What is UX Design?
Differences Between UX and UI Design

Though they fall under the same umbrella in web design, user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) are two terms that are frequently used interchangeably despite their different purposes and definitions. For aspiring designers, understanding these distinctions are key in establishing general web development knowledge, honing applicable skills, and breaking into the UX/UI design field.

In this guide, we will discuss UX design at length, exploring the primary differences between UI and UX, and what designers do for organizations around the world.

What Is UX Design?

User experience (UX) refers to the user’s journey when interacting with a product or service. UX design is the process of creating products or services that provide meaningful experiences for users, involving many different areas of product development including branding, usability, function, and design.

One way to think of UX design is to consider the entire process or journey a user experiences when interacting with a product or service. How is the user introduced to the service or product — through advertising, blogs, or something else? What kind of interaction does the user have with the brand? How does the user feel after the interaction? All of these questions and more are key considerations within UX design.

A UX designer’s primary goal is for each user to have a positive interaction with a product or service. Whether the interaction solves a problem, provides entertainment, or helps the user find critical information, the experience should leave the user feeling fulfilled.

What Is UI Design?

UI design, on the other hand, refers to the actual interfaces with which users engage. The UI design process may include buttons or widgets, text, images, sliders, and other interactive elements. UI designers ensure that every visual element, transition, and animation included within a product or service is setting the stage for a fluid, positive experience.

. . . Ways to Drive Business to Your Website"

By: Donald Lee

There are more than 105 million of them in the United States. Worldwide, there could be at least 250 million of them. Then, according to statistics from the Nielsen/Net Rating service, is the number of active Web surfers. 250 million in the whole world? The figure is more than the populations of Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and a few non-English speaking countries combined. That's a lot of them!

With so many active surfers around, you would think Webmasters and site owners have an easy time attracting them. In reality, they face an uphill battle to bring visitors and, more importantly, consumers to their Web sites. And a Web site without traffic is like a store built in the middle of the desert. You could have the greatest products and most attractive Web Design around, but they're worthless if no one visits them.

There is one way, however, to turn your Web Site into an oasis of business, a way to drive as much traffic to your site as your server can handle: a classified ad.

More on that later. First, all Web builders and site owners should know the basic and time-tested ways to attract traffic to their Web site. The key to all of these methods is to attract the right Web surfers. You want what experts call "targeted visitors," or people who are actually interested in what you're selling. To guarantee that this happens, you should follow this checklist of Web traffic golden rules:

Step 1: Optimize your Web pages.
Webmasters in the know take the time to set their meta tags. These tags, or codes, are hidden keywords in the Web page that tell search engines like Google and Yahoo exactly what your site is all about. A meta tag, for instance, could be "designer handbags," "sporting equipment," or whatever else you happen to be selling. These keywords tell the search engine to direct all handbag or sports shoppers to your site.

Step 2: List your site with every search engine out there.
For this step, you simply need to surf over to Google, AltaVista, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines. Click onto their customer service page, where they allow Web builders and site owners to manually submit their site addresses.

Step 3. Spice up your site with interactive features.
With articles, newsletters, offers, promotions, and discounts, you give your targeted visitors a reason to stay at your site once they find it. More importantly, you give them reasons to come back and tell their friends about the site. Word of mouth is one of the best, and cheapest, forms of advertising on the planet.

Step 4. Exchange banner ads with friends and with other companies that you do business with.
Banner ads are those eye-catching designs at the top and bottom of Web pages. They're like the billboards of the Internet superhighway. But with these online billboards, a simple click transports the Web surfer directly to your Web site.

Step 5. Exchange Web links with friends and business associates.
This, Webmasters and site owners, could be the most important way to drive Web traffic to your site. All of the major search engines rank sites by measuring how many links come to and leave from your Web site.

So links are a way to measure how worthwhile and how legitimate your site is. The better this measurement, the better chance your site will have to show up well in Web surfers' searches. In other words, these links could be the difference between your site being listed on page 20 of a Google search results, or on page 1.

Building better Web links and search engine results-that's where classified sites come into play. Some of the most savvy classified sites on the market now offer Web links in their ads. These links lead right to your business' home page.

Not only are these links convenient one-click ways for more customers to reach your site. They also boost your search engine rankings.

Of course, for business owners, classified sites have so many other benefits, too.

Unparalleled exposure. Classified sites are like online malls. Not only will you get exposure from shoppers coming specifically to find your goods. You get "spill over" attention from shoppers who came for another item but then start browsing through all of the other ads in the classified "mall."
A new arsenal of Web sites. Having online classified ads is like setting up multiple new Web sites across the Internet. Unlike your own original site, these classified ads come with low-cost IT support, security, and advertising.
Incredible growth opportunities. Businesses and individuals selling on online classified sites pull in more than $1.95 billion a year, according to the statistics firm Kelsey Group. That figure does not even include money from eBay.
Money for nothing. As valuable as classified sites are, many of the best ones charge very little or absolutely nothing to set up your ads.

Add up all of these numbers-250 million active Web surfers in the world, $1.95 billion in classified sales, and $0 cost-and your Web business is sure to come out in the positive.

Author Bio
Donald Lee is the public relations manager for Buysellcommunity.com.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

Beware, Cheap Web Developers

In these days and times, many businesses are looking for ways to save money. It's understandable - with higher taxes and other budget concerns looming, who wouldn't want to save money where they can? But in the business world, the old saying, You get what you pay for is true. When designing and creating your company website, there will be consequences for skimping and going with a cheap developer.

There are several reasons why you shouldn't choose a cheap web development company. These companies are likely to charge absurdly low prices to undercut competitors and snatch business away from them. The fact that they're trying to be competitive isn't a problem - in fact, that's how business works. But a truly talented web development company wouldn't charge lowball prices if they truly stand behind their work. It takes an immense amount of time, effort, and resources to create a quality website that will work well for the customers and audiences you serve. If a company is charging you an extremely low price to create an entire website, you have to question the quality and depth of their work.

Another caveat that comes with the low prices cheap web developers give is that they consider these to be one-off jobs. What happens in the future if your site crashes? What happens if you need to add a new application or expand your site because your customer base is growing? If you used a cheap developer to create your site, that company views that job as one-and-done and isn't looking to maintain a relationship with your business to ensure the site works properly and will continue to meet your needs for some time. In fact, if you come back to them and make them aware of the problem, they will likely charge you for that time even though it's their mistake. By going with a more professional, quality web development company, you get what you pay for. If you need to discuss website redesign or expansion, they're there to listen to you and help you through any issues that come up. You can go can to this company over and over again because they are invested in your business and stand behind their work.

Some businesses are even outsourcing their web development overseas to get better prices, thinking that it will add to their bottom line. But adding even more degrees of separation between you and your web services team is a bad idea. You can run into language barrier issues, and at some point, may lose any form of communication with this company at all. You have no way to maintain close proximity with the development of your site and quickly make needed changes as you are essentially at the mercy of a developer thousands of miles away. Your desire to save money doesn't pay off in the end if your site is performing poorly and isn't meeting your needs. Investing money into a quality developer will make the process go much more smoothly and the site will be a pleasing representation of your business.

Keyword Research is the First Step in SEO

Keywords are at the heart of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Keyword optimization is the process of increasing the relevance of a webpage’s content to a given search query.

It’s a fundamental process in SEO because Google and other Search Engines aim to serve the most relevant content to their users.

Keywords are an underlying principle of Search engine optimization. No matter how hard you try, you won't get any traffic from Google or any other Search Engine, if nobody is searching for the content you have written.

That is the reason excelling at keyword research has a profound effect on your progress in Website Promotion. Making a mistakes can be very expensive. If the incorrect Keywords are selected, you risk burning through your time and assets.

What's more, I don't intend on scaring scaring you and Keyword research isn't excessively complicated. The fact is you're going to learn the vast majority of it in about 20 minutes. However, to make better decisions regarding SEO, you need to be aware of several significant distinctions and misconceptions.

What is Keyword research?

Keyword research is the method involved with finding significant pursuit inquiries that your objective clients type into web search tools like Google to search for items, administrations, and data.

Why is keyword research important?

If you distribute a page on a subject that nobody is looking for, that article will not get any traffic from Google (or other web search tools).

Numerous websites commit similar errors, and it's important to justify why 90.63% of pages on the web get no traffic from Google, as indicated in a recent review by ahrefs, shown below:

Pie chart showing 90.63% of pages get no search traffic from Google

In summary:

Keyword research ensures that there is signifigant interest for whatever your writing about. Therefore, if your website ranks well in Google it is because of targeted keywords, and you will be enjoying a constant stream of highly targeted visitors to your website as a result.

You Get What You Pay For

One of the most interesting things about site development and services is the cost that is associated with them. By “them” I mean web site development, design, hosting, repairs and the list can go on. But how do you really know what you are getting when you find that person or business to develop your site?

As consumers of products, we are each responsible for asking questions, reading labels, and researching the products that we buy and consume. This isn’t only an issue with web design and other technology products, as it applies to the food we eat, the cars we drive, the homes we live in and just about every other aspect of life. For an example, if you were looking to build a new home, wouldn’t you take the time to research the builder? Ask a few friends about who their builder was, do some searching about the products they use, the neighborhood they are building in, checking out the homebuilders association and maybe even the better business bureau. There is a lot of time and money that goes into the process, but the end result can be satisfaction, or disaster.

The same can be said of creating a site for yourself or your small business. You don’t have to be an expert in all things web related. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be aware of some things to ask when searching for a quality designer. In a recent post about the cost of web design, Aaron Forgue talks about some of the basic aspects that go into designing a site and how much should they cost. To quote from the article:

Sure your computer geek nephew knows HTML and could build a web site for just $100. He also knows how to use a screwdriver. Does this mean he could build a safe, reliable, and fuel-efficient car for you? Probably not, so why take the same risk with your web site, a potentially large value-center for your company?

This also presents a new issue that has been around the web development community for some time, and it seems to keep growing the more I research it. The issue is companies and individuals that rely on templates to make “cookie cutter” sites that are not compliant with web standards, and are far from accessible to all users. Why would they do that? Well, it comes down to time is money. They can plug in a template, change a few colors, add your text and shazam, they are done!

Another issue with the “cookie cutter” approach is the lack of accessibility and usability that it lends itself to. One of the reasons for this is most of those sites use tables for layouts which lends itself to not being accessible to screen readers or other assistive technologies. It creates a lot of additional code and markup, thus creating longer download times and higher bandwidth issues. If you are trying to watch your costs as a small business owner with your own site, bandwidth overages can eat you alive if you aren’t careful.

Using valid CSS and (x)HTML can significantly reduce your costs, allow for future expandability and compliance and bring greater usability and accessibility to all users. In another great article on Accessites.org, Mel Pedley talks about the issue of Web usability and how it is closely tied into accessibility issues. To quote from her article:

Unlike web accessibility which impacts directly upon disabled users, web usability affects all users, and can be defined as a measure of how easy it is for a generic site visitor to carry out a task such as finding a given piece of information or buying a certain product.

So, how does all of this relate to the cost of having a web site designed and developed? You go back to the issue of you get what you pay for. Anyone can create a site using some of the software that is out there now. It will allow you to draw out the blocks of content, place text where you want, add pictures and it might even look good. But, is it accessible, usable, compliant with web standards? Probably not, and that is where the knowledge of a designer that creates accessible and usable sites really shines.