Are Template Sites as Good as Custom Website Designs?

When a company wants to put a website together, it can go one of two ways: create a custom website design or a template website design.

Is one better than the other? Well, sort of. Each route has its own pros and cons. What determines which one is better is up to your business.

Custom website design

The nice thing about this route is that you get a design that is completely unique to your business. You don't have to worry about anther business's site looking like yours. You get to tell the web design company what you want and how you want it.

The downside to this route is the cost and time. Custom websites take longer than templates and they will take longer since everything has to be coded and created.

Template website design

Templates are a nice option for companies who want a website that looks good but does not break the bank. That is a major perk to templates, the design is already done so you just pay to use it. The time frame to complete a template site can be drastically smaller than a custom site.

The downside to a template site is that other people can be using the same template or you buy the whole template but it costs extra to do so. Some template creators charge for changing the color scheme and other little things; so while you still save money, it can be annoying to pay for so many little things.

Both custom sites and template sites can look fantastic and come with internal optimization so your site can rank on search engines.

So which do you choose? Whichever route you decide, hire Integraphix to help your business get the best site it can have. We are a Chicago web design studio with 25 years experience. We will help you figure out which is best for your business & put it all together.

Don't get overwhelmed.

10 Excellent Font Pairings for Your Website

Picking out fonts to use for your website design is not easy and picking out two of them can be even harder. One quick rule of thumb is to chose a serif font with a sans serif; pairing a serif and a sans serif creates a elegant contrast.

Our creative team took a look at 10 different pairings that we believe work wonderfully together. They never fail to look great on websites and accentuate the headlines and copy. Go ahead and experiment with different sizes, weights, and so forth to get the desired typeface you want.

Frutiger is a elegantly legible typeface. It was originally created for easy reading on signs at airports; this font is ideal for headlines for quick reading. With its sans-serif characters, it blends lovely with Minion, another easily legible typeface. Minion was inspired by the fonts from the Renaissance. 

 Any web designer or graphic designer will agree the Minion family is a must to have in their pocket. Due to its old-school figures, small caps, swashes and glyphs, Minion Pro is a suitor for a wide array of duties. It pairs wonderfully with Myriad. 

You will find these two fonts already installed on most operating systems; this pairing is ideal both for style and its ease, since they are available to people with even basic softwares. Gill Sans is a nice friend to many typefaces. Its history states it was created for the London Underground system with its sans serif. It pairs lovely with Garamond. 

 Clarendon has clear, objective, and timeless form that allows it to be beautiful in both large and small sizes. These characteristics make it a great partner in crime to Trade Gothic and its earthy structure.

 Avenir is an interesting font since it has thicker vertical strokes than horizontals and shortened ascenders. These characteristics make Avenir a great teammate to Minion as it can be great for both display and body copy. The old style fonts of the world, such as Minion, do great with it. 

Bodoni has thick and thin strokes, these strokes allow Bodoni to be very beautiful. When paired with Futura, they become a power couple. You will see this pairing in many style and fashion magazines.  

Caslon is a bold serif typeface, it has short ascenders and descenders with simple modulation. Univers is a neutral fellow and so it pairs well with Caslon.  

This pairing is a champion with professional web designers who are not willing to settle for simple web standards. The wonderful serif typeface, Georgia, and its mate, Verdana, are perfect for screens. 

 This partnership is a definite crowd pleaser wherever it goes. Clean and natural Helvetica makes it the perfect teammate for Garamond, an elegant typeface. 

Baskerville is an old soul but still has a lot of spunk; it was designed in 1757, it has a historical commonality with Franklin Gothic, designed in the 19th century. Sophisticated and contrasting, this pairing is a real winner. 

New Web Domains Cross the Horizon: .porn and .sucks

yourbrandX.sucks! yourbrandX.porn! Will be new domains available to brands, celebs, and even general public in the near future.

When creating a website, it is one thing to have to create a great web design but you also have to put great thought into the site's domain. Of course, there is the good chance a brand can just use their brand name as the domain but other creative solutions arise as a solution.

The idea of buying these domains may seem like a good idea for brands to help protect their reputation. Brands already have to worry about places like social media and review sites for disgruntled consumers, ex-employees, etc. to voice their concerns and frustrations but with these two new domains,  that level of branding attacks could take to a whole new level.

If a brand wants to capture these domains, it will cost them $2500 a year; right now, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), is allowing brands an early period to capture these domains before the general public or their competitors can, which is from March 30 & lasts 60 days.

Many brands and celebrities have decided to purchase a .sucks or .porn domain, or both, before other people can to protect themselves; Apple, Taylor Swift, to name a couple.

Of course, these are not the only new domain suffixes to hit the market, others are more innocuous, such as .party, .rocks, .shoes, etc.

These new domain suffixes are supposed to allow a new flow of creativity for brands to create domains, which makes for a fun time for a Chicago web design company, such as ourselves.

One benefit, instead of a negative, for brands is that they can either buy these domains themselves and use them as a place to field negative news and learn from it, or, let someone else buy the domains and monitor them for what changes to make.

Does your business want to create a new website or upgrade its domain? Then email Integraphix, a Chicago web design agency.

Does Image Size Matter on a Website?

When looking at a website for a B2B business, you may notice that there is a trend with these sites: large product images. This is a good trend that is catching on with B2Bs since the larger product images enable the businesses to highlight the important features and parts of their products and services.

This is a trend that is being appreciated by both consumers and web design teams. Consumers like larger product images because of the reason we stated as being a positive for the businesses: the large images help see the important features of a product or service in an easier way. As a Chicago web design studio, we like to see the larger images.

Having larger images on a website helps reinforce the benefits of a product or service in a valuable way. People love images, people are drawn to them, and people analyze them. An image helps explain something succinctly when words are too cumbersome. This is even better when you can label parts of the image with letters or numbers, then explain those markings with a legend by the image.

People remember images and often the text with the image, versus just the text. Placing an image, especially a good-sized image, with your text is important with larger bodies of text, which people tend to skim over.

Does your website need a redesign? Or simply help with images? Then email Integraphix - a Chicago web design company - we have over 25 years experience. 

Do You Know What People Say About Your Business Online?

Your business works hard to build and protect its reputation so it can grow and be respected. Everything your business does is ultimately to improve its reputation; you want consumers to be happy so they keep business with you and talk about you with their friends & family.

Your reputation is the trust that is built with the consumer; it takes a long time to build up and can be seemingly strong but one bad review and things get shaken. You might not even do anything to earn the bad review. Sometimes, we run across a disgruntled customer who is looking to complain about anything and everything and they leave a hurtful review on your site, Google, Yelp, wherever.

Then what? 

People see that review, they wonder if it is true; some people ignore it, while others believe it. Maybe it costs you some potential customers or clients.

Your business needs to protect its reputation with reputation management from Integraphix. Our reputation management software is meant to keep you at ease and keep your business free from stress of a bad review.

What do you get with reputation management services from Integraphix? We will help you…

• Real Time Reporting
• When someone posts a review, you are notified within a minute. Stay on top of what is being said about your business. You can see your reviews, overall feedback rating score, and average online rating score. 
• Real-time SMS and email alerts
• Active monitoring of review sites
• Connect your review sites such as Yelp, Google+, Yahoo, and other review sites to know when your company receives a review anywhere on the web. 
• Route to the reviews
• When a review is posted, there is a link that connects directly to the actual review, allowing you and our reputation management team to reach out to the reviewer. 
• Ability to suppress negative reviews & share positive reviews 
• Spread the good news when you get a good review! Post it on your social media so your fans can find out about the success, as well. 
• Control the negative reviews so they don't spread like wildfire. 
• Prevent duplicate reviews. 
• Positive and negative routing
• Depending on the feedback, reviewers are intelligently routed to different landing pages.
• Negative reviewers are routed to a page that encourages them to explain their review and another chance, instead of allowing them to post a negative review directly. 

Of course, these are not the only features available with reputation management available from Integraphix, for more information about this service, email Integraphix. 

5 Web Design Lessons We Learn From Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is almost here, just a couple days from away. There are many things to learn from the day, and not just how to be romantic with a loved one, but also lessons about great web design. A website is like your company's significant other, they compliment each other and one cannot succeed without each other.

So what can we learn about professional web design from Valentine's Day?

1. Be creative. Any good lover will tell you that you need to bring out your creative side when planning an evening on Valentine's Day. Think about things the other person likes and would enjoy doing or places they would enjoy going to on that special day.

A great web design is creative. This means that you have things on your site that really "wow" the people who visit it. One of the worst things that can happen to a website design is that it comes out boring and uninspired. You can tell when a website was produced with no inspiration behind it because it lacks the ability to inspire. You need to get your message across to the people who view your site and if that vessel does not intrigue, then it will fail at delivering this message. There are several ways to make a site more creative:

• Great transitions between pages
• Color schemes
• Presentations of copy and images
• Sales tabs
• Great copy
• Great images
• Fun interactive opportunities
• Creative background(s)
• Video(s)

It is important to note that while being creative, your site still has to be effective and not overly complicated. When a site gets too cute, it also loses its usefulness; this creates a waste of money and time. There is a fine line between being creative and understandable, any one of our Chicago web design agency creators will tell you this. 

2. Don't be predictable. One of the worst things you can do on Valentine's Day is pull the same routine year after year. Don't be the significant other that reserves a table at the same restaurant, draws the same heart in the steam on the mirror, and buys the same box of chocolates. While this can be cute, the likelihood is that there is a rut and things are uninspired, your efforts are just to get by and not in trouble.

This does tie into the previous point in that when you are creative, however, just because you are being creative does not mean you are not going to be predictable. You can still be predictable while being creative. There are a lot of creative ways to put together a site that have been done before, if everyone is using those techniques, then you are likely to be predictable. One common way of being predictable is to have a site that is purely informational; too many sites on the web fall under this umbrella. Another way to be predictable is to have copy and images just pasted on a page, without any sort of design or purpose.

3. Make your site easy to love. When you are in a relationship, you want to be lovable, right? Of course! You do things, say things, behave certain ways, etc. that you know your significant other appreciates and you hope they do the same for you.

The same concept applies to designing a website. You want your website to be loved! This is two-fold: your site has to be loved by humans and it has to be loved by search engines. There are several ways to make your site lovable: 

• Good navigation. If your site has poor navigation, both humans and search engines will leave your site, unlikely to come back. Everything that is on your site must be accessible within two clicks. Also, there should be more than one way in and out of every page. 
• Helpful information. If your site does not answer all possible questions of the person who ventured to your site, then they will leave your site and go elsewhere. It also has to be helpful in showing the site viewer why your company is best at what it does or sells. 
• Internal SEO. As we mentioned with good navigation, your site has to have multiple avenues in and around every page, of course, this is not the only aspect of good internal SEO. For good internal SEO, your site needs optimized images, keywords, title tags, meta descriptions, H1s, H2s, H3s, etc. It also needs to be easily understandable-- yeah, search engines can tell the readability of the text on your site and how easily it can be understood; poorly understandable sites are not liked as much. Your site also needs plenty of copy -- good copy. 

4. Make the site beautiful. When getting ready for Valentine's Day, you do your best to look good for your significant other. You take a shower, style your hair, put on a great outfit, maybe a perfume or cologne, the whole nine yards.

Now, take that mentality and apply it to your web design. Have good designs, art, images, and good colors. Do what you can to make the site aesthetically appealing but do not go overboard and make the site too cute (remember, a site that is too cute becomes a site that loses its effectiveness). 

5. Show the site off. You want to show off your date, right? Take them out for a night on the town, go to a restaurant, a park, a show, bar, wherever. The bottom line is that you have someone you find attractive and want to show the world that you love them and for people to say, "Wow, look who they're with!" 

It is time to show off your website. This is effectively done with external SEO as well as promoting your site with a blog, social media marketing, a business card, and other methods. You would not want to create a site and then let it sit at home, all dressed up with nowhere to go. Make people say, "Wow, what an incredible looking site. I'm jealous it is not mine!" when they visit your website. 

Go create a beautiful website and have a fantastic Valentine's Day. Email Integraphix if you are interested in what you read. Does your business need a website? Then let us help you create one that is beautiful, effective, and worth showing off. 

Integraphix Work: iPhone & Android App Design

A longtime client of our Chicago web design company, Weldbend, came to us and asked if we could do a job for them; the job was to create the design and do end-user research for iPhone and Android apps.

Since our creative marketing team was well versed in Weldbend's branding,  products, and their culture, the design inspiration came very naturally for us. Due to this, the ideas for the bonus features that and end-user would appreciate such as "favorites", notes, and easy sharing with their company or colleagues in the industry could happen.

The Weldbend app contains information that is necessary for those in the field of construction who are working directly with Weldbend products (such as plumbers). In the image, you can see the homepage of the app (same for both iPhone app & Android); in addition seeing the homepage, you can see the other pages, such as the "Fittings" page.

The app is essentially Weldbend's entire catalogue of products fit into a phone, which is especially handy when you need to quickly reference some information, order a part, or complete another task but can't fit the large catalog in your back pocket.

Having an app for your business can be a great way to remain relevant in the minds of consumers, have quick access, and engage with them. Does your business need app design? Then email Integraphix and our Chicago web design team will work with you to create the perfect app for your business.

Chicago Web Design Example: Rubino Dentistry Website

Project description: Rubino Dentistry had an outdated site that was not generating many leads, if any. The site was very limited, non-inviting, and lacked many features that modern sites have.

Since the site was designed over four years before, Rubino Dentistry came back to Integraphix for the website redesign. We analyzed modern dental sites and compared the findings we had with what we knew to be great web design techniques and features, creating a prime example of a terrific dental website.

We incorporated a dual-entry slider, with content entering the slider image spot from both sides. In addition to a page designated for patients, we installed a page specifically for new patients, so they would have a place to go to gain knowledge of the office without having to scour the site (despite all information being easily found). Web visitors can make an appointment right from the site, from any page of the site. The homepage features a real-time social media update plug-in so viewers can see what Rubino Dentistry is posting about at any moment. 

Our real pride and joy of the site, though, was our "Ask the Dentist" feature. Visitors to the site can fill out the question box with a question about anything dental related (free-type, not pre-selected, which is what makes it great). Then, they will get a response directly from Dr. Rubino. 

The site was completed within the stated time frame and was under budget. Ross Rubino and his team love the site and have even generated leads from it!

Does your business need a new website? Then contact Integraphix and see what our Chicago web design company can do for you! All of our sites are custom-built and meet most budgets. We built every site to be mobile-responsive and SEO-friendly. 

Integraphix Case Study: Body in Motion Website Design

A great website is something that is not always easy to accomplish; some web designers promise the world and then give you garbage & you lose trust. However, when you find the right professional web designer, a custom website design is not the hassle that it has to be.

Our Chicago web design company was contacted by Body in Motion for a custom website design that would be able to emphasize their unique & state-of-the-art approach to fitness and physical training in Chicago. Our web designers wanted to approach this job in a way that would result in the site giving BIY the image of a modern, effective, and cutting-edge company.

Under a tight deadline, our designers and developers worked seamlessly to create this product of loveliness that you see above. The BIY site features a custom and easy to use Content Management System (CMS), internal SEO, functioning appointment calendar, and client login.

The return on investment-- Due to the site that Body in Motion received, they were able to give a much more professional image and branding. Not only did they get this successful ROI but their site saw a 436 percent increase in traffic over their previous site after one month, 46 percent of the traffic coming from organic SEO efforts (and not referrals) that resulted in great rankings-- 41 percent of this traffic was generated by Google, alone. This increase in traffic created a lot of business leads.

Does your business need a better website? Remember, your website is your 24/7 salesman and is giving visitors an impression of your business, even when you are not there. If your site lacks "wow", then you can be missing out on some business. Contact Integraphix to see what we can do for your business-- we can do a website redesign or built you a whole new site.

Happy New Years from Integraphix

www.integraphix.com