Five J Design Blog

Everyone wants a functional, beautiful website that takes their visitors breath away!

"Wow look at that! Did you see that graphic, amazing! ohhh ahhhh!"

As a designer we love "oohhhs" and "ahhs" with our designs. As marketers, if we really boil down what this website should be doing, we might need to rethink the "ohhs' for a more to-the-point message that ends up with results. Results being new business directly from your website.

It seems like we're a broken record when it comes to talking about responsive design, but the matter of fact is that many websites we come across here at 5j Design are not built with responsive web design. 

So, let's take a step back and talk about the essentials of responsive web design and why it matters to you.

Design trends are constantly changing and it takes time and energy to keep up with these changes, so we have compiled a list of some trends to keep a look out for in 2016. 

Let's say you are a business owner or maybe a marketing manager for your company. You have few choices when it comes to your marketing:

1. Do I hire a graphic designer to work for my company?
2. Do I skip hiring a designer and try to do it myself?
3. Do I outsource my marketing efforts to a marketing agency or firm?

Each of these options has its pros and cons, but the real question to ask yourself is: "how much time am I willing to give towards my marketing and will it be effective in the end?" For this article, we are going to focus in on the benefits of outsourcing graphic design work for your next marketing campaign or web site design project. 

When it comes to your business or organization, the quality of your graphic design materials matter. Just take a look around. High quality graphics are everywhere.

They’re on our smartphones and tablets, apps, digital billboards, on our TVs, social media and on our websites. Business owners, schools, churches and organizations have started to step up their game and are using high quality graphic designs. Gone are the days when a free piece of clip-art will work.

 Have you ever pulled up a web site that made you want to pull your hair out? Or that web site that is a never-ending maze of pages and you can never seem to get back to where you came from? Maybe you can't even find a simple phone number or an address? We've all been on that web site. It sucks, it's bad for you as a visitor, but it's so much worse for the business. Your website is most often a customer's first impression of your business, and if it is a nightmare you're going to lose leads... forever! Well maybe not forever...

Think back to when you first launched your website. You were so proud to have it up and now what is your site doing for you? Has it been a year or more since you've done anything on your site? Here are some things you can do to keep your website current.

Have you noticed your website ranking slip on Google? Is your website not showing up like it use to? Has the competition passed you up? It's okay, take a breath, you can fix this. 

Have you ever been to a website and couldn't find what you were looking for? Or clicked on a page, but couldn't get back to where you began? How frustrating is that!? One key component to a good web design is having a well-thoughtout sitemap. 

Here's how you can create an organized sitemap.

When building a website one might get stuck on the question, what's better? template web design or custom web design?  That really depends a quite a few things! There are certainly pros and cons for each solution. This article is written with some ideas and questions to ask yourself when you get to this point.