Your website’s primary goals are to provide information, interact with visitors, and, eventually, set them on the road to conversion. Of course, “conversion” can mean many different things: Providing an email address, downloading content, receiving a quote, or even purchasing a product outright.

The web has come a long way from the clunky gifs that would often fail to load on Geocities. CSS animation has been building a reputation for itself as a design industry darling for some time now and not without good reason. There are unique benefits to using CSS animation in your web design in regards to functionality, UX design, and style.

By now, most of us are familiar with minimalism in web design. It’s the idea that you can say more with less and create a visual style through strategic use of simple elements:

• Hidden navigation/menus
• Simple, clean layouts
• Understated color palettes
• Preference for visuals over text
• Generous white space and room to breathe

What’s the point of a website?

Is it to provide information to your customers? Is it to engage with them? Is it to show off your brand’s persona?

Sure, all of the above is true. But to borrow from Star Trek, none of these goals are your Prime Directive. The Prime Directive—your website's guiding principle and number one goal—is to generate quality leads. Everything else is secondary.

Your website is an investment, and you’ll achieve a strong ROI only when you maximize your website’s ability to collect information, convert visitors, and bring these users into your marketing funnel.

The best way to do this is through a simple and understandable conversion path.

Who really "owns" a website?

Is it the business that sponsored its creation?

Is it the web design and development team that actually designed and built it?

Or is it someone else?

As a website owner, you probably believe that your website is yours. It’s not!

In truth, your website doesn’t belong to you—it belongs to your audience. They’re the consumers; the primary market for everything you do. As such, your web design and development project isn’t really about building what you want—it’s about using deliberate and stylistic choices to help you hit your mark.

Let’s review a few ways to make it happen.

“Hello darkness, my old friend

I’ve come to talk with you again…”

Thus spoke Paul Simon in the 1964 album “The Sound of Silence.” The haunting melody is one of angst; it’s an elegy of emptiness that paints a picture of a world where we can’t communicate with one another for our voices being drowned out by an immutable and pervasive silence.

“Bounce” is an ugly word in online marketing. Google defines bounce as any session where only a single request is sent to its Analytics server. And while a certain amount of bounce is perfectly normal, it’s good practice to try to reduce the rate as much as possible.

Most of The Creative Momentum web design and web development projects go really well. Client/agency expectations are set from the start. All goals are communicated clearly. Every step of the way goes according to plan (more on this later). Design approvals happen on time, image selection happens on time, development decisions happen on time. The website launches and BAM – everyone is happy.

And then … there are the outliers that are not. In all transparency, here are the reasons why.

The idea of A/B testing should be SEO 101 for smart marketers. A big part of playing the marketing game and winning is finding out which pieces of your campaign are a perfect fit for the big-picture conversion puzzle. Fortunately, modern A/B testing tools come equipped with features and functions that help turn data into actionable insights.

Here are a few tools you should keep in your A/B testing toolbox.

Choosing the right design for your website is just as important as coming up with your branding and marketing strategies. You want your business' web design to look appealing but not by sacrificing the user experience. 

One of the most common mistakes that web designers make when creating webpages is to incorporate flashy images and plug-ins for no reason other than they look cool.