posted by Khurram

If you've worked with Blue Beetle recently, there's a good chance the topic of "usability" has come up more than once. That's because, like many of our counterparts, we believe it's a trait that no serious online marketer can afford to ignore – in the same league as search engine optimization or compatibility across different browsers.

Most clients understand this intuitively: the easier it is for people to move around your website and find what they're looking for, the more likely they are to decide to do business with you. The difficulty isn't in seeing the value of usability, but putting it in practice.

What's needed is a way to add features to an existing online platform, without having to sacrifice speed and performance for your visitors.
As it turns out, there is a tool that does exactly that. It's called AJAX, which stands for asynchronous JavaScript and XML. While I'm sure that clears up the issue for those of you who spend your leisure hours looking through web design articles, maybe I should point out that in the real world, that basically means that AJAX allows your website to run more like a desktop application would – cleanly and seamlessly by displaying portions data dynamically, instead of refreshing the entire page when loading new data from the server.

The result isn't just an improvement in usability... it's a whole new chapter. By changing content and adding resources as your visitors input information, AJAX lets them read, shop, and navigate with a level of data and responsiveness that wouldn't have been possible a few years ago.

For your website to be helpful to your visitors – not to mention profitable for you – it needs to have a high level of usability, and there's no better way to achieve that in this day and age than using AJAX.

posted by Khurram

In some ways, it seems like the Internet has been with us forever. It’s easy to forget that in the midst of our increasingly virtual world, your website might be the first – not to mention last and only – point of contact for an interested customer or colleague. A company with a poorly constructed home page, or one that doesn’t accurately reflect their vision, goals, or unique selling propositions, no longer has anywhere to hide… or anyone to hide behind.

In the “old days,” a smiling face at the front counter or a friendly voice on the phone could be enough to seal the deal. Business was all about relationships, and marketing materials, early websites included, were usually secondary to the people you employed. Now, strategies have changed slightly. Relationships still matter, but they are increasingly built from initial online impressions.

That seems obvious when you stop to think about the ways people use the Internet, but it has some heavy implications for your home page design and message. If you’re going to engage someone to interact with you in some way – and what business site isn’t designed to gather leads, sell products, or promote a message? – then it had better convey some key pieces of information, namely: who you are, what you do really well, and how you can help the visitor, direct from the home page.

What’s more, that information needs to be obvious and accessible, regardless of what type of browser or device they’re coming to you from. If your home page isn’t loading correctly, that’s a problem.

A shortcoming in any of these areas is going to result in a miss; the reader is going to surf along and find what they’re looking for on a competitor website. Wasted visitors are the equivalent of wasted time, wasted money, and a potentially large number of wasted future sales.