Despite their diminutive size, icons take a lot of time and effort to design. The canny professional website designer may occassionally use high-quality free icons for some parts of a website. Or even just as holding images until the real icons are produced.

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A popular post on the Get Elastic site back in 2007 listed over 100 call to action buttons used by US retailers at the time. We thought it would be interesting to take a snapshot look at the buttons of some of the UK's top online retailers in 2010

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Amazon, the online shopping behemoth, launched its UK grocery service in early July. The move had several commentators predicting major shake-ups in the online grocery retail market, as well as possible bad news for the online food specialist Ocado, who were looking to raise money through a stock market flotation around the same time.

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Two recent studies and a few blog posts have again highlighted the persistent problem of shopping cart abandonment – the ecommerce version of an early World Cup exit (sorry, we couldn't resist the analogy!)

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According to marketing wonder-brain Seth Godin, around 92% of all presentations in corporate America are prepared using basic templates in Powerpoint and Word. This is a real shame – because creative infographics can liven up any data set (and stop people from falling asleep).

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Sure, you could attract links by constantly slamming Apple or creating pictures of hilarious kittens. In fact, you could attract links by saying the most vicious, provocative thing that pops into your head. But that's not usually good business.

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The British Gas website has beaten other UK utilities companies in a recent usability study. Market research business eDigitalResearch conducted the tests using mystery shoppers who performed a number of tasks on energy supplier and broadband websites.

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Sometimes friends and clients ask us how to get started with basic web design. After all, lots of people have personal blogs or sites these days. Knowing web design basics can help you customise a blog template, or put up a quick web page. And it's surprisingly easy – once you understand the fundamentals.

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On the eve of the General Election, we thought it might be fun to check how the main parties choose to represent themselves online...

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How drab would the web designer's world be without colour? Colour gives a company personality, a website its identity and draws attention to the right elements.

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One area of web design that causes professional website developers a few headaches is web form building. The reason for the headaches isn't because forms are particularly hard to code, or because they require a huge amount of graphic design. Instead, it's because they're difficult to optimise for the user.

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Back in 1990, when Tim Berners-Lee first unveiled his revolutionary new HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the internet was primarily for sharing and exchanging text-based documents.

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Convention means something that has been accepted as an unwritten rule. For example, it's convention to have handles on pull-doors so that people don't push. Convention is right-is-tight and left-is-loosen on a screw cap. And convention is also naming the front page of your website "home".

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The debate about how likely modern web users are to scroll down a webpage took another twist with the latest report from usability expert Jakob Nielsen.

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Twitter is a great way to make new connections and share information. Yet, it can be overwhelming – particularly if you're a busy person.

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If the only thing stopping you from performing a usability test on your website is budget, then it's time to think again. Usability, while best tested by professional website designers, doesn't have to cost a fortune. So how should you go about it?

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Do you find that you're getting plenty of traffic, but that people are leaving your website soon after they arrive? Here are a few reasons why that could be happening, and how to remedy the situation.

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At OBS, part of what we do is build bespoke content management systems for our clients. To us it's one of the most important aspects of modern website development.

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Whether consciously or not, all of us have similar questions when we arrive at a website. By considering these it can help you structure your design to provide answers in the quickest way possible. So, what questions are people asking?

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It's all about the call to action online - from encouraging newsletter subscriptions and product purchases, to clicking a simple navigation hyperlink. Making sure that your users know what to do next is therefore crucial to your site's success.

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In our last post, we discussed why your website load time matters. (Not least because it improves user experience and Google is now using it as a ranking factor.) Following on from that, here are five things you can do to improve your loading times

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“My customers are patient people – they don't mind waiting an extra few seconds.” Even if it were true that your customers don't care about load times (and they do) Google does care.

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We mentioned in our last blog post that analytics can help web designers. Next, we'll look at how setting up an A/B test with Google is an easy way to gauge the effectiveness of a page element.

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Analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) are beloved by marketers the world over. But how many web designers and developers overlook this useful software?

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The web is teeming with free tools for web designers – from online usability tests to image resizers. Here are six of the best:

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When up to 85% of all email sent is spam, it's understandable that webmasters want to avoid getting swamped. It's because of this desire to avoid the spam tidal wave that many sites use CAPTCHA. You've probably come across one yourself at some stage online.

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For some people, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an irritant – seemingly there to make design less exciting and annoy developers. So, does it really matter if your site code is W3C-compliant, or is it just a formality? Well, here are 6 reasons that W3C compliance is important for your site:

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When it comes to your site, stickiness is a good thing. Sticky sites keep a visitor's attention for longer, and prevent them from bouncing on to the next website straight away. Here are four ways you can think sticky:

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For business, part of the beauty of the web is that it's easily measurable. And your analytics software is probably the best tool you have in your measurement arsenal. But what should you be tracking? Here are five simple stats to keep an eye on

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It's probably no surprise to hear a web development company recommending a redesign. But, at the risk of sounding like Santa selling Christmas, we'd like to point out a few common signs that it might be time to freshen up your site:

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Good designers think carefully about typography. However, while in print design you really only have to consider how your typography looks, with web design you also have to ensure a font is “web safe”.

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In the last post we looked at what to include above the fold on product pages. (The idea being that you keep your most compelling elements high on the page.) However, many web pages require the user to scroll for further info. Here are a few design tips you can follow to help encourage users to scroll down.

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“Above the fold” means anything that the user can see without having to scroll down. It comes from the the old newspaper term – the idea being that buyers only see the top half of a paper when it's folded and placed in the news-stands (so you better make sure the top half has some compelling content!).

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Search engine optimisation (SEO) might seem like a dark art sometimes. Code tweaks here, inbound links there... However, there are some simple (but often criminally overlooked) ways to help your site visibility in the search engines. Here are 3 quick and easy areas where web developers can quickly improve their SEO

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Customer trust is hard-won face-to-face, and harder won online. Yet, without the right aspects in place, your website may be sending out the wrong signals. Here are a few easy ways that you can increase the trust your site visitors have in your site

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Here are 5 quick ways to check you're following accessibility standards (there are many more aspects to test, but these make a good starting point).

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Static web pages are generated from physical files hosted on a web server. Generally speaking, the content on static pages rarely changes. And it usually requires some design and HTML knowledge to change it when needed.

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“Add user-generated content to your site,” they say. “It'll help your SEO, credibility and sales.” Well, that's the theory. But what are the most straightforward (and most effective) ways to give users the ability to create content? (And we don't mean building the next Facebook or YouTube.)

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Your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who rebound from your site instead of staying to read/explore/watch/buy... or whatever else you want users to do.

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