There’s no denying it. Our society is more digital now than ever. You, me, your neighbor, your neighbor’s neighbor… we are all online. Most importantly, your prospective clients are online and are ready to consume high-quality digital content.

Now is the time to invest in your website and make it more user-friendly for your audience. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit to improve your site, ranging from basic content updates like changing imagery and posting blog posts. Or investing in more impactful measures such as consulting top digital marketing agencies to understand the most cost-effective way to improve your website.

So what exactly will make your website user-friendly for today’s content consumers? Many UX designers will tell you that you should either keep your users either scrolling or clicking from one page to another within your site. So which is the better user experience? To scroll or not to scroll?

Keep reading (and scrolling) to understand why scrolling on a website is OKAY and why it is actually expected from the vast majority of online users.

Social Media

Today’s world is used to scrolling. Why? The never-ending social media feed.

Social media sites are designed with one thing in mind: to get users to consume as much content as possible. The best way to do this is to get them to continue to scroll so that they can consume infinite amounts of new content. Most social media platforms are best used on mobile devices, which are easy to use for scrolling through as the flick of a finger takes very little effort.

The Computer Mouse & Track Pad

Okay, so this may be a given… but you know that little roller ball on your mouse? Okay, wait. That may be a little archaic… Do you know that trackpad on your laptop? Well, that lovely thing is used to invite the user to scroll down a page. We know that webpages are going to be lengthy, so much so that the actual hardware we use to “surf the web” has adapted to allow us to do so.

Okay, pause. Those two reasons are only related to how the physical interface prompts a user to scroll. You may be asking, “What are the different types of scrolling that you can include on my website?”

1. The Subtle Scroll

Design the page so that it appears as though you are scrolling through one long piece of content. Maybe the background color stays the same, maybe it slowly changes color, as shown on Palantir’s About Page. Perhaps you’re experiencing parallax scrolling – which in and of itself invites the user to fixate on one piece of the webpage at a time. With this effect, the user barely notices the page length, as the seamless design shift keeps them engaged and focused on the story.

Check out how Bluetext implemented this type of scrolling on the homepage of the Clarabridge website. We designed a seamless animation that invited the user to continue scrolling through the homepage to better explain the technical and analytical power behind the Clarabridge platform.

2. Fixed Long-Scrolling

Instead of having the whole page scroll, fixed long-scrolling allows for specific aspects of the content to remain static while the rest of the content scrolls around it. You can also set up the scrolling to shift to a new section when the user reaches a certain point. 

This is ideal if your website has important content or CTAs that should always be accessible to the user. For example, a sticky call to action button is often used to keep key conversion points always present and top of mind.

3. Infinite Scroll

This is most similar to the type of scrolling shown in social media. Is your website a news site? Do you have blog content that you want your users to explore? Consider implementing infinite scroll on your listing pages, allowing posts to continue to load so that the page gives the appearance of infinite content. Of course, this can often be overwhelming for a user who is attempting to find something specific, so we invite you to consider including intuitive filtering so that users can self-select the types of content they are looking for.

(Photo Credit: knowband.com)

4. Parallax Scrolling

Parallax scrolling is different from the previous three types of scrolling as it invites the user to see new pieces of content and animations with every scroll. Check out how Bewegen invites the user to scroll through their home page and explore their main product. For a personal favorite, give a scroll through Albino Tonnina’s personal website.

Now that you have four great design options to incorporate into your website, it’s time for you to choose the right design for the content on your website. Top web design agencies like Bluetext are great resources for you to turn to in order to gain expert insights on what is best for you.

Looking to begin your next website project? Contact Bluetext today for a consultation.

It’s rare for a business to offer its services for free. The phrase “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” reigns true in most industries and all business decisions. Originating with early-century saloon owners marketing free, salty lunches as a way to entice beer drinking, even the etymology of the #TNSTAAFL phrase foreshadows the destiny of commerce itself – it’s impossible to get something for nothing.

So, what does a free ham sandwich in 1891 have to do with 2020 content marketers and gated thought leadership? Imagine your business is the bar and that hungry and thirsty passerby out front is the CMO searching for a way to convince their boss on more paid media dollars, or a CTO who needs a VPN alternative. You have something they could want – a delicious, frothy piece of premium content to quench their industry-specific questions. Post that “Free Lunch” sign, give them some snacks, and then charge them for the beer to wash it all down. You’ll have a bar full of returning customers every time.

You Want to Be a Thought Leader?

Let’s break it down. Businesses that are trying to establish themselves as thought leaders in their space usually have two types of content: Blogs and premium content. Typically, you want to spend your time on the premium content first and then chop it up into free digestible portions, which become your blogs. Since the blogs are free and busting at the seams with the same SEO juice that you prioritized in your premium content, both should come up as a result when someone is looking online for an industry-question you have the answer to.

Think about the last time you were researching B2B tactics. You wouldn’t hand over your email address to just anyone at the beginning of your research. You browsed around to see who knows what they’re talking about. Once you found a credible thought leader, then you actually started paying attention to what they were talking about.

Economy vs. Premium Content

According to content marketing agencies, balance is key. The trick is to walk the line between having free ungated blogs that are enticing and helpful to draw traffic but not too helpful and giving away a company’s expertise without gaining any leads. Save the premium advice and info for the premium content. Ask yourself, “Would someone reasonably pay for this service?”

Make it exclusive, insightful, and urgent. Typically, premium content are eBooks, courses, webinars, checklists, and sometimes videos. Those resources take a lot of effort to create, so you want to put them to work for you and your marketing team. This premium content comes with a price or a gate. The key to the gate and unlocking the juicy stuff is usually as harmless as an email.

As a top content marketing agency, Bluetext breaks down some do’s and don’ts behind gating the premium content.

Do Design Gated Content Conversions Using Ungated Content UX/UI

Make sure your tip top-funnel blogs feed into your top funnel gated content. A UX design company will engineer an ungated content user interface to drive invested leads to gated content. Dangle the carrot and then drive them down a rabbit hole of insights.  If your resource page template’s layout has a related topic listing, you can get someone reading one blog to jump to the next, especially when you have click-worthy resource titles.

Create a clear, focused path to follow. Put an enticing CTA at every step of your ungated posts to draw them to the gated content. Theoretically, the user lands on a first blog post via Google search, they peruse 2-3 of your other blogs, and then they are a bit invested by the time they get to gated content. Long story short, using the Free Lunch scenario, clean up your bar so it looks inviting enough to have them buy a drink.

Don’t Forget to Design the Landing Page UX/UI for Conversion

At least make the gated content page template easy to use and worthy of personal info. Best practices for gated content landing page design include showcasing the product, talking about the benefits and insights they can learn, highlighting a quote from the piece, and ideally some social proofing or testimonials. A website design agency will be your best bet to formatting these nuggets of information in a clean, digestible fashion. Like any other business transaction, sell it with foreshadowing what they are about to invest in.

Do Add SEO Excerpt from Gated Content on the Landing Page

The Google Algorithm crawls ungated content, but while you will be losing out on SEO potential by putting keywords behind the gate, you can still put some of those keywords directly on the landing page. Think of it like a teaser, or a sample sip of the beer you want them to buy.

Don’t Miss Out on Capturing User Journey Clues Via CTA Pixel

If the user has followed the intended path laid out above, they have digested other information on the website before converting on the gated content. A digital marketing and analytics expert will implement Google Analytics or UTM parameters to track where users come from and behavioral trends. This is a critical insight that can help your sales and marketing team follow up and understand the lead without asking them. In fact, don’t ask them anything else besides their email (coming up next!).

Trusting a digital marketing and analytics agency to configure the UI/UX back end of your CMS to gather clues (via UTM or Google Analytics) will ensure these tools talk to your CRM when it passes over the lead. Your CRM can then organize to segment those leads into audience pools with the user journey info and UTM parameters. Did they arrive via Facebook or LinkedIn? Did they read about technology or marketing thought leadership? Did they visit SMB or Enterprise blogs before? Depending on what you want to do with the leads gathered from the gated content, a digital marketing agency can follow up with retargeting campaigns. By taking out the guesswork, digital marketing campaigns are then geared toward the topics and categories you know a specific user is interested in.

Don’t Over-Gate with Nosey Forms

Sometimes businesses want more defining characteristics of the user to help their follow up marketing to have some foundational info. Asking for an email is the easiest marketable piece of info you can gather – but should you want more, make sure the form is at least easy to use. For instance, free type is ok, but dropdown select from offers convenience. Ideally, if you need to ask for more info, triage that asks by making some questions optional so you don’t scare anyone away. Remember – you want them more than they want you at this point. You might be the third tab they have open in their research, so think twice if knowing their position is worth losing them to a competitor’s simpler gated content.

Do Gate Content. Don’t Gate Content.

We wish it were black and white, but the answer to the infamous To Gate or Not to Gate question comes down to the following:

• How exclusive is your offer?
• How easy is your form to fill out?
• How SEO friendly is your LP?
• How actionable is your CTA?

If you have your thought leadership on fleek from a UX/UI, SEO, and CMS perspective than you’re ready to start offering free lunches to any potential lead that comes into your digital business.

As the world becomes increasingly digital, having a professional, user-friendly website is now more important than ever. With countless options for building or overhauling a website, picking the right content management system or DC digital web design agency can seem overwhelming. Don’t panic, Bluetext is here to provide expert advice to all decisions that go into building your digital ecosystem. As a top DC digital web design agency, with teams of Drupal and WordPress development experts, Bluetext has worked with countless client’s to build high-quality, easy-to-navigate websites. Our teams of user experience and user interface specialists take many things into consideration when building a website; however, navigation is always a top priority. 94% of web users report easy navigation is the most important feature when evaluating a website. As an experienced DC digital web design agency, we’ve been able to test why and how logical website navigation is critical. Here are four ways to make sure your website is as intuitive as possible.   

1. Keep Things Orderly

In creating a new website, the order of information on a page can make or break the user experience. People tend to best recall the first and last items in a series and forget the information in the middle – this is known as the primacy and recency effect. For this reason, the most important information should be included in the hero zone of a website. The hero zone, in other words, can be best equated to an elevator pitch – a short description of your idea, product, or company that briefly explains your concept in such a way that any viewer can quickly understand it.

2. Remain Consistent

By 2027, there will be more than 41 billion IoT devices around the world. The increased volume of IoT devices means more individuals around the world will be accessing the web through a wider range of devices. As a DC digital web design agency, we’ve seen the increased importance of creating responsive websites that automatically scale to device type but remain consistent in general structure. Menu systems often become crowded and confusing as screen widths decrease to tablet and mobile devices.  Digital design agencies can help overcome this obstacle by recognizing the critical breakpoints in your site’s design and implementing menu structures optimized for tablet and mobile screens of all generations. By keeping this consistency in structure and navigation across devices, users will become more familiar with and loyal to your website and brand.

3. Limit Menu Items

To ensure a website is easy-to-use and navigate, the structure is essential. For example, listing each page separately in a navigation header creates an overwhelming and near impossible user journey. Your sitemap should act as a foundation, with the most important items laying the building blocks for secondary pages. By systematically creating a logical sitemap utilizing primary and secondary navigation, you can create a fluid user experience that allows users to find exactly what they need with ease. As a DC digital web design agency, we have access to and frequently use site map testing tools, such as Treejack, to evaluate the findability of topics on a website. Not to mention, creating a logical, hierarchical sitemap makes it much easier to produce an XML sitemap, which is pivotal for SEO.  

4. Test. Test. Test.

A/B testing website navigation is the only way to truly take the guesswork out of website optimization. As a DC digital web design agency, our Drupal and WordPress development experts have seen first hand the benefits of A/B testing. With proper testing, website navigation changes can be data-driven. Conversations surrounding those changes then shift from “I think” to “I know.” Although A/B testing can be employed to answer one-off questions, it should be continually used to improve metrics, such as conversion rate, over time. 

In building or redoing a website, intuitive navigation design should always be a top priority to ensure users don’t require instruction or trial and error to move around the site. By using the navigation best practices mentioned above, you’ll have taken a great first step towards better engagement and higher conversion rates on your website by enhancing overall user experience. To learn more about our processes and to see our work, check out our case studies.

If you’re looking to hire a DC digital web design agency with Drupal and WordPress development experts, see what Bluetext can do for you.

Trends in website design are ever-evolving. It’s a fast-paced industry, but any business with a digital marketing presence should take efforts to stay informed and keep up with best practices. Just as you would ensure employees are helpful and informative to customers in a physical store, your users expect the same experience online. Here are three user experience trends that you should consider for your business’ website in 2020:

Design as a part of your business strategy.

A few years ago, chief executives might have excluded themselves from having a say in website design or functionality to focus on the bottom line. That being said, more and more companies have come to recognize the critical importance of a strong online presence. With the world participating in the digital-first movement, your website says a lot about the health of your business.

The future of the company often lies in the hands of top executives, as they typically establish the company culture and the goals with investors or the board of directors. Including top stakeholders in the design process is critical to get initial sign off and ensure their vision is incorporated. It is important to involve diverse perspectives into any web design, especially the ones writing the checks. These stakeholders offer a unique perspective in the current state and future aspirations of the company. Website strategists and UX designers should always include the top decision-makers in the room to make sure the website they are designing today aligns with the business strategy of the future.

When Bluetext recently partnered with Blue Yonder (formerly JDA), the #1 supply chain management software company in the world, we made sure to include top decision-makers from the initial discovery session, all the way through to launch of their brand new website. You can view our work with Blue Yonder here. 

Thumb-friendly design.

With over 50% of website traffic coming from mobile devices, responsive website design has become a top priority. Menu navigation and intuitive user journey has been and always will be a top design consideration, but recently there has been a shift in attention towards mobile menu design. 

How do top UX design agencies optimize for user comfort as we design for mobile? We think about adding content and important elements to the “thumb-zone”.

The “thumb-zone” includes the area at the bottom of a mobile device and on the side opposite the thumb. Test it yourself by holding your mobile device. Where does your thumb naturally fall? User studies say that about 75% of user interactions are thumb-driven, so including navigational items and important content in this zone creates a simplified and more natural user experience. In 2020, you will likely notice a lot of websites start to move away from hamburger navigation on the left side of the screen. These are often replaced by navigation bars at the bottom of the screen, aka the thumb’s natural setting.

Bluetext designed a mobile-first website for Built With Chocolate Milk, an organization that promotes the benefits of chocolate milk as a natural recovery drink. Bluetext enhanced the user experience and overall engagement through a website redesign that emphasizes the science-backed benefits of chocolate milk and showcases Built With Chocolate Milk’s impressive partnerships with world-class athletes such as Klay Thompson of the Golden State Warriors.

Accessibility.

With the internet being a critical part of daily life and the rise of user-centric design, it is no surprise to see accessibility on the list. When thinking through how a user gets from point A to point B, UX designers should be inclusive of those people who may have a disability and use assistive technology.

One way of keeping accessibility top of mind is to develop separate personas for users that may have low vision, deafness, or other disabilities. Persona creation is a common exercise for top digital marketing agencies when beginning a website project. But thinking beyond the expected customer personas can open insight into a more inclusive and realistic set of potential web users. Having empathy for these personas while designing will help ensure little tweaks are made that allow them to equally experience your content. For example, ensuring text is large enough for users with low vision and inclusion of space for video transcripts are all UI elements that make the website more accessible to all. With the rise of imagery- and animation-heavy sites, adding alt text to all website imagery will allow screen readers to provide context to visually impaired users. Plus, this step will kill two birds with one stone by improving your site’s SEO ranking with keyword-rich descriptions.  

Added bonus: Google prioritizes websites that are more accessible to more users, so if you want to boost your SEO rankings, keep accessibility top of mind.

When the SSB Bart Group, the leading provider of accessibility solutions and software, needed a new brand to increase its market share and continue on its growth trajectory, it chose Bluetext to deliver a new name, brand, and website that would focus on its people and expertise. After a thorough discovery process, competitive review and market analysis, Bluetext proposed Level Access to simplify the brand and its promise to the industry. The new look and feel and how it is presented on the website reflects Level Access’ mission “to create a world where digital systems can be made readily accessible to users with disabilities—enabling digital technology to become a profound empowering force in their lives.”

Looking for more information about the state of web design and where we’re headed? Check out some more of our case studies. 

The decades-long reign of the PC is over, with mobile devices now making up more than 52% of all internet traffic. While plenty of people preach the importance of responsive website design, far fewer have articulated updated guidelines for the reality of today’s internet. Keenly aware of trends as ever, Google has continually refined its search algorithm to keep pace with increasingly mobile and untethered internet. Advertisers, marketers, and website owners alike need to be aware of what these paradigm shifts are, and how that could impact their sites’ SEO.

Cellphones’ bountiful data has empowered Google to enhance its search engine. Search results are more custom than ever before, incorporating key differentiating factors like time of day, weather, and geography. The search results for a morning bagel in Washington D.C. will look entirely different three hours later in San Francisco.

Optimizing for Local Search

More so than ever before, websites need to be local. Gone are the days of simply tacking on addresses and list of phone lines. To be competitive in 2020, websites need to address the mindset and inquiries of the region they serve, be it a street, coast, or country. A quintessential, doughy foldable New York slice is in stark contrast to a dense, deep-dish pie from Chicago. The top result for a pizza in Manhattan will not be wasting content on merely their cheese, sauce, and pepperoni, but rather what distinguishes their slice from their other New York brethren. Language, context, and local distinctions are now a mandatory part of website content strategy.

Dealing with Short Attention Spans

Major changes to search algorithms are only a handful of the changes introduced by the rise of mobile. Attention spans online are shorter than ever with the ubiquity of the internet and easily accessible information, even more so for mobile where screen size comes at a steep premium. Hero zones should be appropriately leveraged. Heroes should state the most important critical information concisely and contain a quick and simple CTA or takeaway. Organic visitors who cannot immediately find an answer to their search query after a glance and a few swipes will assuredly bounce away to a competitor.

Search and Virtual Assistants

Smartphones’ impact on websites has not just been limited to mobility and smaller screens. Virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri fundamentally change how people browse the internet. For many on-the-go, the automated search functionality provided by these virtual assistants have all but replaced a typical Google search.

How Google and the other virtual assistants parse through webpages and present them for voice search is a complex topic, but the vital SEO fundamentals remain in place. Research demonstrates that people are unsurprisingly far more conversational in their wording versus a typed-in search. Optimized content thus needs to serve this need directly, often best served using blogs that cover such frequent, informal topics as “What is the best X” or “Y versus Z”.

Google has been increasingly leveraging its structured data for voice search results, largely due to its predictable format and parseable nature. For best results, website owners need to cross-reference website content and identify what data could be passed off to Google using structured data. Articles, menus, locations, events, and reviews are just a handful of the many structured data formats that Google accepts. Conveniently, Google now provides a simple tutorial for anybody familiar with HTML to get started on incorporating structured data and improving their site for voice search.

The shift to mobile devices has opened up new avenues for content creation and design. Location and voice were unheard of topics even a decade ago, but they are here to stay for organic search. It’s up to website owners and marketers whether they take advantage of these new strategies, or get left in the dust.

As the world has changed in the blink of an eye, so has the way we market to consumers. Now, more than ever, your website exists as BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT doorway to your brand and your brand experience. While stores stay shut, and face-to-face interaction is vastly limited, brands will rely on reaching their target audiences via their websites. Therefore, your website is mission-critical to your success.

Bluetext has published a 5 part blog series to help you think about and pressure test if your website is the best it can be.

With 57% of the world’s population now on the internet, promoting your business through a website has become even more critical. Additionally, over 50% of website traffic comes from mobile, and over 66 million American adults now own a smart speaker with digital assistant capabilities. Your website is where a potential customer will get their first impression of your business, and navigating the way website browsing behavior continuously evolves can be tricky.  Because having a poorly designed website can be worse for your business than having no website at all, turning toward an expert website design agency can help you find the best website solution for your company. An agency can help you stay on top of the latest web design trends, and bring both your website and your business to the next level.

User experience (UX) is one of the most important things to consider when redesigning your new website. According to Jakob’s law, users spend most of their time on websites other than yours. This means that users prefer for your site to function in a similar manner to other sites they frequently interact with. Staying up-to-date with current web design trends is imperative to keep your users engaged.

Bluetext suggests considering the following seven trends when building your website to ensure that your site combines SEO functionality with the best UX, boosting your brand’s presence online.

1. Make Mobile a Priority

 Over 50% of all website traffic comes from mobile. With a user-base continuously becoming more dependent on mobile, it is even more important for website designers to prioritize and optimize web experience for mobile devices. Designers must create a thumb-friendly design to not only make mobile navigation easier for the user but also create a seamless, visually-appealing design.

More than 60% of companies reported an increase in sales after designing mobile responsive platforms; however, approximately 40% of people will leave your website if it isn’t mobile-friendly. While simply having a mobile presence may seem good enough, optimizing this experience through design to cater to mobile users is the most important factor.

If these statistics aren’t convincing enough, it’s also important to keep in mind that Google gives priority to mobile-friendly sites by ranking them higher in search results, positively impacting your SEO. Lacking a mobile-friendly experience can negatively impact your website’s ranking, whereas sites that are mobile responsive will often receive a ranking boost, even for searches on a desktop.

Check out some of Bluetext’s work on mobile with Paya and Mindtree.

2. Increase Page Speed 

It takes users only three seconds to decide whether or not they want to stay on your website. These three seconds are crucial to your website’s dwell time (aka the time a user spends on your website before returning to the search results). Web design agencies can provide creative solutions to help engage your users within these three seconds. Additionally, web agencies know the best tactics for improving page speed, such as image compression. Image formats like JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP often provide better compression than PNG or JPEG, which means faster downloads and less data consumption.

The less time it takes your website to load, the better your SEO. Because of the Google Speed Update, Google won’t prioritize your website to users if it will take too long to load. Taking your site to a web design agency will ensure that your website is optimized for the user, while also ensuring that you have the best possible SEO ranking. 

3. Optimize for Voice Search

Page speed is also becoming more important as the number of smart speakers and digital assistants continues to grow. Over 66 million American adults now have a smart speaker, and designing a website that capitalizes on Voice Search Optimization is the only way to ensure that those using smart devices for their searches will have access to your site. Voice search is meant to be a faster, more convenient way to get information, and if your website takes too long to load, it is less likely to be returned for a voice search result.

According to a PWC study, 71% of respondents would rather use their voice assistant to search for something than manually typing their query into a search engine. The differences between these spoken and typed searches may lead to different SERP results, and if your website is not properly optimized for vocal search, you may lose ground to your competitors. Because vocal searches only result in one top result, everyone is vying for this “ground zero” position. You can obtain this coveted position by gaining Google’s featured snippet spot, which aims to directly answer users’ questions. Voice searchers are also more likely to search in long-form questions as opposed to using shorter keywords, so it’s important to consider the types of questions your target audience may ask, and to position your website well to answer these searches. 

4. SEO vs. SEM: Choose Wisely

How can you tell whether to focus your marketing efforts on SEO or SEM? Let’s return to square one: what’s the difference? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was traditionally thought of as a component of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which comprised of both paid and organic tactics. However, this language is shifting, with SEM now referring exclusively to paid search. SEO is a method to optimize your website to receive organic traffic, while SEM is a way to funnel in relevant traffic from search engines by buying paid or sponsored ad listings. 

So which is better to focus on for your website? SEO allows your business to get more visibility, building brand awareness at a low cost. Choosing keywords that are relevant to your website can earn you a spot on the first page of the SERPs, automatically earning you credibility and trust from search users. In order to increase your website’s chances of making this first page, follow these simple steps:

1. Use relevant keywords in the URL to describe the content of the page
2. Use your main keywords in the beginning of the title tag of your page
3. Use the right keywords in the meta description of your page and make sure it is enticing enough for users to click-through to your site
4. Use your primary keyword(s) in the H1 tag of your page
5. Use your main keywords along with related long-tail keywords in the first few paragraphs of the page

SEO will bring your website brand visibility at a lower cost, but it’s important to invest in researching which keywords will best optimize your website. 

While SEO is typically more sustainable, turning to SEM can also do wonders for your website. SEM allows you to capture the attention of your target audience by claiming a spot above-the-fold of the SERPs. Sponsored listings also give you more control over the results you achieve; every element of the ad can be customized and tweaked to target your audience. SEM charges on a per-click basis, and while this may be more expensive, it allows you to achieve quick, measurable results without going through the trial-and-error process that SEO typically involves.

Both SEO and SEM have their pros and cons, and both may be right for your business at different times. Turning to an agency that specializes in SEO and SEM will help you choose the right tactic at every turn. 

5. Hello, Homogenous Hero

 The fast pace of modern life means that people have less time to spend on your website. When they enter your site, simple and intuitive web design will allow them to quickly find what they’re looking for. The use of minimal design allows for the rapid digestion of information and ultimately leads to more satisfied users.

The inability to spend endless time searching for information on a website also means that many web design agencies are moving away from the once-popular ubiquitous site, and shifting instead toward the homogenous hero. Instead of boldly featuring the headline in the center of the landing page, designers are opting instead to move the header and CTA to one side, with the image on the opposing side. This split-screen aesthetic also allows for easy conversion to mobile, providing a clear dividing line between the two content blocks.

Check out some of Bluetext’s latest homogenous hero designs through their work with Centauri and Perspecta.

6. Animate Your Site 

The use of animation is an easy way to make your website appear polished and dynamic. Animation also helps bring your brand’s story to life, quickly engaging users and drawing more visitors to your homepage. When used as a tool to communicate complex messages easily, animation can reduce the time that a user must spend in order to understand your message, which enables them to spend more time exploring your website. 

When adding animation and motion into your website design, it is important to consider web image optimization, which is the process of providing the smallest-sized images optimized in terms of quality, resolution, and format. With the rise of internet browsing on mobile, images and animations must be optimized to perform well on mobile. While animations are a fantastic way to engage your site visitors, they can also slow down your website load times and negatively impact your SEO. Let a professional website design agency like Bluetext help ensure that your website can support lively animation without dragging down your website load time. 

When Bluetext redesigned the Clarabridge website, we made sure to incorporate motion in a sophisticated way, making the UX come alive. We used motion throughout the homepage to engage the user and pull them further down the landing page. This design also quickly explains how Clarabridge works and allows a site visitor to visualize how they might best use Clarabridge’s services.

7. Incorporate More Video Content

Video content diversifies your web page, and also appeals to those fast-moving users who do not have the time to search through a lot of text. Videos are also a great way to make an emotional connection to your users and lead to a better overall website experience. By 2020, experts predict that 80% of online traffic will be video. Additionally, 72% of businesses say that video has improved their conversion rate, and 45% of people watch an hour or more of video per day. 

While video content is clearly an important marketing tactic, 64% of marketers see video as the most difficult content to create. Not only do videos take time to plan, shoot, and edit, but it is also tough to decide exactly what type of content should be presented in your video. Because viewers’ attention starts to drop off after roughly two minutes, finding an expert who specializes in video content may be the best route for creating the perfect video for your website. 

Not only will video content boost your website’s success, but it is also rewarded by Google. If your site includes video, it is 53X more likely to get a first-page spot in search results. Video improves SEO, which boosts your ranking. But if a short video is one of the first impressions a user will have of your business, how do you go about creating successful video content, and keep the user coming back for more? Many website design agencies have video specialists who can tell your story in a clear and powerful way. Check out Bluetext’s latest video work with Invictus.

Invictus Brand Essence Video, July 2019 from Bluetext on Vimeo.

2019 has been a big year for Bluetext full of limitless growth and many successful launches. As one of the top digital marketing agencies in the Washington, D.C. area, we are growing faster than ever in both size and knowledge. 

As we look back on 2019, we can reflect on some of our major accomplishments. Partnering with impressive and innovative clientele gives our team the opportunity to push our creative boundaries and exceed client expectations. 

This past year, ResMan, a property management platform with a robust range of solutions, sought out Bluetext as a top marketing firm for their digital needs. With the introduction of a new suite of offerings and a more holistic platform, ResMan needed to repackage their solutions and relaunch their digital presence. ResMan brought in Bluetext to reinvigorate the ResMan brand with an updated website and CVI, while modernizing and streamlining their existing brand.

Bluetext took inspiration from Resman’s customer-centric philosophy and delivered on a request for external messaging and marketing efforts to reflect their goals as a company. Bluetext stepped up to the challenge and seized this project as an opportunity to enhance expertise as a top user experience agency. Resman’s request was met by a fully redesigned—and responsive—website, focusing on an enhanced UX that guides users with an intuitive⁠ website flow. 

Similarly, Bluetext assisted in creating the new Mindtree.com, which offers an intuitive, fully responsive user experiences and personalization to serve relevant content to each user. As a leading global digital transformation and technology services provider, MindTree needed a brand and website that reflected their capabilities and future-focused customers.  The website utilized Drupal 8 CMS platform to provide the utmost flexibility and scalability needed by such a large enterprise while allowing a design that reflects a vibrant brand and its employees. This improved user experience translated to measurable results, as the bounce rate decreased by 20% and website traffic rose 60% post-launch.

What does MindTree have to say about the experience? “Bluetext has been a tremendous digital agency partner to the Global Marketing Team at Mindtree. From digital brand strategy, to innovative user experience design, to enterprise Drupal content management implementation expertise… they were impressive every step of the way. Great collaborators with our in-house folks – I would strongly recommend the amazing team at Bluetext!”

Bluetext takes pride in offering exceptional client service and taking the time to learn a client’s distinct brand values and user needs. Bluetext has succeeded in bringing our client’s values to life through digital marketing and campaign deliverables. A portfolio of industry-leading clients has taught us to treat every new project as a two-sided relationship to grow and enhance both parties’ business value. Our efforts to work backward, prioritizing the end-user experience and ultimate brand goals have translated into the measurable success that we look forward to continuing into 2020. 

Creating a successful digital web design can mean the difference between growing your customers and losing them on your website doorstep. For Clarabridge, which delivers a better customer relationship platform for its clients by leveraging artificial intelligence to sort through complex data, providing clarity with its website was critical. It turned to Bluetext to unify its various website platforms into a single customer experience.

Clarabridge’s challenge was fairly straightforward: Its clients’ own customers constantly provide feedback through a wide range of information channels, from direct contact to social media and everything in between. Yet, that same explosion of these channels and the sheer volume of data creates significant challenges on how to make sense of it all. Telling that story on Claribridge’s digital platforms had been confusing. It needed a better way to tell its story.

To address the digital web design, Bluetext used digital storytelling, brand extension, a sophisticated user experience, and aggressive search engine optimization to deliver a new website that does what Clarabridge promises for its customers – turning complexity into clarity. You can view the website live here.

The digital website design begins at the top of the home page, with an engaging animation that represents the massive amounts of customer data and feedback flooding into their clients’ systems. Flowing down the page, moving through a funnel that sorts and selects the right information at the right time, the graphic turns the data into actionable snippets of intelligence that can be fed to executives, product managers, contact center teams, and frontline staff to better serve their customers.

The creative style of the digital web design pushes the boundaries to enable Clarabridge to stand out in a crowded industry, while the linear path of the video animation delivers the product messaging in a creative way that gets attention while taking audiences through the sales funnel. To see the design in action, visit our Bluetext Hall of Fame.

“Bluetext should be at the top of your list if you are in the market for a redesign.”

Learn how Bluetext can help with your digital web design for an amazing customer experience.

The Bluetext Blog has been focusing on website design for the best user experience. In this post, we are examining five trends that companies need to understand as they examine the performance of their website design and whether it is delivering a successful user experience that is delivering results for the brand.

Cards are Taking Over. Card first became popular in consumer-focused social sharing sites such as Pinterest and Facebook for placing clusters of information – including text, photos, and links relating to one topic – in one place. For 2018, they are already gaining in popularity and offer a visually appealing way to organize and display larger data content in a smaller space. Cards also allow visitors to quickly assess the category of information and decide immediately whether they want to click on it or not. They are easy to manage and companies can select different arrangements and sizes to emphasize some types of content over others. Because of this obvious advantage, particularly on a smaller screen, cards are moving into the mainstream across all platforms.

Don’t neglect the touch. Mobile devices are physical objects that hit a number of our senses, most prominently sight and sound. But the feel is also important, and shouldn’t be neglected. Because of the small size of the screen, giving haptic feedback can be important and enhance the small-screen experience. Adding in well-tuned clicks as the viewer advances through a screen or a list of items also improves engagement. This is particularly true for sliders and similar types of horizontal navigation that takes viewers away from the downward scroll.

The sound and the fury. Some designers feel like sound should be an afterthought, and many find the auto-play functions that are so popular across Facebook and other social meid platforms more annoying than helpful. But when done right, sound layers will enhance the web design user experience on mobile devices. Subtle but pleasant sound layers can signal when a visitor is on the right page and can reinforce the buyer’s journey through the site. They can also add to the experience when a comment is placed, or even an emoji selected.

Video is replacing static images. We all know the appeal of video for communicating information about the brand and its products or services. As video and streaming capabilities continue to get more robust, and as screens themselves better display high-res video, it is quickly supplanting static images on mobile devices. It also better engages customers – after all, video clips are always visually more appealing than static images.

Colors and borderless display. As mobile screens, now including the Apple iPhone X, are moving their screens to be completely borderless, maximizing that display field is essential. To do that, vibrant colors are making a comeback. It was not too long ago that the trend was for muted and pale color combinations to accommodate the flat designs of mobile devices. Not only do more vibrant colors attract user attention, when used in combination with the borderless display, they allow website design to literally go outside the lines for a better user experience.

Looking to build a website design and user experience for your mobile applications? See how Bluetext can help.

WordPress and Drupal have been the leading open-source content management systems for the past 8+ years. During this time, both platforms have created strong reputations for themselves.

WordPress has been viewed as a user-friendly content management platform, built for bloggers who need to get their information out quickly and easily without having to worry about learning how to code. This made the barrier to entry onto the platform extremely small, resulting in the landscape we have today with more than 25 percent of all websites built in WordPress.

Drupal comes from the other side of the spectrum, designed for developers as a developers platform. With this developer-first mentality, Drupal offers many more features than WordPress to provide flexibility, scale-ability, and maintainability. While the learning curve for Drupal is significantly higher than that of WordPress – reducing the adoption rate by non-technical users –  this did make Drupal stand out in the enterprise by catering to larger applications with a more robust set of requirements. Yet, in the meantime, it acquired a reputation as a developers CMS that’s not as friendly for general users.

Drupal 8 changes the game for Drupal and highlights several core strategic initiatives to help break down the barriers and remove the developer-first stigma that the platform has acquired over the years. In this blog post, we will take a look at some of these core initiatives.

Fast-forward to today, with Drupal 8 in its prime

Drupal 8 opens up a new world for users. This is backed up by the fact that 5 out of 7 active strategic core initiatives for Drupal 8 relate to improving the content management experience. The goals of these initiatives are simple:

• Reduce the barriers of entry for non-technical users (Out-of-the-Box#, Outside-In#)
• Provide site builders with the tools they need without having to write code (Out-of-the-Box#, Layout#)
• Provide content managers the tools they need to be successful (Workflow#, Media#, Outside-In#)

Out-of-the-Box#  Out-of-the-Box# is a strategic core initiative for Drupal 8 which focuses on improving Drupal 8’s OOTB capabilities to provide a fully-featured CMS. Phase 1 of this initiative is to provide a fully baked example site into a core destination website for Food Network Magazine. The example will provide a rich and beautiful experience for users as they navigate through the website.

This example profile will also provide a framework for other developers to do the same thing and begin creating pre-packaged site templates, similar to what WordPress does, as a way of providing a near-plug-and-play experience.

Outside-In#  The Outside-In initiative is one which strives to improve the in-line editing experience in Drupal 8. With today’s landscape of website building platforms, it only makes sense for Drupal to push for this. A key benefit to this type of editing experience is that it keeps content managers in-context of the work they are doing. Content managers are coming to expect these types of slick editing interfaces which are offered by other CMS platforms and website builders such as WordPress, WIX, and Shopify.

Drupal 8 now ships with basic inline-editing experiences across its core features. The foundation is available and the “contrib” space is catching up. Many of the “contrib” add-ons support the in-line editing experience, while Drupal is adding more every day.

Layout#  The Layout initiative is one which is focused more on the site-builders and power-users. The goal for layouts is to provide cookie-cutter like shells where users can drag and drop content and blocks to meet their content needs.

Workflow#  The Workflow initiative is focused on improving the workflow, preview and staging capabilities for content in Drupal. Every organization has slightly different requirements when it comes to publishing content to the web. The Workflow initiative helps to strengthen the core functionality of Drupal to allow for these varied requirements by providing configurable workflows on a per-content-type basis.

Content staging is extremely important to large organizations. Being able to preview a new version of a page before publishing is significant.

Media#  Drupal 8 has long struggled with reusable media assets. The objective of Phase 1 of the media initiative is to provide a simple media solution to make Drupal 8 easy to use for basic use cases. There is a focus on strengthening this feature and integrating it into the core components of Image Fields & WYSIWYG.

While Drupal 8 may not set the highest bar for a great content management experience, it is making significant strides to catch up to its competitors. This combined with the areas at which Drupal already excels, including Performance, Security, and Maintainability, make it an obvious choice for enterprise-level CMS implementations.

Looking to see how you can transform the way you manage your website? See how Bluetext can help!