There are literally thousands of options when it comes to hiring a web design firm, and finding the right fit for your company can be time consuming and stressful. With so much competition in the marketplace, it can be difficult to know what to look for when selecting an agency partner.

Your website is one of your most valuable and visible marketing assets. While you may only care about getting your website up and running as quickly as possible, choosing the wrong partner can be a costly mistake. Web design agencies are far from being created equal. So, to help you narrow the field, here are the top 4 traits you should look for to make sure you’re partnering with a truly great web design agency.

Brevity might be the soul of wit, but when it comes to marketing, long-form content rules. We’ve known this to be the case for a while; SEO marketing experts like Neil Patel describe the benefits of long-form content, detailing how longer blog posts are the secret to inbound marketing success.

But we’re not here to talk about the benefits of longer content, numerous as they may be. Instead, we’re looking at a few UX design tips that will support your long-form content assets and guarantee that users stay engaged as they read.

Checkout is, without question, the most important part of your eCommerce flow. The last thing you want to do is slip up in your UX design and drive customers away at the checkout page, wasting all the work you put into finding and bringing them into your marketing fold.

Nobody wants to wind up in development hell. Without a clear roadmap for development or a concrete idea of the core features of your end-product, the development process has a tendency to meander and stall with countless iterations that aren’t necessarily making progress. This is where the concept of a minimum viable product (MVP) comes into play.

If it’s been a couple years since you’ve last redesigned your website, you might be considering an update. Most website redesign projects produce positive effects, given that designers are able to update site assets with the latest and greatest trends, but it’s hard to quantify just how much a redesign will help boost your company goals.

Managers have a bigger responsibility in understanding these UX concepts than their teams. It’s the job of the manager to steer the ship—to lay the groundwork for their teams and then get out of the way and let them do their jobs. But how can you lay the groundwork if you aren’t familiar with the fundamentals of UX design guiding their processes? As a manager, it’s your job to be aware of these issues and make sure that you’re the control tower for your team.

If you’re designing a website, you know that user experience (UX) is essential to your overall success. You want to create a website that doesn’t just attract traffic but engages visitors once they arrive, is intuitive to use, and ultimately encourages them to follow through on your CTA. But even though this is a general description of UX, you might be surprised to find that this is only scratching the surface when it comes to the design concept. In fact, UX can be further broken down into a number of additional subcategories, with tactical UX and strategic UX design being two popular schools of thought.

It’s natural for consumers to be curious about what’s going on behind the scenes of the internet machine, especially these days where data breaches, violations of user privacy, and social media infiltration campaigns are daily news.

We’re being bombarded by news reports detailing how websites, government agencies, and mega-corporations are buying and selling our personal information and leveraging what they find to push their own agendas.

There’s a lot for users to be worried about. And to make matters worse, even seemingly-innocent design choices are beginning to take their toll.

Once upon a time, the internet was so new that developing a website meant fighting against the constraints of slow load times and limited coding options. In fact, the early days of the internet left us with garish and clunky websites that were far from user-friendly. And the idea of a “beautiful website” was such a limited concept that it is part of the reason that minimalist sites like Google were considered ahead of the curve and intuitive.

Fast forward to 2019 and interaction design is a major focus in the graphic and web design world. It’s so common that even Google leverages the medium throughout its product portfolio and even their Google Doodles. So, how can you capitalize on interaction design to make your website dynamic and appealing?

Steve Jobs once said, “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.” Jobs was a gifted storyteller himself and sold the vision of the future to the modern world of technology users.

There are many areas in which UX design can benefit from effective storytelling, from the visual storytelling that helps graphic designers set up a landing page to the narrative logic that engineers use to create navigable web sites. However, we sometimes overlook a part of the UX design process that can benefit the most from storytelling. It is in the same place Steve Jobs used it when he sold the iPhone to the world – the pitch.