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How Web Engineers Should Prepare Websites for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Alla Taff — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 17:02:18 +0000

The busy Thanksgiving shopping season is just around the corner. It means web developers and business owners should prepare their websites for the upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday promo campaigns. Many customers are anticipating the start of Black Friday sale campaigns to grab epic deals and discounts from their favourite brands. To the biggest degree, it’s all about preparing your eCommerce website to handle loads of online orders. A lot of work involved in getting ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Most of this job should be handled by the web development teams managing your website. Choosing the best website templates to upgrade a website in style is also part of the process.

So, how exactly should web developers and engineers prepare their websites for the year's biggest sale? Let’s find it out.

Update your website with a Black Friday theme

Choosing the best Black Friday and Cyber Monday themes for your website is essential to the preparation process. There are many ready-made designs that multiple niche-specific businesses can use to add a special vibe to their online projects. Depending on the company's goals, the update can be applied only to a landing page design or simply replacing the regular banner ads and popups with visuals promoting Black Friday deals.

Let’s consider good and bad examples of websites featuring Black Friday and Cyber Monday designs.

And here is an example of the website that should have worked more on creating the Black Friday campaign. It’s a ready-made design for a landing page, which you can use to promote the hottest deals in your electronic store. The design looks vibrant and catchy. The products are well-organized within the theme’s layout.

And here is an example of the website that should have worked more on creating the Black Friday campaign. It’s poorly designed and doesn’t communicate the message clearly, making it more likely that people will leave the website without trying to figure out the deal.

Be ready for traffic spikes

The start of Black Friday promo campaigns commonly leads to huge traffic spikes over the entire Thanksgiving weekend. Engineers should ensure their websites can handle this. If they can’t, servers can get overwhelmed. It can significantly affect your website’s performance and multiple lost sales. To prevent this, engineers should ensure their websites handle large traffic. They should provide web users with a seamless shopping experience regardless of the number of users browsing the inventory and placing orders simultaneously. Before the sales season begins, webmasters should contact web hosts to determine the traffic limitations and upgrade the plan whenever needed.

Improving the website’s security

It’s no surprise that increased interest in your company’s Black Friday campaigns can increase the risk of phishing schemes. People should be assured they can safely share their details while ordering any Black Friday specials from your website. Web engineers should ensure users their data is in good hands.

There are several ways to do so.

First of all, these are SSL certifications that help you improve your website’s security. You can protect your website’s data from scammers by encrypting communication between your website’s servers and users’ browsers.
Besides using SSL, companies can consider implementing other approaches to defend their content, including setting up firewalls, captchas, and safe checkout pages.

Ensure the website looks good on mobile devices

More than 50% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. In 2021, mobile shoppers generated 40% of all sales during the holiday season. Such numbers indicate the importance of making your website fully adaptive to all types of smartphones and tablets. A company can lose up to 50% of Black Friday sales if it doesn’t run smoothly on mobile devices.

How can engineers optimize their websites for mobile devices? First of all, one should ensure the website is fully responsive. Besides making your website look stunning on all screen sizes, responsiveness helps you improve your website’s SEO. It can help you improve your website’s ranking in search engines, making your Black Friday deals more findable to a larger community of users.

Improve website load speeds

Do you know how long it takes for your website’s content to load? Researches show that 25% of customers quit web pages that do not load within 4 seconds. If you haven’t checked your website’s loading speeds recently, now it’s the best time to do it. Google PageSpeed Insights can come in handy for this purpose.

If you figure out your website’s loading should be improved, you can take the following steps:

Resize images;
Cache web pages;
Get rid of the plugins you do not use.

Pay more attention to testing

You cannot be 100% confident that you won’t miss any opportunity on sales on your website unless you test everything carefully. Web engineers should ensure there are no bugs or errors on the website. It’s important to test the website’s performance in all web environments, responsiveness, load times, etc. Everything should be running smoothly.

Analyze data

Web engineers should consider this last but not least important point while preparing for Black Friday. It’s more like a technical part but cannot be neglected.

Using tools like SQL and Python, web engineers can clearly understand their target audiences, users’ interests and online behavior. Such results can be further used for fine-tuning your website to deliver a better experience to your audience. It doesn’t mean you should only mind testing and improving your website during the busy shopping season. You should improve your website to deliver exceptional UI/UX to your clients all year round.

Web engineers should take several major steps when preparing websites for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Suppose you are looking for a quick solution on how to update your website with a Black Friday or Cyber Monday design. In that case, you can always rely on website templates and creative digital assets intended to provide your customers with an unforgettable shopping experience this Thanksgiving.

TemplateMonster Black Friday Discounts

Lana Miro — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 13:06:12 +0000

Get the most from this Black Friday.
When? Nov, 21st - Dec, 3rd
Where? TemplateMonster Marketplace

Follow the link

Best Logo Assets Packs to Save Time

Lana Miro — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 14:05:45 +0000

If chosen successfully, the logo influences the first impression of your potential customers and sticks to their minds. A strong logo builds a connection between you and your customers and helps you stand out as a well-established business that offers first-rate services/products. In this article, I’ll talk about how to create a strong logo using best logo graphic templates and asset packs.

How To Create a Strong Logo

A logo is just a small image, and creating it may not seem a big deal. However, once you consider the importance of the choice you make, logo design becomes one of the determining factors of your enterprise’s success both in real life and on the web.

Come Up With The Concept

The initial stage of logo creation is thinking and distilling the meaning you want to supercharge your logo with. Here you go with a list of factors to take into account when developing your logo concept:

Firstly, sit down and think what the essence and the mission of your enterprise are; what values it transmits. Try to be as short and precise as possible.
Secondly, study the logos of your competitors. What is common among them? Do you want to keep in line with their logos or take an unconventional approach?
Thirdly, decide what type of logo you’re going to use to better embody your message:

1) a font-based logo is the visual representation of your company name;
2) a picture-logo depicts what your company does, or it is an abstract symbol that strikes the imagination and better sticks to one’s mind.

Next, make sure your logo is functional. The logo should look equally well online and offline (mind printing restrictions). Avoid logos that demand higher printing expenditures and look dim when printed monochrome.
Finally, make sure that your logo has a modern look that attracts clients. For inspiration, you can get some fresh ideas if you check out the logo design trends of 2019.

These are the basic steps to take when developing the concept of your future logo. Now, it’s time to implement your vision into reality. You can either create a logo yourself or get the job done by a professional. Creating a logo yourself is cheaper than hiring a professional to do the job. However, if your graphic design skills are not advanced, you may end up with a shabby logo that scares away potential clients.

To create an invincible logo yourself, start its creation with a logo asset pack handy. Pick the pack that you can work with and use its elements to create a one-of-a-kind logo for your company. Below, you’ll find the top 8 trendy logo packs that take your efforts to the new level.

Bundle #1: 10 Professional Ready-to-Use Business Logo Templates

Details
Do you need a versatile collection of logos for different businesses? The Logo Bundle is a collection of ready-to-use logo designs by the renowned MotoCMS web design provider. This bundle will be of use for freelancers and web design agencies who want to deliver their clients best logo designs for their projects. In this bundle, you’ll find unique logos for such business niches as web design, real estate, financial and consulting agencies, sweets stores, etc.

Needless to say, all logos in this bundles are available in a bunch of popular formats like AI, SVG, PDF, JPG, PSD and EPS. You can customize them both in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Moreover, these invincible designs are crafted to look good on all displays from mobile phones to high-resolution PCs. Moreover, these designs are Retina-friendly. Use these designs to foster the easily recognizable and memorable identity of your brand.

Bundle #2: 30 Pre-made Geometric Logos

Details

Abstract geometrical shapes are a prevailing trend in graphic design across the board. Take advantage of their popularity with 30 sleek jet-black logos that let you create one of the hottest brand representations in your niche. With perfectly-styled font combinations and elegant icons, your logo will be both modern and meaningful.

This bundle includes 30 ready-made logo designs. For your convenience, each logo design comes in 4 styles, such as compact logo, wide logo, wordmark, and icon. Each of these styles fits for certain logo use, ensuring the coherent presentation of your brand both on different screens and offline. Needless to say, all fonts used in this logo bundle are free for commercial use. Once you choose your logo template from the bundle, just navigate to the corresponding website to download the needed font and start customizing. A list of fonts with download links is included to the bundle package.

Bundle #3: Unique Food Logo Templates

Details

This logo bundle may be not a large one, but it contain a logo for you if you need a restaurant, sweets shop, healthy nutrition or catering logo. This bundle includes six unique logos, such as:

Healthy nutrition logo with avocado;
Food blog logo with a carrot;
Cakery logo with a cupcake;
Bakery logo with a wheat circle;
Healthy nutrition logo for kids with vegetables.
All the 6 logos included to this bundle come in 2 styles: multi-color and monochromatic. This means that you won’t have to spend additional time to create * a high-quality black-n-white logo for printouts.

The logos in this bundle come in some most-popular image formats, such as AI and EPS Vector Files, JPG and PSD. Moreover, these logos are optimized for a dazzling display on all screens of different resolutions. Finally, these logo templates have all the information needed to download creative free fonts used for their creation.

Bundle #4: 30 Gorgeous & Bright Logos

Details

Save your money and time when creating a present-day business identity with 30 unique and multipurpose logo templates. These logo designs reflect upon the most recent branding trends and feature bright splashes of friendly colors, color rainbows, and creative overlaps. Moreover, you can freely change the fonts used for each logo and easily recolor logo elements. For your convenience, all the colors of these logos are represented in CMYK color mode.

Fortunately for you, the logo templates included to this bundle come in an array of handy formats. The package includes Illustrator AI, PDF, EPS 10, CS, CS5 versions of each logo. So, you can employ a wide array of software to customize your logo the way you’re used to. Finally, these logos employ only the free and easily accessible fonts from across the web to foster their idiosyncratic designs. The list with the font download links is handily included to the bundle package.

Bundle #5: 15 Niche Business Logo Templates

Details
This is yet another gorgeous logo bundle by the reputed MotoCMS web design company. Inside the bundle, you’ll find a plethora of logo design for different business niches, including Internet Technologies, real estate, hotels, cryptocurrencies, car repair, layers, etc. Moreover, this bundle will perfectly fit the needs of web design agencies who want to use these templates as a basis to create impeccable logos for their clients.

Needless to say, each logo in this collection employs its unique layout, icon, font, and style. The fonts used for these logos are available for free on the web. All the 15 logo templates included to this bundle are available in such popular formats as AI, JPG, SVG, EPS, and PSD. Moreover, these design products are guaranteed to look equally good on screens with different resolutions. They are also ready for a high-quality display on the Retina screen. Finally, these logo designs are compatible both with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to let you choose your way of customizing them.

Bundle #6: Retro Badges Logo Set

Details

Retro logos were a popular trend in 2018. No doubt, their popularity is not fading this year as well. Especially popular and successful are the badge retro logos that get this year the credit and exposure they deserve. Logo badges have been named one of the major logo design trends for 2019. This bundle delivers you 12 handcrafted retro logo badges that are bound to take your brand up a notch.

For your convenience, each logo in this bundle is available in 4 formats. You can customize them in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and MS Word. Moreover, you can tap into 8 pre-designed color variations for each logo, including its Light and Dark versions. You can also freely recolor the logo to match your existing brand identity using the editor of your choice. The vector-based designs of these logos are fully scalable, so you can always resize your logo with no loss to its quality.

Bundle #7: 100 Typography Logos + 100 Frame Logos

Details

Typography logos have been round there before the inception of the Internet. And their popularity never fades. This logo bundle delivers you 100 unique typography logo templates for different purposes. With this bundle, you’ll tap into one of the richest collections of hand-picked creative fonts that foster a unique representation of your brand. Moreover, among 100 logo designs, you’re bound to find the logo layout that best fits your professional vision.

No doubt, all the logo designs included to this package are fully customizable. You can use the fonts interchangeably and adjust the logo shapes up to your liking. Moreover, these logos come in different color variations. So, with this package, you get access to a total of 10.000 logo variations. Just choose your one and save the maximal amount of time creating your logo.

Recently, this logo bundle was updated. Now, it includes not only the typography logos but also an additional batch of 100 frame logos. So, your choice is twice as big with this bundle this year!

Bundle #8: 30 Minimal Edition Logos

Details

Minimalism is one of the never-fading trends on the web for years. If your logo is minimal, it will be successful in providing for better brand recognition. Currently, even the brands in technology and fashion industries are switching toward the new ultra-minimal logos. If you want to jump on this logo design trend, embrace this ready-to-use collection of minimal logo designs. Within this bundle, you’ll find 30 trendiest new minimal logo designs that you can freely use for any purposes.

To ensure the best display of your logo in different contents, this bundle delivers you 4 logo variations for each logo design. Among these variations, you’ll find the wide and compact logo versions, as well as a wordmark and icon logo. Moreover, these logos are fully resizable and display on different screens with no loss to their quality. Of course, a list of fonts with the links to their sources is included in the bundle pack.

Wrapping Up

Having a strong logo is crucial for wide recognition of your business and active development of its brand. Companies that have powerful logos make it to the top quicker, as people remember them better and relate to messages that their strong logos transmit.

If you want to devise a powerful logo for your enterprise, give it a decent amount of thought: distill the main message, study competitors’ logos, wisely choose colors and the type of your logo, etc. Then, choose one of these top 10 logo bundles to supercharge your logo with trendy shapes, colors, and fonts.

Are there any exciting logo bundles that I’ve missed out? Feel free to speak up in the Comments section below.

Happy logo creation!

Novi Tool: HTML Visual Editor Worth Attention?

Lana Miro — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 12:26:50 +0000

Well, today I’m going to share with you, in my opinion, this very thing that will make your life so much easier.

I’ll introduce you to Novi Builder. So in this article I am going to share my own experience of using Novi Membership and try to uncover all its advantages and disadvantages.

What Is Novi Builder?

Basically, Novi Builder is an HTML drag and drop builder.

As you have already guessed, this tool is aimed to help you build a website practically without coding, which is actually pretty cool.
From my own experience of using Novi Membership, I can tell that it does not mean that you will be able to build a fully functional website without coding at all.

However, this tool indeed makes the process of creating a website much easier and faster. Moreover, drag and drop builder is not everything you will get with Novi.

What Exactly Do You Get with Novi Membership?

Novi Builder Membership is not just a visual editor.
Aside from the drag and drop builder itself you will also get:

lots of free HTML templates;
some basic must-have plugins (such as Social plugins, Contact form, Countdown, Sliders, and Google Maps).

Well, I do think that it’s a pretty decent giveaway, since creating a website with a template will also save you the whole bunch of time plus I just cannot think of a website without some nice plugins.
And with Novi Membership you will get it all for free.

Personally, I really enjoyed using free website templates which this service provided me with. All the templates are beautifully-designed and look professional.

So this is for sure a strong advantage of this service.

Novi Builder Features

Novi Builder comes with, in my opinion, a pretty good set of features. For instance, among its features are:

Page Manager
Page Settings
Design Mode
Preview Mode
Edit Mode
Presents tool
Configuration (Layer tool)
Content Editor (basic tools)
Text Editor
Drag and Drop tool
Code Editor.

You can find out more about Novi Builder features and how to use them here.

I personally, enjoyed Drag and Drop tool, Code Editor, and super easy-to-use Edit Mode the most.

Novi Prices

The first plan is Startup which costs just $29 per year. With this plan you’ll get:

Novi HTML visual editor;
Novi plugins;
Developer support;
30-day money-back guarantee;
Multipurpose HTML template;
Free updates.

The next pricing plan Novi Membership offers is Advanced for $49 per year. This pricing plan will provide you with:

Novi visual HTML editor;
Novi plugins;
Unlimited projects;
Developer support;
30-day money-back guarantee;
Over 20 HTML templates;
Free updates.

And the last pricing plan, Developer, is the most expensive one, it costs $149. However, this plan is perhaps the most beneficial one, since you pay $149 once and you can use the service literally forever. This plan will equip you with:

Lifetime access to Novi visual HTML editor;
Lifetime access to Novi plugins;
Lifetime unlimited projects;
Lifetime developer support;
30-day money-back guarantee;
Lifetime access to all Novi templates;
Lifetime free updates. # Documentation

Novi Builder Membership comes with a clear and easy to understand, even for inexperienced users, documentation.

Novi Builder documentation provides all the necessary information about the product, its features, and how to use it.

Besides, there is a pretty cool videos that visually show how to install and use the tool.

In addition to that, there are lots of other overviews of the Novi Builder features and plugins, so I think that you won’t have any troubles with this membership. Well, I did not have any issues that I wasn’t able to cope with by myself, so I daresay that you will not have any as well.

Novi Builder Community

In addition to all mentioned above, Novi Builder has a friendly Facebook community. In this Facebook group other users share their experience with Novi Membership as well as some tips and tricks on how to make the most of it. I do think that those communities are really helpful, especially for the beginners, since you can ask for a piece of advice there or just read other developers’ posts about website building. So it’s really great that Novi Builder has one.

Final Thoughts

Whether to get Novi Membership or not is completely your decision. I just decided to tell you about it, because my experience with it was (and still is) just awesome.

So, who is next in testing Novi editor? :D