Studio Pygmalion

March 29, 2016

Top 5 Web Design Trends for Website Makers to Consider in Year 2016

Every year comes with a lot of new trends, which is more so in case of web designing. We have seen a lot of new techniques rising and booming back in 2015, and much of this kind is expected in 2016 too. Some basic trends are vertical patterns, more video content, material design interfaces, and sliding style sites gaining in popularity.

If you are planning to develop a new site or to upgrade the existing one, one need to be aware of these upcoming trends. Following it will help you to gain more consumer attention and also be on top in the search engine results and traffic. Here, let’s see the top 5 upcoming web design trends of 2016.

Top design trends of 2016

Scrolling and vertical patterns

As mobile internet traffic is expected to surpass desktop traffic this year, web design is getting a step closer to being mobile-friendly. More sites are designed now with vertical user flows. Scrolling-type designs made a roaring come back last year even when the tech experts predicted the end of scrolling a couple of years back itself.

Scrolling is now a vital interaction tool as smaller mobile screens lead the users to scroll more. It also demands the designers to make friendlier user interfaces, which are mostly vertical in nature.

Card-style interface

One of the major element emerged from material design concept was card-style interfaces. Now, these are there everywhere, ranging from apps to websites and printed materials. Cards are so easy and fun to create, and keeps information well organised in containers that make web design more user-friendly. Another advantage of this design concept is that it can seamlessly work across devices of various screen sizes as cards can flexibly stack across the screen in various forms.

Video headers

You can expect more movie-type websites this year. The higher speed of internet now makes video playback a breeze, which will prompt the websites to have more interactive video contents. This shift is largely happening in B2C sites now, where text is considered as standard, and videos engage the consumers more effectively. Clips are now changed from small snippets to full-length videos. The images too became much sharper and crisper with HD technology.

Tiny animations

Animation had been one among the major trends of 2015 too, which is becoming more succinct in 2016. Featuring hero-style animations, which prevails in a site design, too little divots, moving elements are there everywhere. Along with growing in popularity, you can also notice that the animations are decreasing in size. The animated elements in the UI is a fun way to engage users like giving them something to enjoy while waiting for the content to load or to get a surprise element.

Effective interactions

Going along well with animation is interaction. Acting intelligently within web interfaces and apps, interactions work to create successful links between the users and devices. Excellent interactions are always small or micro in nature, but aimed to provide some value to the users. From a tiny text message popping up to an alarm to remind something, effective interactions can shape the way how people interact successfully with devices.

Above mentioned is not a comprehensive list of web design trends, but you can take it as the baseline to do a more research and identify and diversify your options to design an engaging and successful website in 2016.

Emma Web Design 0 2 min read

March 29, 2016

Top 4 Trends Expected to Dominate SEO Sector This Year

Gone was an exciting year for SEO industry as we had witnessed many unexpected trends and technologies dominating. The long-awaited Mobile addon update came from Google, which cruelly penalised many top sites just for not being mobile compliant. There was also a sizeable overhaul in local search rankings with the ‘local three-pack’, which is an improved algorithm for quality content, and another dozen minor updates from Google.

Now, this year, anyone can blindly predict that the digital assistant technology and most advanced mobile devices are going to shape the future of search engine optimisation. Let’s look at some of such trends, which may rule SEO further.

Mobile optimisation over desktop optimisation

“How many of you have heard that the count of mobile searches surpassed desktop searches for the first time in the history?”

Yes, it had happened earlier this year, which clearly points to the most groundbreaking trend of the year. With Mobile add-on, Google undoubtedly announced that the world should go mobile with no exception to SEO.

Google reiterates that having a desktop-specific site isn’t necessary at all, and the local three-pack also reflects the search engines’ commitment to the mobile experience in all types of devices.

Cortana, Siri and more

“Do you know Cortana and Siri?”

– The first one is from Microsoft to offer voice assist to Windows smartphone users and the second one is the same from Apple for iOS users”

Digital assistants are already making life simpler for the new-age men and women. It is also predicted that these digital assistants will change the way we go about search queries. New-gen search engines will receive more queries from digital assistants, which can add a lot of complexity to the concept of search.

The simple reason for this complexity is that the spoken language queries are much different from typed in queries. Unlike the standard typing scripts, it will create a whole new set of unique queries with long-tail keywords, which may particularly contain colloquial and conversational content.

Video content over text

It is expected that video content will overtake text content in terms of ROI, more so in B2C sector. For a general consumer, of course, visual content is more meaningful than to sit back and read through the entire thing.

Written content is considered as “standard” nowadays; however, effective communication is made possible with images, infographics, videos, and other peripheral mediums. You can see Google also is experimenting with including video ads in the search results. Over time, B2C brands, which lag in updating regular video feeds, may go behind times.

NB: B2B may also take this route, but not expected soon as it is a more serious affair by weighing worthy text (not until 2019 probably).

Deep links in apps

“The hot news for SEO administrators is that Google already started indexing apps in search results.”

With the shift towards mobile usage, Google anticipate apps overtaking traditional websites in functionality and popularity in near future. Online marketers and search optimisers can also benefit by anticipating this change.

It is expected that the “deep links”, which point toward specific sections of the app or a page will be more meaningful. Starting to think in this line, it is the right time for you also to create your own app if your business doesn’t already have one.

It is also notable that Google sets forth deals with Facebook and Twitter to index relevant social content too in search results. The separation between web and social media is expected to blur this year, and it also can add more scope from an SEO perspective to plan and reap the best results.

Emma SEO 0 2 min read

March 29, 2016

Upcoming Trends in Graphic Design for Businesses and Designers to Try in 2016

Graphic designing is visual storytelling, which demands artfulness and power to engage the viewers to be successful. The role of a designer is to pay close attention to the market trends and develop designs to gain the much-needed consumer focus. The trends in graphic designing is changing day by day and it is important for the designers and businesses who are planning to make new designs to be updated about these.

“Why you need to take extra caution in graphic designing?”

Before getting into the design trends, you should get a convincing answer to the above question. If you are a business owner, own a blog, or interact with masses through social media, then you will never want to give them an outdated look and feel. People are going to make an instant assumption based on the very first impression they get about you through your website, business leaflet, flyer, or the logo they see designed by logo designing firms.

If you are convinced about the need, find below the latest graphic design trends.

2016 graphic design trends

Usability

The future designs will all be user-centric. User experience (UX) in the new buzzword you will hear all around. Remember no one will care for your most beautiful designs if those are not usable. For example, designers used to experiment with menu styles to add more charm to the display, but what if you find a user say;

“yes, your design is so cool, but I am unable to figure out how to go about it”, you are doomed.

Effective user engagement comes on top of any list on graphic design trends. Moreover, in the changing scenario, user experience on mobile screen is also the key to success.

Loading speed of web pages

Make a perfect graphic design, but what if it can load only in several minutes. The latest algorithmic changes of Google and the concept of customer behaviour data everything point to the same direction as “your website needs to be fast loading and easy to use for holding back viewers.” Page load speed is very crucial in e-commerce sites. It is also noted that a single-second bloat can drop the sales by 27%.

“Looking cool is fine, but people choose fast over cool.”

Responsiveness

We are hearing about responsive sites for quite sometime now, and this trend will continue until responsive becomes an untold standard. With the web traffic through mobile surpassing desktop, all sites needed to be compliant with the first screen.

The latest update from Google also needs sites to be responsive in order not to get penalised in search engine ranking. An ideal responsive design will offer seamless integration of a web page to any possible screens ranging from 4-inch smartphone screen to 80-inch conference room screens.

Along with these major ones, here we will list out a few other changing trends too as below, on which you can do some better research to find out more details.

App-inspired designs
Modular texts
Clever menus
Modular and infinite scrolling
Parallel scrolling
Material design
Flat design
Visual storytelling
Infographics
Modern retro
Grids and geometrical designs etc.

Having a good understanding of all the above graphic design trends and adopting the best strategy to customise your graphic designs will surely take your business to new heights in 2016.

Emma Graphic Design 0 2 min read

March 29, 2016

A Few Less-Noted Trends in Online Marketing Unveiled for You

What comes to your mind while thinking of online marketing? Most of the business owners are aware of SEO and social media marketing etc., and majority of the online marketers too won’t introduce you into much deeper concepts. However, online marketing is an ocean of ever-changing strategies and techniques.

Online Marketing

You may not be able to master all, but having a fair understanding of the most relevant techniques to your industry may help you better survive in the highly competitive online market. Here, we will discuss a few latest online marketing trends, which are not so commonly discussed at other places. Here we go,

Adapting to Ad blockers

As Apple released iOS 9 back in 2015, marketers were in disaster as they simultaneously introduced content blockers in Safari. With more than 200 million people across the globe using ad blockers, the marketers need to think much innovative to find ways to get adapted to ad blocking as to incorporating native advertising and initiating partnership strategies for typical search and display techniques etc.

Leveraging wearable technology

With an expected US$54 billion revenue generated from wearable devices by year 2019, online marketers should have a keen eye on leveraging this for best benefits. Fitbit is still the leading brand in wearable technology market, but Apple and Chinese brand Xiaomi are also gaining in momentum to pose a tight competition. The marketers outside wearable technology industry too need to look for a possible integration, sponsorship, or partner apps to take advantage of this direct physical connection with potential consumers.

Marketing and sales coming together at last

There was a clear top-of-funnel line separating marketing from sales throughout these times, but the changing tools and innovations make the marketers to actively contribute to sales throughout the funnel. Marketing teams can now generating customised emails and quotes to the clients with the help of CRM tools. Everything becomes data-driven and marketing efficiency hand-in-hand with complex sales cycles can ensure these all-in-one teams to be well prepared with customer data and pitch in rightly to close deals.

Content is changing face

Content marketing is there for long and it has been a key aspect of the online marketing industry. However, until recent times, content marketing was all about maintaining a strict content calendar and frequent blog updates; but content marketing of the new age seems a bit different. You can see how Facebook Instant Articles came up in 2015 changed the reading experience to users by loading needed articles right at the app. Twitter and Google too line up now in the publishing train by promising similar features. These changes will force the content creators too to think in this line and see who actually owns their content and how to use it for measuring success.

Native ads

Native advertising was one among the top online marketing trend for the last couple of years, and this trend continues. The ability of native ads to effectively engage audience without the stigma of standing-apart ads is irresistible to marketers.

Relationship marketing

While majority of the businesses were doing namesake relationship marketing previously, things will change. The online reviews are mighty enough to do good or harm to any businesses than the hefty ad campaigns, so nurturing a good relationship with the existing customers and taking its leverage online becomes critical.

Take all these into consideration while weaving your online marketing strategies for future. The competition is too tight and trailing even by milliseconds can pull you out from the picture.

Emma Online Marketing 0 2 min read

March 29, 2016

5 Latest Internet Marketing Trends to Watch out in 2016

The first quarter of 2016 is already over, and the picture is now much clearer about where the internet marketing is heading. 2015 had witnessed a tremendous advancement in this sector and 2016 too will follow the suit. If you are an online marketing expert, it is essential to know above the most changing trends.

Here at ADEL SEO (Adelaide SEO company), we will discuss a few clearing up internet marketing trends of 2016, which you can ponder to devise your strategies.

Brand videos are back on top

Over the past couple of years, we have seen an enormous consumer shift to social media, which caused many brands to cut short their video resources to make it lightweight to be viewed in tiny attention spans. However, the trend is changing and brands are now investing more on making;

Extended-length videos
Short films
Animation videos
Informative videos etc., which are highly admired by the viewers.

However, when it comes to promotions, offering high-quality and highly informative content to the consumers is the key.

Visual assets to drive e-com

It remains undisputed that strong visuals are inevitable in creating a meaningful engagement on internet. However, in 2016, what we are going to see is that the visual assets may start contributing higher means than just engagement, they will initiate online purchases.

“A study shows that about 77% of the new-age marketers are pressured to prove their ROI on visual content, yet only less than 10% check out whether their current visuals actually work or not”

More than 70% of the marketers who participated in the above study were also sceptical about showing how the visuals contribute to their online revenue. However, with more reliable revenue‑tracking mechanisms to see how much each aspects of online marketing generate, this problem will be resolved soon.

Internet of things

Not just the smart phone, but even your LED lamp switch is now connected to internet. Internet of Things has now become an ubiquitous term and more than 60% of the service firms now use customised apps to communicate with and engage customers.

Even when such a shift happens with IoT, hardly about 20% companies only implemented any sort of location sensors or product-based sensors to collect relevant customer data. This also may largely change in 2016, and we can see the potential magic of IoT in online marketing this year.

Influencer marketing

More than just a picture being shown to promote the product, celebrities are now paid largely for social media posts to promote a brand or product. The identified celebrity influencers across the globe now have social media accounts with millions of followers across multiple social networks. A six-figure partnership with a top-rated celebrity may be out of reach for small to medium business; however, the influencer trend exists at all levels.

Next-gen social

It is not down just to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but a wide range of new‑generation social media platforms also popping up. These create a new niche of audience and also offer marketers to leverage the latest technology. Say for example, messaging apps are becoming the latest trend in social communication.

These are just to a few to count on, but online marketing is rapidly changing day by day, which makes it mandatory for you to keep upgrading your knowledge base to stay ahead.

Emma Internet Marketing 0 2 min read