What is Pageless Design? 

Read on to know everything you need to know about pageless design and what it could mean for your business.

pageless design

One of the fastest growing web trends this side of responsive design are pageless websites. This term is already being thrown around a lot in web design circles, but many end-users have yet to hear about it. We here at Fast Track want every business owner to be in the loop when it comes to new and exciting trends. Read on to know everything you need to know about pageless design and what it could mean for your business!

Pageless design is about creating a compelling story for consumers

Web design has followed the status quo of imitating print design for many years. While this is a great approach for large enterprises, pageless design is better suited for small to medium sized companies that need to create a compelling story for customers. Rather than having the site sub-divided into multiple pages, the entire website is on one page that follows a story line. For example:

 

As the user scrolls down they learn more and more about the important components of the business. Chapter 1 can be the main landing page, with a large image depicting the product, and subsequent chapters are important features, the business process, reviews, etc. It’s great for quickly introducing the main selling points of a brand and its products. Some great examples can be found here.

After looking at those example, you may be asking yourself “Those look cool, but why should I invest in pageless design?” Well, pageless design has a lot of benefits thanks to its simple and visual approach:

It’s seamless and easy to digest.

Users don’t have to dive through multiple page to find important information. It’s all there on one page, and presented in a way that’s very easy to understand.

It presents content in a stimulating way for all types of learners.

By using a combination of visceral images and concise text, pageless design gets all of the important aspects of your brand communicated to different types of learners.

It has higher conversion rates.

There would be little to no reason to switch to pageless design if it didn’t present business advantages. At the end of the day, business is about securing more leads and sales. With this approach there are decreased bounce rates because it is so intuitive that users don’t get confused. Lower bounce rates mean more time spent on the website for users to immerse themselves in your business. Ultimately, pageless design helps to improve conversion rates over traditional print design, meaning more money in your pocket.

Pageless design is mobile and social media friendly

Another great benefit of pageless design is that it looks great on any type of device. In today’s Internet that is important because of the variety of ways users are accessing website. It is also very social media friendly, because of the way that it allows users to share the site. With traditional websites, users would have to pick which particular page to share, but this approach simplifies the entire decision making process.

Pageless design can be more affordable

A custom website can be extremely expensive. Pageless websites can be made at a much more affordable price point than many other options. Many can be purchased for less than $5000 dollars. O at the end of the day the pageless design equation looks like this:

Pageless design: More conversions + More affordable website = More profit      

View User Profile for Steve Hoag Steve is a recent graduate from UW, and the Marketing Coordinator at Fast Track. He primarily has experience in the tech and start-up industries. When he's not busy promoting Fast Track, he's watching Huskies or Green Bay Packers football. You can find him on Twitter @steven_hoag .
Posted by Steve Hoag Monday, January 27, 2014 7:40:00 PM Categories: B2B B2C web design web development web trends website

The Best Free Design Tools On The Web 

By Steve Hoag

free web design tools

As a designer, you want and need the best tools available. There are a ton of options out there for both beginners and experienced designers. We combed through the Internet to bring you this mix of free tools to add to your toolkit. Enjoy!

Brackets

This open source program was developed by Adobe to help designers edit code in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s great because it has a very clean look by not cluttering your workspace with a variety of buttons. Instead, it focuses on using shortcuts and live previews to help you throughout. There are a bunch of extensions as well, so it has become pretty useful for beginning and experienced designers alike.

OpenBEXI

The most unique feature of this WYSIWYG HTML editor is that it lets you drag and drop different elements. It’s really useful if you want to have a quick visual of what you are creating. This editor lets you edit CSS and add scripts as well. Not stopping there, it has an FTP client that will upload everything for you when you have finished your design.

GIMP

GIMP is a great free image editor. It has a variety of powerful tools you would find in paid solutions. For example, it provides great color editing tools, tons of special effects, photo retouching, and much more! Honestly, you will be surprised by how many features this free program has.

Firebug

This FireFox extension is one of the most useful tools I have come across for designers, developers, and anyone managing a company website. It lets you view the CSS and HTML of any page, while displaying tweaks in real time. You need to use an actual editor to change the code, but this is useful for playing around with layouts without accidentally making a mistake.

View User Profile for Steve Hoag Steve is a recent graduate from UW, and the Marketing Coordinator at Fast Track. He primarily has experience in the tech and start-up industries. When he's not busy promoting Fast Track, he's watching Huskies or Green Bay Packers football. You can find him on Twitter @steven_hoag .
Posted by Steve Hoag Thursday, January 23, 2014 10:02:00 PM Categories: web design web development web trends website

Why Every Company Needs To Make SEO A Priority 

By Steve Hoag

making SEO a priority

A strong online presence is an absolute must in today’s business world. People are using the Internet to find products they want to buy, not the Yellow Pages. There are a variety of marketing tools to get your name out there, but one of the best ones is SEO. Search Engine Optimization focuses on maximizing your rankings in major search engines like Google and Bing. So why do you need to make this a priority?

SEO improves ORGANIC search rankings, so you don’t have to spend as much on paid advertising.

Organic search rankings are the results that appear whenever you type a keyword into Google that aren’t paid ads. Your organic search rankings are absolutely free; you aren’t paying Google or Yahoo to place you that high. They are doing so because of your strong SEO. By building strong advertising you are able to forgo other options like Google Ads, which can run fairly expensive based on your budget. In the long term organic search is much more beneficial for your company, since most consumers use those results.

SEO improves brand awareness and recognition

SEO isn’t just about click throughs. It’s about getting your company name in front of consumers. Even if they don’t click on your website, they will have been exposed to your name and brand. Over time, this can greatly increase awareness and recognition. This is especially true if you build a strong SEO program and consistently appear on the first few pages, where most of the impressions are.

SEO improves brand credibility.

Besides improving awareness, a strong SEO program can improve the credibility of your brand. The higher you appear in rankings, the more consumers will trust you. Who do you think you would trust more: a company that appears on the 1st page of results, or one that is on the 30th page? Probably the former.

SEO can build traffic, leads, and sales.

Once you get down to brass tacks, SEO is all about creating more traffic. A strong search engine ranking means more click throughs, which your sales and marketing team can turn into leads and sales. SEO is critical if you depend on e-commerce, or if your online presence is important to your business. Keep in mind, SEO is not an overnight success. You need to stay persistent, and eventually results will come.

View User Profile for Steve Hoag Steve is a recent graduate from UW, and the Marketing Coordinator at Fast Track. He primarily has experience in the tech and start-up industries. When he's not busy promoting Fast Track, he's watching Huskies or Green Bay Packers football. You can find him on Twitter @steven_hoag .
Posted by Steve Hoag Wednesday, January 22, 2014 7:00:00 PM Categories: B2B B2C enterprise SEO SMB web development website

Three Questions Every Designer Should Answer Before Taking A New Client 

By Steve Hoag

questions every designer should answer

New projects are awesome. They mean more sales revenue, connections, and a bigger portfolio. That doesn’t mean you should take every project though! It’s important to focus on the ones that are a great fit for your business, and ignore the ones that may be more trouble than they’re worth. You should always ask the following three questions before undertaking a new project:

Does this project fall into the same scope of work I’ve done before for previous clients?

This is a really important question to think about. Do you already have the skills/experience needed to provide an excellent finished product? Will you have to learn anything new to complete the project objectives? You should make a rubric or checklist so that you can easily ascertain how good of a fit a project will be for your business. The point is, you always want to be able to guarantee high quality work, with little to no delays. If there is an aspect of this project that you can tell could create problems, you should either consult with the client, or move on to another project. You don’t want to have any party frustrated/dissatisfied during the design process.

Can this client pay for your work in a timely fashion?

The only way to maintain a profitable business is by guaranteeing steady cash flow. The best way to do that is to minimize your accounts receivable, and taking clients that you know can pay for your time. If you are having any doubts, go over this with the client before starting work, or move on. Your design business isn’t non-profit after all.

Is this a one-time project, or can this client be retained for ongoing work and future business?

Any client that can be retained for long-term design work is extremely valuable. Besides minimizing cash flow volatility, ongoing work can create a relationship. You can leverage this to get more projects with your client’s connections. Word of mouth is a powerful thing! That being said, don’t forgo a one-time project for an ongoing one if it’s a huge contract, or with a great corporation to add to your portfolio. Always do a cost-benefit analysis so you can make an informed decision!

View User Profile for Steve Hoag Steve is a recent graduate from UW, and the Marketing Coordinator at Fast Track. He primarily has experience in the tech and start-up industries. When he's not busy promoting Fast Track, he's watching Huskies or Green Bay Packers football. You can find him on Twitter @steven_hoag .
Posted by Steve Hoag Wednesday, January 22, 2014 1:31:00 AM Categories: B2B B2C enterprise SMB web design

Blogging 202: Mistakes to Avoid 

By Steve Hoag

blogging 202

Once you create your initial blog schedule, get your ideas together, and start writing, you have to avoid making easy mistakes. There are a number of things you should NEVER do, especially if you want to use your blog to build traffic and online exposure.

Duplicating online content.

This should be a no-brainer, but you should never copy someone else’s content and try to pass it off as your own. This will not help your search rankings, because search engines look out for this sort of behavior and will remove your post from results. Also, you could get into some legal troubles down the road if you aren’t careful. When it comes to blogging, it’s ok to use other articles as inspiration, but it’s not ok to copy them word for word.

Ignore using social media to share your blog.

Blogs are meant to be shared, and social media is the best way of accomplishing that. If you forget to use social media, you are forgoing a free marketing tool that has unprecedented reach. You are limiting your blog’s exposure to its subscribers, when it could be reaching thousands, if not millions of people.

Forget to use analytics to track clickthroughs.

Using analytics is the only way to know which topics you are posting about are generating traffic for your site. Without proper monitoring you will never know which topics to ignore or focus on. There are a bunch of free options out there like bit.ly which you can use to track clickthroughs on URLs. Trust me, using services like these go a long way.

Forget to make content shareable on your blog.

Another easily made mistake is forgetting to include social sharing buttons/badges on your blog page. You need to make life easy for your users by streamlining processes. Many users might think your article is great, but don’t want to go through the ‘hassle’ of copying a link, logging into a service, and then sharing it. Social sharing buttons take care of this potential problem, and can help to create more buzz/traffic.

View User Profile for Steve Hoag Steve is a recent graduate from UW, and the Marketing Coordinator at Fast Track. He primarily has experience in the tech and start-up industries. When he's not busy promoting Fast Track, he's watching Huskies or Green Bay Packers football. You can find him on Twitter @steven_hoag .
Posted by Steve Hoag Friday, January 17, 2014 5:30:00 PM Categories: B2B B2C blogging enterprise SEO SMB social media social media marketing website
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