PSPINC Official Company Blog

Affinity diagramming is a technique created by Japanese anthropologist Jiro Kawakita in the 1960’s. It’s an idea creation method designed to help you organize ideas by their natural relationships with each other. It can be helpful for organizing and consolidating information about products, processes, or other complex issues or problems.

It’s a technique often used by Product Designers to help decide how to best organize information for an app or website in a way that will be most intuitive for users who might be unfamiliar with certain products or services.

How to use the Affinity Diagram technique:

• Gather your product team for a brainstorming session.

• Record notes and ideas about a specific product onto note cards or sticky notes.

• Have the entire group organize notes/ideas into groups that are in some way related.

• Have a discussion with your team to define categories from these relationships, and select header cards for the various categories that clearly identify the common thread.

Affinity Diagramming can be a very useful method to help you come up with your information architecture for a website or application. It allows you to move beyond habitual thinking and preconceived categories, utilizing a more intuitive approach to grouping information. This can result in a product structure that is easier to understand for end users.

The PSPINC design team would be happy to help you organize your website in a way that best serves your target audience.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. 1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

Make a personal connection with your customers

Good for search engine optimization

1. Provides fresh content on your website which tells search engines that your site is actively being updated. This encourages search engines to crawl your website more frequently.

1. Blogging allows you to use keywords that your customers are likely to search to find your website. The more those keywords are organically found on your website through blog content, the more likely it is that a search engine will serve your site to your customers.

1. Allows you to reach a specific audience with each post. At PSPINC we offer numerous different types of services, from web design to web and mobile application development to technical support. Often each service caters to different types of customers. The keywords one type of customer uses in search engines to find you may be different from another. Blogging allows you to fill the gaps and cast the widest net possible.

An avenue for showcasing your company culture and news

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. 1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

• How many pages do you need?
• Do you have content and images ready?
• Can you provide some samples of websites you like?

Custom-built Website

• Pros: Generally quicker to build, and thus more cost-effective for initial development. Often less bloated under the hood so it is capable to be much more optimized than a content management system for search engines.
• Cons: Unless you know how to code yourself, you will need to hire a developer to make every little update. If you frequently change your site this can prove to be costly, and challenging if your updates are time-sensitive.

Content Management System (CMS) Website

• Pros: Provides tools for the website owner to make updates immediately themselves, lowering the cost associated with future changes. Many have plugins that are easy to install and use to add more to your website.
• Cons: Initial development is longer and more costly. There is also the risk of the website owner breaking their website when making updates. You will be responsible for making necessary security updates as time goes on (very prevalent with WordPress). Sometimes running these updates can cause issues with various areas of your website.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. 1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

When talking about what makes a good website, we often point to a good design and useful content. However, there is a component to web design and development that isn’t actively talked about at the surface level. To industry professionals, this is called UX, which stands for user experience.

What is UX?

According to Wikipedia, it is defined as:

"How a user interacts with and experiences a product, system or service. It includes a person's perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency."

This is a critical and often overlooked component of web design and development. Having the most beautiful graphics and well-crafted content means nothing if it is not arranged in an easy-to-navigate manner.

Improving your UX

Our team of Designers and Developers is always focused on the user experience in all of our projects. From our cloud-based business tools to custom application development projects to sites we design for customers just like you - user experience is a critical consideration for everything.

You don’t have to be UX Designer to make sure you are providing your customers with the best experience on your website. Below are a few tips you should consider when working on your company’s website.

Have a simple and organized navigation

I know it’s tempting to immediately focus on the design of your website. However, a critical first step is to determine the purpose of your website and then creating a sitemap to map out all of the pages you need to create.

Part of the sitemap process is to determine how you will organize your pages into the website's navigation.

Your site navigation should:

• Not exceed more than 7 top-level navigation items. If you have more than 7 they should be arranged into a sub navigation beneath ‘parent’ top-level items.
• Not feature a sub-sub navigation, meaning having a dropdown menu for your dropdown menu items.
• Pick clear and simple page names so users know where to go to find the information they need.
• Make sure your navigation is easy to access and click on mobile devices. Over half the world’s web traffic is browsed on mobile after all.

Consider “above the fold” content on your home page

Every website has a purpose. Be it lead generation, sharing information, sales, etc. “Above the fold” refers to content that is seen on a web page without requiring any scrolling. The “above the fold” space on the home page is your most prime piece of real estate when it comes to hooking your customer/site visitor. When used incorrectly it is the quickest way to lose them as well.

When creating your website determine what is the ultimate goal and use this space to funnel those requests to this location. If your website exists to sell products, focus on popular items and link to pages where they can purchase them. Do you gather leads? Send them to a simple online form (we have an online form building tool for that).

Keep it simple

Nobody is more passionate about your business than you. So it goes without saying that it is tempting to give site visitors all of the information they would ever need and more.

Unless the purpose of your website is to deeply document information it is always recommended to keep the content and layout simple. The fact of the matter is these days customers want information at their fingertips as quickly as possible. If they are looking for an answer but find an overwhelming amount of text that is poorly arranged, they are likely to bounce and find that information elsewhere.

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We are just scratching the surface on what can be done to provide site visitors with quality UX. However, following the above steps will get your website off to a good start so you can maximize its impact.

If you would like some professional assistance auditing your existing website’s UX, please reach out to us. We have years of industry experience on tap to help you and would love to help take your website project to the next level.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. 1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

Does your company sell your products or services online? If your company is in the manufacturing, distribution, or retail sales industry, then you are selling products, and I would like to talk about that another time.

A service business provides services regularly, rather than delivering goods as products. It is also considered a service when the customer comes to the location to receive service. In short, anything that does not involve the delivery of a product is a service.

For example, medical appointments, consulting, maintenance, beauty salon appointments, tutoring, parking lots, lodging, restaurants, and so on. Needless to say, these are things that are not sold on Amazon (although I'm sure Amazon will appear in the future). By integrating them into your website, you can use your site to sell these services.

At Pacific Software Publishing, Inc., we have developed custom reservation systems in the past. Why don't you consider selling your services online using the Internet for your business? Needless to say, all of the hosting services we offer have been developed so that they can be purchased online.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. 1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

What is responsive design?

Why is responsive design important?

Is your website mobile-friendly?

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. 1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPinc Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

Enter "Responsive Design"

More than one way to build a responsive website

1. Mobile-first: It’s the idea of first building a website for the lowest browser size (mobile). This version should display the most basic functions and features. Anything that is perhaps unnecessary is hidden or pushed further down the page. As you advance to tablets and PC’s, additional interactions, effects, and complex layouts are slowly added over time.
2. Graceful degradation: This is the opposite, you start with the design at the most advanced end (desktop computers). As you scale down you start to limit functions, reduce the number of columns, and deliver a beautiful single-column mobile experience.

A few important considerations when building a responsive website

• As your website scales down to mobile, your navigation should be contained within a ‘hamburger menu’. It is a fairly universal practice to manage your navigation, users can click to expand a full list of navigation items. This will save you space and make your nav links more manageable.

• Previously mentioned, but as you scale down to mobile it is best to utilize a single column layout and stack everything to make it easy to read.

• Make sure to utilize proper line height, spacing, and size for your typography as your screen size decreases.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. 1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPinc Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

Using your logo

For this blog we’re assuming you already have a logo (if not that’s an entirely separate conversation). Do you have a brand guide? If so, there are probably specifications within that guide to let you know how your logo should and should not be displayed. If not, here are some basics:

• Sizing - what is the native size of your logo? Do you have a vector or is it a fixed size? Take some time to figure out how small you can make it without looking bad or losing readability, this will be especially important when developing your mobile site.

• Transparency - make sure you’re using a transparent file type, nobody wants to see a logo sitting in a white box on top of a gray background. Which brings up one more point:

• File Type - the most popular file type for a logo is a PNG as it supports transparency while retaining image quality. SVG’s are a great option as well. Avoid using JPEG as it is a non-transparent file type.

Using your colors

Chances are you already have a color scheme for your business which may be reflected in your logo. How you integrate these colors into your website depends on what your company’s colors are, but here are some tips:

• Use the darkest color for your text. If your logo/color scheme doesn’t include a dark color, then use black or something close to it.

• Use your most eye catching color for your “Call to Action” buttons, or other areas that need a pop of color or that you want to draw attention to. Reds, blues, greens, whatever your brightest and most eye catching color is.

• If your color scheme includes a light or muted color this may be a good choice for a background color for areas that need to be separated from other content.

Using your font

Another good way to extend your brand into your website is by utilizing your company’s chosen font:

• The first thing you need to do is make sure you are allowed to use your font online. For certain fonts you can only use them with the right license, so check to see if your font is copyrighted and if so, what type of license you have to use it.

• Ideally your company is using a web font, such as one found on Google fonts. If so then including your font will be as easy as adding a single line of code to your markup.

• In the even that your font is not web based, but you do have a liscense to use it online, then you’ll likely need to use an online web font converter tool - such as the one found on Font Squirrel - to create .woff files which you can upload and call by way of the @font-face rule in your CSS.

Need some help with all of this? The PSPinc design team would love to help you create a stunning business website which showcases your brand.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. 1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPinc Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.