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                    [post_content] => The homepage of a website for users is like Emerald City for Dorothy and Toto. To get there, they had one route: the yellow brick road. Well, websites only need one route home as well, and for many years it has been the home button on the site’s navigational menu.

But now a clickable logo will also take you back to the homepage and not only are users aware of this, but often they prefer it as a universal method of returning to a site’s homepage. And just as Dorothy didn’t need two yellow brick roads to get her to the green capital of Oz, you don’t need two routes home for your users either.

 

Only using a clickable logo

Ditching the home button from your navigation menu not only creates a better experience for your users by simplifying their choices, it also limits the number of items in your navigation menu. This allows search engines to better read your site which should help with your overall search rankings.

It also gives your users a better controlled experience; less is often more when it comes to a website’s content and when you don’t overload your user with options, they tend to navigate your site faster and more efficiently. Keeping your menu navigation simple and limited gives users less choices, which can help them identify their needs faster and ultimately provide a better experience.

Clicking the logo to get back to your site’s homepage is something that majority of your users understand and actually prefer. Plus there is a lot of ways a clickable logo can benefit your business. Not only is there less clutter on the navigation bar when the home button is removed, but a clickable logo will draw more attention to your logo and could ultimately help grow your brand. 

It’s what all the big guys are doing

Hey, hey—we aren’t copy cats by any means, but a lot of the bigger corporations are using clickable logos instead of a home button on their navigation menu as well. So it’s pretty safe to say that this practice is more than just a trend, as some would argue. 

Take a look at Starbucks’, Target’s, and Apple’s websites—all of their sites have clickable logos instead of a home button in the navigation menu. And because of this, their navigation menu is clean and better organized. Plus, their clickable logos reinforce their brand when users click them to go back to the site’s homepage. 

Our goal is easy navigation for your users

Behind every website we design, creating an excellent user experience is a core focus. We truly believe that your site’s functionality is strongest when the navigation menu is simple, clean, and limited to showing the best parts of your website. A repetitive home button on the navigational menu doesn’t do this for your site, which is why we strongly recommend removing it.

Instead, let us create a great looking logo for your site that will be linked back to your homepage. This will:

So, that’s why you shouldn’t have a home button the navigation menu. Our goal is to send those home buttons somewhere over the rainbow because the clickable logo is here to stay.


 

 

 
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                    [post_content] => The world of web design has its own language, and if you don’t understand the terms or process, designing and building your website can be frustrating and stressful. Here, we’ve defined some of the most frequently used terms and divided them by process, so you’ll know what’s going on every step of the way. Most of these terms and definitions are broadly used and understood, but some are specific to our process here at Key Web, so we’ve outlined that first:

Our Process


1. Consultation

Our initial meeting. We pair our project manager, a designer, and a copywriter with your team to hear about your business and your web presence needs. We explain our method and show you some of our work to ensure that our styles and best practices mesh well.  After our meeting, our project manager meets with the designer, developer, and copywriter to determine an estimate for each phase of the process. We don’t begin until both parties agree on the conditions laid out in the proposal.

2. Content Review, Support, or Full Copywriting

Websites should not be designed until the content that will be featured in them is planned out completely and in detail. Depending on your budget and needs, this phase can go one of three ways:


3. Design & Development

Once we know what your site will say, our designers figure out the best way to say it. We brainstorm as a team, look to other sites for inspiration and to see what doesn’t work well, and then your designer creates a static image of your potential new homepage. From there, client and designer communicate back and forth until everyone is excited and happy with the home- and subpage designs, and the site moves into development. This phase can take anywhere from 4-6 weeks.

4. Content Input & Optimization

After your website has been developed and proofed, the designer passes the baton back over to the copywriter to input and optimize your content. Here, she tweaks the content so that it is easily readable, aesthetically pleasing on the page, and optimized so the site can be found and produced by search engines when customers search for relevant keywords. This phase also includes the installation of an SEO plugin and Google Analytics setup to further improve your search engine results standings and monitor traffic on your site.

5. Training & Launch

The site is ready for launch once the designer, copywriter, and client are all pleased with every last pixel. Because our websites are built on WordPress, they can be quickly and easily updated with new images and content as often as is necessary without any additional help from the designer, so an hour-long training session is provided for up to 3 people prior to launch. Two to four people (ideally not the copywriter and designer on the project) conduct pre- and post-launch quality assurance checks to ensure that there are no bugs, broken images, or misdirected links both before and after the site is launched.

[caption id="attachment_6062" align="aligncenter" width="573"]homepage-skin-labeled Our homepage, labeled.[/caption]

Web Design Terms & Definitions


Content management system (CMS)

Software that your website is built on (we use WordPress) that allows you to log in to the “back end” and easily make changes to content (including changing and removing text, images, and entire pages) after your site is launched.

Custom site

A website constructed completely from scratch on a content management system (we use WordPress). Best for large or complicated projects, e-commerce, integration of databases, and sites that require manipulation of or interaction with forms.

Theme customization

Best for small businesses who need a lower price-point and a simple site. Our designer purchases a pre-designed website template that works best for your needs and then customizes it with your logo, brand colors, images, and content. Since development time is eliminated, theme customizations have a much shorter timeframe than fully custom sites. Check out Key Web’s subsidiary, Emerge, for more information on theme customizations.

Stock photography/iStock

Stock photographs are generic images that can be used to give your site texture and interest if you don’t have high-quality photography at your disposal. iStock is a website that we use to source these images. Want to select your own stock images? Read this first.

Navigation/Nav

The navigation (often abbreviated to “nav”) refers to the menu structure of the website. The navigation can be formatted in several different ways: with items listed across the top (or even in the middle, like ours!) of the homepage, condensed into a menu button into a top corner of the homepage, or both!

Domain

Your website’s domain is its name—www.yournamehere.com—and address on the internet. You register for this particular identification string with a domain registrar and usually pay a yearly fee to keep it in your name.

Web hosting

Your web host is the company that rents your website its space on the internet. For a more in-depth definition, check out Emerge’s blog post on hosting. To learn about the different types of hosting and to help you determine which is right for your business, read Key Web’s post. Sometimes your web hosting company is also your domain registrar, but sometimes it isn’t. Knowing who hosts your website becomes important when you decide to redesign or update, or if your site becomes compromised by hackers.

Want to know more? View the complete list. Ready to jump into step 1? Let us know by completing our consultation form. We can’t wait to work together!

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                    [post_content] => Remember when you sat in a high school classroom and thought to yourself (or, if you were that kid, said out loud), “When are we ever going to use any of this?” If you happened to ask that when your poor English teacher was trying to inform you of the dangers of plagiarism, the answer is now, when you’re trying to create a web presence for the business you’re building from the ground up.

There’s a general misconception among the public that anything out there on the internet is just free to use as you wish, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Copying and pasting content that you find on the web without attributing it to its source is no different than turning in someone else’s essay and calling it your own—except that now the integrity of your business—not just your grade—is at stake. The reasons you shouldn’t plagiarize are rooted in morality, but the consequences are concrete: being sued, astronomical court costs, poor digital representation, and Google burying your site in search engine results may be the prices you pay for stealing content.



If you’re still not convinced, read on for more details on why you shouldn’t plagiarize:

It’s unethical.

Stealing someone else’s words—or intellectual property—can be more damaging than stealing their physical property. Physical items, while sometimes expensive or sentimentally valuable, can usually be replaced or replicated. Unique perspectives, ideas, and words make up a person’s or a company’s identity, and are often the product of years of dreaming, days of hard work, and hundreds of hours of coaxing and finessing and agonizing over. To steal that identity, in part or in whole, is to steal the creator’s livelihood. 

It’s against the law.

That’s right--the United States has a Copyright Law and you can read all 13 chapters and 16 appendices if you’d like more details, but essentially, it states that stealing, using, or passing off previously recorded ideas or material as one’s own is to commit fraud and is punishable by fines and even jail time. 

You can be sued or at the very least, embarrassed.

While you probably won’t be thrown in jail for copying web content, you are likely to be caught by the person you’ve stolen from, and they won’t be happy. If you're going to take a chance and "borrow" images or content from another site, be prepared for retaliation. Ask yourself if it's worth clients clicking on your newest blog post and seeing—where that perfect (stolen) image used to be—glaring black-and-white text boxes that say something like "Stop stealing our images." Besides being unprofessional, web content like that is unlikely to inspire confidence in your clients and customers—consider the value of your reputation.

Google and other search engines dislike duplicate content.

Even if you aren’t busted by the person you’re plagiarizing, stealing content can still have a negative impact on your website through search engine rankings. Google becomes confused when it finds the same content in two different places on the web, and when it tries to choose which version is most relevant for search engine results, both sites suffer by sinking in the rankings.

It doesn’t properly describe your business or services.

Really, there’s no such thing as a “generic” description of a business or service, and that’s actually good news for you. Your ability to convince potential customers that you’re the best option for their needs rests on your ability to communicate the specific ways you’re different from (and better than!) your competition. Write descriptions and content that make you stand out, not blend in. 

Bottom line: copying content is a dirty business practice and not worth the headache it’s likely to cause. 
Is the task of writing your website’s content daunting enough to give you panicked, high-school-term-paper flashbacks? Good thing we offer full copywriting.
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                    [post_content] => We published a blog post entitled “The Importance of Your Site’s Homepage” back in 2010, and while we’ve noticed it still gets a ton of hits, we’re also here to admit that a lot has changed since then. So, as the saying goes, out with the old and in with the new: here’s a 2017 guide to your homepage.

THE BIG THREE

We’re into making things a little simpler and more streamlined these days, so we’ve cut that 2010 mega-list of 8 homepage “must-haves” down to 3:

    
 	
  1.       Establish an identity and make a good impression with a clean design that utilizes your brand colors, typeface, logo, photography style, and any other elements that showcase your company’s personality.
    2. 



    
 	
  1.       Be user-friendly—highlight main attractions or pockets of information on the homepage and offer a clear navigation system. Take into consideration which pages users are likely to visit most often, and those which are necessary, but can be tucked away in a more inconspicuous location.
    2. 



    
 	
  1.       Supply relevant content. Ask yourself what visitors (both new and returning) are coming to your site to see, and provide them with the useful information they’re seeking.
    2. 


So what did we cut out? We decided a site-wide search tool is not necessary on all websites, fresh content doesn’t always trump relevant content, and—while we always want site visitors to read more—gimmicky “teasers” on the homepage are never a good idea.

GONE ARE THE DAYS OF “ABOVE THE FOLD”

In our 2010 post, we emphasized the notion that everything you want visitors to see on your site should be located “above the fold,” or above the 600 px mark (whatever is visible without scrolling). This concept is outdated, largely thanks to the pervasiveness of social media—in 2017, users’ first instinct upon arriving at a new website is to scroll, so the pressure to fit all content of importance within a screen-sized page is off.

There’s no doubt that you should certainly still seek to secure your users’ attention with that first screen, but there’s no need to cram in all of your relevant content. Ask yourself what you want your visitors to know about you first and also what your visitors most likely want to know: are you an architecture firm who seeks to grab new visitors with a stunning image of your most recent building? Or do you need to let your large population of returning visitors know about an event that’s just around the corner?

Our own recent redesign really showcases how a longer homepage can work for you. Our “above the fold” content has few words but lots of color, and what’s there gives our users our identity in a nutshell: we “help businesses build better digital identities,” and the services we offer include web design, branding, graphic design, and SEO. Upon scrolling, visitors find examples of our featured work, a brief description of our process, and an invitation to meet us for a free consultation. Each full-width section has its own visual identity, which gets the reader excited to continue scrolling and find out what’s next.



NEW VS. RETURNING VISITORS

It’s not necessary to prioritize one group of visitors over the other. A clean, comprehensive homepage should allow new visitors to explore and learn more about your company, and it’s safe to assume returning visitors will go directly to the page they need upon landing at your site.

FUNNELING YOUR USERS

This sounds much more manipulative than it really is. In theory, you shouldn’t have a lot of information on your website that isn’t important in some capacity, but there are still certain things you want your user to see, read, or interact with earlier or more often than other entities. Strategic design and calls-to-action can help you guide your users’ experience through your website and get the return you desire.

Design best practices, like using blank space to provide visual breaks or presenting essential information in a way that attracts the eye, capitalize on users’ natural tendencies to control their journey through the site. Using contrasting color, exaggerated sizing, or interesting shapes can also draw attention to specific pieces of information or calls-to-action.

Calls-to-action use graphics and/or words to compel users to complete a specific action: to sign up for a newsletter, join a program, enter an email address to receive a free trial, etc. They are often attention-grabbing buttons or full-width sections that are nearly impossible to ignore, and their verbiage should be enticing and specific to the action they are asking users to take (“sign up here” for a newsletter or membership). Stating up front the benefits to the user can also be helpful (“to receive 25% off your next order, enter your email address”).

THE BOTTOM LINE

We ended our 2010 post by emphasizing the necessity of making your purpose clear to your visitors within a few seconds of viewing. While it’s true that your website should be honest and straightforward in presenting your purpose, we know now that most users are web savvy, smart, and willing to scroll. Rather than cramming lots of information “above the fold,” try for a clean, visually-pleasing design that won’t intimidate or turn users off, then let your content unfold naturally down your homepage.

Is your homepage cluttered, outdated, or just plain ugly? We can help with that. (See what we did there? This is a call-to-action—one that hopefully entices you to check out our services!)
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            [post_content] => The homepage of a website for users is like Emerald City for Dorothy and Toto. To get there, they had one route: the yellow brick road. Well, websites only need one route home as well, and for many years it has been the home button on the site’s navigational menu.

But now a clickable logo will also take you back to the homepage and not only are users aware of this, but often they prefer it as a universal method of returning to a site’s homepage. And just as Dorothy didn’t need two yellow brick roads to get her to the green capital of Oz, you don’t need two routes home for your users either.

 

Only using a clickable logo

Ditching the home button from your navigation menu not only creates a better experience for your users by simplifying their choices, it also limits the number of items in your navigation menu. This allows search engines to better read your site which should help with your overall search rankings.

It also gives your users a better controlled experience; less is often more when it comes to a website’s content and when you don’t overload your user with options, they tend to navigate your site faster and more efficiently. Keeping your menu navigation simple and limited gives users less choices, which can help them identify their needs faster and ultimately provide a better experience.

Clicking the logo to get back to your site’s homepage is something that majority of your users understand and actually prefer. Plus there is a lot of ways a clickable logo can benefit your business. Not only is there less clutter on the navigation bar when the home button is removed, but a clickable logo will draw more attention to your logo and could ultimately help grow your brand. 

It’s what all the big guys are doing

Hey, hey—we aren’t copy cats by any means, but a lot of the bigger corporations are using clickable logos instead of a home button on their navigation menu as well. So it’s pretty safe to say that this practice is more than just a trend, as some would argue. 

Take a look at Starbucks’, Target’s, and Apple’s websites—all of their sites have clickable logos instead of a home button in the navigation menu. And because of this, their navigation menu is clean and better organized. Plus, their clickable logos reinforce their brand when users click them to go back to the site’s homepage. 

Our goal is easy navigation for your users

Behind every website we design, creating an excellent user experience is a core focus. We truly believe that your site’s functionality is strongest when the navigation menu is simple, clean, and limited to showing the best parts of your website. A repetitive home button on the navigational menu doesn’t do this for your site, which is why we strongly recommend removing it.

Instead, let us create a great looking logo for your site that will be linked back to your homepage. This will:

So, that’s why you shouldn’t have a home button the navigation menu. Our goal is to send those home buttons somewhere over the rainbow because the clickable logo is here to stay.


 

 

 
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Why You Don’t Need a Home Button on Your Website
WP_Post Object
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    [ID] => 5908
    [post_author] => 1
    [post_date] => 2017-01-19 13:52:05
    [post_date_gmt] => 2017-01-19 18:52:05
    [post_content] => We published a blog post entitled “The Importance of Your Site’s Homepage” back in 2010, and while we’ve noticed it still gets a ton of hits, we’re also here to admit that a lot has changed since then. So, as the saying goes, out with the old and in with the new: here’s a 2017 guide to your homepage.

THE BIG THREE

We’re into making things a little simpler and more streamlined these days, so we’ve cut that 2010 mega-list of 8 homepage “must-haves” down to 3:

    
 	
  1.       Establish an identity and make a good impression with a clean design that utilizes your brand colors, typeface, logo, photography style, and any other elements that showcase your company’s personality.
    2. 



    
 	
  1.       Be user-friendly—highlight main attractions or pockets of information on the homepage and offer a clear navigation system. Take into consideration which pages users are likely to visit most often, and those which are necessary, but can be tucked away in a more inconspicuous location.
    2. 



    
 	
  1.       Supply relevant content. Ask yourself what visitors (both new and returning) are coming to your site to see, and provide them with the useful information they’re seeking.
    2. 


So what did we cut out? We decided a site-wide search tool is not necessary on all websites, fresh content doesn’t always trump relevant content, and—while we always want site visitors to read more—gimmicky “teasers” on the homepage are never a good idea.

GONE ARE THE DAYS OF “ABOVE THE FOLD”

In our 2010 post, we emphasized the notion that everything you want visitors to see on your site should be located “above the fold,” or above the 600 px mark (whatever is visible without scrolling). This concept is outdated, largely thanks to the pervasiveness of social media—in 2017, users’ first instinct upon arriving at a new website is to scroll, so the pressure to fit all content of importance within a screen-sized page is off.

There’s no doubt that you should certainly still seek to secure your users’ attention with that first screen, but there’s no need to cram in all of your relevant content. Ask yourself what you want your visitors to know about you first and also what your visitors most likely want to know: are you an architecture firm who seeks to grab new visitors with a stunning image of your most recent building? Or do you need to let your large population of returning visitors know about an event that’s just around the corner?

Our own recent redesign really showcases how a longer homepage can work for you. Our “above the fold” content has few words but lots of color, and what’s there gives our users our identity in a nutshell: we “help businesses build better digital identities,” and the services we offer include web design, branding, graphic design, and SEO. Upon scrolling, visitors find examples of our featured work, a brief description of our process, and an invitation to meet us for a free consultation. Each full-width section has its own visual identity, which gets the reader excited to continue scrolling and find out what’s next.



NEW VS. RETURNING VISITORS

It’s not necessary to prioritize one group of visitors over the other. A clean, comprehensive homepage should allow new visitors to explore and learn more about your company, and it’s safe to assume returning visitors will go directly to the page they need upon landing at your site.

FUNNELING YOUR USERS

This sounds much more manipulative than it really is. In theory, you shouldn’t have a lot of information on your website that isn’t important in some capacity, but there are still certain things you want your user to see, read, or interact with earlier or more often than other entities. Strategic design and calls-to-action can help you guide your users’ experience through your website and get the return you desire.

Design best practices, like using blank space to provide visual breaks or presenting essential information in a way that attracts the eye, capitalize on users’ natural tendencies to control their journey through the site. Using contrasting color, exaggerated sizing, or interesting shapes can also draw attention to specific pieces of information or calls-to-action.

Calls-to-action use graphics and/or words to compel users to complete a specific action: to sign up for a newsletter, join a program, enter an email address to receive a free trial, etc. They are often attention-grabbing buttons or full-width sections that are nearly impossible to ignore, and their verbiage should be enticing and specific to the action they are asking users to take (“sign up here” for a newsletter or membership). Stating up front the benefits to the user can also be helpful (“to receive 25% off your next order, enter your email address”).

THE BOTTOM LINE

We ended our 2010 post by emphasizing the necessity of making your purpose clear to your visitors within a few seconds of viewing. While it’s true that your website should be honest and straightforward in presenting your purpose, we know now that most users are web savvy, smart, and willing to scroll. Rather than cramming lots of information “above the fold,” try for a clean, visually-pleasing design that won’t intimidate or turn users off, then let your content unfold naturally down your homepage.

Is your homepage cluttered, outdated, or just plain ugly? We can help with that. (See what we did there? This is a call-to-action—one that hopefully entices you to check out our services!)
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