PSPINC Official Company Blog

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.

Do you need some help with online marketing? It just so happens that's one of our specialties! Don't hesitate to reach out for assistance.

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.

Dreamersi is a web and email hosting platform developed in-house by Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. Let me tell you the story of how we started this service. In the early days of the Internet, if you wanted to have a domain name of your own and manage your web and email, you had to get a dedicated Internet connection. As well as set up and manage your domain server, web server, and email server. This was a huge cost and involved a lot of time and effort.

In 1996, we started hosting these services on our behalf, and in 2000, Dreamersi was launched as an integrated system that automated these services. The following is a description of the site at the time.

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From Dreamersi.net on September 1, 2000

Dreamersi.net is a new service that makes it easy to set up a mail server.
For an initial fee of $150* and a monthly fee of $75, you can have 50 email accounts and up to 20MB of web space for free. If you wish, we can also provide you with a complete service from acquiring your domain name to hosting.

You can also create and delete email accounts, change passwords, and create large numbers of email addresses in bulk by importing files through the administration screen. You can also create a website without any knowledge of HTML by using Homepage Wizard, and you can easily embed bulletin boards, guestbooks, counters, and other commonly needed features in your pages.

Dreamersi.net will greatly contribute to your company's CI using the Internet.

If you have any questions or inquiries, please contact us at info@dreamersi.net.

*Initial cost includes domain name ($70) and DNS, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP configuration ($80).

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Currently, our service is provided at dreamersi.com with the URL https://dreamersi.com instead of dreamersi.net. Our email has evolved from the POP-only service of that time to IMAP, with webmail as a part of our mail servers. As for web services, space has been expanded from 20MB to 10GB, and customers have their choice of web environments. They can choose custom (to add their HTML or other web files to the web server via FTP), WordPress, and WebdeXpress (a web builder tool developed in-house).

In addition, the original price of $150 initial fee + $70 monthly fee is now $250 per year with no initial fee. This is the story of Dreamersi, the flagship hosting service of Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. With 21 years of experience and evolution, we hope you will consider Dreamersi when choosing your hosting services.

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.

Many tools make it easy to build a website yourself these days (we offer a super easy-to-use web builder ourselves). However, building your website is only part of the battle. Once you build your website you want to make sure it is optimized for performance and SEO. Whether you build your website yourself or hire a professional to do it for you - below are some useful tips for you to be aware of to make sure your website is well-optimized.

Don’t use extremely large images

This includes both the size of the file and the dimensions of the image being used. It is important for users that when they visit a page on your website, that it loads quickly. The more your customers have to wait for your page to load, the more incentive they have to leave your site and go elsewhere. It’s for this reason that Google and other search engines consider this when it comes to determining your rank. Want to be ranked higher? Load faster!

What you can do to decrease the size of your images:

• Make sure your images are in the right dimensions. There is no need to load a 4000-pixel wide image on your website. Decreasing the dimensions will also decrease your file size.
• Use the save for web feature in Photoshop to decrease the size of your images.

For more details on this, watch a video we made about optimizing your images for the web using Adobe Photoshop.

Use real text, don’t embed it within your images

When you include site content within your images rather than as actual text you create issues both with the page speed and search engine optimization. The more images that the web browser needs to load, the longer it will take to load. Whereas plain text loads much quicker.

Search engines also rely on real text to index your site and serve it to users who search for particular words or phrases. Web crawlers cannot read the content within images, even if it is extremely valuable information. You are doing yourself a huge disservice by not allowing search engines to know about this content and provide it to their users.

In addition to these points, embedding images within text create accessibility issues for visually impaired individuals who rely on screen readers to dictate content to them.

Make sure your site is mobile-friendly

Everyone has slightly different statistics to back this up, but one thing that is universally agreed upon is the growth of web viewing through mobile devices. If your website is not mobile-friendly, those users who are viewing it on their smartphone are going to bounce almost immediately - potentially costing you a customer.

Your website should be coded to be responsive so it will scale to fit whatever type of device your visitors are viewing it on. We’ve talked about responsive design before, so be sure to read that blog post for more valuable information.

What you can do to make sure your website is mobile-friendly:

• Test it out for yourself, open your website on a mobile device. If it is really hard to read and everything looks small, chances are your website is not mobile-friendly. You could be due for a redesign. If you don’t know where to start, reach out to use or a free quote!
• If you are building a website yourself, make sure your web builder offers responsive themes. Our web builder, WebdeXpress, offers a ton of mobile-friendly themes.
• If you have hired a Web Developer and the website they are building for you isn’t readable on a smartphone, consider that a huge red flag. Every website we build at PSPINC is responsive and meant for devices of all types.

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These are just a few of the things we take into consideration when we build websites for customers. There are so many other things we do to ensure the websites we provide are well optimized, extremely visible, and perform to the best of their ability.

If you are looking for a free quote, or have a question for us please contact us on social media, by phone at 1-800-232-3889, or email at contact@pspinc.com. We would be happy to help make sure your website is a valuable tool for your business!

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.

Effective July 1, 2021, we will be permanently shutting down WebdePhoto. If you are a WebdePhoto user and wish to download any of your photos please do so by the end of June.

Thank you to all of our WebdePhoto users throughout the years. If you are looking for a modern solution for displaying your photos on your website, we encourage you to take a look at our WebdeXpress web builder tool that comes free to all Dreamersi hosting customers. Within WebdeXpress you can build modern, responsive, and flexible photo galleries, perfect for your users!

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.

You can get away with an informational website, but mobile devices are often an afterthought when creating a website where programs run on the backend. Of course, when developing a program, the developer uses a computer to do it. In many cases, developers use powerful computers with multiple large screens for development.

The finished program is then tested on a computer to make sure it works. After this is complete, the developers think about the support for mobile devices. This is where a lot of problems often arise. The biggest difference is the size of the screen. Also, programs that require user input are often very difficult to use on mobile devices.

If you think about the actual usage of the Internet, you will find that there are more and more mobile users these days. So if you are creating a website or a program, you need to think about the usability of mobile devices from the beginning. In some cases, it may be necessary to develop programs that are designed to work on mobile devices first, and then figure out how to transfer that functionality to computers.

Also, more and more companies are ignoring computers and only developing programs for mobile devices. Are you thinking that the program you need is only for use on a computer? The mobile market has surpassed the computer market. Don't forget that when you are developing a web application.

Our company has experience in developing Internet programs for web browsers (mobile and desktop) and mobile applications. If you are interested, please contact us at any time. We will be happy to discuss the differences, advantages, and disadvantages of each development option.

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.