HTML5 compatible format. Some features may not be available yet, however these will be addressed with future updates.

What about the Mobile Version?

Your new HTML5 version will be viewable on a mobile device as well as the existing mobile version. The tech guys will be working on ways to improve the Mobile version and will give you the ability to choose which version you want viewed as default.

Just a quick note, while we do endeavour to try and keep all the information accurate, the dates we provide are only there as guidance and deadlines are sometimes not met. We do apologise for frustration caused by delayed releases, but we assure you we do try our upmost to stick to them.

via: digitalbuzzblog

We know this is only 5 new templates and you are all used to seeing us publish a lot more in one go, we promise there a quite a lot more on the way (we are just tweaking them).

Our Next Release!

As you may know the next BIG project is being delivered in Q3 this year which will see the implementation of a full HTML5 website instead of the standard Flash sites we currently publish.

But whilst that is still in production we do not want you to wait for a new release so next on the horizon is the Mobile Editor which will allow Mobile Only Styling (colours), also allow you to include or exclude content on the mobile version and enable reordering of the content. “When is it coming” I hear you ask….. well end of March is our aim (if testing goes well).

Well that is it for another monumental blog post, see you again soon.