Digital Disruption from EX²

It can take visitors less than one second to reach an initial impression of your website, and less than three seconds to decide whether to stay or move on, according to a study conducted by the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Unless you can keep visitors engaged once they are at your site, there is little chance that they will receive your message or make an online purchase. It is therefore of critical importance to make the best first impression possible.

It seems that every time web developers become proficient at creating sites that will render correctly on any device, the industry releases yet another type of device that requires changing design strategies. Such is the case with the phablet. (For the uninitiated, a phablet is a device that combines the features of a smartphone with a tablet, and is between the two devices in terms of overall size and screen size.)

It seems that every year, a new technology is touted as "the next big thing," Occasionally, these technologies are an epic fail -- think Warner's Qube or the Net PC -- but more often, they are true game changers. Technological advances have had a major impact on how companies do business as well as how they market to their customers. For example, iBeacons offer new ways to market to a targeted customer, and mobile apps have had an even greater impact.

Metro-style designs have the potential to be sleek, beautiful pages. However, just like city metro vehicles can be shiny and attractive or dented and rusty, a metro site can be poorly planned and offer unsatisfactory results, or it can be well-planned and executed and provide a consistent user interface. When planning a metro design, there are certain key points to consider.

Every business that wants to gain competitive advantage needs to be fully aware of the importance of populating online channels with meaningful content for a particular target market. But this no longer means setting up a simple Wordpress website and hoping that your content reaches the right people. 

In recent years, there has been a major shift in the way that consumers and brands interact. The traditional model of purchasing advertising space in a newspaper or magazine in the hope that 1 consumer out of 100 will be motivated enough to make a purchase based on this promotional method is disappearing – and fast. The rise of the online world has created a new sales model called Buyer 2.0.

When redesigning your site for responsive behavior, allowing it to adapt to various screen sizes and types of web-accessible platforms, there are a number of things to keep in mind. While we covered several of these in our previous article on the topic, here are a few more to help you make your site that much better: