Keep it simple, stupid!

Successful people have long known that the simple solution is almost always the best one, but unfortunately when it comes to practice, too many designers and clients think that having lots of varying stuff on their website will somehow meet the needs of everyone – rather than nobody.

Good designers instinctively know that simple, familiar designs will perform better, and one of the scientific theories that backs up this intuition is cognitive fluency.

So, what is cognitive fluency and why does it matter for my website?

Cognitive fluency refers to the experience of how easy or difficult it is to think about something. As a general rule, humans prefer things that are easy to think about and shy away from things that are hard to think about.

This principle influences pretty much every aspect of human behaviour - and decision making when it comes to buying goods and services online is no exception.

So, if a user reaches a website for the first time, but the navigation looks similar to the vast majority of other websites they been to, then it will feel familiar and ‘right’ and they will feel at home and know how to proceed.

On the other hand, if they arrive and the navigation is in a completely unexpected place, or requires them to figure out some kind of krypton factoresque puzzle in order to find their way around the site, they are more likely to think the site is ‘wrong’ or at the very least it leave them with a vague, sub-conscious uncomfortable feeling.

The Mere Exposure Effect

Cognitive fluency is closely linked with The Mere Exposure Effect, which basically states that the more you are exposed to something, the more you prefer it. This can easily be seen when popular brands change their imagery, and all the customers moan and groan that it’s not as good anymore, even in the product inside is identical.

If you’re smart, you can take advantage of this exposure effect with your web design, by playing on the experiences people will have had in the past and ensuring your website echoes those experiences.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should just copy everyone else, or that all websites should always look exactly like they did in the 90s – far from it. But you need to use originality and innovation where it works, and in small enough chunks that it delights your users in comfort rather than baffling them.

Further reading:

Read more interesting and research backed up stuff about cognitive fluency here: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2011/07/how-cognitive-fluency-affects-decision-making.php

We offer managed hosting services with all our websites, because we care about the long term performance of our products and about making a meaningful difference to our clients' businesses.

However, sometimes potential clients look at the budget options that are available online and wonder why we aren't matching those prices. Other times, they want to know if they can use us to make the website, but then move over to cheap hosting to reduce ongoing costs. Some people (heaven forbid) might even suspect that we're simply trying to squeeze as much money out of them as possible. This simply isn't how we do business.

Here's the real reason:

Why we don't complete on price when it comes to hosting

We don't complete on price, because it would mean making huge sacrifices in quality and service, which would result in poor performance and unhappy clients (or going bust - resulting in unhappy us).

A good technological platform with robust backups and redundancy to make sure the website loads quickly and never goes down takes investment, and that costs money. On top of that, we want to make sure our staff are available and have time to deal with each client's query patiently and properly.

We believe that our prices are extremely reasonable when you consider the level of high quality hardware, software and genuine personal service we provide.

Why we won't put our websites on other hosts

In the past we have agreed to make websites and then host them on other servers, but we no longer allow this, because of the headaches that have arisen for both us and our clients.

The problem is that cheap hosts are cheap for a reason. These companies usually sacrifice quality of hardware and software and customer service, in order to drive their prices to the absolute minimum. This means that servers are unreliable and overloaded, meaning the clients' website runs slowly and may frequently dissappear altogether.

It also means that the customer service is impossible to get hold of, unskilled and in such a rush they simply send autoreplies without finding out about the problem properly. This wastes a great deal of time and contributes to high blood pressure and hair loss (not clinically proven).


When this happens, the client comes back to us, and it's our word against their that the poor website performance is all about the host, and nothing to do with our work - which would have worked great if we were hosting it. And because we're soft, we often end up sorting out these problems where the cheap host refuses too.

What do you mean 'to begin with'?

The reasons stated above are why we insist on hosting our websites - not because we're trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of our clients - and to prove it, we DO allow clients to move, but only after we've proven the quality of the website on our hosting and support platforms first.

If, after this has been proven a client still feels they wish to move away, then they can - at their own risk...

If you're thinking of getting a website designed in Leeds, or anywhere across the UK, then give us a call for a chat about your project. We're happy to give free advice and suggestions as well as quotes and proposals.

Or if you need help with your computer - anything from fixing a broken laptop to maintaining a snappy response, then check out our associates, who offer great IT Support Services, from their base in Guildford.

We offer managed web hosting as standard with all our websites, because all websites need hosting, and it's a critical part of having an effective, reliable website.

But quite often clients who don't work with technology have no idea what web hosting is, or why they need it. We try our best to explain everything in terms that every one can understand, because a client who is confident that they know what's going on and are in control of the process, is a happy client.

This article aims to explain what web hosting is in very basic terms so that everyone can understand the principles. We don't go into the nitty gritty technical details, so it's not quite as simple as we make out - but it's as much as most people need to know.

So.

What is web hosting and why do you need it if you have a website?

A website is essentially a collection of files, including code files and images. These files need to be stored somewhere. You could keep them on your computer, but then your website would dissappear every time your turned your computer off, and if your internet connection wasn't very powerful, your website might appear unreliable to visitors. Also, whenever someone wanted to view your website, they would be using up your personal intenet connection.

So, instead of having websites live on home computers, there are huge computers which are dedicated to being homes for websites - and these are called servers. Servers are usually very powerful and are never turned off.

Having your computer live on one of these computers is called 'hosting'. Your 'host' is the supplier of the space on the server.

If you found this article helpful and want to learn more about web design and SEO, then have a look at our resource bank.

If you're looking for IT Support services for business or home, then try Unigold 2000.

Like most things, there's no clear and straightforward answer to this question - it depends on a lot of factors.

For those of you that aren't sure what PayPerClick (PPC) is, it's basically where you pay Google for particular positions in the listings. These are kept separate from the (sacred) natural listings, which you can't buy a position in, no way, no how. For a more detailed explanation of what PPC is and how it works, read our article.

In fact, you don't actually pay to be displayed in the position, you only pay when someone clicks the link and goes to have a look at your site. Just hanging out there (or getting the 'impression' to give it its technical term) is free. So you pay for each click. Pay per click. Get it?

We've found PPC to be one of the most effective forms of marketing we've undertaken - the others being newspaper adverts, radio adverts, flyers mailouts and highly targeted mailshots. Having said that we're not professional marketers, so it may be that we just didn't carry out the other campaigns as well as we could.

The reason it's so effective is because you really are only paying for people who are interested in your products (unlike the newspaper, where there are all kinds of people who will see your adverts, most of whom aren't your target market).

Whether it's going to make money for your business or not depends on how competitive your target key phrases are, how niche your products and services are and how well you design your campaigns. However, it's fairly easy to test the water, so it's probably worth a try.

If you'd like to learn more about having an effective website and how to improve your search engine optimisation, visit our site.

Sentiva is a web design company serving Leeds and Reading.

In the past, it has been evident that the words in your domain name had a huge effect on your Google rankings for those words. Therefore it made sense to try to include your keywords in your domain name where possible – although as with everything, balance is important. You also had to take into account your company name / brand and how big a presence and draw that was. Of course, it’s also no good making a nonsensical keywords stuffed domain name.

However, recently Google have been making a big deal about the fact they’re going to be adjusting their algorithm to change all that.

On Twitter, Matt Cutts announced: ‘Minor Weather Report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality “exact-match” domains in search results.’

What that suggests, is that where people have bought a domain name solely for the keywords in includes, in order to rank highly for that search term, but not put a decent website up there (just leaving a single page or very sparse or duplicated content), the keywords in the domain name will no longer be enough to keep it afloat.

Of course, if as well as having keywords in the domain name, a website has a wealth of great content, then it shouldn’t be affected by the EMD (each match domain) change to the algorithm.

As is always the case, the way to achieve and maintain good quality listings is by having the best website, with the best quality, unique content. Every time Google makes a change like this, it benefits those of us who play by the rules and makes life a little harder for those gaming the system.

We offer web design in Leeds. If you found this post useful, you might want to check out our web design and SEO resource bank.

This really is like asking how long is a piece of string - it hugely depends on what sort of web design  you're looking for. But I'll try to give a few guidelines, explaining the process, to help give a rough idea.

Technically, you could make a website in a few hours, if it was a simple html page (or possibly two or three), you didn't care too much how it looked and weren't worried about fancy graphics. However, it would take at least 24 hours to sort out the domain name and configuration, so unless this is already set up, a day or two is your absolute minimum.

However, this process only works if there is one person responsible for building and approving the site.

Once you bring a client into the picture, everything changes, because you have to go through a feedback and approval process. Assuming the website is built directly as above, that the client gives feedback immediately and doesn't want too many changes, you're looking at about a week minimum, or up to four weeks of back and forth if the initial design is too far from the vision and the communication process is inefficient.

However, for more complicated design, fiddling around with the code in order to make interface changes is inefficient, and means you end up with ugly code at the end that's been hacked about. It's better to get the design signed off before the coding is started. This means that a client approves a concept first, again, this could take as little as a week if the design is spot on and the client is prompot in feedback. Or it could take weeks, or even months, if either party is a bad communicator or dawdles with updates. Once that's done the coding should be much swifter and the only thing left to do is adding in the content - which can be quick if it's all ready and in good shape, or delay things greatly if it's not.

We've found a comfortable time frame for website design for a fairly standard small business website without any fancy back end, from initiation to launch is about six to eight weeks, and breaks down like this:

Concept web design and approval - two weeks
Development build - one week
Content insertion and fine tuning - two to three weeks (assuming it's ready and in good shape)
Final sign off and launch - one week.

Obviously if extra services are needed, such as database development or logo design, that's going to take longer.

Find out more about our Leeds web design services.