At the heart of the e-commerce industry is product pages. You can’t make sales without a strong online representation of what you’re offering. You’ve probably visited Amazon.com and Walmart.com hundreds of times and are familiar with their web design layouts. However, there are a lot of additional things you can focus on for your pages to remain as competitive as possible.

Gartner took a look at how the pandemic shifted more businesses to a digital model. Researchers confirmed that societal changes propelled digital commerce to become the number one customer buying channel. They advise all industries to look to online technologies to adapt to changes and remain competitive.

Consistently providing exciting content on your web page is an excellent way to attract regular visitors. However, there are a couple of subliminal elements that need to be used in the web design to boost traffic. These elements are psychological, resulting in the visitors not realizing what keeps attracting them to the site.

To create a visually engaging site that keeps visitors returning, attention needs to be paid to a couple of essential web design areas that will make your website stand out in the already crowded digital landscape. First, let us have an understanding of what web design psychology essentially is.

Web design psychology is getting to know how visitors feel when they visit your site. That is, designing your website in a manner that engages the feelings of visitors either consciously or subconsciously. This understanding helps to improve and positively influence the traffic your website generates.

In today’s business environment dominated by the slogan “better, faster, cheaper”, templates are often seen as the go-to solution for everything. Need a logo? Get a free template. Need a website created? There are template-based web development platforms for that as well. Many entrepreneurs tend to think of these platforms as being “basically web design, but simpler and cheaper.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work that way: if you don't choose a website building platform wisely, there are several drawbacks to web template platforms that custom web design does not share.

1.       You don’t own your website. This is the root cause of many issues with website templates. The development platform hosts your website, essentially “loaning” it to you. In fact, if you read the Terms of Use of some template-based web development platforms, you will find that they can freely modify your website without your consent.

2.       Website templates are cheaper… in the short run. A corollary of the above, really. As tempting as it may seem to save on web design, you need to consider that template-based web development platforms usually run on a “freemium” basis. To remove ads, change your domain name and overall give your site a modicum of professional appearance, you need to pay a monthly subscription fee, and the more functionality your website has, the higher it rises. You might save money in the short term, but in the long run, even a dozen dollars a month can gradually add up.

3.       You have very limited options for modifying your website. Your company may grow, but web development platform templates offer very limited possibilities for expansion compared to a site you own. Eventually, your company may “outgrow” your website, and then you will have to buy a custom website anyways and go through the trouble of migrating all your data, something that’s not always easy depending on the platform you use.

4.       Your website may look generic. Templates are not exactly known for giving much room to creativity. Even with a variety of design options available, your site will typically lack a “personal touch” to make it really stand out. Experienced web designers can help you find a way to personalize your website, so without professional assistance and with relatively limited template material to work with, your site may come off as dry and impersonal.

5.       Template-based websites are not always the best for SEO. Despite many companies’ claims to the contrary, it is frequently difficult to implement a working SEO strategy into template websites, leading them to be ignored by Google searches.

Unless you are a trained automobile mechanic, you probably wouldn’t build your own car. Shouldn’t the same logic apply to a professional website? Missing or malfunctioning features and poorly implemented SEO can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. Template-based web development platforms may be fine for blogging and other limited applications, but if your business goal is to go big, it may be a good idea to invest into a professionally-designed website that you can grow and expand in accordance with your clients’ and your company’s needs.

About the Author:

Daniil Stoenko is a professional writer and translator who produced a variety of articles for LogoBee’s Logo Design Blog over the years.

Google’s image recognition software is an incredible feat of engineering. Based on the structure of a biological brain, the ‘artificial neural network’ (ANN) consists of 20–30 stacked layers of artificial ‘neurons’, each neuron talking to the next to decipher what it can ‘see’ in a given image.

Like a human brain, the ANN is ‘trained’ to recognise objects and elements of a picture, with the neurons constantly adjusting and learning until together, they are able to accurately recognise, say, a dog, a banana, a tree.

But the ANN is not yet perfect. In an effort to understand precisely what is happening at each layer of the network, programmers decided to try turning the network upside down: instead of the ANN simply recognizing elements of an image, would it be able to recreate the image?

The results were surprising – often beautiful, and sometimes pretty creepy!

You see, while our human brain can look at clouds in the sky and sometimes imagine that they look like a bird, or a heart, or a face, we know that clouds are clouds. But the ANN doesn’t know that, yet.

When presented with a picture of clouds and asked to recreate it, this happened:

To answer this question, it’s firstly important to establish that there is a difference. Web design is the art (and science!) of building a website. On the surface, a web designer is someone who makes a pretty website by arranging blocks of text, images, and other elements into an attractive and eye-catching design that will inspire a site visitor to take a closer look at the product, service or information being offered. Delve deeper however, and you’ll see that web design is highly technical and includes the use of some complicated-sounding programming languages. Speak PHP, Ajax, BASH, AWK, TCL or Python, anyone? Graphic design on the other hand was traditionally a print-based profession, and the design process still generally begins with pen-and paper sketches. Nowadays, the internet and computer software such as Adobe Illustrator now go hand in hand with the job. Graphic designers create logos and corporate identities, and design packaging, advertising, letter heads, brochures and more. They work with typography – not only the traditional black and white, or Pantone 2 to 3 color logos, but increasingly these days, full color logos incorporating gradients, transparency, 3D shadows and more edgy effects. A graphic designer may provide the artistic and aesthetic talent towards creating the look and feel of a website, and mock up where on the page the different design elements should go, but the web designer is the responsible for converting this mock up by splitting the graphics into images, polishing the design with software such as Adobe Photoshop, and then using web coding to translate the design onto the screen. Since the global recession, design companies have been increasingly looking for multi-skilled jacks-of-all-trades who can perform the role of both graphic and web designer, thus cutting costs and getting two skills for the price of one.

The LogoBee design team knows that free stuff is hard to find and quality free stuff even harder! After 10 years in the business, we wish to fix that problem by sharing our logo design savvy by offering these high-quality free logos for you to download.

Each logo design was created by our talented designers using Adobe Illustrator. They are provided free of charge for you to download in scalable vector format (Adobe Illustrator CS3). Click the picture of a logo to download it. Each logo includes a brief description of what we think it would be better used for, but the possibilities are endless!

You are welcome to use these logos for your business or for personal use, but we have to ask you not to distribute them without permission.

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It seems that one of the hardest things to get right in web design is creating proper layout and navigation. Sometimes a web site will be very rich in content, except that traffic will suffer due to poor navigational structure. In other words, navigation has become one of the key ingredients in developing sustainable, long-term traffic to your site. Your site tree: Often before you even get into the graphical aspects of your site, it is useful to think about the content that you will have for your site and brainstorm possible navigational schemes, otherwise known as site trees. These trees describe the way in which your site branches out into articles, products and services, and any other additional sections you may have. You would be surprised how different tree layouts can be created, but not all are created equal. Read the rest of this entry »

Internet search engines exist to organize the seemingly immeasurable amount of information available on the web. They direct people to pages that are relevant to their searches, pages that discuss the exact keywords they are looking for. For businesses that receive the majority of their clientele from search engines, search engine rankings can make or break their business. Search Engines Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing technique that enhances a website and its content in order to increase the chances of achieving a high rank the search engine result pages (SERPs). Search engines are very secretive about their criteria and ranking systems as they continuously update and revise their algorithms (mathematical formulas used to determine which web pages are displayed in search results), and therefore there is less likelihood of webmasters and search engine optimizers being able to achieve higher rankings by manipulation and spamming. Every search engine has its own formula and criteria for indexing and ranking pages. One can analyze SERPs and backward links (all the links pointing at a particular web page) and attempt to determine a search engine's indexing criteria, however there's a lot of risk involved in relying on a limited number of optimization techniques. Because of the unpredictable nature of search engines, websites can easily move from a top ranking position on a SERP down to the third or fourth SERP or even be banned from the search engine altogether.

LogoBee logo design has recently taken it upon itself to start the cleanup of the OSCMax Shopping Cart Suite. This project was intended to accommodate web developers and programmers in general.  The final version has been released in the hopes that the web community, and LogoBee clients, will benefit  from their best efforts. OSCMax is a derivative of osCommerce which is the world’s most used Shopping Cart. It comes with a lot of extra functionality pre-installed, while osCommerce requires you to install them manually.  Many articles have been written on the fact that this open-source solution is not W3C compliant and that it would be a large job to resolve this. These articles point out that a full cleanup to bring the code up to speed with the W3C compliancy expectations would be quite complicated. LogoBee logo design has done their best to make the OSCMax Shopping Cart Suite code W3C compliant. The code was quite extensive and the clean up was a time consuming process; but LogoBee is proud to release the results of their best efforts.  Now website developers and programmers from the global web community will be able to benefit from their hard work with the new OSCMax shopping cart suite which can be found on LogoBee.com. The final version produced by the LogoBee team has been released and the web community is encouraged to try it out. This final version of the OSCMax Shopping Cart Suite can be found on the LogoBee website at this location:  http://www.logobee-web.com/demo/oscmax/.

W3C Compliancy refers to the programming standards that have been established by the W3C Authority; which is the group responsible for maintaining and evolving the HTML language. Open Source Solutions are pre-programmed solutions that can be customized on both an aesthetic and functional level by experienced programmers. These solutions generally cover most of the business needs of clients; which is what makes them extremely popular as Online Business Solutions for clients not willing to invest large amounts of capital in Custom Developed (Programmed) Solutions. Since the W3C released its new level of standardization and Validation Tools it has become far easier for clients to see how their website complies with the standards established by the W3C. The one issue Read the rest of this entry »

Search Engines: As a business owner, your first priority should be to get your website listed in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and Alta Vista. This can be done simply by submitting your website to the various search engines.

Directories: You can also submit your site to web directories, which are databases of categorized listings of websites. Focus on directories that are popular and that specialize on your industry.

Directories: You can also submit your site to web directories, which are databases of categorized listings of websites. Focus on directories that are popular and that specialize on your industry.