What's the difference between UX and UI design?

What’s the difference between UX and UI design?

Alright, digital design devotees and confused creatives, gather ’round! We’re about to embark on a journey through the often misunderstood lands of UX and UI design. It’s gonna be more enlightening than that time you finally figured out the difference between “your” and “you’re”!

But first, let me spin you a yarn from the trenches of design confusion. Picture this: It’s 2014, and I’m at a job interview for a “UX/UI Designer” position at a hip tech startup. The interviewer asks me to explain the difference between UX and UI. Confident in my knowledge, I launch into a detailed explanation about how UX is all about making things look pretty, while UI is about making buttons work.

The result? A look of horror on the interviewer’s face that I haven’t seen since I tried to explain Bitcoin to my grandma.

Turns out, I had it completely backwards. And thus began my journey to truly understand the difference between UX and UI design. A journey that, hopefully, will save you from similar embarrassment in your next job interview or dinner party conversation.

So, how do you tell the difference between UX and UI design? Well, grab your favorite caffeinated beverage (or a glass of wine, I don’t judge), and let’s dive into this design dilemma!

UX Design: The Invisible Superhero

First up, let’s talk about UX design. UX stands for User Experience, and it’s like the invisible superhero of the design world. It’s working behind the scenes to make sure everything runs smoothly, but you might not even notice it’s there unless something goes wrong.

Read more

7 Ways Local Lawyers Can Compete For Rankings Against Large Law Firms

7 Ways Local Lawyers Can Compete For Rankings Against Large Law Firms

In digital marketing, there are many scenarios where smaller firms compete against larger ones, and a prime example of that is within the legal sector where small law firms try to outrank larger law firms on Google using SEO, which they often do very successfully.

Whilst a larger legal business may have more resources, including finances, thankfully none of Google’s ranking factors for the results on its search engine is how big a company is or how much money it has in the bank. Indeed, every website, regardless of who or what owns it, has as much chance of ranking on Google’s top positions as any other.

What differentiates law firm website rankings, is not the size of the law firm, but how well that law firm has carried out its SEO strategy. What this can mean is that, even if your law firm is not the biggest in your area, you still have every opportunity to generate new clients via the internet by ranking well on Google.

Be aware, that this is not necessarily an easy task. It requires you to follow several tried and tested tactics, and the seven most effective of these are outlined below. Follow them, and you can outrank even the biggest law firms in your area.

#1 – Ensure Your Google Business Profile Is Optimised

Google allows every business, including your law firm, to claim their Google Business Profile. This is a listing within Google that can show up for search terms you are trying to rank for. In it, you can have your business details plus client reviews, images, map location, and information on your legal services.

Read more

Content Marketing Strategy

5 Foundations Of A Successful Content Marketing Strategy

A core element of any digital marketing strategy that is going to be successful is the creation of content. The medium, the subject matter, and the amount of content created will vary significantly depending on the niche it is for and the goals of the digital marketing campaign it is a part of.

However, what should not differ, regardless of which business the content is created for, are key principles that must be applied and adhered to if the content marketing strategy is to achieve its aims. We trust that the basics, such as quality and not plagiarizing content, are a given, but other important principles exist that may not be as well known to those creating content.

Define Your Goals

One of the biggest digital marketing mistakes businesses make concerning content creation is that they set out with no clear objectives for that content. In other words, no matter how well written it is, unless the content has a purpose and has been written to that end, then all it is, is a great piece of writing, nothing more.

When planning content, decide what each piece is to achieve. Examples include social media posts, lead generation, blog content, external content to generate backlinks, or SEO purposes to improve rankings.

Read more

5 Advantages Of Using Google Ads To Advertise Online

5 Advantages Of Using Google Ads To Advertise Online

Of all the ways how a business might use digital marketing to generate leads and customers, Google Ads is up there with the very best of them. Previously known as ‘Google AdWords’, Google Ads has undoubtedly allowed thousands of businesses to reach their target audience and subsequently turn that audience into paying customers.

As great as that sounds, Google Ads does require planning, understanding of the metrics involved, great ad copy, and, of course, a budget to pay for the clicks or the impressions that are required. Often, a business owner wishing to take advantage of Google Ads will take the sensible route and seek out a digital marketing agency to create and manage their Google Ads campaign for them, whilst they get on with what they are good at, which is running their business.

Whether you do it yourself, or employ a digital marketing agency to manage your Google Ads campaign, the great news is there are a plethora of advantages that Google Ads provides. Here are five of the most important.

You Can Target Your Ads To A Specific Audience

There are many forms of online advertising where your ad might be seen by anyone, anywhere in the world. That might appeal to global brands but if you are a local landscaping company in Perth, or removalists in Melbourne, for example, your ad being seen by someone living in Los Angeles is of little use. That is why the targeting options on Google Ads including location, income, gender, and age, allow your ad to be seen only by the audience you wish to target.

Read more

Content Marketing Strategy

5 Metrics That Will Help You Evaluate The Effectiveness Of Your SEO

One of the biggest mistakes that a business can make is to set up its SEO and then sit back and do nothing else. By nothing else, we mean that they do not monitor their results, nor do they use the available data to evaluate, amend, and improve their SEO so that their results become even better. It is akin to a soccer team playing a match and their coach not watching it or not even checking the score at the end of the game. When choosing an SEO agency, it’s important to review the SEO case studies of former clients to understand how they continuously track and enhance performance based on data.

According to an experienced SEO agency, seoperthexperts.com.au, the scenario of not checking data and metrics tends to happen when a business decides to do its own SEO rather than use an SEO agency or consultant. On their own, they might get it set up, but not knowing how to analyze its performance means that they do not know how to improve the results it is achieving. Alternatively, an SEO agency will know exactly what metrics to monitor and how to use the data they provide. By reviewing an agency’s SEO case study, you can see clear examples of how they have improved client results over time through continuous monitoring and adjustments.

A starting point for business owners concerning the performance of their SEO is to know what metrics are the most important and what they mean. So, with that in mind, here are five of the key metrics that can be used to evaluate your SEO. The data can be sourced from the dashboards within your cPanel, Google Analytics, and from other SEO tools which provide a multitude of useful data related to your SEO campaign.

Traffic By Source: One of the starting points for assessing your SEO is knowing where the traffic that visits your website is coming from, and for the traffic coming from search engines, which keywords are generating the click-throughs. By knowing the keywords that are generating the most traffic it allows you to plough more resources into consolidating the rankings for them even further.

Read more

VPS Hosting

Dedicated Hosting vs VPS Hosting

If you are looking for web hosting for a website you will already know that there are no shortages of choices relating to web hosting services and web hosting plans. For web hosting services we recommend you choose one which is proven to be reliable and has lots of positive reviews. As for the type of hosting you choose this will depend on what your needs are.

For business websites, we would recommend that you choose one of the higher specification hosting plans and two of these are dedicated hosting and VPS hosting. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. Whenever these two are mentioned side by side, there seems to be some confusion, so we are going to try to resolve that by explaining what they are and how they differ.

What is VPS Hosting?

Virtual private server hosting means that you are sharing a server with others, but unlike ‘Shared’ hosting you not competing for resources as you have your own dedicated resources within that server. As a simple analogy, think of shared hosting as you sharing an apartment with four other people, but with VPS whilst you are sharing the apartment block, you have an apartment that is yours and yours alone.

If you prefer numbers to explain this then imagine a server has 8GB of disk space, then with shared hosting 8 websites will all be vying for that a share of that and if one larger site is using 6GB that mean there is only 2GB left for the other 7 sites to share. With VPS that same 8GB is divided equally, and so you would have 1GB to use and no other site would have access to it.

Advantages Of VPS Hosting

  • It is a more affordable option than a dedicated server
  • Increased performance and reliability over shared hosting
  • You have dedicated resources
  • Access to multiple settings and options
  • Managed VPS hosting is available
  • You have options to upgrade as your website expands

Read more

4 WordPress Plugins

4 WordPress Plugins to Help Improve Your Blog

There are hundreds of tools and plugins available to help improve your blog, but it takes time to find the perfect one. So to help get you started in the right direction, here are 4 WordPress plugins to help you improve your blog.

After the Deadline
This is a must have plugin that will check the spelling, style, and grammar of your content before publishing. The built-in spelling editors in most browsers are great, but they don’t check the more important things like biased language, redundant phrases, double negatives, hidden verbs, jargon, and more. This is what makes After the Deadline the ultimate tool to help you improve your writing skills and blog content.image03asdasd.png

WordPress SEO by Yoast
In addition to the spelling, style, and grammar of your writing, you’ll also want to work on your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This is important because it helps to increase your blog’s ranking and traffic. WordPress SEO helps you improve your post title, meta description, and meta keywords. One of the best features is the ability to see a preview of how your our content will appear on Google.

Read more

7 Ways To Optimise Your Videos For SEO

Over the years the internet has changed enormously and there are few other ways in which that is more evident than the advancements in the use of video. Long gone are the days when a two minutes video took twenty minutes to download, and no longer does it require equipment worthy of a TV studio to record and produce a video. Today, videos can be recorded on a mobile phone, be uploaded instantly and someone could be watching it within seconds.

As well as informing and entertaining those who watch them, videos also have great appeal for website owners, including businesses who wish to boost their SEO campaigns. Videos provide lots of opportunities and advantages over traditional content such as text. Not least is the fact that the vast majority of internet users prefer watching videos to reading text.

Whilst we have already stated that recording and publishing videos is easy and can be done by anyone, if you want to turn that video into an asset that bolsters your SEO, it does take a bit more thought, time, and effort. However, none of what is required is especially difficult as you will see from the seven ways to optimise your videos for SEO that we have outlined below.

Make Them Worth The User Watching Them: It is essential that you do not make videos just for the sake of it. Each one should have a purpose and more importantly, should provide whoever is watching it with some benefit so that they are encouraged to return to watch your other videos.

Do Not Make Them Too Long: Long videos are desirable in some circumstances but, for SEO, your videos should be kept short. You risk your bounce rate increasing if visitors land on your website and see that the video they have clicked through to watch is over an hour long.

Read more

Website Free Tools

Starting a Website with Free Tools

Because of the current economic crisis, it is advisable to minimize your costs and be as frugal as possible and there is nothing better sounding to an individual or small company’s ear than the word ‘free’. Start up websites or companies planning to put up one should definitely take advantage as hiring a freelance web designer in London can prove to be costly.

There are several types of free software that offer web templates which are easy to manipulate. A popular choice is Google Page Creator which has been replaced with Google Sites which has no advertising on your pages and Google takes care of the bills when it comes to web hosting. There are an astounding number of templates to choose from which can be manipulated through step by step instructions presented or can be searched during this process. You do not have to be technically inclined to understand the instructions and it is so simple that with the right amount of practice you can build several websites with the greatest of ease.

Most websites will tell you that there are no draw backs in using free building tools for a website but there are. Not customizing the template may result in sliding in rank because uniqueness plays a factor in ranking as well. Templates leave imprints and since this is a free website building tools there are so many websites that have used this template which makes the imprint similar to each other and therefore can be grouped and penalized for not being distinct.

Read more

How much is your business worth?

The definition of fair market value is a business is worth what a willing buyer is willing to pay. Too many people believe that their business is worth more than it is. Unlike a house, you cannot compare your business to the one down the street. No two businesses are identical. Even franchises are different, one location has more sales, more profits therefore the valuation will be different for each separate business. All you can go by is ask a reasonable amount based on the valuation methods traditionally used in the marketplace.

A business is not worth more because you have a client who an exceptional client however if the sales are only $10,000 per annum, it is not a big account. Your company is not worth a premium because you have a premium client but does not generate a lot of sales. Yes, they may buy more in the future but you are selling the business based on what it did in the past and not what the new investor can do in the future.

Some businesses have huge cash flow however their financial statements may show little profit. Why – the company has significant assets which are being depreciated annually The assets were purchased in prior years but the amortization reduces the profits of the company. Banks look at the cash flow the business and can see that it is positive however they still look at retained earnings and if depreciation reduces retained earnings, the banks factor that into the borrowing ability of the business. The banker may say that they look at cash flow only but if you find out about their lending model, it is based on the balance sheet and the income statement, not just the income statement.

Read more

All You Need To Know About Virtual Private Cloud Hosting

One of the recent developments within the world of web hosting that have become increasingly popular with businesses that have an online presence is the virtual private cloud. VPCs are being used more by businesses of all sizes and many who have found them perfect for their web hosting needs. If you have never heard of VPCs before, or might be wondering what they are and how they might provide a web hosting solution for your business,  then read on and will explain all.

What Is Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)?

Whenever you see the term ‘cloud’ used concerning online activities it refers to an environment online where files, applications, and software are stored, and which can be accessed from any device which is connected to the internet. In effect, a cloud could be considered a giant online warehouse that is extremely secure but at the same time allows easy access for those who have the authorisation to do so.

A virtual private cloud is hosted within a public cloud, but the resources allocated to the users are not shared with others. An analogy would be a business renting a floor within an office tower whereby they control and have exclusive use of that floor, but not the whole building.

What Can VPC Be Used For?

One of the primary uses of a virtual private cloud is to host files, and that can include hosting a website when VPC is offered by a web hosting company. However, if a business has sufficient technical resources it can configure a VPC to host its website without the need for a hosting company.

Read more

What is SEO?

What is SEO?

Are you getting enough website traffic? Want to attract more customers to your website? You are probably familiar with some of today’s terms and methods used on the Internet or you may not. Here’s a start.

First of all let’s define it. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. It is a term used in most cases when you want to refer to a method known as optimizing your website or making your website search engine friendly.

You might say to yourself, “I have a nice website and paid good money for it, why should I optimize it?” What does that mean? Let’s talk about that a bit in the paragraph below.

Why Optimize your Website?

Well have you ever asked yourself how are people supposed to find your website if they don’t know you exist. Sure if they know you and type your website name in Google™, it will find you.

How about if they typed in a couple of keywords looking for your product or service? Will your website be found and appear on the first page of the most popular search engines on the Internet? If I may be so blunt, probably not! If you haven’t established an authoritative presence, paid dearly for advertising or optimized your website it’s not going to happen.

Optimizing your website requires some good planning and engineering. You need good content that includes your keywords and these keywords also have to be properly inserted into certain areas in your code known as Meta Tags.

Read more

Market Your Website via Article Marketing

Many web mastered tend to skip this technique not knowing that it is very vital. This technique is only common to professional web masters and in this article will tell you on how best you can market your site making use of article marketing. Even if you are a novice you will certainly get to achieve great results if you are to implement this technique.

I would actually state that article marketing is one of the vital aspect in bringing great traffic to your site. With article marketing you are able to briefly describe all the services and products that your site has got to offer. You should also bear in mind that the majority of browsers like to read information and hence an article about your services and product will be worthwhile.

It is very simple to create articles of your own and you have to make sure that all articles contain 100% original content so that you may be able to submit them via several article directories like ezinarticles.com, articlesbase.com etc.

In order for you to check the originality of your articles you can get your articles checked via copyscape.com which I would recommend to be one of the best article checkers for originality.

Read more

What is a start up business?

A start up business is any business which has been created from an idea and has no history of sales, failure or success. This could be a clone of someone else’s business however this is the first business of this type created by this entrepreneur.

Entrepreneur is a person who is a risk taker. He/she is willing to place a large bet on the success of their idea. They could put a lot of money into the business or just time. They are willing to try a new idea even though others think that it may not succeed.

Advantages of a start up:

  • you are your own boss
  • freedom for creativity
  • no constraints by bosses, you are the boss
  • ability to take risks and enjoy rewards of success
  • no rules to follow
  • can change direction or strategy of business on a moments notice
  • owner controls all aspects of business

Read more

What is an angel investor?

An angel investor is a high risk investor looking to put some play money into multiple different ventures.
Typically these are non bankable ventures, very risky, often start ups.
Angel investors are there when no bank will finance you, when your credit cards are at the max.
Angel investors typically do not put money into your company for you to pay off your debts or creditors.

They only put money in when they know that it will be used for going forward in the business, for expanding the business but never for paying past debts and definitely not for the owner to get some money out of the company.

Because they participate in risky ventures, angel investors look for a high rate of return.

Read more