2017 witnessed a plethora of advancements in the web designing realm, including the use of mobile devices overtaking desktop browsing. This year is poised to capitalize on mobile functionality in unprecedented ways, making us stand in awe, with our jaws hanging open. On the other hand, desktops must continue to evolve to stay pertinent in the fast-changing world. Before I flood you over with more information, here are a few notable web design trends that are bound to take 2018 by storm:

Bright Minimalism

According to Paul Jarvis, a veteran designer who has worked with various mammoth names such as Microsoft, Mercedes Benz, and Warner Music, bright minimalism is a steep-soaring trend that is projected to dominate the website design industry in 2018. While simplicity is still in vogue, advances in brightness, color saturation, and monitors make sure that minimalism is not boring anymore! With vibrant hues and big, bold typefaces, designers are going to have a lot of fun in 2018.

More sleep is a design studio that has perfectly amalgamated minimalism with bright colors. By using an actual product shot in bright red, not only have they successfully created an interesting collage but also managed to showcase their client in an innovative way. The header shot was taken from their homepage that highlighted one of their projects,  a lookbook that they created for their client Mini. The lookbook seems a great example of bright minimalism and we are sure it will be loved by their client as well.

Interesting Real-Time Photography

Gone are the days when brands used to look towards stock photos to enrich their website designs. 2018 is all about originality, be it in design or the visuals that enrich them. This year, the world will see an influx of scintillating real world photos depicting the real value of the brand to its prospects. Here is a great example:

Joyride is a taco house based in Phoenix USA. By using a real picture of a couple casually strolling inside their physical location, they have portrayed the trendy look and feel of the restaurant along with rolling out a vibe that draws your attention with plants galore. Just by looking at the picture, anyone would feel the freshness and tastefulness of the food that is served at the location.

Use of Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence

Jane Portman is a user interface consultant who specializes in creating website application designs. She predicted that in 2018, businesses will take the user experiences beyond normal activations and are going to derive a real-world formula that is predicted to provide more viable metrics on driving success. She said that with the help of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, personalization will be enabled, empowering the website to keep improving according to the needs of their users and figure out more appropriate answers to any user queries.

Wix is an online website builder that allows users to create a website design according to their whim. With the easy drag and drop options, Wix enables its users to create heartfelt designs that are engaging and equally usable. Wix can add custom forms and change the behavior of your website by including APIs in your web design. Wix is a great example of how user analytics and AI are going to change the future of website designing in 2018.

Rise of Interactivity

Interaction is the key to success for businesses, especially online websites. Talking about website trends in 2018, interactivity is something that is going to rise and can dramatically change the way a user interacts with a website design.

You must have witnessed online businesses including polls, quizzes, and contests in their web designs. This is meant to create engagement. An engaged customer is more likely to convert quicker and presents a lucrative opportunity for a business generation to the owner.

In 2018, the kind of content that is going to be liked by users will be something that asks and prompts for interaction, instead of just telling. Challenging a customer by asking relevant questions, which can be in the form of quizzes to simply glean an idea of what they are looking for, can be the most viable business opportunity that a website can cash in on this year.

Here is a great example:

Need I say more?

Inventive Typography

Typography is one of the most potent weapons in your arsenal when it comes to the battle for eyeballs. This year, the use of creative and in-your-face typography is projected to broaden out. This year, typography is going to be all about “the bigger the better.” So while grotesque sans-serif styles such as Helvetica are still a norm, designers are branching out and tapping into myriad available typefaces. 2018 will see an ever-escalating number of sites pairing sans-serif and serif fonts, as well as the return of serifs to the screen to create a dynamic user experience. Since device resolutions are vamping up the legibility factor by getting sharper, this is bound to open up doors for custom fonts.

Designers are increasingly looking for typography packing bucket loads of personality for an aesthetic effect, and not simply for emphasis. The drama and vanity created by oversized typefaces speak volumes about the fact that 2018 is going to bid adieu to subtlety, bringing in the rise of bold trends. Another typography trend that is going to make big waves is that of typography cutouts. This technique works by superimposing a block of color over amoving or still image and making it pop out with clear lettering. Limiting the number of letters and choosing the right typefaces paramount to making this work.

For instance, Danbury has achieved this technique well with a vibrant cutout that serves to catch the attention of users and draw it to its video.

Final Word

The above-mentioned website design trends are only a few amongst a barrage of trends that design analysts have predicted, but they are going to consume a huge place in the overall web trends space for the coming year.

Alternatively, you can get in touch with a Branex – Web Design Agency to give a definite shape to your web design idea.

The post Stellar Website Design Trends that are Going to Surface in 2018 appeared first on Branex Official Blog.

Machine learning is a vast subject that does things which seem almost magical. But how marketers can incorporate machine learning and artificial intelligence into their branding strategy and how they can use it to get more sales and ROI? I’ve answered all these questions below:

What Marketers Can Expect from Machine Learning?

With many methodologies and applications, machine learning can be used to solve problems by finding patterns that we can’t create ourselves.

As a subcategory of artificial intelligence, machine learning quickly processes huge quantity of data and then learn patterns from the data and information that it holds to make decisions. The results of these machines differ every time because they are capable enough to change their resulting actions based on patterns, trends and data-points.

The more information it holds, the more relevant and personalized and accurate the results are. You can notice machine learning in technologies that might amaze you. For instance, self-driving cars, spam emails filters, character recognition, Super Mario game, search engines and much more.

Machine learning can help eliminate the guesswork for marketers. It can provide you with the most accurate predictions about customer preferences, content targeting and website friction. With using that information, your company can be a cutting-edge business in the market, rather than simply reacting to the latest trends.

Machine learning is a magic, designed especially for a world of huge data. Marketers who want to make the most out of their agencies’ data should understand why it is meant for, what it can do, and what to watch out for while employing it. Obviously, machine learning is not something that comes from another planet. The main goal is to learn the ways to improve your business functions and operations.

Don’t let the technical term of machine learning overwhelm your marketing team. Start with the basics, build upon the knowledge, and then think how you can use it for your branding endeavors.

How Machine Learning Can Benefit Your Brand?

You need to understand the real potential of using machine learning, and how does it exactly benefit your business. For instance, in B2B businesses, machine learning helps digital marketers connect with users by providing recommendations based on customers’ behavior, interest, emotions, interactions and feedback with the development of knowledge graph technology.

Personalization is something that can do wonders in the digital world. Users desire personalization in everything, from emails to products to apps to shopping bags. And if you don’t understand your customers’ needs and interests, your business fails.

Machine learning takes advantage of customer data, it greatly helps you find what information is accurate and why it is occurred. Then, your marketing team can make better customer-centric and data-driven decisions.

Machine learning can serve as a powerful tool for your business that provides branding solutions, but to get the most out of it, you need to access all available datasets. For machine learning more data means accurate results, because new data will enable the computer program to teach and improve itself from time to time.

In addition, employing machine learning can help you improve your marketing strategies with customer segmentation, churn rates and customer value. Many businesses are leveraging machine learning techniques in a majority of areas of their brands. Discover how machine learning can help your brand grow and how to come up with some new avenues to learn more about your audience.

Use Cases

Machine learning is everywhere, and if you haven’t noticed it then start observing it today. It is already being employed in the digital world.

Amazon uses machine learning to offer their customers precise product recommendations. The most famous ecommerce business learns users’ interests based on browsing history and unique purchasing options.

Similarly, Siri, the speech recognition software by Apple detects patterns by learning natural language. This is why, Siri understands what you speak.

“Machine learning will begin to be less of a one-to-one interaction in which you ask one question and get one specific answer. We will first see it evolve into learning your preferences and patterns, and from there, it will become more proactive. IA technology will recognize questions that you might not be asking but should be”. The power of machine learning explained by John Bates, Product Manager, Adobe.

Customer Struggle Score uses cutting-edge machine learning techniques to robotically recognize specific areas of a website where customers struggle. This way, marketers can enhance conversion rate optimization, by diagnosing, fixing and optimizing their high-traffic ecommerce websites faster than ever before.

Change the way you do branding, learn from these industry leaders and deliver the perfect customer experience by making changes required to meet their needs.

Get Ready to Transform

It’s high time for businesses to transform their marketing strategy and start implementing machine learning techniques. Because as you collect more data, your marketing team will surely need some automation processes, so preparing for machine learning is key.

With the already profuse data expected to be increased further, there is a great opportunity for marketers to adopt artificial intelligence and cognitive computing to make the most of all the data to drive success for all your marketing campaigns.

Investing in machine learning can help brands to develop targeted display advertisement. This way, marketers can integrate constant testing of customer activity to predict the customer churn rates.

You don’t need to transform your entire business operating system, all you need to make a start from somewhere.

Key Takeaways

Remember, machine learning is not a substitute of strategic marketing and branding efforts. However, it should be used to enhance your current business techniques.

Introduce some machine learning tools to your marketing team. Explain them the amazing benefits to your band. And then start using products already integrated with this latest technology. Combine machine learning techniques into your branding strategy and it will surely double your ROI.

The post Here’s How to Supercharge Your Branding Efforts with Machine Learning appeared first on Branex Official Blog.

One point that can be extracted from the transformation that a website can never get your business up and running if its only just design-driven. All top website designers are on to reverse engineer the process around ideal clients’ searching behaviors as well as their content consumption behavior.

If you are to redesign your website around that, it’s best to take search engine optimization into account as well so that we can feed on the customers’ behaviors. With the world of online marketing growing rapidly, it is challenging to keep up with it. SEO is evolving too and can have a positive impact on your redesigning needs if you include it early in the stages. Here’s how and what you can do about it all:

Efficient Keyword Research

Keyword research aids in determining the content and pages as it impacts site navigation, page count as well as content. While it may sound like a lot, it’s not all complex but still not many implement it when drafting website content.

Right when you are to design your website and make a content strategy, include the keyword research as part of the entire plan. Use Google AdWords from the beginning to look for the keywords that your niche is conducting search on. You can kill two birds with one stone here: You can find out the most searched words in your niche as well as the competition for commercial competition amongst the words. Grab a list of words from there and include in your website copy alongside the marketing plans.

Craft Useful Content

Your content team needs to know what they are to write about. Therefore, as soon as you are through with keyword research, now is the time to call in content team and inform them of the objectives. They can produce better content if they have a fair knowledge of the goal of weaving keyword targets in the website copy. Remember, it’s a team work.

Best Practices for SEO Coding

Best practices should be conveyed amongst all without any delay. As you are getting the website redesigned, ensure that it is optimized right from the first line of website code. You may also have the developers take a look at Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet by Moz.

Overall Website Layout

The overall layout of your website needs to be affixed as well in order to better convert via optimization. This means content placement above the fold, CTAs (Call to Action buttons) are placed where they are visible and the right copy of content is using the best code. Also ensure that you are not just stuffing content. Break it into parts and be precise about making your point since the beginning because you are not just designing for the SEO but for the visitors as well. Other content also needs to be included which may or may not include downloadable PDFs, embedded podcasts and YouTube videos and images to add more life to plain content.

When SEO is not taken into account in the early stages of website design and development, your website will never fully be able to reach organic search engine potential. We all want to know How to Rank Higher on Google but seldom do we try. Your website needs the eternal combination of SEO and design so that it doesn’t become a victim of lower rankings on Google and other search engines.

The post Redesigning Your Website to Steer Clear of SEO Traps appeared first on Branex Official Blog.

A good design with a user-friendly functionality of the website can do wonders for businesses. In fact, they stand as a valuable source of differentiation which becomes a reason for buying from you and not from your competitors. With a good research, a perfect combination of both is possible. Here’s how you can implement good design and secure business opportunities out of it:

Incorporating Design in Business Strategy

The design doesn’t just need to be aesthetic enough and merely be a head-turner with a short-lived approach. It deserves more attention from business owners and managers. A common mistake is to take care of the design after strategy has been formulated and key decisions have been made. Understand that alienating design from strategy is not a wise approach. Include it in all stages of the strategy to reap the benefits in the long run. From the colors that helps highlight certain factors to the Call-to-Action buttons, there are so many minor elements of design that can help better your overall strategy.

Using Design to Improve Product Development

Understanding the demands of the customers is yet another important matter that needs to be taken into consideration right in the beginning of the product development. As Seth Godin said, “Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.” If the product you have created went into the design phase keeping in mind the preferences of the target market, there are better chances of crafting the product in accordance with what the customer wants. So carry out a thorough research on the target market, draw an initial design, identify the relevant materials, create a prototype, evaluate the new product and make revisions if need be before you settle on a final design. A research-led design always end up in efficient product development that is promising.

Designing to Win Over New Markets

Product development is not merely for the existing customers and can also be used to move into new markets and target new customers. So incorporate design in variety of ways in order to appeal to newer markets. Prototypes can help in this regard as it could be used to reveal various customers’ needs and preferences. Use trend research to anticipate those needs and come up with various packaging and graphics to communicate better with the customers as it has the power to retain customers by means of positioning the product for newer markets.

Be it product design or website redesign, incorporating fresh design based on trend research and prototyping, you can keep your existing customers interested as you build new markets. So create a design brief, look for errors, revise them and utilize design as part of the strategic operations that will help to create valuable opportunities for your business. Achieving such objectives will surely help in enhancing the overall brand image as well as you keep everything in line. Just remember never to craft designs in isolation.

The post How to Use Design for Gaining Valuable Opportunities in Business appeared first on Branex Official Blog.

The first thing to figure about your target audience is to learn where they are and who they are. Learn what kind of things they love to do, what products they use, what age group are they etc. Assessing every group will help you devise effective and efficient marketing strategy.

Do the Research

Finding out about your target audience doesn’t require any rocket science. It is a simple process using which you determine what your goal is. It is easy to recognize your audience if you understand what the product is all about. A corporate business related to T-shirts will target a specific age group and might be possible a specific gender. So being product specific is the key in successfully identifying the target audience and doing research in this regard about the product can play a vital part.

Audit your Approach

Once you feel that you now have a firm grip over your market, avail the opportunity and strengthen your grasp. Audit yourself before creating something, the questions may include: What kind of product/service I am working for? Or what is the motive of this marketing campaign, to draw awareness or to fetch customers? With this approach, you can not only maintain equilibrium but will also be accountable to no one but yourself.

Startup with the Basics

After gathering up all the information feel the purpose of your audience. Just because you are designing something creative doesn’t mean that you should forget your basics. You need to incorporate all the basic theories that produce an effective web design.

Assemble Things Together

Graphic designing is not only about organizing visuals, you need to create a fusion of multiple stuff to fulfill the client’s requirement. The ultimate motive of a designer is to create a design that convince people for your products and services. Use design to tap into producing something that feels a certain way, a good vibe or a sudden pleasant feeling. Get people drive into your web design, this is what the customer wants too.

Design Your Website

Use appealing visuals on your online representation, yes your website. Some people just stumble on and want more information, but some just randomly surf the internet and it on your site. Give your audience something to stay, with a catchy image or detail about your company. Give your traffickers something worthy so that they spend time on your website.

The post How to Target your Design Audience? appeared first on Branex Official Blog.

Most of us think that a complex website embarks a strong impression, but the reality is different. A simple website that is easy to navigate and loads faster is usually what most of us prefer. Here are the 5 important reasons of why you need a simple web design for your company that marks your existence online.

1. Meet your Client’s Expectations

With the high level of fluency for your site, the lesser the visitors need to scrutinize their mental efforts and will focus on what they desire. It does not feel comfortable when your site is not fluent and is complex in any case. You can immediately feel it when you surf.

2. Visual Information and Site Complexity

Your site should be visually appealing, this certainly does not mean you upload loads of pictures just to attract your audience, but this means your site should be appealing with attractive color combinations. The more complex your visual appeal, the lesser the impact you desire.

3. Simplicity is the Key to Effective Web Design

Basically, our retina converts the visual information into electrical impulses. These impulses are then routed to the appropriate photoreceptor cells that transmit the color and light to our brain. This process is carried out is no time. Considering the above fact, it feels typically harder when we visualize complex graphics. The more color and light variation the complex for our brain to discriminate, thus a simpler web page with sophisticated colors is a need for an effective web design.

4. Deviation causes Disengagement

Websites with multiple plugins, complex tabs and widgets are often found to be less interactive. Excessive use of widgets and tabs creates a website distraction that affects involvement of a user. Your site should be simple with a clear and straightforward approach and content. Viewers find it easy to surf and learn more about your company.  

5. Flat Design Trend

In the field of designing, flat designs marked a strong impression. A flat design is basically a simpler form of a website design that is commended globally; this is because of the easy navigation techniques used. Having a flat design to your complex systemic website ensures that your visitors will find it easy to navigate and will eventually make you productive.   

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