Website Development – Xeplin Development

How Should I Use Google Analytics With My WordPress Site?

June 2, 2021October 17, 2024Website Development

Although just a few years ago web designers were relatively uncommon, website creation and monetisation is quickly becoming an extremely competitive field. While a lot of people try and create their own WordPress websites with the idea of quick, easy money, most of them fail.

The most common reasons for failure are people not really knowing what they are doing and people ignoring crucial warning signs about their website. Google analytics is an extremely useful tool for web developers which can be used to provide insights into websites and their performance.

What exactly is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a freemium service provided by Google. It is designed to help you get the most out of your website by providing you with a wide range of insights into the performance of your website and the behaviours of your visitors. Some of the services that Google Analytics provides include:

Online advertising campaign management. The Analytics platform allow you to see how visitors interacted with your Google Ads campaign, how successful your campaign was, and what campaigns worked best.
Tracking visitor numbers. Analytics tells you how many people visit your website, where they come from, and what time of day they visit. Real-time monitoring is also possible, and tells you exactly who is on your website and where they are from.
E-commerce reporting. If you run some sort of e-commerce store, then a few stats are going to be extremely useful when it comes to optimising your store. Google Analytics can give you information about the people who are shopping on your website and what they are buying.

Continue reading “How Should I Use Google Analytics With My WordPress Site?”

3 Web Design Trends To Avoid in 2018

March 18, 2018October 17, 2024Website Development

It is now the 18^th year since the turn of the new millennium, and the world of marketing has shifted into the digital world faster than we could have imagined. All businesses, big and small, know that a good online presence is more significant now than ever before. The importance of their presence in the digital world is going to keep on increasing. If you ask digital marketing experts, at the epicentre of a company’s online presence is their website. The trends in web design have been seeing shifts with every passing year with businesses constantly in a bid to improve the traffic to their websites and improve on their success.

The trends in web design are constantly changing. To stay ahead of the competition, the web design companies have to follow the latest trends. That being said, the trends for web designing that businesses follow have to be effective ones. Here are a few examples of web design trends that should be avoided in 2018.

Floating Content

The floating content on websites is something that is right there in the middle of your website and stays there while you scroll up and down the page. This can be anything from the menu options to advertisements to social media platform sharing options.

This web design trend is somehow being used quite liberally but it is an annoying trend that does the opposite of encouraging your visitors to engage. They can block some of the important content on your website and visitors close the tab because they want to see the content and not some omnipresent options blocking the content instead.

Endless Scrolling

Another strange web design trend that has recently picked up is the infinite scrolling. When people are scrolling down your website, the lower they go, the more content starts to appear. It is endless. This can become an annoying thing for your users since infinite scrolling effectively means they cannot access the footer of your website which is an important part of your website.

One Page Design

You will see some websites have their web design done in a way that all of the content that they have is on a single web page. While it makes sense that their intention is to give all the relevant information to visitors on a single page, it can have an adverse effect on the engagement factor for your company’s website.

Continue reading “3 Web Design Trends To Avoid in 2018”

Are You a Front End Web Developer

February 12, 2015October 18, 2019Website Development

Just ran across this link explaining the difference between developing the front end and the back end of a website. The “back end” is the “engine”: PHP, SQL, file storage, server interaction. The “front end” is the “body”: XHTML, CSS, Javascript, and Flash. It gets scary when you have to mix the two, but that’s exactly what AJAX is all about.

It’s worth pointing out that, as the article states in discussing Dreamweaver, Frontpage, and Adobe Pagemill, “As soon as you need the site to fulfill a specific task, these WYSIWYG editors stop being that handy.” And yes, your worst nightmare is to have to take a website done in a visual editor and hack on the code. Glory be, what a mess! As long as a web page’s only job is to sit there and look pretty, a WYSIWYG editor is the way to go… but then, why not just use Photoshop? Freelance web designers see this all the time: the client has drawn up a page in Photoshop, and now wants it sliced-and-diced into a working web page. Experience shows that this doesn’t always have the desired results. It’s like trying to make a banquet out of frozen instant dinners. At some point, those plastic trays and sectioned compartments really start to get in the way.

Continue reading “Are You a Front End Web Developer”