Design

As most of you know, earlier this year we rebranded the website CMS Report to this site, socPub. The website's new identity has allowed me, article contributors, and our readers to explore topics well outside the norm of conversations surrounding content management systems. Although we're going through a bit of growing pains with establishing a new identity under socPub, I'm fully committed to this new website. The change has been good for me and I'm once again inspired to write on topics that interest me.

While I may be an old dog with decades of experience utilizing websites for marketing purposes, I'm more like a newborn puppy when it comes to email marketing. Until a couple years ago, I never utilized email campaigns or email newsletters in hopes to get more visits to my websites. My current email marketing service provider is MailChimp, but there is another customer communication platform that is on my radar, Colorado-based SendGrid.

This week, SendGrid announced a new editing experience for SendGrid Marketing Campaigns. The new email marketing editor addresses familiar pain points for marketers who previously had to choose between the convenience of visual design and efficient editing of code.

While the purpose of good web design is to make the user experience informative, useful, interesting, and enjoyable, it is quite common to find web developers tripping over basic design concepts that result in a negative impact on the ROI. Let’s take a look at some of the common mistakes that you must not make while developing a small business website.

Too Many Things Happening on the Site

Unless the user can immediately figure out what the website is all about, it is very likely that it will be abandoned for something more explicit. Often small business owners think that the user will never progress to the other pages so they tend to cram in as much content as possible on the home page. The result is clutter, slow loading, and a confused user. Try to only include vital information that serves to indicate what you offer and a clear navigation.

Nuxeo has announced the release of Web UI, a brand new web client for the Nuxeo Platform. Nuxeo’s Web UI is built on a modern JavaScript stack (Polymer), leveraging Web Components to provide a responsive, configurable and extensible user interface that delivers a compelling new user experience (UX).

With this latest release, users can efficiently find and work with content most relevant to them. This personalization enables business users to get work done as quickly and efficiently as possible by automatically presenting them with their most commonly used actions, such as recently created documents and previews of pending workflow tasks.

“Our goal is to delight our users and improve their productivity, so we streamlined the most common user interaction patterns and embraced the latest UI technology to deliver a fantastic user experience,” said Alain Escaffre, VP Product Management, Nuxeo. “With several new groundbreaking features, like customizable menus, instant preview and live search, the Nuxeo Content Services Platform continues to lead the market in delivering a modern, compelling and optimized user experience.”

We're no longer yesterday's CMS Report. Less than ten days ago, I started the process to migrate this website's content management system from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. During the migration I decided it was also time for a rebrand by listing the site under a new name and a new domain. We're now socPub and registered under the domain socpub.com.

What does socPub mean? Absolutely, nothing.

Several years ago, I had the idea of using the domain for a niche website focused on social publishing and neither of those two things happened. Looking back, I'm glad I didn't move forward on the project. Today, no one really talks about social publishing in the way it was originally envisioned. But also, I have too many interests to want to run another website where the name itself limits the topics a site covers. socPub has no meaning today in order to give us a chance to be a lot of things tomorrow.

Can you remember how the first websites looked like? Some looked funny while others appeared complicated enough to launch a rocket in the moon. A couple of years down the line, significant changes are evident. Modern websites are not only sleek but also user friendly. They also contain answers to most of our daily needs. That is enough. We might want to say customers have reaped huge benefits from such changes, but the truth is business owners have gained even more.

The web design evolution is on; it never stops. In future, trends are expected to shift further. While it is good to remain optimistic and wait for more changes in the future, it is fair enough appreciating the existing trends. For any business owner aimed at boosting revenues and taking his business to the next level, having in mind certain revolutionary web design trends in the business world is necessary. Let’ take a walk through some of them.