Silver Barrel Solutions

Sure, having a website for your business serves a practical need: to draw net-surfing users to your product or service. However, it’s also much more than slapping on a run of the mill two-column template and calling it a day. Nothing kills an online buzz like a poorly designed or drastically outdated website. Dry and boring default templates, broken assets, confusing pages and invasive widgets do nothing but harm a page’s style, which in turn reflects poorly on the company.

2012 is heralding a new wave of innovative Web technologies and design, and a page that stays in step with these trends is bound to pique interest and lower your bounce rate. Even more, a well done and on-trend website remains effective well after the year is over, reeling users in with thoughtful design and building a design-conscious and taste-making reputation. Keep these tips in mind when you clean up your company’s website, and stay ahead of the curve for the new year.

1. Don’t be afraid to be bold

Mail Chimp. Instagram. Pinterest. All of these websites are joined together by a commitment to bold designs and layout. Whether it’s an exaggerated footer, a turn to minimalism or a bold and new typeface, incorporating a key graphical element to a website speaks volumes about the overall composition of the layout—and a keen level of attention to detail. Opting for a bold design element is a great way to modernize a website and keep it on trend in the coming years.

A bold design can be obtained with very little money, especially for those who aren’t necessarily experienced in coding. For example, Web pages operating on a WordPress can find a host of free templates that offer a wide range of customizable options to suit any business. New and exciting fonts can be found via Google’s open API font styles and require a simple set of code to be dropped in for compatibility with a website. Inspiration and how-tos for more hands-on DIY upgrades can be found at coding/design blogs like A List Apart, One Extra Pixel and Mashable‘s Dev and Design channel.

For those with a little more cash to burn on a proper contractor, 99 Designs relies on crowdsourcing to gather great designers for companies looking for a reliable and cutting edge renovation. Companies on 99 Designs are allowed to name their own price, which means a promising design on a budget.

However you choose to go about it, a bold design dusts off the cobwebs on your old page and keeps it fresh for years to come.

2. Use HTML5…with care

For the last couple years, people have been buzzing about HTML5, and it’s not just chatter; HTML5 offers a lot of exciting flexibility that can make a website truly interactive. Seamlessly embedded videos, drag-and-drop interfaces and dynamic message posts are all achievable via HTML5, and with relatively little code work.

But it’s not enough to just call up your freelance Web designer and throw up some HTML5 features. As with any programming language, there’s always an issue of browser compatibility. While your new and shiny UI outfitted with dynamic HTML5 might look stunning to a user running on the latest version of Chrome, your high-tech page may look like a series of broken features—or nothing at all—to a less tech-savvy user running Internet Explorer 7 (and there’s a lot of them).

This issue has been longstanding in the Internet world, but there are precautions to take in order to ensure that every user has a pleasurable experience on your website without you making a major investment. Modernizr is an open-source, JavaScript-based tool that offers feature detection for HTML5, and it’s just-as-snazzy brother CSS3. Instead of doing simple browser detection, Modernizr will figure out just what features the user’s browser can support and react accordingly. If a user is operating on an incompatible browser, then Modernizr will automatically decide whether to switch to a JavaScript-based fallback of the features or just create a downgraded version.

Make no mistake, this solution shouldn’t be implemented by a newbie to code, but it does provide a simple way to implement exciting and revolutionary features while still providing support for the little guys.

3. Cut the fat

The traditional layouts for websites often call for separate pages that encapsulate the “About,” “Contact” and other informational areas of the website. 2011 saw minimalist designs from multiple websites, and that often translated to cutting these pages in favor of a sleeker overall design (think Tumblr). Some companies chose to forgo nearly everything to produce a strongly graphical one-page website—blogs like One Page Love and successful networking tools like Flavors.me show that people are drifting towards a bold singular statement that makes a big impact on fellow users.

As we move forward in 2012, further exploration into one-page websites is a given. But a single-page website has both its pros and cons. HTML5 can help create a one-page website that cleverly contains all necessary information via pop-up boxes or other media, but the amount of information that can be on a one-page website is still relatively limited. Do you want your website to make a bold statement about your company and focus less on a blog-style format? If so, a one-page website could be right in your wheelhouse. Are you more interested in showing off testimonials, case studies and blogs from your employees? If yes, then this trend would be worth passing on.

However, that doesn’t mean you should forgo trimming entirely. Culling the best parts of your website and truncating the rest will result in a sleeker, more intuitive design—and sleek never goes out of style.

4. Tie in social media intelligently

This tip could also be titled “Quit it With the Widgets.” Announcing your social media presence on your own website is an absolute necessity, but it needs to be done with care. Automatically updating widgets that stream in social media presence seems intrusive and outdated, not to mention that they can be a hassle for a DIY designer to install and maintain.

To put it simply, social media should definitely be a presence on a business website, but it should not be a dominating presence. Integrating social media, whether in graphic links or a social ticker, should be done with the user’s eyes in mind. It’s simple on paper, but can be difficult to execute. When social media is done intelligently and with consideration, your website instantly will look socially connected and organized.

CREDIT:   Lauren Hockenson as published at OpenForum.com

Wow! 2011 was another outstanding year. We’d like to take this opportunity to extend our sincere thanks all of our new and returning clients. We appreciate your support and wish you all the best during the holiday season and in the New Year.

Holiday Office Hours

We’ve been working hard this year and are looking forward to spending some time with family and friends during the festive season.

We’ll be taking some vacation time from December 13, 2011 to December 18, 2011.  During this time our office will be closed.

We’ll have limited office hours on the following dates:

December 19, 2011-December 23, 2011
December 27, 2011-December 30, 2011

We’ll still provide support for any important issues and, as always, keep a close eye on our client’s websites and our hosting servers. If anything urgent comes up during the holidays, please don’t hesitate to contact us for support.

I hope that everyone had a fantastic holiday season and that the early days of 2011 are treating you well.  We had the pleasure of spending some time in Mesa, Arizona over Christmas and New Year’s and I can say that the sunshine was a welcomed change from the winter months in Victoria, BC.  We’ve been enjoying our time here so much that we extended our trip by one week!

It’s not all sun and golf though.  We’re back at work today and have limited our time by the pool to non-business hours.

On the business side of things, I think that it’s worth commenting on some noted differences in the marketplace in the Phoenix area versus that of Victoria, BC.  First off, it’s very clear that the economic downturn has hit hard down here.  It’s surprising to see the number of vacant urban lots that were obviously prepped for development when times were booming but never got started once the recession hit.  We’ve also seen a number of ghost-like subdivisions where roads, sidewalks, utilities and the likes are all in place but without a house to be seen.

We did our share of Christmas shopping in the Phoenix area only a few days before Christmas.  It was amazing how quiet the stores were in comparison to the insanity of shopping that close to Christmas in greater Victoria.  Perhaps it’s the saturation of massive retail stores down here such as Macy’s, JC Penny, Target, Walmart, Kohls, etc. which seem to be on every freeway exit.  Are there enough people to fill these stores?  Was I lucky enough to hit the less populated areas?  Who knows, but it certainly wasn’t overwhelming to shop 1 day before Christmas.

One of the biggest things that I noticed almost everywhere we went was the fantastic, friendly and welcoming level of customer service.  Whether it was filling up with gas, grabbing wine at the local corner store, dining out or wandering through one of the many malls, it was very eye-opening to see so many pleasant and helpful people.  Is this a byproduct of the recession?  Are businesses dying for your business that they are finally realizing that they need to treat consumers like people and not numbers?  Or is it that the 300+ days/year of sun in Phoenix just makes people happier?  I can’t answer this but I can say that some businesses in Victoria could learn a thing or two.

From an advertising perspective, I think this emphasizes to me that the focus really needs to be on treating the consumer like a valued part of your business.  Regular, honest communication rather than flashy sales pitches are what’s going to work in this economic downturn.