Lack of speed when it comes to websites. No-one wants to hang around waiting for a slow website to load. It is incredibly frustrating and most people do not have the time or patience to wait. Research shows anything over 1 second load time will affect conversion rates of your website. In fact, every tenth of a second over a 2 second load time bleeds customers. Numbers vary depending on who you believe, but it is several percent of your website users for every tenth of a second.

Going faster

So we have a clear need-for-speed, but how can you achieve a faster website? There are dozens of little detailed improvements to make to fully optimise a site, but follow these three big ones and you’ll make huge progress.

1. Good Hosting
2. Optimise Images
3. Turn on Caching

1. Good hosting

The crux of this is that website hosts are not made equal. A web host is, fundamentally, a computer connected to the internet. Web hosting computers have specialist software to do the job, but many of the things you might intuit about them as computers are true. Namely, these computers will perform better if:

• there’s better the hardware in the computer
• it has less simultaneous tasks to do
• and it has an amazing internet connection

Web hosting companies will often promise you lots of storage, email, and other bells and whistles, such as unmetered bandwidth or several database installations. In fact it is likely these will be the features they tout most. However, none of these things affect your website performance. You probably don’t even need most of them. What matters is the expenditure the hosts expenditure on their hardware, and how many other clients are sharing that particular hardware with your website. Comparing this can be hard as many companies are cagey about it, rough rule of thumb though; the cheapest packages are nearly always terrible.

2. Image optimisation

Images are a super important part of your website presentation and message. They are also the bulk of the “data payload” on most websites. A customer using your website has to download all the images to their device. So how are your images “unoptimised”? The most common issues, images are…

• larger than they need to be
• the wrong format for the content
• not set to most relevant quality

How to fix these issues?

• Check the dimensions of your images.
  Don’t make pictures larger in pixel width and height than they are going to be seen on the website.
• Set the right formats.
  Photos should be JPGs and graphics should generally be PNGs. There are new and exciting formats like WEBP, but these are a little harder for non-technical website administrators to use.
• Set JPG qualities to around 50%.
  It sounds harsh, but this is probably the best balance between performance and visual quality.

3. Turn on Caching

So most websites with content management or page builders are “dynamic”. Not dynamic in the marketing buzzword sense but rather the content the public sees is constructed on request. This is clever stuff, and allows for things like frequently updated blogs and whatnot without having to manually rebuild web pages constantly. However, if your website is building the page every time for every user, it can get a little redundant as it “dynamically” rebuilds the same page over and over. Most of us arent updating our websites that often, and instead we can get your web server to store the last dynamically constructed page for quick and easy display to the next visitor. That’s caching; storing a recent version of something for better performance.

The nuts and bolts of caching is complicated, so we suggest using an off the shelf piece of software like LiteSpeed to do all the settings for you.

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These user journeys can be successful or unsuccessful for your organization. A successful user journey can have many forms. The most obvious might be a product sale. Other good outcomes include users finding the information they want or using your contact form.

Together we have a responsibility to help the user with that journey. We need to make it easy; we need to make it obvious.

It is in everyone’s best interest.

What differentiates a good user journey? It is one that feels smooth, effortless, and ultimately fruitful. To help make this happen we need to guide the user. That means designing easy to spot buttons, clear headings, and structured content.

Navigational elements and aids like buttons are critical but are very much the actionable end of this topic. In practice we begin with rather more abstracted discussion. This is about website architecture! We need to build the simplest expression of your content; the one that is most readily understood by your audience. To build this we first need an understanding of your business and then your customers. Meaningful consultation is critical. Once we have an understanding, we will pitch an architecture for the website. This architecture will map the pages and categories the website will have, that we believe will be most effective. This architecture forms the basis of the potential journeys a user can take through your site. The deliverable is your main menu content, and deep content sitemap. We will discuss Information Architecture in depth in another post.

Once we have that sitemap, we are best placed to guide users through it in a meaningful way.

User testing is particularly good at picking up whether our design is working well. In user testing we set test users tasks on the website. There is a problem if users cannot complete those tasks. Users might describe feeling lost or unable to find what they were looking for. It is user journey that we need to pay attention to.

We can measure our success using tracking once your website is launched. Tracking will show us the path news is take out the website and whether it matches with our expectations and testing.

We do not like using buzzwords. Any web jargon is a barrier between you and us. That said, some phrases neatly encapsulate important concepts. We will use them but define them. User journeys are important to your organisation!

The post What is the “user journey” through your website? appeared first on Andy Gardner Web Design Bristol Fashion.

This time the fantastic opportunity came our way to design the website for Ascent Flight Training. Ascent train all the pilots in the RAF, Royal Navy and Army.

You may know that amongst other things we enjoy photography, hiking and airshows. Taking photos in the “Mach Loop” low flying training area in Wales is a rare opportunity to combine all 3. The notion is to climb a hill near Snowdonia till you’re high enough to get a picture looking down on passing low flying jets. You get a real impression of the speed and skill involved as they zip through the valleys.

These are invariably trainee pilots from the armed forces; in other words, Ascent students! So it was surprising in the best way when Ascent got in touch, and a great opportunity to use some of Sam’s photography as well as our web design skills.

The post Take off for Ascent Flight Training website appeared first on Andy Gardner Web Design Bristol Fashion.

There’s a 50:50 chance this issue does affect your website. So what exactly is happening and how can you fix it?

Well users of the the Google Chrome browser will soon receive a warning about ‘insecure’ websites. To be exact, from Friday, that’s 44% of UK website users (see below) about to start receiving warnings about visiting certain websites… will it affect yours?

How can I test if this affects my website?

You might be already ‘secured’. It’s simple to test. Can you visit your website at https://yourwebsite?  For example you can visit this website at https://andy-gardner.co.uk. If that works without any warning then you should be fine. You’ll see a little green padlock or similar in the address bar too. If not, you might want to take action.

No need for panic. This doesn’t mean your website or your browser are under attack or that the website is bad in some way. The type of insecure Google is talking about is insecure in the sense that the connection between the website and your browser could potentially be viewed by third parties. To understand how all this works, and what it means for your website, then you need to know a little bit about HTTPS and SSL.

What is HTTPS?

An HTTPS connection is an encrypted connection between a web server and a visitors web browser.

It makes using websites more secure for people as third parties can’t see the data going back and forth. It’s a good direction for the web, hence Google’s heavy handed approach.

What is SSL?

An SSL certificate is how one makes an HTTPS connection publicly available on your website.

An SSL certificate is essentially a file generated by trusted issuing bodies that is bound to the characteristics of the web server in question and moreover a third party guarantee that this is connection is genuine and secure.

What is the solution?

The solution is to install an SSL certificate, so users can get an HTTPS connection without a warning. In fact it should have a friendly green padlock or similar instead.

We can organise, install, and manage SSL certification for you, just get in touch!

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So, whilst all our charity endeavours feel like important contributions, it’s especially satisfying to help GWAAC build their new website.

GWAAC is funded solely by donations, and the website needs to do a better job of making that clear and making it easier for people to give. We’ve already been to the airbase and charity HQ to do some research and are looking forward to working with the GWAAC team on this project!

The post Designing the Air Ambulance Charity website appeared first on Andy Gardner Web Design Bristol Fashion.

We’ve been business members of the Bristol Pound for several years, and the opportunity to help with their own website is something we jumped at the chance of.

Adam and the £B team have been diligent in gathering lots of feedback from users of the current system and we’ll be helping deliver a website that improves their experience.

There’s some beautiful design work on the notes themselves and a diligent tech team behind the scenes; great teams to build new solutions with!

The post Working with Bristol Pound appeared first on Andy Gardner Web Design Bristol Fashion.

With an audience of healthcare providers and Clinical Commissioning Groups and practice staff this medical site needed very specific appeal. These demographics are all time starved and benefit from a well laid out, readily consumable, top view of the brand and their products. Accessible across all devices due to responsive design and culminates in a clear call to action of contact.

Presentation is strong but clean, and given the technical app development nature of the product basis, is also inspired by the cutting edge FinTech sector.

We also needed to make clear the strong set of accreditations, awards and certifications enjoyed by the client. We also employed the occasional touch of animation to make development progress of the various platforms clear and engaging.

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Look at any well designed website and chances are good design is being supported by great photos and videos. Truly amazing photography needs little embellishment to craft a convincing website.

However, it’s hard to come by. The easy alternative is stock photography or something uploaded from your phone. The problem with this is most web users tend to have a sixth sense for stock photography. Think of awful tropes such as “women laughing eating salad” or “businessman pumping fist”. Such corny fakery undermines any authenticity your website may otherwise establish. Low quality phone photos tend to run foul of rule#1 above: it gives a bad impression of your business quality.

Transparency really helps build trust with users. To this end, we encourage our clients to include pictures of themselves and their offices. Smiling faces also help with engagement! We sometimes run into a little bit of reluctance to ‘be published’ but it does help humanise your organisation.

We can recommend excellent photographers if you don’t have professionals at hand.

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True, responsive design has been best practice for some years now. However, in years past it was us making the case for more flexible, mobile and tablet friendly websites to clients. This year, it has noticeably been on most clients wish list when they approach us.

The notion and value of mobile friendly web destinations has clearly penetrated corporate consciousness. That said it has often been up to us to bring attention to non-desktop use during development. Why the discrepency? In my experience businesses know they should have it, but don’t truly empathise with these users. Business owners typically still conceive and request layout in a very fixed, desktop orientated way.

The post Responsive web design: a 2016 retrospective appeared first on Andy Gardner Web Design Bristol Fashion.

They working with amazing machinery that can transport up to 250tonne tractors or huge wind turbines. We get to see some amazing local businesses when learning about our clients. Their equipment bursts off the page on their new site.

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