This had happened for a very simple reason. Facebook was eating up all internet traffic and it had become pretty superfluous to put time and effort behind a site. To make matters worse, Facebook was giving away a lot of free traffic, too, so brands could be found more easily on Facebook organically than they could on Google.

This made the need for sites nearly redundant, because even if you had a great site (and more so if you were a B2C brand), your site was not going to get that much traffic. People would even initiate most searches on Facebook, and even when they didn’t, your Facebook page would probably rank even higher than your own site on Google.

But times have changed. Facebook has stopped giving any real organic traffic, and now the only way to be seen by a good number of your customers on the platform is if you pay for the privilege.

Even when you do pay for the visibility you’re hampered by all the limitations of the platform, and you’re still showing your content on a site that’s doing its best to keep people on it. Your site, on the other hand, can be built in a way that works for your business, not Mark Zuckerberg’s. He’s rich enough.

So what should you do? You should build a site that’s at the centre of your communication efforts. You should, if I may say so myself, work with an agency like ours, one that understands what all your messaging is and then finds a way of displaying it conveniently for your audiences.

I’m going to be very kind and assume that anyone you work with will get the technical side of things correct. It’s a long shot, I know, but there’s a ton of great resources to cover that. If you need one you can see the ultimate web design checklist that covers it all. No use reinventing the wheel.

What I’d like to cover today is the high level plan of the site, the part that is much more about communications than about the actual nuts and bolts of the site. Anyone can get that right. 

From a content and structure point of view, a good web design and development agency, or a good web planner, will understand that any website should:

Be built to convert.

The website should be built to convert your visitors somehow or other, either into customers, into leads, into sales, or into fans. You should never waste traffic. Build a plan for every kind of visitor that you get and make it a point to have a goal (or multiple goals) for each. You won’t hit that goal with every visitor, but I can guarantee you that you will not hit a single goal that you don’t set. If you’re selling online, for example, then your primary target will be to close a sale, but if your visitor is not ready to purchase then you should at least get them to give you an email address or to share a product. Failing that you can place them into a bucket to hit them again with advertising at a later  

Cater for your different audiences.

While also making it seamless for them to navigate through. Some people will land on your site because they are ready to buy, others are there to research a product or solution that you offer. Make it easy for clients to choose where they want to go, and lat your site out in a way that will solve your visitors’ problems without creating new ones for them.

Host your content in a way that’s easy to browse and share.

It’s all well and good if your site looks incredibly sexy from miles away, but if the experience is frustrating for users, then it’s not really fulfilling its function. Some people are awestruck by inspirational experiences, and if that’s what you’re aiming for, then you should excel at it, but don’t play around with fancy stuff if you’re giving your audience a 5,000 word blog post to read. Just give them the text and informative images.

Tell your visitors about you, who you are, what you stand for.

It might sound obvious, but make it easy for your visitors to find out who you are and what drives you. If people find it hard to learn about who’s behind a brand, or at least why the brand exists, then they’ll have trouble trusting it.

Act as an extension to your social media activity.

Your website should include versions of the content that you create for social media. I’m not saying that you should have a feed that automatically pulls posts from your Facebook feed, that’s lazy, but you should make it a point to keep your website as updated as you would update your Facebook or LinkedIn profiles. But the medium is different, so make it a point to create content that makes sense in the context of a site.

Once we’ve established some of the key elements that need to go into a great site for the roaring 20s, I think that it’s time to see how we will get there. It’s not as hard as it might seem, all it needs is a bit of thought before we get started.

In order to do this you need to start off your planning before you start designing and developing, and you should work on a strategy for your site that will tie down:

• Your audiences
• Your goals (for each audience, if they differ)
• Where you’re going to get your traffic from
• What you’re going to do with your traffic
• What behaviour you’re expecting from your visitors

And in the end…

Websites are here to stay. They’re more important than ever, and you need to work with a good partner to get yours right. A good website will give you control over your narrative and will help you stand out from the crowd. If you want to have a chat about your next site, feel free to get in touch, we’d love to help you. 

The post How a great web development agency can build a site as the centre of your communications appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

For a lot of brands, it’s the only form of storytelling they can have a little fun with. From glitchy graphics to hidden links to slow-scrolling pictures, web design enhances what’s good about your brand to mythic proportions. It’s the Willy Wonka method of storytelling, everything bigger and brighter and more beautiful. 

In 2021, web design isn’t just storytelling; it’s crucial storytelling. Without a good website now, the losses aren’t even calculable. 

And that’s without taking into account the fact that without a website, your brand might not exist on the greater planes of the web. 

So. 

Let’s talk about web design. 

The State of Web in 2021

As with most trends, what happens on the web starts out in real life. 

What happened in real life is this: people stayed indoors. Mobile phone users glued themselves to their phones. Internet usage skyrocketed. 

Websites ruled. 

In Malta alone, 91% of the country was online by January 2020. It’s estimated that, during COVID-19, internet usage increased to 100% in countries most afflicted by it – think Italy, the United States, even Malta. Online traffic surged. 

Globally, transactions online increased 39.7% from January 2020 to January 2021. Global conversion rates increased by 40.3% for the same time period. 

Everywhere, everyone, was online. 

Which meant that everywhere, everyone, had something to say about web design. 

Web is the first impression your audience will get with your brand. Websites that load slowly, are difficult to access from mobile devices, or are just plain ugly are going to affect your brand’s reputation, even if you don’t know it. 

A negative review left on Facebook is bad. 

A person who clicks through your website and leaves without saying anything at all is worse. 

85% of B2B and 79% of B2C consumers put a lot of value into the experience they have with a brand. That includes their first impression of your website, and how easy it is to understand. 

Web Design 2021

Here’s what we’re seeing in Web Design for 2021. 

Silverscreen Life

Let’s face it: we’re unlikely to move past the pandemic in the next year or so. In the meantime, there’s been a resurface of digital events, digital experiences, and digital lives, from online lectures to virtual lives. 

Interactive websites can make the separation between virtual and IRL seamless. 

Do you remember the early internet? All those clickable, hidden links?

This is similar, though without the 90s pop-up ads. 

Think of clean, clear space and elaborate, moving visuals – parallax is making a comeback this year, and we’re a fan of it for clean websites that want enough animation to compel and hold the attention. 

Our tip: add animations. Animations help keep focus where static images struggle. The best of both worlds? Have a static image with some animation. Additionally, make sure your website can load up content fast – optimise it for that purpose. 

We See You

Seeing other humans has become a little more rare since the early days of lockdown. 

Is it any surprise that web design is suddenly, understandably, loaded up with images of humanity? Avatars, filters, memojis: human identity built to bridge a connection. Images of humans and personalised services bring the website back around to experience. 

The experience of your life, of how you look at the world, of how you understand. 

It builds connection. Seeing yourself reflected in images, your capabilities echoed in design, helps consumers feel like the brand considers them at all stages, not just to make purchases. It’s conversation and connection without being obvious.  

Dark mode or light? Colour or black and white? Larger text, smaller text?

Customisation features allows for audiences to really feel like the brand understands them, understands their needs, understands that sometimes they need text to be bigger or to have a different colour-palette for legibility. Each website a nest of interfaces. 

Each interface unique. 

Our tip: don’t skimp on accessibility. More people than you know struggle to read tiny text, tell colours apart, or to manoeuvre around a factory-built website. Give your audience as many ways of customising it as is possible, and remember that most of your consumers will be accessing your website through their phones or tablets. 

Remember When…?

We’ve been writing a lot about nostalgia recently, and with good reason. From clothing to web design, 2021’s bringing nostalgia back. 

In web design for 2021, this means tactile response. It means a physical moment made virtual. Web pages will scroll, turn, twist, move, just like the pages of a magazine, a leaf of postcards, a selection of notebook doodles. Websites look lived in and used and heavy. 

Websites are interactive. With so much of our lives conducted virtually, this interactivity, this physicality, helps connect a user to the moment. They’ll remember it. 

They’ll want to relive it. 

Forget the sleek, flat, 2020 gloss. 2021 is all about the heavy physicality of the past, ‘60s curves, ‘70s patterns and ‘80s colours.  

Our tip: What’s your favourite nostalgic memory? Is it the glitchy spatiality of Windows ‘95, or the sweepy, flowery patterns of ‘70s mandalas? Add that into your website – as text, as a graphic, as a hidden link. Nostalgia makes people feel better, think back to a better time. Happier consumers are more likely to remember you when they’re in a position to buy something.

Design With Purpose

There’s been a lot in the news lately about historical moments. We’re living through something that is going to be taught in schools, immortalised in memoirs, and taken apart by university graduates. What history is going to remember is who helped, who hindered, and who watched. 

Companies are expected to be the helpers. 

Brands are expected to talk about social issues. Audience loyalty, especially now, is a fickle thing to hold: with so many companies talking so much about so many things, it’s easy to switch to a company that better holds your values. We’ve spoken about this before, and we’ll continue to say it – your best supporter is always going to be who you cultivate. 

Web design in 2021 puts your loyalties at the centre. 

You have to talk about what you support. Sustainability? Community responsibility? Put it in there. Dig through your archives to showcase the diversity of your customers. Add a graphic to talk about burnout. Your audience wants to know that you care. 

In 2021, it’s fundamental that you do. 

Our tip: you have to have an initiative you’re proud of. Maybe you boosted your employees’ wages when so many other companies slashed them. Maybe you switched to environmentally-friendly packaging. Find your pride, and put it where people can see it. 

Softer, Soothing, Supportive

From gentle colours to feel-good news, web design in 2021 wants to uplift. 

This means a call back to simplicity. Clean lines. Pastels bleeding into one another. Colours. Whimsical type. 

Whereas 2019 was all about the corporate, the glossy, glassy, smooth, professional web, 2021 is about softness and feeling good and design that makes you happy. 

Our tip: Play around with colours, shapes, and text. We’ve had our fill of professional blue, corporate grey, and gentle beige. A pop of colour, a curlier text, can help liven up a corporate website – and show your brand’s personality a little better. 

Statistics for Web in 2021

We don’t like telling you what to do without backing it up with facts. 

Here are a few to get you started. 

• 55.64% of internet users come from mobile devices. 
• 68% of consumers expect better from businesses when it comes to digital capabilities. 
• 94% of people notice the appearance of a website first, and make the decision whether or not to continue using it on that appearance.
• People make up their minds about a website within 50 milliseconds. 
• Websites that take longer than 2 seconds to load abandon the website 38% of the time. 
• 48% of people decide a business’ credibility based on their website design. 
• 85% of users believe a mobile website should be as good or better than the desktop version. 

Web Design Going Forwards

We’ve made a lot of changes in the year and a half of the pandemic. 

Only some of it is internal. 

The rest is external: in the way we run our social media apps, the way we talk to each other online, the way everything looks. From sleek, flat, angular design, we’ve gone for softer curves, brighter colours, and better usability. As more of our lives become entwined with online, this is not likely to change. 

If anything, it’s going to become more important. Web is never going to be the same as it was before 2019. 

Neither are we. 

So hit the ground running, and get ready for the future.

And speak to us if you want to take this journey with us.

The post Web Design in 2021: Where We Were, Where We Are, Where We’re Going appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

• Marketing Account Manager

• Accounting Executive

The post Let's build stories together appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

The Idea + The Research

1. The Web Design industry is alive and kicking, and generates at least $20.1Bn in the US economy alone (Source: Yahoo).
2. There are many people who face organizational issues like us. When we reached out to fellow web designers like us, we learnt that organizing of projects is a serious headache for many agencies and freelance designers.
3. Research – make sure your idea is not saturated with competitors. There’s always room for competition, but the market has to be large enough to sustain all of you competing for it.
4. If you’re going for a saturated market, make sure you have a few unique selling points which will hit the spot for the niche you’re targeting.
5. When reaching out to people like yourself – particularly with an idea for a solution, you’ll get plenty of people who are in the same problem as you are. Converse and discuss.
6. If you don’t get any feedback, or people who face the same problems as you – then you might want to rethink your “next big thing”.
7. Test the waters. Before rolling up your sleeves to develop a solution – cheat a bit. Design a page as if your solution existed and ask for an email address. If after driving traffic to your site, a significant number of people give you their email address – good! You’re on the right track. There are other great tips at The Lean Startup – get the book and read it.
8. Test the waters some more. Now that you know that some people are interested in your proposed solution – see whether they are ready to pay for it. Add a pricing tab with gut feel prices. See whether people click to see the pricing and still give your their email address. If they still give you their email address in significant numbers, then there is potential in the market for your solution.
(Hint: Use Google Analytics Click goals to monitor clicks)
9. Read, read and then read some more. There are hundreds of great people out there giving excellent advice. You’ll recognize the experts from the trash when you learn amazing stuff you would never have thought of. YCombinator how to start a startup is an excellent starting point. So is Reddit/r/startups
10. Take notes. Especially of the excellent ideas. Stickies are fine. A whiteboard. A real paper notepad. You’ll be plenty busy, and if you don’t write you’ll forgot a few good ideas.

The development of BeeWits

11. We bootstrapped (and self-funded) the development of BeeWits. Make sure your company is able to fund itself and the development of a product.
12. Identify a target demographic and build towards that demographic only. You may have plenty of ideas and see tonnes of potential – but start with laser focus on one demographic and make sure you get that right.
13. Start small. Build a Minimum Viable Product – a product which is small enough to provide value to your target demographic but not large enough to bust all your budgets.
14. Estimate a development time with your developers. Multiple the estimate by at least two and ideally three. Developers are surprisingly over optimistic. You’ll run into other problems too so prepare yourself.
15. If you’ve got a good development partner company and excellent communication with them – off sharing development is a good budget-conscious idea. Don’t offshore to people who you don’t know, unless you’re ready to dump everything and start from scratch with a new partner.
16. Make sure communication with your developers is spot on. Language barriers can create serious problems all over the place.
17. Node.js developers are severely in demand. If you have a choice, you might want to avoid it unless you’ve got a deep pocket and are prepared for turnover issues.
18. Staff turnover will severely impact your project timelines, especially for small development teams. Seriously consider making your developers founding partners.
19. Mocking up ALL screens is the best way to spec a project. Visuals with accompanying text go a long way in taking an idea from a concept to a working screen.

20.Push your suppliers for better prices. You’re a startup, use it to your advantage.

The marketing + the exposure

21. Build it and they will come is a fallacy. It *might* work if you’ve got millions of VC dollars to burn through and are super well-connected.
22. Start marketing your solution from day one. Seriously. You have to put as much work into marketing as much (if not more) as you do into development.
23. Write epic blog posts for your target demographic. Find a problem and fix it for them. Share the idea. Such as the Ultimate Web Design Checklist.

24. Google+ is not dead. It sends SEO signals too. Mark my words.
25. Good design goes a long way in establishing trust. Spend time and money on making your site, blog, and everything else which is public look pretty.
26. If you’re not spending more time promoting your great content than writing it – you’re doing it wrong.
27. Your only marketing aim whilst developing your product should be getting the email address of users in your target demographic.
28. Tools such as SumoMe go a long way in collecting email addresses. Offerring a free ebook in exchange for an email address is a surprisingly effective method.
29. Offering a download bundle which is useful for your target demographic for the “price” of an email address is also a surprisingly effective method. You might want to get our 101 Free Fonts or our Web Design Contract bundle.
30. Once you’ve got email addresses – make sure you keep your users engaged with consistent targeted mailings and content.
31. Building small free but helpful tools for your target demographic can be a very good source of driving traffic to your sites.

32. Outreach is hundreds of times more effective using these helpful tools as opposed to blog content.
33. Don’t forget to create a privacy policy and abide by it. People like to be reassured their email won’t be sold to spammers.
34. Use email outreach or Contact Us pages to get in touch with people who are likely to feature your blogs.
35. Make outreach emails all about them. Butter them up, be very contextual and topical to their sites, and be very very brief. Read about sending outreach emails and use something which works well for you.
36. Warm people up to your outreach by establishing a relationship via social networks, commenting on blogs works wonders for your outreach. Incidentally, have you joined BeeWits on Facebook and Twitter?
37. Use voilanorbert.com and Findthat.email to find the exact email address of people you want to contact.
38. Use SideKick to know when your emails have been read (and ignored).
39. Follow up after two weeks with people who have not replied.
40. Sometimes you’ll get links without getting a reply. Pat yourself on the back for all those times when you were completely ignored.
41. Do not get discouraged when you are ignored. It’s a game of numbers. Some people will reply. Some won’t. It’s a fact of life.
42. Try going for the big fish if you’ve got a very good free tool. You’ll be surprised at your success rate. We’ve been featured by Creative Bloq, LifeHacker, DesignTaxi and Fast Company Design, and Co.Drops.
43. If your success rate is abysmal – you might want to go back to the drawing board. Is your tool REALLY as good as you think or … ? Does it have awesome design?
44. Maintain a good relationship with anybody who replies to you. When you’ll need them again, it will be easier to reach out and get results.
45. Attend conferences. You’ll learn lots of stuff especially if you speak to your potential customers. You might meet investors too. Free t-shirts work wonders.

The Launch

46. Plan a viral giveaway with a prize your target demographic will kill for as part of your launch. Spend as much money as necessary getting it right.
47. Use good communication with your leads. Intercom seems to be a very nice tool for us.
48. Use onboarding tools to guide your users. There’s plenty of good libraries and services. We’re using Hopscotch but there are plenty of others.
49. Start onboarding users slowly. Don’t get overenthusiastic and invite few people at a time. Listen to what your customers say.
50. Don’t let perfect get in the way of done but don’t leave obvious ugly bugs.

The Revenue Ramp Up

51. Contrary to what you might have heard, converting clients to a recurring revenue service is harder than converting for one-off products. A 3% conversion ratio is fair, 5% and you’re doing great.
52. Make sure that your subscription prices work in favour of your clients, not in favour of your bottom-line. You’re looking to establish a long-term relationship with your clients, with minimal churn.
53. Handling subscriptions is a complex use-case which you should not endeavour to build yourself. Interface with a payment gateway or opt for a subscriptions plugin such as the ones listed here.
54. Make sure your support is absolutely top-notch. Your clients need to feel fully at ease if you want to keep them long-term. A long-term client also increases the LTV (lifetime value) average, allowing you to spend more on marketing and sales.
55. If at first you don’t succeed, iterate and improve. Get feedback from your clients and implement some of their best suggestions. You’ll find that feedback in general will return mostly the same comments, so it’s fairly easy to prioritize your development.
56. If you still don’t succeed – pivot. There are plenty of ways to monetize your service, or blog traffic, particularly if you’ve done the marketing right. As long as you provide value, your readers will be happy to take your advice.
We’ve learnt lots more, and we’ll surely be sharing more of these tips in the future. In the meantime, we’d love it if you would sign-up to the BeeWits for a 30-day trial. If you’re into web design – you’ll be happy and you’ll make us happy!
This is the sort of great stuff we do at Switch Digital, not just for us but for our clients too!

The post Lessons Learned While Building BeeWits appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Results

The site was ready to launch within a couple of months, and once the offices opened for business we received very positive feedback on both projects. All in all, a great project to work on – and thanks to everyone at GX4 Projects for being such great clients!

The post Client spotlight: The Hub appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Doing things digitally

Before we started promoting the brand, we needed to lay the groundwork for the campaign. The brand had zero online presence in the local market, and we needed to fix that. We first built a responsive, one-page microsite for Duo Délice – a flexible modular platform that can easily shift around to house the different campaigns we had planned for the months, and potentially years, to come.
Once the site was live, we turned our attention to building a local Facebook community. The new page provided an ideal platform for customers and competition participants to post any questions or comments about the site, the contests or the products themselves. Once everything was in place, it was time for the first campaign to kick off.

The June Campaign: Not your average Selfie Competition

You read that right – we hosted a selfie competition for dogs! Well, not actual selfies, but you knew that already. The idea stemmed from the Duo Délice brand itself – it’s a product that is luxurious, yet not exclusive.
Every dog can be a Duo Délice dog, and we wanted to drive that point home by encouraging loving dog owners to upload photos of their favourite pooch to the site for a chance to win the grand prize: a year’s supply of Duo Délice and the opportunity for their dog to star in the next brand campaign. Everyone had an equal shot at winning the grand prize – all you had to do was submit a photo and lobby for as many votes as possible through the microsite itself.

One thing’s for certain: We never thought we’d receive 219 entries within 2 weeks alone. Once the voting opened, engagement skyrocketed both on Facebook and on the website – 8,181 votes were cast on the site alone, which is significant when you consider that each user could only vote for each dog once. After a few weeks of tight competition and heated voting, Harley was announced as the clear winner.

The October Campaign: Grab your free bag of Duo Délice

The next step was to put a number of small sample bags that were available to good use. And what better way to promote pet food than to let the pets try it for themselves? A new section of the site was installed to allow interested pet owners to subscribe to the offer.
Before we knew it, there were over 700 hungry doggies that were one step closer to tasting deliciousness. To sweeten the deal, everyone who signed up to receive a free bag also received a surprise voucher for 10% off their next Duo Délice purchase!

Results

Practically every dog owner on the island was targeted with Duo Délice promotions at some point during 2014, so brand awareness has been firmly ticked off our to-do list.
Just over 1000 dog owners actively participated in the two campaigns, and a few thousand others engaged with the campaign to help their favourite pets win the grand prize over Summer.
Around 700 owners have sampled the product (or rather, their pets have), and that will definitely translate into increased sales from a number of new, happy customers over the coming months and years.
All in all, it was just the type of project we like to work on: An interesting blend of web development and digital marketing strategy, with a few furry friends thrown in to make us feel all warm and fuzzy as we go about our workday.
Many happy customers + many happy dogs + one very happy client = A very happy Switch!

The post Client Spotlight: Nestlé Purina Pro Plan Duo Délice appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Simple concept: check!

Tilda Rice takes 2 minutes to cook in the microwave, and the client wanted to promote just how quick and simple it is to prepare a full, nutritious meal. So we gave players exactly 2 minutes to try and collect as many falling ingredients as possible to increase their high score. The game would run for 1 month on the Facebook pages of Frankie and The Shopping Basket, and there would be no less than 100 winners announced on the final day, with the player in first place taking home a tablet and the runner up winning a smartphone.
Fast forward to launch day and the game was ready to rumble. Design, development and rigorous testing had got us this far, but there was no telling how the game would be received by the audience.




 
One month later, we’re happy to confirm that the game was a success.
Just under 40,000 games were played over just 4 weeks. Players spent an average period of 9.5 minutes on the game page, which is plenty of time for the point of the campaign to come across – chances are that most of those players will remember Tilda the next time they’re at the supermarket. Mission accomplished!

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