Jennifer White Launches New Website Thanks To DRC Web Design

Ottawa-based lawyer and investigator, Jennifer White, has just launched her brand new website thanks to DRC Web Design.

Jennifer White came to DRC Web Design after meeting with Domenica Agostini through their mutual work in law within the city of Ottawa. She has established herself in the city by working alongside companies in the private and public sectors investigating allegations of harassment, discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual violence.

As a result of her conversation with Domenica, Jennifer decided it was time to get a new website to  showcase the company that was optimised for search engine results. Of course, Domenica was happy to collaborate on this project and help Jennifer to establish herself online and reach a wider range of companies across Ottawa and beyond.

Jennifer White provides investigative services to well-known companies in the public and private sectors as well as local governments. She conducts fair, thorough, thoughtful and confidential investigations and prepares a report of her investigation that is both vital and useful for the organization.

DRC Web Design is a web design agency founded in Ottawa with one goal… delivering excellent websites in days not weeks. In the past, building a new website to capitalise on your big idea, whether in-house or via freelancers, seemed to always take forever and be over budget or be subject to compromising what you actually wanted.

The challenge is knowing where to start. It’s one thing to start a website, it’s quite another to actually make money from your website. This is why DRC Web Design decided to do something about it. We improve and build websites to become more profitable, seeing results in just a couple of months.

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The Impact of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on Web Design

The mobile web is tricky to navigate for developers and digital marketers, especially since 53% of mobile website visits are abandoned if they take more than 3 seconds to load a page. As an Ottawa-based web designer, we have experienced this and there are a few factors that contribute to it that pose a challenge for web developers: short attention spans, poor mobile experiences, slow unresponsive pages and intrusive ads. So, how can we get around this problem and deliver websites that load quickly on mobile?

AMP! Accelerated Mobile Pages are created from an open source framework that enables organisations to build performance oriented, engaging and fast web pages without any additional training.

In October 2015, Google officially introduced Google AMP which it would later launch in February 2016. In September that year, AMP-based web pages began to be indexed in organic search results and just two months later Google announced its new mobile-first index. In March the following year, Google announced that AMP would now be available for Sogou, Baidu and Yahoo Japan search engines at their AMP conference. Finally, in May 2017, AMP became available for both AdWords search and display ads, as announced by Paul Muret.

The Impact of the AMP Project

Here are some statistics about the impact of the AMP project:

 

Statistics

Median page-load time = less than 0.5 seconds

Number of pages published = over 4billion

Number of domains created = 25million

Number of developers involved: over 10,500

Number of code submissions: over 7,000

 

Quantifiable Benefits

Sales conversions profit growth: 20%

Sales conversions source of data: A/B Testing

Sales conversions total profit value: $676,822

Year-over-year increase in AMP traffic profit growth: 10%

Year-over-year increase in AMP traffic source of data: eCommerce and Publisher interviews

Year-over-year increase in AMP traffic total profit value: $328,625

 

Unquantifiable Benefits

Improvement in site discovery and traffic: 10%

Time being spent by users on AMP pages: 2x

Increase in engagement on different pages: 60%

Decrease in page load time: 80%

Increase in ad-placement click-through rate (CTR): 20%

 

Case Studies

Here are some case studies from real websites showcasing the improvement made by AMP utilisation.

Readwhere

Increase in revenue: 30%

Improvement in user engagement: 30%

Increase in ad viewability: 20%

US Express

Improvement in page load speed: 5x

Projected savings annually: $1million

More applications via AMP page: 62%

Discover Car Hire

Better ROI from mobile devices: 20%

Increase in mobile-based organic traffic: 73%

Better conversion from mobile” 29%

Greenslips

Increase in conversion rate: 12-15%

Improvement in load time with AMP pages: 15%

Tokopedia

Better conversion rates on mobile: 5x

Increase in page-load speed: 65%

Reduction in bounce rate: 60%

Carved

Better eCommerce conversion rate: 75%

Increase in page-load speed: 37%

Fall in bounce rate: 33%

 

What’s Next for AMP?

As AMP evolves it will not only have an impact on eCommerce and publisher websites and the number of ways to use it is increasing. These include combining the power of Progressive Web Pages (PWP) with AMP. The thought behind this is that it will streamline the development process and ensure consistent page-load times.

 

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Why You Should Get A Web Agency To Design Your Website For You

Building your own website can seem like a great idea, especially with all of the Wix and Squarespace ads plastered all over YouTube. They make it seem like making your own website is as easy as clicking a dragging but there is a lot more involved with it than you might expect.

As a web design agency in Ottawa, we would like to share with you six reasons why you should get a web agency to design your website rather than trying to go it alone. We are going to discuss the following:

• The art of web design
• Saving time and money long term
• SEO
• Credibility
• Ongoing Support
• Peace of mind

The Art of Web Design

Web design is an art form, so you don’t want it to be done by someone who is inexperienced. To put this into context, if you were getting married and you were looking for a photographer, you wouldn’t ask someone who doesn’t have the relevant experience, would you? This is because this day is far too important in your life to leave it to someone who is an amateur.

This same logic applies to designing your website. It’s your company’s business card to the world, so it needs to be successful in order for it to be valuable. This is the first reason that investing in a professional to design and develop your website will pay off for you. Just like how you’ll be a million times more pleased with professional photos of your wedding day.

Saving Time and Money in the Long Run

One of the main reasons businesses will choose to make their own website is because of the low cost they have to invest in it. Of course, it’s easy enough to get a template and make your own website, but in more cases than not you’d be lacking in the creative design led skills that are necessary for targeting the right audience with your website design.

This leads to a majority of people who commit to making their own website being unsatisfied with the final product and deciding to use the skills of a professional designer anyway. It may seem easier to build your own website but in the long run, it is much easier to just with a professional agency, to begin with.

Search Engine Optimisation

The entire reason for your website existing is to showcase the products and services you offer to the people who are looking for them. To achieve this, you want to be appearing high up in search results to increase the likelihood of them clicking on your website instead of your competitors.

This is where a designer’s digital marketing knowledge will come in handy. The art of search engine optimisation is quite complex and doing it for Google alone will mean catering to over 200 different factors that affect your website’s ranking. You have to make sure that search engines know exactly what your website is about and therefore who they should be showing your website to.

Credibility

In the digital age, your website is the first impression you will make on your potential customers who are looking for the services that you offer. If you don’t have a professional looking website, you are more than likely turning away more customers than you are gaining for your products and services.

You’ve probably heard the age-old expression “you only have five seconds to make an impression” and it couldn’t be truer. In the time it took for you to read that quote, someone has made up their mind about your company. If you miss the mark then you could lose potential customers to your competition down the street.

Ongoing Support

Of course, when you decide to build your own website, the level of assistance you can expect to receive is pretty much non-existent since there’s no one you can go back to for help.

Website support won’t usually be included in the money you invest in a self-build, which means that when you experience any issues (which will happen), it’s going to cost you. Whether that be monetary by hiring a web design agency or a significant amount of your time to be spent trawling through FAQs and forums online to find a solution for your issues.

Peace of Mind

You know that feeling where you do something that you have no experience in and you never know if you’ve done it right or if its finished, that feeling is something we’d bet you’d like to avoid.

We’ve spoken about how important your website is to your business and this level of uncertainty isn’t going to be good for it. This is why hiring a professional web designer allows you to have someone who you trust to guide you through the web design process to make sure it’s all running efficiently. How much is this worth to you?

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Innovative Web Design Trends For 2019

2019 is the final year of the decade – can you believe we’re there already? As a web design agency in Ottawa, it seems like only yesterday that the country was preparing for the Winter Olympics to come to Vancouver and now the decade is almost over. With it, we have seen massive changes across the internet landscape and the mobile web has grown incredibly to become an important part of our daily lives.

Too many acronyms to remember have been introduced – AR, VR, AI, AMP – and you’ll likely not know what they stand for if they don’t come up in daily education, but you will experience them almost every day when browsing the internet.

Traditionally, we have seen either advancement in technology or creativity every year but this year something unprecedented will happen, we will see big leaps in both aspects of web design as aesthetics and technology will see innovation from developers and designers alike. We can tell you now, this is going to be a very exciting year for web design.

Today, we are going to discuss 5 of the most innovative trends we are going to see in 2019, thanks to Lennart de Ridder at 99designs.co.uk, who has compiled the things he predicts will have a major impact on how we use the internet this year. He goes on to urge web developers and designers to make their make before the decade is over.

The Evolution of Chatbots

Let’s start with everyone’s favourite piece of technology at the moment – chatbots. They have been moving upwards for a couple of year now but 2019 will see them become even more pivotal. We have been seeing huge improvements in AI and machine learning over the past few months, enabling chatbots to become more intelligent and efficient.

(via insomnobot-3000)

A new generation of chatbots will be appearing on more and more pages that you use daily and they’ll be much more customisable than we have ever seen before. They will likely have bright colours to make them pop off the page and be more inviting to users than previous generations. A friendly mascot will no doubt accompany the chatbots that will help represent the brand and provide a personable face to blur the real and digital world.

Video Content Explosion

Obviously video content is nothing new for the online world but thanks to changes in the way Google displays search results, businesses are turning towards it more and more. Video allows you to not only diversify the content on your website but also caters to your audience that isn’t viewing your page at home as they can watch a video instead of scanning through paragraphs of text.

(via pipipi.det)

As you will no doubt have already seen, Google now shows mixed search results for terms that have video results relating to them, with those appearing above all other results. This change in search engine dynamic is leading websites to prioritise video production over traditional content to try and lead the pack in search results. This also allows them to offer new content in a more efficient and shareable format.

Minimalism

Yes, this is a classic and indeed timeless trend for web design and development, but minimalism is still the go-to aesthetic choice for many websites across the world. The idea is that the less content your audience has to look at, the less they will think about and the more likely they are to become a customer. Of course, this only occurs if you present the content in the right way, showing the user exactly what they are looking for – nothing more, nothing less.

(via Libratone)

So, it should come as no surprise that minimalism will continue to dominate the digital landscape throughout 2019 and undoubtedly into the new decade. With advancements in the types of animation and effects that are possible, the experience of scrolling through pages will become more engaging. This also allows designers to space out their content more and produce beautifully contrasted white space and clear typography without unnecessary elements to distract readers.

Navigation that is Friendly for Your Thumbs

Browsing websites on mobile devices have firmly overtaken browsing them on your desktop and this is leading to design becoming more and more thumb-friendly. Josh Clark discussed this very phenomenon in his book “Designing for Touch” where he investigated how users hold mobile devices and how this affects the way that movements, particularly of their thumb, should be processed in modern web design.

(via tubik)

In 2019, more than ever, we will see companies adopting a thumb-friendly experience. Not only websites but also software developers will be catering to this growing audience. You could even say that Apple was ahead of the curve when they introduced the iPhone X range with its lack of a home button and gesture-based controls.

Socially Conscious and Diverse Imagery

We refer to the online world so often as simply “the web” that it can be easy to forget that the phrase is accompanied by two other very important word – “worldwide”. We are fortunate to be connected with people all over the world through the internet, each with their own cultures, abilities, ages and gender identities. All of these different people want to see themselves represented through their content rather than boring old stock photos.

(via GlobalXplorer)

Small considerations can help this come a long way (think Apple’s inclusion of emojis with varying skin tones) to making people from all over the globe feel comfortable in the digital world we now inhabit. With social consciousness and diversity on our minds more than ever coming into 2019, we should see designers strive towards inclusiveness more head-on than previous years. As a population, the world still has a long way to go to make everyone feel universally accepted but designers can help make steps towards this by demonstrating the real connection people can make online.

Looking Ahead and Where to Read More

These are just half of the predictions that Lennart de Ridder has come up with for the year ahead and you can read about the rest over at 99designs. With them all laid out, what are you most excited to see in 2019? This isn’t a definitive list and there are bound to be plenty of surprises along the way as the year progresses and maybe you will contribute to them yourself! After all, what catches on and becomes a trend is defined by one person… YOU.

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70+ Statistics to Help You Optimize Your Website in 2019

SEO can be overwhelming but there are plenty of resources that can help you learn what you need. As a web design agency in Ottawa, we want to be able to help you beyond building your perfect website.

SEO Tribunal has put together an infographic with stats to understand for SEO. It is incredibly detailed and backed up by a lot of research, so you can trust all of the information they have provided.

Here’s a summary:

• History of search engines
• Google algorithm updates
• Who controls the market
• Trends
• Mobile vs desktop
• Ranking in Google
• SEO for local businesses
• Best tools for SEO

Check out the infographic below.

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WooCommerce vs. Shopify: The Battle of the eCommerce Platforms

The interest in creating an online store continues to grow through 2019, but what platform is the most suitable for your needs? As a website designer in Ottawa, I would like to walk you through the two platforms and help you make your choice.

There are many different solutions available but two platforms tend to stand out among the rest: WooCommerce and Shopify. Combined, they have nearly 4 million companies using their systems, but what makes them so popular?

Let’s start by looking at what you need from an eCommerce platform in order for you to be able to run a successful online business.

The process of choosing an eCommerce platform begins by thinking about what you’re selling, how you’re selling and how you would like to expand in the future. Knowing these things will allow you to choose which of these two giants is the right platform for you.

Here are a few things you should be looking for while choosing your eCommerce platform:

• How many products are you looking to sell on your website? And how will this grow in the future?
• How tech savvy are you? Are you able to handle the purchasing of your own hosting, domain and software installation?
• How are you going to market the website? SEO? Pay-Per-Click Ads? Email marketing?
• Will you be managing your website? Will more than one person be managing it? Are you looking to automate the process as much as possible?
• Would you prefer ease of use of more control over your website?
• What’s your price range? Would you prefer to pay more up front or would an ongoing payment structure be more suitable for you?

Once you have idea of what your answers are to these questions, you can begin to compare the Shopify and WooCommerce platforms and see how they stack up.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is one of the most commonly used eCommerce platforms on the internet with over 3million active installs in online stores. It’s typically one of the first names that will come up when you begin to search for the options for your eCommerce store.

It is a product that is developed to run on the open-source WordPress platform and many products that tend to be too generic for some specific use cases. So, let’s break down the pros and cons of WooCommerce…

Low Initial Cost

WooCommerce is built on top of WordPress, which makes it possible to get a basic site up and running using only WooCommerce, WordPress and a free theme. The only costs that are associated with this would be hosting and a domain for your website. This leads to minimal effort and cost to yourself to get your site up and running.

Add-Ons (Free and Paid)

Of course, WooCommerce will be suitable for a wide range of purposes out-of-the-box but it’s likely that there will be some things that you require that aren’t included.

If you want a more premium look for your website, ThemeForest has over 1,000 paid themes for WooCommerce that you can easily install yourself. If you are looking for some more functionality, CodeCanyon has over 1,500 plugins for WooCommerce that will allow you to do just about anything with your website.

Additionally, WordPress has an incredible number of plugins and combined with what is on offer for WooCommerce, you should be able to add in just about any feature you could ever want for your online store.

Customisable

If you need something for your website that you can’t seem to find or add yourself, both WordPress and WooCommerce are incredibly friendly for developers to work with. There are plenty of options for developers who are ready to work with WordPress and will be able to help you out. You can probably even find one that lives in your town or city!

This will allow you to customise your website to do whatever you want it to do and adjust it over time to suit your changing requirements.

Hands-On

This is one of the downsides to making an eCommerce website with WooCommerce is that it will be a lot of work initially. Of course, there is plenty of support available but you need to learn a lot in order to get your site going. Other platforms are simplified to make things easier for beginners and WooCommerce/WordPress are designed to give control to developers.

An upside of this is that you can potentially set up your own full site without ever having to work with a developer. You just need to take the time to figure out how everything works on your own. There are a large number of resources available to help you to get everything sorted on your website, so you’re not alone.

Scalability

You can get on happily with hundreds or even thousands of products with WooCommerce, but if you begin to exceed these numbers it will become difficult for you to continue scaling your business without some extra help.

This will require you to move your website to a server that performs better, utilise Content Delivery Networks and work alongside a professional developer to optimise your website. While this is typically what you need to do with most eCommerce platforms, Shopify has a built-in scalability factor into their pricing model.

Shopify

So, how does Shopify compete with WooCommerce?

The Shopify platform is explicitly built for online stores rather than being available as an extension for multi-purpose platforms like WordPress. This does, however, mean there are some options you will have to trade-off: it is more difficult to create adjacent functionality like information pages and a blog, but it is much easier for you to manage your store. Let’s see what it has to offer.

Subscription Pricing

WooCommerce allows you to set up a functional online store for almost no cost. If you choose to go for a more premium theme, there may be some cost there but Shopify has chosen a different model – subscriptions.

The pricing of Shopify ranges from $29 to $299 per month but it does come with a number of benefits. Some of these include discounts on shipping, regular updates, inclusion on Shopify’s own Content Delivery Network and an in-store POS solution.

Easy Scalability

One benefit of not managing your own hosting is that it’s possible to constantly increase the number of products on your online store. However, if you experience a massive amount of traffic or need to add additional items to the management of your store, you will need to upgrade your account and Shopify will handle it for you.

This allows you to spend more on the business itself and less time worrying about the actual infrastructure that lays beneath your website.

Less Resources Available

WooCommerce is much more widely supported than Shopify, but there are still plenty of guides themes and apps available to suit your needs. The diversity of these resources is just much slimmer than that of WooCommerce.

This does lead to a slight lack of diversity for stores running on the Shopify platform as there is a smaller, niche user base than the WooCommerce/WordPress combo. Additionally, there are tens of thousands of themes available for WordPress and Shopify has roughly a tenth of that selection.

This is again true for apps (or plugins in WordPress speak). For example, if you are looking for an app to help with your SEO, there are a few dozen available for WordPress, whereas Shopify only has a few to choose from.

So, who wins in the battle of WooCommerce vs. Shopify?

To answer this, you need to look at your specific needs from the questions we asked you at the beginning of this blog post. After reading through the pros and cons of each, which one do you think best suits your needs?For in-depth control and low up front costs: WooCommerce is the solution for you.

For ease of use and scalability: Shopify is the better solution for you.

We can’t tell you which one to decide as they each suit different needs but it’s worth working out which one suits your business the best before taking the plunge with either one.

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What Does 2019 Hold For Website Design?

It’s a new year and that means a new set of trends that will sweep across the internet. From memes to challenges and even web design, the cycle begins again. As an Ottawa-based website designer, we wanted to share some of the predictions that have been for website design over the forthcoming months. Some of these may not be as likely as others but we are hopeful that some of these catch on, as it will be an exciting year for website design if they do.

Voice Input

We all know that using our voice to interact with the digital world has been steadily growing for a while now, especially with voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. However, it will become an increasingly popular way of interacting with websites in 2019. Of course, Google has had voice search for a while but we will start to see it appearing on a much wider range of websites. Some proof for this comes in the form of Adobe XD introducing voice prototyping, meaning the technology for voice input on more websites is certainly more possible now.

Brand Variation Will Return

It seems like all major websites these days look the same, which is creating a bland design landscape. This creates the potential for brands to begin to differentiate themselves as customer experience is becoming more important and users don’t want to have the same boring experience on every website. To maintain long-term engagement websites need to have a distinct brand identity, so the same old styling we’re currently seeing across major websites won’t cut it anymore.

Pseudo-VR

Over the past few years, virtual reality has gone from being a sci-fi fantasy to being something that is fairly affordable and can be enjoyed in our homes. However, there are still some hurdles in the technology that prevents it from becoming a normalised part of our lives. This is where pseudo-VR design elements can help to bridge the gap. Using 3D environments that are reactive to user interaction can simulate the VR experience without the need for wearing an uncomfortable headset.

Video Will Be The New Image

Our landing pages have been slowed down with huge image file sizes for years and despite the fact that we know it’s a terrible idea, we still do it EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. So, the natural succession for this trend then is to introduce huge videos to makes our landing pages even slower. This one is kind of a joke but we know that people will naturally lean towards this trend as we have already started to see it happen!

Emotional Experience Design

Of course, user experience will be at the heart of all web design in 2019, as it is the most important thing to consider when designing a website. However, people will still try to redefine what this means, despite it remaining largely the same for years. User experience has been leaning more towards being emotive for a while now, but will we see the rise of “emotional experience designers” as 2019 goes on? Only time will tell.

Source

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