For those who run their own business, going into a new year is the perfect opportunity to reflect on your business’ direction and to set some goals for the upcoming year. Some might call these resolutions, but they are bigger than that. If you want to make 2015 your most successful year yet, setting goals and having a plan for growth is essential. Here are three ways to help ensure 2015 is a year that you look back on fondly when considering your business’ achievements.

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The use of colour is a persuasive and significant aspect of marketing. Ask any professional promotion and marketing companies, such as The Print Group, and they will confirm the importance of strategic colour selection in influencing customer opinions and perceptions of products.

Colours Do Not Always Produce the Same Effects

Although colours can influence us in particular ways, personal preferences, the experiences we have had, cultural considerations and many other factors influence our responses to colours, so no two people’s reactions to colours in advertising will be identical.

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The world moves faster than it ever has before. For businesses to thrive in the 21st century, the only option is to embrace change. Troublingly, precious few organisations are keeping strict a pace with today’s rapidly evolving technology. In order for a business to differentiate itself, it must be able to harness cutting edge technologies and build a strong strategic formula around them. But which will be of most use to you and your business? Here are a few of the top contenders.

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The Surface tablet is a pretty good device, but this device and the fear of tablets and mobile phones led Microsoft to create the truly terrible Windows 8 operating system. The notion that a powerful desktop needed to be reduced to tiles you touched on a screen and dumbed down programs resulted in a pathetic user experience. Solid programs like Skype disappeared, and lame mobile versions with few features showed up instead.

The staggering stupidity of this company under Steve Ballmer has led to countless misteps in the PC and operating system market. Will the ineptitude continue with Windows 10, or will they get this one right like they did with Windows 7?

Designing an effective website is more than just making sure a page looks good and ranks high on a Google search. For a website design to work, there needs to be a seamless blend of form, function and an ability to immediately engage visitors from whichever page they land on.

Below are five fundamental design principles that every website should have.

Strong Goals & Objectives

Why does the website exist? What purpose does it serve? These are pivotal questions that should be answered before embarking on a web development project. There is no ‘right’ answer to the questions, as each business is different but the fact that if they want the website to work for them they have to know why they are making it remains the same across any company in any industry.

Consistent Branding

Customers and clients should be able to recognise a business, whether they go into a shop or office or digitally engage with the organisation. This is where hiring a full service agency like simple.com.au can be really effective as the brand identity can be creatively applied across all communication mediums and customer touch points.

Usability

No matter how the site looks aesthetically, it is crucial to ensure that it works on any browser on any device and has user friendly functionality and intuitive navigation. It should be easy for customers to do business with them from the website and find their way around to what they need. Consider how readable it is as well – while dark backgrounds often create impact, text on a black background (even when in a contrasting colour) can be difficult to read

Meet Expectations

There are some things that just are on the internet – for example, underlined or coloured text is generally reserved for hyperlinks; boxes typically mean that someone can free type into the field and if there are photographs of stock, people assume that there will also be relevant information to accompany them like pricing, dimensions etc. Some rules are not meant to be broken, so no matter how unconventional or creative a site design is, sticking to the standard and accepted practices is still important.

It Should Load Quickly and Not Take up Too Much Data

More and more people are shunning the desktop and laptop computers of times gone by and relying only on mobile devices and this is crucial for designers to keep in mind. Mobile users want their information to be rapidly accessible, and they don’t wait around as long as a desktop user does for a page to load. Consider the fact that many of the site’s visitors will be using the mobile phone network or public WiFi to access the page and design accordingly.

Other basic design principles like descriptive page titles, engaging and effective copy written for the user not the search engine, and effective use of white space are also still important when it comes to how the site is going to look and perform – but those elements need to be applied after these five considerations have been addressed.

What do you think are the basics of effective and emphatic web design?