A responsive design enables greater user reach and receptivity by enhancing readability and ease of navigation, and by promoting a sense of confidence in the sender’s progressivism and commitment to meeting the consumer’s needs. With that in mind, the only decision left to make is about which responsive newsletter model best fits branding and marketing requirements. Below is a guide to seven inspiring template themes that all have something different to offer, each with a price tag of US$19 or less for a regular license.

Teasy

With its ten modules, free editor and easily customisable format, Teasy makes it easy to create an attractive email template. The simplicity of the drag and drop function and the MailChimp compatibility are particularly suited to small businesses wanting to make an impression without negotiating unnecessary bells and whistles.

Oferta

?

The key features of Oferta are clean code and comprehensive compatibility, teamed with unlimited variations on six base templates and a remarkably elegant design. The quality of its features and layout make it a great option for larger businesses and key campaign strategies.

Penio

?

Slick style comes as standard with Penio, along with the flexibility and functionality of unlimited colours and layouts, and a powerful drag and drop editor. It’s a great option for unique small businesses wanting freedom of choice as well as ease of use.

Slice

Slice is great for smaller, targeted marketing campaigns and newsflash announcements that need to garner major impact from minimal input. While this template doesn’t currently include its own builder, it does have two eye-catching animation styles designed to attract solid response rates.

Alerta

?

It’s all about customisation with Alerta, which includes an online editor with unlimited variations for an easy approach to tailored design. This capacity for individuality, along with a modern feel, make Alerta great for youth-oriented leisure and entertainment rather than professional services or B2B, particularly as some elements aren’t well supported by Outlook.

Announce

Announce comes with a package of four templates with drag and drop modules and unlimited colours and structures. While it isn’t compatible with the Gmail app for Android, it’s chic, sleek, includes the backing of full administrative support, and is well suited to professional industry.

Dotty

With its sophisticated look and compatibility with all major email software, Dotty is an excellent fit for on-the-go commercial clients. It comes in dark and white variations with drag and drop functionality for easy to use, clean, corporate-style communication.

1. Pinterest

Taking a peek at this high-flyer of social engineering is inspiring in itself, but the real gems of ingenuity come from the pinners, who together form a perfect example of culture in motion. From weird and wacky to wunderkind, Pinterest is a buzzing hub for up-to-the-minute concepts. Browse through the search results for web design pins and the ideas will start sparking in no time.

2. 99designs

The world’s most extensive online marketplace for graphic design is a sure place to find one’s muse. With a community of almost a million designers, the scope for creative stimulation is virtually limitless. Wander through the categories and see what’s emerging at the vanguard of independent web design to get a dose of front-line innovation.

3. Awwwards

The fundamental aim of Awwwards is to provide an online space where designers can share work to receive feedback and ratings, as well as view the work of others to galvanise inspiration for their own future projects. In this, Awwwards gets ten out of ten. The site gathers the talents of web designers from all around the globe, bringing together unique perspectives and creative strategies, with the handy bonus of user and expert rankings. This is a win-win for both the designers getting the kudos and those benefiting from peer ideas.

4. The Design Inspiration

The name of this website really says it all. It’s a great place to spur imagination and cultivate ideas from others that can be turned into something new. The Design Inspiration has been especially created to showcase high quality work from around the world, so there’s no need to sit around waiting for that lightning bolt to hit when a project plan is lacking in lustre.

5. Smashing Magazine

For a bit of rejuvenation and insight into the technical side of things, Smashing Magazine is a great place to look. It’s focused on practical advice and techniques for web developers and designers, with lots of new content as well as a useful bank of past articles from which to learn and glean some tips to assist with the next big thing.

1. Make your site responsive

Responsive websites are the new standard. Basically, this means that the website can adjust to any device or screen that it is loaded on to. It can be easy to forget that while your new business website design looks great on your office desktop it may be unworkable on a tablet or mobile device. Just in the United States market, 58% of adults have a smart phone, while 48% of adults own some form of tablet computer (Pew Research, January 2014). So if your site can't cater to them then you may be losing 50% or more of your potential customers!

2. Are you search engine ready?

While search engine optimisation can seem like a magic trick sometimes, the fact is that Google is getting better and better at "reading" the content of your website. So in order to make an impact with search engines you need good quality written content, and you also need to avoid errors on your website such as broken links. The format of this content is also important. Using H1, H2 and other formatting tells the search engine "how important" certain things on your pages are. Also remember to do extensive keyword research!

3. Added boosts with directory listings

Directory listings online can help customers find your website and give your website that little boost it will need with the search engines. Do a search for both local, free and industry specific directories and list with as many as you can. Provide clear details and remember to write a different company description on each one. Using the same text for all of your off-site promotional efforts can end up looking like spam (especially when the search engine bots take a look).

4. Ease of use

Make sure your website user interface is not too crowded, hard to use or dysfunctional! People can spend anywhere from 1 – 15 seconds on your site so every little thing counts. The best way to ensure your website is easy to use is to have it tested in advance.

5. Keep on testing!

Use as many people as you can to test your website – your company employees, your family and anyone else that may be able to point out small problems with your site. Remember, even after the site is up and running, keep testing and keep improving.

There are a number of things that can off-put visitors to your site and be losing your business potential sales. Below we highlight 5 of the most common website design mistake we’ve come across. Most websites are guilty of at least one of these, but they’re also easy fixes and shouldn’t be left unresolved.

Poor User Experience

Navigating through a website should never be an overwhelming experience. The navigation should be featured in an easily accessible location on the site, with clear headings for each new page. Visitors to your website are looking for useful information and want to access this in the most timely manner, the more time-consuming or confusing it becomes the more likely your visitors will leave your website and not return.

A common practice is to feature the menu in a visable location, towards the top of the page. Avoid ambiguous names for web pages that do not clearly define what the page features. 

Hiding Important Information

This one varies from site to site depending on your business. If you have an ecommerce site the shopping cart should be featured permanently on each page of your website, normally in the top right hand corner of the page. If you sell any type of service or product your contact details should never be difficult to find, ensure you have this information highlighted through your website.

Broken Links

This happens more often than you’d think. Broken links makes a website look outdated and unmaintained. Whether a link has been moved or removed it leaves your visitors with no place to go. Checking for broken links is easier than you’d think, there are a handful of Free Online Broken Links Checker that’ll do the hard work for you. Submit your site, find all the broken links and get onto fixing them right away.

Low-Quality or Stock Images

Let’s start with low-quality images. Websites showcasing poor quality, pixilated images aren’t helping their reputation one bit. Your website is for most customers the face of your business, so putting time into quality images is necessary to portray a solid representation of what you do.

On the other hand there’s those all-too-common stock images. Although they have superior quality they are also easily recognisable as stock images and don’t do much for your businesses branding. It may be worth investing in a quality camera or the skills of a corporate photographer to take professional photos of your business and using these instead. Trust me, these will give you much more credit than generic stock photos.

Old, Irrelevant Content

This again is one that seems to happen all too often. Whether it’s an old promotion still highlighted on your homepage, or content that just hasn’t been updated in years. Providing new and current content, alongside relevant updates shows that your proactive in your business. Not to mention Google loves new content – so the more the better! A great way to regularly feature new content is through a blog or business news section on your site, it's easy to set-up and can be updated as often as you like. 

Wrap Up

Web design trends come and go, but one thing will remain constant and that’s a well maintained and functional website. We’ve only highlighted 5 of the more common mistakes we come across, sure there are many more we can add to this list but these are a good place to start. If you think of any other common mistakes we’ve missed please add them to the comments section below.

Here is our list of seven hot trends that are gaining in popularity:

1. Clean homepages that get to the point

Cluttered homepages are a thing of the past. The best websites have a main page that gets right to the point, leaving extra details for other pages and unnecessary information off the website entirely.

2. Flat design

Following on the app icon designs that were bundled with the iPhone 5, flat design is the big trend at the moment. This means ditching the drop shadows and bezels that have long signified buttons and letting the images stand on their own. For web design, it's also a matter of getting rid of unnecessary decorative elements and allowing users to have a clean, easy to use experience.

3. Focus on mobile sites

With more and more people browsing exclusively from mobile devices, every website needs to keep mobile users in mind. Whether it's using responsive design or deploying a separate mobile version, it's worth putting serious effort into how mobile users will see your website.

4. Less text

Less is more when it comes to text. The long winded paragraphs of a few years ago are out, with the current trend being for bullet points, symbols, and infographics.

5. Bigger, better images

With bigger screens and higher resolution, images hold a lot of value on a great looking website. The current trend is not just for big images, though; it's also for better images. This means a step away from stock images, with the best sites using great quality images that are unique to their site.

6. Interactive navigation

The bar across the top is a thing of the past, with the best navigation design being interactive. The current design trend is to integrate navigation into the images on the site in a creative, interactive way. This encourages visitors to check out more of the site as they become engaged with the navigation itself.

7. Parallax scrolling

See this great example live here.

For a cool, futuristic website, look no further than parallax scrolling. This technique gives a sense of depth as the foreground and background images scroll at different speeds. The result is something that visitors will certainly want to share with all their friends!

Here are seven of the big web design trends that are already out of date, and why you should avoid them on your site:

1. Unwanted popups

Whether you are inviting visitors to like you on Facebook, join your newsletter, enter a competition, or chat with a live representative, nobody wants to see your popup. They can be very annoying for visitors, and can detract from the great website they do want to see.

2. Stock photos

It used to be a given that any image was better than no image, so lots of sites started filling up with stock photos. However, this is no longer the case. Every visitor can spot a stock photo a mile away and they’ve learned to ignore them, knowing they don’t represent what you really do. Instead, ditch the overused and unoriginal stock photography and replace it with real images of your company’s work.

3. Flash intros

Although Flash used to be the big web design trend, it’s rapidly becoming an internet dinosaur thanks to smartphones. Some of the most popular mobile devices simply don’t support Flash. It’s also not Google friendly, so a Flash intro can hurt your search engine optimisation efforts.

4. Autoplay videos

Including a video on your website is fine; having it start playing automatically is not. Whether you have it on your homepage or any other page of your site, you should never force visitors to watch your videos. Like popups, it can cause major annoyance and even send a potential customer running to your competition.

5. Huge banners on the homepage

The huge banner trend is the bell bottom trousers of web design. A few sites might be able to pull them off, but for most it’s just not a good look. Many visitors can feel they’re overbearing and take up valuable space that could be used for content.

6. Long winded text

Visitors want you to get to the point clearly and quickly. Bullet points are a great alternative to long paragraphs, especially as they make it easy to skim your content on a mobile device.

7. Animated sidebars

Like popups, these can make your visitors very annoyed and distract from the content you want them to focus on. Whatever you have included, whether it’s social feeds, promotions, news, weather, or a photo gallery, don’t animate it. It will be eye catching, but for all the wrong reasons.

Triangly

This is the app that artists the world over have been waiting for. As you might know, demonstrating uniqueness is incredibly important to most creative types, and Triangly allows them to do just that. It's the first platform on the planet that enables personal branding. Users can come up with their very own online portfolio, which isn't like anyone else's, anywhere.

Readymag

This app assists users to create seriously impressive digital publications without any experience or knowledge of coding. Its scope includes magazines, portfolios, presentations and microsites.

Fontface Ninja

You know that frustrating moment when you come across a font that you absolutely adore, but you can't find the name of it anywhere? Fontface Ninja is here to change all that. It's an extension for both Safari and Chrome that can help you to find the name of any font that you see online and therefore track it to its very source. The best part is that Fontface Ninja is free, so you can give it a whirl whenever you're ready.

Raumrot

One of the biggest challenges of creating striking web pages is finding awesome images, right? The good news is that Raumrot has come to save the day. It provides you with a huge range of specially selected stock photos for use in both personal and commercial projects – at no charge! They're available in both internet-friendly resolution and high-res.

Sassline

If you've been looking for ways to improve your headlines, Sassline is here to help. It's a Sass collection of Mixins and style recommendations that can help you to organise and compose typography so that it looks more professional than ever before.

Just before the envelope is opened, the name read out, the dash to the stage, the acceptance speech – you know the rest: “But first, let’s look at “the nominations”…

Let’s interrupt the ceremony for just a moment to wonder why we would even consider holding such an event. After all, it’s the words that matter, isn’t it? Well yes, but if you are speaking to someone, saying something important, then a large part of your message will be about your tone of voice. Consider your choice of fonts to be similar, helping you to say what you wish to best effect, as clearly and in as easy-to-read a way as possible.

…and the nominations in the Web Designers Favourite Fonts category are…

Garamond

Claude Garamond was a publisher in 16th century France, credited as being the first to make design of type a speciality. He seemed to know his stuff, considering his fonts are still in regular usage half a millennium or so later! These old-style serif typefaces encourage easy, relaxed reading, being both functional and elegant in equal measures. You’ll find this style in documents, novels, poems and the like – and will have read each piece easily, probably without knowing why.

Helvetica

Helvetia is the Latin name for Switzerland, so you can guess where this font originated, with the amendment in title being due to other products already bearing the original. It was born in the 1950s as a typeface designed to become more popular than a rival of the Haas Type Foundry. It is now one of the most-used sans serif faces, and has been chosen for many corporate logos (Panasonic, Orange, Target and others) and public signage.

Futura

This truly versatile typeface, including bold and condensed variations, is a widely-used display tool. It retains high readability, even when condensed for tight spaces, or set at smaller font sizes when much information needs to be provided. It is also highly-regarded for areas such as captioning or quotations. It was released in 1927 and set a benchmark for many following geometric designs.

…and the winner is…

Entirely up to you! Choosing the style of font most suited to your message and how and where it is being delivered, is part of the art of communication. However, with these three proven winners, we hope we’ve provided some useful food for thought.

Themes add and alter the HTML, PHP and CSS of pages, designed to allow the user to specifically customise their e-commerce website. Amongst the e-commerce community debate exists regarding the best themes for functionality, appearance and performance, though what we consider as the top 10 responsive themes are explained below.

1. Simple Magento Theme

Minimalist and user friendly, Simple is just that – simple for those new to e-commerce CSS to configure and manage. The homepage is capable of exhibiting Latest and Featured products together, while a slideshow of products can be set to autoplay or not.

2. Dresscode

A fully responsive Magento theme, Dresscode boasts unlimited colours, a powerful admin panel and customised dropdown menus amongst a host of other features, all of which can be customised to the users needs.

3. Celebrity

Celebrity is perfectly suited to any store with a stylish design! Installed with just one click, Celebrity features both full width and boxed layout styles, more than 500 fonts and 200 pattern backgrounds, all with 300-plus configuration options, allowing the user to fully customise the site without learning HTML or CSS.

4. Shopper

Shopper is not only extremely responsive but very powerful, coming with unlimited colour choices, an AJAX price slider, flexible fluid slide show and a customisable sidebar. Because of these features, the theme is perfect for any store in the e-commerce trade.

5. SM Total Magento Theme

With the ability to support multiple shops, SM Total offers AJAX Cart Pro for quick buying options, Carousel Sliders for product images, and can display content in either a one, two or three column layout, while also featuring advanced and impressive CSS3 animation effects to truly enhance your site.

6. Aries Magento Theme

Teaming together layered navigation, price sliders, toolbars, pagination, add to cart, add to wish list and add to compare, Aries is a responsive Magento theme able to serve many purposes in the e-commerce world, suited to sites of almost any nature.

7. Maxshop

Maxshop is a retina ready Magento theme, that allows users to customise the layout of their site easily. With good font support and a guide to installing videos, Maxshop offers an extremely responsive and easy to use template, constructed on the bootstrap framework.

8. Pastel

Responsive web design provides Pastel with extreme flexibility, allowing it to function across a range of devices from PCs to mobiles, while maintaining a high aesthetic quality and high speed performance. Designed for stylish e-commerce sites, Pastel provides users with large product images, Mega Menu Builder to organise and categorise, and advertising space for promotional purposes.

9. ShopFast

Based on Twitter's bootstrap framework, ShopFast utilises two sliders, Nivo and Flex Slider, a retina ready responsive layout, and clean and modern styling to deliver the ideal template that comes complete with SEO.

10. Layover

Layover offers what other themes cannot without expensive plugins or hefty customisation in the way of action, offering Facebook integration on product pages and unique product spotlights with flipcards on the homepage. It is fully responsive and comes with AJAX-enabled quickvies and AJAX add to cart features.

1. WordPress Cheat Sheet

WordPress is an incredibly powerful Content Management System and easy to use. However, when it comes to customising or making your own themes and templates it can get a little tricky. This Cheat Sheet outlines the file structure of WordPress themes; the structure that files should take and the WordPress tags that must feature in pages.

2. CSS 3 Cheat Sheet

CSS is as essential as HTML when it comes to designing websites. However, there is a number of properties, selector types and allowed values, and it can be difficult to recall some of the more niche commands. This extensive, cheat sheet groups properties into intuitive categories and lists the various properties they can take.

3. HTML 5 Visual Cheat Sheet

HTML is the language of the web and the latest HTML 5 standard adds many new HTML tags to the specification. This colour coded Cheat Sheet is great for identifying the new tags added in HTML 5 as well as the tags no longer supported. A brief description of the intended use of the script is also provided, helping developers understand the new tags. Additionally this Cheat Sheet lists every attribute that corresponds to each tag.

4. HTML 5 Cheat Sheet

This Cheat Sheet contains almost all of the information incorporated in the Cheat Sheet above but in a slightly more condescend format. The tag descriptions are a bit more detailed in this list and may suit new developers and designers better.

5. jQuery Cheat Sheet

jQuery is an incredibly powerful library for JavaScript which drastically improves the ease of use of JavaScript and can save developers an abundance of time. Furthermore, jQuery is the cornerstone of a wealth of free and premium plugins which can add rich functionality to any website. This Cheat Sheet lists every object in the jQuery library. All objects are helpfully grouped by type (selector, event triggers and individual functions) and include a link to the detailed jQuery documentation.