What do some of the biggest and successful organizations have in common, apart from the fact that they are big and successful? The answer is that they have a great logo. Look up any popular organization and you will find a distinct and memorable logo behind it.

The logo can very well be considered the face of your business. So it needs to be original, exclusive, interesting and must be the perfect visual representation of all that your business/company/organization/corporate stands for. It must embody the company’s beliefs, values, mission, purpose and objective. It must be able to inspire trust and prompt instant recall. Yes, a logo does all these things, and a whole lot more.

As can be imagined, it’s going to be quite a task to ensure that your logo is able to improve the awareness of your brand amongst your target audience. But, keeping the tips given below in mind, the task can become a little easier.

Simplicity works Best

Some of the best logos are very simple. Take the case of the Apple logo; what could be simpler than an apple with a bite, the bite was given to ensure that people don’t confuse it with some other fruit. Some of the other logos that are as simple as they are recognizable are Nike, Sony, Yahoo, Google, and Dell amongst various others. Simplicity ensures that the logo can be easily recognized, wherever it’s placed. Such logos, because of the inherent simplicity of their design and purpose are able to make an impression that stays long after the people have seen your logo.

It should impress wherever and whenever it is used

Your logo is going to be used across different channels of communication, and must look good anywhere and everywhere. So, you must identify the various places in which your logo might appear such as brochure, websites, banner etc. and while designing a logo, you must ensure that your logo will look good if and when used in the places that you have identified. At times, you might have to decrease size of the logo, and at other times, you might want to enlarge its size by quite a bit. So, the use of fine lines,  choice of graphic format, fonts, color, texture should be such that it makes the right impression whatever its size and whatever the background on which its used.

The keyword is ‘Unique’

Your logo helps generate awareness about your brand and encourages brand recall. This is why it mustn’t resemble any other logo. It is the uniqueness of your logo that will allow it to create its own space in the minds of the audience. You must do everything you can, to ensure that your logo is different and has its own distinct identity. Here, it’s important not to take the easy way out and download those stocks images from the web and use them in your logo. Do not take a chance. You can take inspiration from various sources, but at the end of the day your logo should be your own creation and must be able to stand out from the crowd.

These are just three tips that should help you choose a logo that is memorable and has the longevity to keep impressing people for a long period of time.

A website is a sum of the various functions that it brings together on a single platform. It’s important to understand that website visitors will love a visually appealing design, but they will appreciate a highly functional design more than anything else. So, the focus should always be on the functional components that will be useful and which can ensure website success.

There are a few ‘must haves’ that can really make or break your website design. Let’s take a look at some of them. These haven’t been picked randomly and have not been given in any order of importance.

Well Thought Out Website Forms

Every website has forms and yours will have them too. Now, the question is whether you are going to use simple forms whose sole purpose will be to enable your customers to sort out any problems they might be having with your products or services; or they might be used to put in a query about your products and services – but nothing else. Otherwise, you could think about implementing intuitive website forms, which do all this and more. Such forms can help you initiate a far more personal interaction with your website visitors, which helps you improve customer service. The idea behind using such forms is helping open engaging channels of conversation between you and your customers and vice versa, to build a reliable and mutually beneficial working relationship. This is one way that you can ensure website success.

Social Media Integration

Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn etc. have left their mark everywhere, in all spheres of the online world and also contribute towards ensuring website success. How? By integrating Twitter Feeds and Facebook activity streams in your website, you are making it more engaging. Like it or not, these days, your website has become a means of initiating a conversation between you and your target audience. So, offsite conversations happening on your social media networks can be integrated with the exchanges taking place on your website, improving the overall engagement quotient of your website. Another related component of your social media integration are Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons that can be placed on the web page to enable visitors to share content that they like, by clicking the buttons. The content can be immediately shared with their followers on Twitter, Facebook and Google plus.

Viewable Photo galleries

Can something as ordinary as a photo gallery determine web design success? It definitely can, more so, because most websites don’t have a decent photo gallery. They get the visuals of the website spot on, but falter when it comes to choosing photo gallery. Let’s face it; using Java based photo galleries is no longer a worthwhile option, because it might not show up well if the website is accessed through a smartphone. More importantly, the photo gallery must be such that it is aligned with user requirements. So, a user might want a full page view of the photo gallery or might want to view one photo at a time. The idea is to put in place the kind of photo gallery that can keep the user on your site for a longer period of time.

These are by no means all the functions that you absolutely must implement in your website design. More often than not, the purpose and objectives of the website also determine its functions. The choice of functions must be a product of brainstorming and comprehensively charting out the direction of the website and its quantifiable goals. This ensures that the combined usability of the functions goes a long way in ensuring website success.

Validation and Testing are an integral part of designing mobile website. This is what will ensure that the website is mobile compliant and will work on the smartphones and tablets available on the market. What’s more, it’s only testing the devices on the various usability parameters that can ensure that its bug free.

The Unforgiving Nature of Mobile Browsers

As compared to desktop browsers, mobile browsers can be quite unforgiving. You misplace a few HTML tags and you have a problem on your hands. More importantly, the fact that mobile browsers are not as powerful as desktop browsers means they can’t handle more code, and therefore the markup for mobile websites must be perfect. With their small footprint in memory and on disk, mobile browsers don’t have the robustness of their desktop counterparts.

So, testing and validation is important.

Initially, you can check the markup that you have been developing for your mobile website using normal desktop browser, by using the same set of tools that you validate traditional sites with, for e.g. W3C validation etc.  Once the validators confirm the accuracy of your markup, you need to take the website through a series of live testing.

Crucial Mistake

One of the cardinal sins of mobile website testing is thinking a web browser or a desktop computer will help perfectly simulate the mobile experience. No doubt you can always test the functionality of the site on a web browser or a desktop browser, but you won’t be able to test your mobile website in a comprehensive manner. You can’t expect to replicate the mobile environment completely on your desktop. There are plenty of other things that need to be considered when it comes to mobile platforms such as the packet sizes of the mobile operation, content mime types, functionalities of the specific devices amongst various others.

So let’s take a look at some of the ways that can help you exhaustively test your mobile website.

• Buy a variety of Phones

Agreed this will be expensive, but not if you just buy a handful of phones that are representative of the mobile brands that your target audience is using. . What this means is that you will need to identify the kind of smartphones that your target audience is using and buy some of them. This idea is usually good for you, if your mobile website is not a one off thing and you will be developing more mobile websites or applications in the future. There are 5 mobile OS that you will need to test your website for, namely iOS, Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry, Android and Symbian. So, purchasing smartphones that are specific to these mobile OS will be a good idea.

• Using Emulators

You don’t have to buy emulators as they are freely available online. What these emulators allow you to do is see images in context and also the general layout of your mobile website. The disadvantage of using emulators is that they are real devices, so you can expect a perfect environment for testing, but the advantage is that they are free, so you shouldn’t avoid testing on them. Think of testing on emulators as the first step towards getting a bug free, mobile website.

• Taking the Help of your Friends

It’s the easiest way of testing your mobile website. You can ask your friends to lend you their mobile devices for some time. Use them to test your website. You might have used your online emulators to test the website thoroughly, but there is no denying the benefits of testing the website on a mobile device. You might like this ‘way’ of testing rather than buying mobile phones, but asking your friends will limit your testing on those phones that your friends have. What if they are only using phones that use the Symbian and Android OS? You will still need to test your website for iOS, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7.

It’s advisable that you use a testing strategy that is a combination of all the three ways listed above, but at the end of the day, it’s your choice. But, whatever the option you choose, it’s important that you keep testing, till you are absolutely satisfied.

Cut back to around ten years or so to a time when usability testing of websites was considered a luxury by businesses. But, back then no website owner was worried about the amount of conversions on their site. As long as their website was up and running, they were happy. But times have changed and it’s not only having a website and attracting traffic that is important, but also the amount of conversions it achieves. Optimizing the rate of conversions is now the focus of attention and online merchants are leaving no stone unturned to ensure that their website can convert as many visitors as possible into their customers.

This is why usability testing is important. The point is very simple. It is only a usable website that can guarantee conversions. Such websites reduce bounce rates and improve sales by offering users a highly satisfying user experience. Basically, usability testing involves, checking the website on various parameters.

Let’s take a look at what these parameters are:

Checking the Design for Credibility

Credibility is the key driving force of a website that ensures a high degree of conversions. If the design does not project credibility, it isn’t going to work for the customers. So, usability testing involves checking it for professionalism and whether it is able to deliver its message with clarity and without confusing the users.

The Navigability Check

Are the websites navigation buttons, easy to use and doing their job properly? Website visitors don’t like wasting their time, trying to understand the navigation of the site. They need to be able to go through website to the pages of their choice conveniently and quickly with effortless ease.  Great navigation turns into an essential time saver and helps visitors optimize their use of the website.

Checking the Response and Intuitiveness of the Website

The design features and functionalities of the website should be responsive to the needs of the user. What this means is that the website must be able to effectively respond to the user’s action. For e.g. in an ecommerce shopping cart, if visitors have chosen the products that they want to purchase and place them in their shopping cart, the payment button should be highlighted as soon as that happens. Doing a thorough testing of the website with respect to its standards of responsiveness and intuitiveness is an important component of usability testing.

Evaluating the Products or Services Page for its Ability to Make an Impression

There are three major components of an impressive products and/or services page – Images, Content and their Presentation. You need to put in place the best product images that are attention grabbing and can help visitors sit up and take notice. Also, you need to add eye catching content that enhances the marketability of the products. More importantly, the website should be able to present the images and content in a way such that they deliver a single, comprehensive and effective marketing message.

Testing Load Time

Designers very often are accused of designing a website for themselves rather than designing it for website visitors. They add a whole array of visuals and animation that makes the website impressive to look at and its creative navigation buttons also ensure the navigation is inventive, but in doing so, they compromise on the most important factor determining website usability – load time of the website. It’s of paramount importance that whatever the internet speed of your target user, the website must be able to load quickly. The visuals, animations, features and functionalities of the website must be such that they do not take a toll on the time taken for the website to load.

Apart from these crucial parameters, there are other parameters like cross browser functionality, help features, next action and call-to action-buttons and various others that are also tested for their feasibility and ability to create the necessary impact in the minds of their website visitors.

The idea behind ensuring website usability is to remove any barrier that the website might have created between itself and the user. This ensures that the website generates more interest, converts better, and improves its profitability.

 It was inevitable and something that was just waiting to happen. Adobe has announced that it is moving away from Flash software and is embracing HTML 5 for mobile devices. Industry watchers say that this was a move that was predestined; HTML 5 has emerged as the universal standard for displaying rich media on the World Wide Web, and Adobe was going to realize this fact sooner rather than later.

This is great news for those smartphone and tablet users, especially those using iPhone and iPads who couldn’t view Flash coded media on their devices.

Steve Jobs Proven Right

Back in April, 2011, Steve Jobs didn’t have nice things to say about Flash and said that it wasn’t a great choice for viewing rich content on mobile phones because it was closed, proprietary software and did not offer support for touch based mobile devices. He also said that the time of HTML5 had come and its time developers started to use this language instead of Flash as it was an open standard and allowed media content to be directly embedded, without need for middleware. Many experts dismissed this as rant, but it seems Adobe was taking notice.

HTML 5 for Mobile Devices

Adobe has abandoned developing Flash for mobile devices, and has woken up to the realization that it’s HTML 5 that is way ahead and not Flash when it comes to mobile platforms. All major mobile devices support HTML 5, which means that it has emerged as the definitive choice for the creation and deployment of content across multiple mobile platforms.

Adobe’s shift speaks a lot for HTML 5 as a universal standard for putting rich media content on mobile devices conveniently and efficiently and in a manner that ensures the highest standards or reliability. As more and more users are starting to access the internet through mobile devices, it makes perfect sense for development companies to start developing HTML 5 tools. This is why Adobe’s, move towards using HTML5 development tools such as Adobe Air etc. to build HTML 5 websites and applications for mobile devices isn’t surprising.

Flash Isn’t Dead

Adobe will continue to develop Flash for PC. Its aim is to use Flash for offering PC users advanced gaming experiences and premium video solutions, which also includes 3D graphics.  But, when it comes to mobile devices it’s shifted its attention to HTML 5. It realizes, as many other companies have realized that HTML5 is the future of mobile development and its increasingly getting difficult to justify the use of Flash for developing and deploying mobile compatible content. That’s not just working any more.

So, when it comes to mobile development, its goodbye Flash and Hello HTML 5.