Situated Research's Blog

These days, everyone is struggling to catch up on digital marketing.  In the rush, too much of the thinking is often left to impressive young web developers who seem to know a lot about all of the new technologies however they lack experience in functionality.

Your business on the web is far too important to leave to a bunch of techie people.  In their quest to show off their dazzling skills, the web developers often forget that your digital strategy needs to fit into overall strategy.  The result is usually wasted money and missed opportunities.

Here are a few simple rules that will help you get the most out of your web development and digital strategy. Read more »

How many times have you heard someone say, I just want that top search result on Google? For a business website, the top spot in the search engine returns can be a lead generating machine.

Think about it. Google is where most people go when they are researching. What if there was a way to get your company’s website on that first page?  Well there is…

One of the best ways to gain that top spot is by blogging. Incorporating a blog into a website can have a huge impact on the overall website’s search engine rankings. Read more »

The future of the Web is everywhere. The future of the Web is not at your desk. It’s not necessarily in your pocket, either. It’s everywhere. With each new technological innovation, we continue to become more and more immersed in the Web, connecting the ever-growing layer of information in the virtual world to the real one around us. But rather than get starry-eyed with utopian wonder about this bright future ahead, we should soberly anticipate the massive amount of planning and design work it will require of designers, developers and others.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is concerned with helping to raise your website on a list of returned results when people perform a search for your business. In other words, when customers search on Google for a business like yours, how far down the list will your business appear? The closer to the top, the more likely potential customers are to visit your website. Read more »

Whether you’re an employee or a consultant, it sometimes falls to you to drag an organization into the 21st century—and that often means convincing a company to adopt social media. Someone might even be asking you about some new web tool their son or daughter is using.

“Any individual or organization that sells products or offers services should value open communication as a goal. If your client or company does not have an existing communications plan, or even a mission statement that includes nods to openness or transparency, a social media strategy might be a good starting point for developing one.” Read more »

Small companies should consider outsourcing the facilitation of their usability testing projects.  On the surface, it makes sense to have a designer/developer who has a deep understanding of the project be in charge of usability testing, but in fact this can cause serious problems. Read more »

In a recent blog post discussing the importance of link building for search engine optimization, I asked people to share how they build links to their website. I recommend you go read the responses. I also recommend you read that article so you know how to construct inbound links so they affect your search rankings for individual keywords that you want to rank for. Read more »

If you ask most Web developers about Section 508 they will respond with something about their site being accessible to the blind. Most people don’t realize that 508-accessibility is not just about making Web sites accessible to the blind. Section 508 is about removing barriers and making Web site information accessible and usable to all. Read more »

With a new year on the horizon, it’s time to pack away the old, worn web designs and prepare for the brave, new face of tomorrow. Although trends don’t start and stop on January 1st, there is a definite shift from what we craved at the beginning of the year to what we are seeking tutorials for at the end of the year. Most of the time, this shift is subtle. It’s a perfection or re-interpretation of a currently hot trend. Trends help us evolve as designers. As we master the skills of design aesthetic, we continue to push forward to what’s next or what needs to be fully discovered. Read more »

A user’s perception of a Web site can evoke a wide range of emotions and attitudes.  These emotions and perceptions impact the user’s attitude towards the Web site’s content, advertised products, company, credibility and site usability.

The design and presentation of a Web site is strongly visual and users are known to make aesthetic judgments of a site very quickly. As the Web site likeability and credibility increases so does the likelihood of purchasing from the site. Since the site’s aesthetics can influence brand perception and credibility, the importance of design and color treatments must be considered. Read more »

As many of you well know, designing a Web site can be very difficult. Part of that difficulty is in creating an information architecture that represents your content and labeling the links to make that content easy to find.
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Your website is designed, the CMS works, content has been added and the client is happy. It’s time to take the website live. Or is it? When launching a website, you can often forget a number of things in your eagerness to make it live, so it’s useful to have a checklist to look through as you make your final touches and before you announce your website to the world.

This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch — little details are often forgotten or ignored, but – if done in time – may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release. Read more »

A group of students in China produced the image montage software, and had the following to say about it:

We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. Read more »

Work with a reliable web-design company that can help you meet current and future needs.
by Michel Ann Sharritt

People are often in a rush to get something, anything, up on the Internet. Because the average business owner is inexperienced at web design and related terminology, website companies that are anxious to offer a cheap, yet profitable (to them) service, bring up a website on the Internet that may or may not help the client generate additional revenue…the goal of commercial websites. Read more »