But by doing this, are businesses hurting their chances of ranking higher than their competitors in search engine result pages (SERPs)?

In this article, we take an in-depth look at single page websites from an SEO perspective and weigh the various pros and cons of having a one page website.

Finally, we’ll also share a few optimization tips which you can use to boost your single page website’s SEO.

What are Single Page Websites?

Single page websites are websites that consist of just one HTML page and all the different sections of the site (about, products, contact, etc.) are featured on the same page.

A typical single page site has a menu bar on top, but the menu items are not linked to new content on new pages. Instead, these menu items take the user to particular sections of the website within the page itself.

In the next section, we’ll reveal a few examples of exceptionally well-designed single page websites.

Best Single Page Websites

Before we explore the pros and cons of a single page website, let’s take a look at a few examples of what a well-designed one page website looks like.

There are tons of single page websites on the web, but here’s a small selection of the best single page websites:

1. Plastics Unlimited

2. Hashtago

3. The Art of Texture

4. Dice Sales

Single Page Website: SEO Pros

Here are some of the benefits of having a single page website from an SEO standpoint:

1. Single page websites are more mobile-friendly

Mobile search has gradually taken over desktop search in the last few years, increasing the popularity of single page websites.

Single page websites look better on mobile, load faster, and provide a superior user experience.

Check out the above examples of single page websites on your mobile device and compare them with a typical multi-page site.

Single page websites are built for mobile which is the reason why so many mobile apps have one-page websites.

2. Single page websites are easier to build and maintain

There are tons of one page WordPress themes (free and paid) in the market which allow you to build a professionally-designed website in no time.

They take a fraction of the time and energy that’s taken to build dynamic, multi-page websites. They can also be quickly updated and are easy to maintain.

3. Single page websites provide higher domain authority

Domain authority of a website is mostly determined by the number of backlinks the site has been able to generate.

This works to the advantage of single page websites as all the links acquired by the site point to the same URL, meaning there will always be a 1:1 ratio of links to pages.

4. Single page websites make it easier to target a specific audience

Single page websites are great for those looking to target a specific type of audience and provide them with a unique user experience.

This also allows you to easily control their behavior on your site and lead them in a specific direction.

In other words, you don’t have to worry about them clicking on different pages in the wrong order.

Single Page Website: SEO Cons

Now let’s look at some of the features that could potentially hurt your single page website’s SEO:

1. The content on single page website lacks depth

One of the biggest drawbacks of having a single page website is that all your information needs to be presented on a single page.

You’ll not be able to devote a separate page for each topic you’d like to cover.

This will invariably mean that the content you create will lack depth.

This might pose a problem for visitors who are looking for more in-depth content on your website on specific topics.

2. Your ability to rank for a wide variety of keywords is limited

Another drawback of a single page website is that you’ll have to compromise on keyword rankings.

Single page websites are usually developed around one main concept.

In this scenario, your ability to rank for a wide variety of keywords within the concept is quite limited.

Single Page Websites Optimization Tips

Now that you’re aware of the pros and cons of having a single page website, let’s look at a few ways you can optimize your one page website for increased search traffic.

1. Be selective with your keywords

Because of the lack of content depth on a one page website, you need to be selective with the keywords you choose.

Do thorough keyword research using any of these tools and choose keywords you’d like to associate your business and offerings with.

Recommended reading: How to Use Semrush for Keyword Research: The Definitive Guide

2. Have multiple H1 tags on the page

As a rule, you should not have more than one H1 tag on a page. But you can treat single page websites as an exception to this rule as you’re trying to pattern each section after multiple pages on a multi-page website.

As such, create H1 tags for each of the sections on your one page website.

3. Optimize page speed

Site speed is one of the most crucial search ranking signals and it is even more critical for single page websites as you’re serving all kinds of elements and design layouts on a single HTML page.

Most of these elements may take a long time to load which may hurt your site’s SEO.

As a result, keep checking your site speed regularly using Google PageSpeed Insights and follow these site speed optimization techniques.

Conclusion

Single page websites are not as good for SEO as multi-page websites. You need to consider your business goals and keep your buyer persona or target audience in mind when deciding to go for a single page website.

What are your thoughts on single page websites? Do you currently use one for your business? Do you think the one page website has impacted your SEO? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

If you liked this article, please share it on Twitter using the link below:

Editor’s Note: This article was first published on March 23, 2018 and has been updated regularly since then for relevance and comprehensiveness. 

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The post Are Single Page Websites Bad for SEO? Here’s What You Need to Know appeared first on 99signals.

The impact of visual content in content marketing can’t be stressed enough. Visual content increases content quality, engagement, and even memory recall.

In a recent study, Buzzsumo found that articles with an image once every 75-100 words got double the amount of social shares of articles with fewer images. So needless to say, visuals such as infographics, presentations, web graphics and social graphics should be integrated into your content marketing strategy.

And to create visuals that leave a lasting impact, you need a tool that allows you to easily design visual content assets such as infographics, presentations, and social graphics.

One such tool is Visme which is quickly gaining popularity among marketers. Visme claims to be a design tool for non-designers. It’s time to verify this claim and put Visme’s key features under the microscope.

In this Visme review, we’ll evaluate the tool’s features, pricing plans, ease of use and user feedback, and help you decide whether it’s worth investing your time, money, and resources on this design tool.

What is Visme?

Visme is an online design tool that helps you tell powerful visual stories in the form of engaging presentations, infographics and other visual content.

Visme is considered the “Swiss Knife” of visual content, allowing the user to create more engaging presentations, infographics, demos, web banners, animations and virtually any other type of visual content right from the browser.

The content created using Visme can be easily shared on social media, embedded to a website or blog, and even downloaded to use offline.

Ease of Use

When it comes to designing graphics, Visme shares a lot of similarities with other popular design tools like Canva and Venngage. So if you’re already familiar with these tools, then you’ll find it easy to create graphics and presentations on Visme. The key differentiator with Visme is that you can even add lots of interactivity to your content, including elements such as video, audio, charts, and maps.

To create a new project on Visme, just click on ‘Create New’ button from the dashboard.

You will then be presented with multiple categories of content. Select the content type that is best suited to your current requirement.

Next, you’ll be presented with all the themes or templates for the content type you’ve selected. Choose a theme that’s most suited to your current needs and start editing to make it your own.

Once your design is ready, you can publish it online or download it for offline use.

You can also use Visme to visualize boring data into beautiful visuals using Visme’s graph maker and make beautiful flyers with the drag-and-drop flyer maker.

Visme Pricing Plans

Visme has 3 pricing plans for 3 types of users: individuals, business, and education. For this review, we’ll be examining the 3 individual pricing plans:

• Basic – $0/month
• Standard – $10/month
• Complete – $20/month

(*billed annually)

The basic plan is free forever and there is no credit card information required to sign up. But in order to access Visme’s premium features, you’ll need to upgrade to standard or complete plan. The key features of each individual plan are discussed in detail in the next section.

In addition to the individual plans, Visme also offers Business and Educational plans. Both these plans offer more team collaboration features and come with premium support. To learn more about these plans and their features, click here.

Features

Now let’s examine the key features of each individual plan:

Basic Plan

This is Visme’s free plan. As such, there’s a restriction on the number of projects you can work on and you’re given limited access to Visme’s premium assets and templates.

Here are some of the key features and restrictions for the basic plan:

Key Features

• You can store up to 3 projects in your account at any given time
• Storage provided to your account is 100 MB
• Limited access to Visme’s premium assets and templates
• Access to millions of high-quality stock images
• You can only download your projects in JPG format

Restrictions

• No option to import from PowerPoint
• You can’t download your projects in PDF, HTML5, and PNG formats
• You can’t create your own brand color palette
• No privacy controls

Price: Free forever

Click here to sign up for Visme’s basic plan

Standard Plan

Visme’s standard plan gets you access to powerful premium features such as complete access to premium assets and templates, a higher storage limit, and the ability to download projects in PNG and PDF formats.

Here are all the key features and some restrictions that you need to be aware of:

Key Features

• You can store up to 15 projects in your account at any given time
• Storage provided to your account is 250 MB
• Complete access to Visme’s premium assets and templates
• No Visme branding on projects
• You can create your own brand color palette
• You can download your projects in JPG, PNG, and PDF formats
• You can import powerpoint presentations

Restrictions

• You can’t download your projects in HTML5 format
• You can’t organize your projects into folders and sub-folders
• No privacy controls

Price: $10/month (billed annually) or $19/month

Click here to sign up for Visme’s standard plan

Complete Plan

This is the most popular plan at Visme. Under this plan, you get 15 GB of storage, privacy controls, and the ability to download your project in HTML5 format.

Here are all the key features of Visme’s complete plan:

Key Features

• Unlimited projects
• Storage provided to your account is 10 GB
• Control over privacy settings of your projects
• You can download your projects in JPG, PNG, PDF, and HTML5 formats
• You get a branded publish page and can even set brand URLs
• Ability to organize your projects into folders and sub-folders

Restrictions

• No premium support
• No team collaboration features. To get access to these features, you’ll need to upgrade to Visme’s business plans

Price: $20/month (billed annually) or $30/month

Click here to sign up for Visme’s complete plan

User Feedback and Reviews

Since Visme is relatively new compared to other design tools like Canva and Venngage, it has very few reviews on review platforms. But the few reviews that do exist on these sites are overwhelmingly positive.

Visme is rated 4.6/5 on G2Crowd from 18 reviews and 4.5/5 on Capterra from 13 reviews. Most users appreciate the user-friendly nature of the tool and some have even called it a photoshop alternative.

On their website, you can find reviews from marketing managers of companies like IBM, Schneider Electric, and several others. Visit their testimonials page to check out these reviews.

Final Verdict

Marketers who embrace visual content see huge returns in terms of more readers, leads, and customers. If you’re looking to be a visual content champion, you need an online design tool like Visme by your side to create stunning visuals that grab your audience’s attention.

Sign up for Visme’s basic (free forever) plan and integrate visual content into your marketing strategy.

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• 40 Infographic Submission Sites to Promote Your Infographic (and Get Backlinks)
• How to Create Shareable Content: 7 Proven Tactics

The post Visme Review: An Online Design Tool for Non-Designers appeared first on 99signals.

Depositphotos is a popular stock image platform with an extensive library of high-quality stock images, vectors, videos, and graphics. All images are royalty free and can be used for commercial purposes, both online and print.

Launched by Dmitry Sergeev in 2009, Depositphotos is now one of the most popular stock image sites with a library of over 60 million photos and 18 million vectors. They are well known for their discount offers, which they promote extensively on their own website and on AppSumo, and their excellent customer support.

Free Download: The Ultimate Blogging Toolkit – 75+ Tools to Grow Your Blog

In this quick review of Depositphotos, we’ll compare the different pricing plans offered by Depositphotos, look at some pros and cons, and do a quick comparison with other free stock photo resources to help you decide whether it’s worth subscribing to Depositphotos.

Depositphotos: Quick Review

Pricing

If you’ve used stock images from other paid resources before, you’d know just how expensive they can get. This is where Depositphotos truly differentiates itself from rest of the stock image platforms. Their plans are highly affordable, while maintaining the same high-quality photography that you’d expect to see from other sites such as Shutterstock and Getty Images.

Depositphotos offers 3 types of pricing plans: subscription-based, flexible, and on demand.

Subscription-based Plans

• 75 images/month – $62/mo or $629/yr
• 150 images/month – $89/mo or $899/yr
• 750 images/month – $179/mo or $1799/yr

Flexible Plans

• 10 images/month – $10/mo
• 25 images/month – $25/mo
• 50 images/month – $50/mo
• 100 images/month – $100/mo

If you opt for an annual flexible plan, you get to download 10 images per month for 12 months at $99.

On Demand Plans

You can download images and vectors any time within a year.

• 10 images – $44
• 25 images – $89
• 100 images – $269

Depositphotos: Pros and Cons

Pros

• Massive repository of images, vectors, and icons
• High-quality images
• No limit to how many images you can download per day
• Advanced search engine which allows you to filter images by category, size, resolution, photographer, etc. You can even do a reverse image search.
• Excellent customer support (phone, live chat and email)

Cons

• No free trial. There is a collection of free images on the site, but they are nowhere near as good as the paid images.
• No custom packages

Is it worth subscribing to Depositphotos? How does it compare with free stock image sites?

With a plethora of free stock image resources on the web, do you even need a subscription to Depositphotos? Let’s try to answer that question. For the sake of convenience, let’s compare Depositphotos with two of the most widely used stock image resources – Unsplash and Pixabay.

I’m a big fan of both Unsplash and Pixabay. Especially Unsplash, because the quality of images on this site is unparalleled. But it’s fair to say that the images lack variety and if you’re looking for something very specific, you won’t find it on Unsplash.

On the other hand, Pixabay images lack the finesse of Depositphotos images. Depositphotos images just look more professional. Furthermore, Pixabay images are all too common on the internet. They are used extensively by publishers, bloggers, and marketers all over the world. As such, if you’re using a Pixabay image, chances are that the same image has been used by thousands of other users, making your site seem less unique.

So, if you’re looking for a top notch stock image resource that’s not too heavy on the pockets, then you need to subscribe to Depositphotos.

Final Verdict

If you’d like your website to truly stand out, you need to use images that are different and unique from the generic images used by other users in your niche. Grab your visitors’ attention as soon as they land on your site with high-quality images and vectors from Depositphotos.

Try Depositphotos today

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The post Depositphotos Review: How Does It Compare with Free Stock Image Sites? appeared first on 99signals.

By now, you should know that because of technology and the ways information is delivered (smartphones, video games, social media, etc.) you only have a few seconds to capture website visitors’ attention; your product and landing pages need to be optimized to do so.

If you don’t know where to start, this can be a monumental chore. You can get carried away with tons of fancy design bells and whistles, but if you can just narrow things down for the consumer, it’s not that difficult at all. Here’s how you can optimize your pages by simplifying them, step-by-step.

Step #1: Test and Optimize Your Page Speeds

The first step to creating a massively high converting page is to test your page speeds because 40% of online consumers expect a page to fully load in two seconds or less – this includes images, copy, product information, buttons… everything. If your pages aren’t visible almost immediately after clicking, site visitors will likely move away and many of them will never return. Correcting slow load time on a landing page can tremendously increase your conversion rate.

Luckily, you can leverage a free tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to easily check how long it takes for your pages to load. Just by entering the URL of your landing page, you will see approximately how fast your page elements appear on mobile and desktop browsers as well as potential optimizations to speed things up. If you don’t know how to “Minify CSS,” don’t worry – the tool will provide you with precise instructions.

Recommended reading: 8 Actionable Tips to Speed Up Your Website

Step #2: Make Sure Your Headlines are Compelling

Since this is the first thing readers see (often before they even land on your page), a compelling headline is your secret weapon for high conversion. So, the second step in optimizing your pages is to analyze your headline and subheadings. You need to give readers a reason not only to click through from online searches and social media posts, but also something to stay on the page for.

Understand that online readers are more likely to scan your page for relevant information rather than read it from start to finish. There are tools to help with this as well. My favorite headline tool is CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer. The analyzer is designed for blog posts, but works well for all types of landing pages.

You simply enter your headline or potential headline into the tool (which is free in exchange for signing up) and the Headline Analyzer delivers a score with word balance and length review. According to CoSchedule, a balance of common, uncommon, emotional and power words tend to increase click-through rates, and the sweet spot for headline length seems to be around 55 characters that make up 7-9 words.

Recommended reading: 7 Proven Tactics to Create Shareable Content

Step #3: Include All Relevant Product Information

While headlines are the cornerstone of your page content, you cannot afford to stop there. Product descriptions, images, product reviews, product and shipping costs, and estimated delivery time are crucial components of a product page. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve moved away from a product or service website because I couldn’t find clear pricing. Be as detailed as possible when optimizing your product pages.

Luckily, there are tools to help with this as well. Shopify’s inventory management apps provide eCommerce stores with a way to simplify inventory management processes while including all relevant product information for online customers.

Step #4: Simplify Your Navigation Menu

Your website visitor may not convert on the first landing page they arrive at. Around half of page visitors will use your navigation menu to orient themselves on your site. So, you want to uncomplicate the process in order to keep them hooked.

Since there is no one-size-fits-all approach to website navigation, you’ll have to design a structure that allows users quick access to the pages they need. For example, MightySkins sells vinyl skins for various devices. They have thousands of products in stock. Their DJI skins alone fall into 24 different categories. So, when a visitor lands on the page, they are given access to all of these categories in a side menu.

Whatever navigation menu style you choose, make sure it streamlines the conversion process.  

Step #5: Include an Email Subscription Form

If all else fails, and a page visitor isn’t interested in your offer today, you always have email marketing to fall back on (as long as you’re willing to work at it). You should assume that the people who are willing to navigate away from your site might be interested in hearing from you again in the future. This means you’ll have to invite them to connect.

Yes, your page should include links to your social media profiles, and that might seem like enough. But, not everyone is going to want to like your Facebook page; those who do will end up seeing only some of your posts, especially with the implementation of Facebook zero. Eventually, all social media platforms are likely to follow-suit to facilitate more meaningful personal interactions and allow less organic reach for businesses. Learn to effectively build an email marketing list, use subscription forms throughout your website, and start seeing higher conversion rates.  

Conclusion

Follow the five steps above to skyrocket your online conversion without redesigning your entire website. Do you have any simple tricks to help improve website conversion rates? Please share your insights in the comments below.  

Liked this article? Please share it on Twitter using the link below:

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The post 5 Steps to Optimize Your Landing Pages for High Conversion appeared first on 99signals.

This trend will most definitely continue as mobile web browsing continues to steadily overtake desktop’s share of web traffic. Therefore, if you want to make your website stand out from the crowd and beat competition, you must optimize your mobile design for SEO.

To that end, here are five tips to ensure your website’s mobile design is SEO-friendly.

5 Tips to Ensure Your Site’s Design is Mobile-Friendly

1. Eliminate Intrusive Pop-ups

Think of the times you’ve stumbled upon interesting content on the web, only to leave because of those annoying pop-ups which completely cover the contents of the web page.

Since the mobile-friendly algorithm update in 2015, Google has been devaluing websites with intrusive mobile pop-ups. And rightly so!

Below are a few examples of intrusive popups:

Image Credit: Google Webmaster Central Blog

According to Google, intrusive interstitials result in poor user experience due to the smaller size of mobile screens. As such, you should avoid having too many pop-ups on your website.

Not all popups are intrusive though. Check out this article by Search Engine Journal on how to use pop-ups without harming your SEO.

2. Speed Up Your Landing Pages

Site speed is a crucial search engine ranking factor. The quicker your landing pages load, the more engagement you’ll receive.

The speed at which the landing pages on your website load is even more important when they are being accessed via mobile devices.

Users won’t stay engaged for long if your web page takes a long time to load, no matter how valuable the content is.

So how do you go about decreasing the load time of your landing pages?

Start with these 3 simple steps:

• Identify larger images on your website and compress them using tools such as ShortPixel or TinyPNG.
• Next, analyze every piece of JavaScript and CSS and minify them when need. Here’s a useful guide on how to minify CSS and Javascript files in WordPress by WPBeginner.
• And lastly, minimize as many redirects as possible. These redirects create additional HTTP requests, which increase your page’s load time. Google recommends sending users with mobile user agents to the mobile equivalent URL without intermediate redirects.

Need more tips on how to improve your site’s speed and performance? Check out this article which highlights 8 simple to steps to boost your website’s speed. 

3. Use the Right Font Size

If the font size on your website is too small, you may force your visitors to “pinch to zoom” in order to read. You’d ideally like to avoid this mistake by using the right font size.

To do this, specify a viewport for your web pages, set your font sizes to scale properly within the viewport.

Read more about font size best practices here.

4. Resolve Unplayable Content Issues

Some types of videos or content are not playable on mobile devices, such as experiences that require Flash or other players that are not supported on mobile devices.

Unplayable content, when featured on a page of any website can be very frustrating for mobile users who may receive messages like these:

Image Credit: Google Developers

To provide a better mobile experience for users, follow these tips:

1. Use HTML5 standards for animations to provide a good experience to all your users.
2. Use video-embedding that’s playable on all devices.
3. Consider having the transcript of the video available. This will make your site accessible to people who use browsers that cannot play a proprietary video format.

Here are some more video best practices you can follow.

5. Keep Your Design Simple with Clear Calls to Action (CTAs)

Google recommends keeping the website design as simple as you can to provide a better user experience to mobile users.

To keep your website design smooth and simple, here are 3 recommended actions:

1. Keep your calls to action (CTAs) front and center while keeping secondary tasks on the menu or “below the fold”.
2. Keep your menus short and sweet. Mobile users don’t have the patience to scroll through a long list of options to find what they want. Reorganize your menu to use as few items as possible, without sacrificing usability.
3. And lastly, make sure all your contact forms are designed for mobile.

Conclusion

Having a mobile-first design approach is a must for all site owners as mobile continues to drive more web traffic than desktop. Start by implementing the above tips to improve the mobile design of your website and stay on top of the latest SEO trends to proactively make any future changes.

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The post Mobile SEO Basics: 5 Tips to Improve Your Mobile Site’s Design appeared first on 99signals.

And nothing demonstrates the impact of visual content in marketing better than the continued popularity of infographics.

In a recent trend analysis on visual content, HubSpot found that infographics are liked and shared on social media 3 times more than any other type of content. Furthermore, readers spend more time looking at the images than they do reading text on the page.

In short, infographics can help you get more page views, social shares, and as explained in this guide, boost your SEO by helping you generate authoritative backlinks.

Download Now: The Ultimate Blogging Toolkit – 75+ Tools to Grow Your Blog [Free eBook]

So how do you go about creating infographics that are deemed share-worthy by your readers?

The main challenge for non-designers is to create visually appealing infographics without hiring a professional graphic designer. To address this limitation, bloggers and solopreneurs often have to resort to sites like Behance or Upwork and spend tons of money to hire a graphic designer who can do a decent job. While this option certainly works for some people, it’s not the ideal path for people who’d like to create infographics in a cost-efficient way at a brisk pace. Besides, wouldn’t it be great if you had complete control over your design?

This is where a design tool like Venngage is a blessing for non-designers. Venngage is an online infographic maker which lets you easily create infographics from hundreds of predesigned templates. It’s a highly popular design tool, used by marketing veterans like Sujan Patel, Brian Dean, Neil Patel, among others.

Hence, I thought it’s about time we put this tool to the test.

In this Venngage review, we’ll help you decide whether this is the right online infographic maker for you and examine the tool’s key features, pricing, and user reviews and sentiments around the product.

Venngage Pricing Plans

Venngage uses the tagline ‘Free Infographic Maker’ in most of its communications, but to reap the benefits of this tool, you’d have to upgrade to one of their paid plan.

These are the 3 main pricing plans that Venngage currently offers.

• Free Plan
• Premium Plan
• Business Plan

Here’s a brief snapshot of what each plan includes before deep dive into the key features of each of these plans.

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You can save 12% by paying quarterly and 20% by selecting the annual payment option.

In addition to these 3 plans, there is an education for students and teachers as well as a non-profit plan for non-profits and NGOs.

All Nonprofits and NGOs get 50% off on all plans.

Features

Now let’s examine each plan and see which one provides the best bang for buck.

Venngage Free Plan

As you would imagine, the free plan has several restrictions. There are very few free infographic templates you can choose from and very little customization which is possible as you’re not allowed to upload any of your images. Moreover, you’ll not be able to use your logo nor will you be able to export the infographic.

If this is your first time using an online infographic maker, then you should probably go with this plan as it’ll allow you to ascertain how user-friendly the tool is. Once you’re confident about creating infographics using Venngage’s drag-and-drop editor, then it’s time to upgrade to any of the following paid plans.

Price: Free (5 infographic templates per month)

—> Click here to sign up for the free Venngage plan

Venngage Premium Plan

With the Premium plan, you can access premium templates, include your branding, export the file to PDF or PNG, and upload up to 50 images per month. You can also access hundreds of charts, maps, and icons and choose the perfect data visualization.

In addition to this, you can look forward to new premium templates being added each week.

Price: $19/month

—> Use code ’99SIGNALS20′ to get 20% off on Venngage Premium

Venngage Business Plan

This is the best plan that Venngage offers and understandably, the most expensive at $49/month. Venngage’s Business plan includes everything under the premium plan plus access to professionally designed business templates, charts, reports, flyers, brochures and social media images.

Aside from exporting your files into high-res PDFs and PNGs, business members also have the option to export files in interactive PDFs, allowing you to insert hyperlinks.

You’ll also receive priority support, which includes 1-1 consultations from Venngage’s team of designers, marketers and experts.

Price: $49/month

—> Use code ’99SIGNALS20′ to get 20% off on Venngage Business

Selecting a plan on Venngage will depend on your needs. If you publish 3-4 articles a week and would like to leverage infographics for each one of them, then you should probably go with the business plan. On the other hand, if you’re selective about the infographics you want to create, then the premium plan should suffice.

The free plan, sadly, doesn’t offer much for serious bloggers and publishers, as there is no scope to include your logo or even export the file. But you can choose the free plan to learn the nitty-gritty of designing with the tool. Editing pre-existing templates should give you a fair idea as to how the design tool works and how much time you’ll need to create an infographic.

Ease of Use

Like any other online design tool, there is a learning curve involved with Venngage. There is a lot of similarlity between Venngage and other design tools like Canva and Piktochart. So if you’ve experience using these tools, then you’ll find it very easy to create infographics on Venngage.

Just follow these 3 simple steps to create your first infographic on Venngage:

1. Choose a template: Sign in to your Venngage account and select a template that best suits your needs.
2. Add charts and visuals: Visualize your data and information with charts and text. Enhance your infographic by adding icons and images from Venngage’s library.
3. Customize your design: Make your infographic unique by applying your own style. Change the fonts and colors with the Venngage infographic maker.

You can also visit the support center and search the knowledge base if you need assistance in designing your infographic.

Here are some infographic examples from the Venngage gallery.

User Feedback and Reviews

Venngage is well-loved by entrepreneurs and bloggers. You can find a few testimonials on their site from influencers like Sujan Patel from Mailshake and Nathan Chan from Foundr.

There are not too many reviews of Venngage on review platforms. Having said that, the few reviews that the tool has received are highly positive.

On review site G2Crowd, Venngage is rated 9.4/10 from 18 reviews. It’s worth noting that Venngage is a relatively new tool compared to other design tools such as Canva and Piktochart which have had more time to establish a reputation among bloggers and solopreneurs.

Final Verdict

Once you start using Venngage, you’ll understand why it’s so popular among marketers. It’s easily the best online infographic maker and also the most easy-to-use design tool you can find to create drool-worthy infographics.

With hundreds of predesigned templates and new ones added each week, you can create infographics that people love.

Stop wasting time and money on freelance sites and start using Venngage. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed!

Click here to sign up for Venngage’s free plan

If you liked this Venngage review, please share it on Twitter using the link below:

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Here are 3 of our favorite illustrated logo designs to draw inspiration from.

1. Firefox

Firefox is not just known around the world for its web browser, but is also recognized as one of the most stylish logos of the internet era. The logo, which integrates the ideas of ‘fox’, ‘fire’, and the world wide web, was originally based on a concept from Daniel Burka, sketched by Stephen Desroches and then rendered by Jon Hicks using Fireworks MX.

Despite going through several iterations in the past few years, the core concept of the logo remains as strong and eye-catching as ever.

Read more about the story behind Firefox’s logo design in this article here.

2. Mailchimp

The friendly cartoon monkey has become synonymous with the email marketing company, Mailchimp. The original logo was designed by Ben Chestnut when he founded the company in 2001, but he was never really satisfied with the design.

So in 2008, he hired Jon Hicks (designer of Firefox logo) to design a new version, featuring a 3D illustration of the Mailchimp monkey.

3. Malibu

Featuring serene palm trees set against a golden sunset, the above illustration perfectly captures the warmth and energy of the Carribean.

Unlike other logos in this list, the Malibu logo design has largely remained the same over the years. The last change was done in 2013 when its parent company, Pernod Ricard, revamped both the typography and illustration of the logo.

Learn more about the logo revamp here.

Do you have any favorite illustrated logos? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

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The post 3 Best Uses of Illustration in Logo Design appeared first on 99signals.

Do you know what the following words mean?

• Kerning
• Triadic
• Skeuomorphism
• Knolling

It’s like learning a new language, isn’t it? Welcome to the world of design!

With so many technical design terms thrown around, life can get a little confusing for a marketer with no design background.  But fear not – we are here to help.

But you may be thinking – Why is it so important to know these design terms?

It’s because of the impact visual content has on social media.

Visual content gets you more attention on social media. According to Buffer, visual content is 40x more likely to be shared on social media than other types of content. As a result, marketers must at least have a basic knowledge of design terms.

You no longer need expert (and expensive) designers to create well-designed images. We have tools such as Canva and Pablo by Buffer to help us in our pursuit. Both these tools require no prior design experience for marketers to create beautiful visuals that are more share-worthy on social media.

That being said, it’s always helpful when you have a deeper understanding of design to help you in your marketing efforts. Basic knowledge of design terms will also enable you to use tools such as Canva and Pablo to their maximum potential.

If you’re ready to take your design game to the next level, here is a glossary of key design terms every marketer should know.

54 Key Design Terms Every Marketer Should Know

Colors

1. RGB – RGB stands for ‘Red, Green, and Blue’. The RGB color model adds red, green, and blue light together in different ways to create a broad array of colors.

2. Color Palette – A color palette represents colors that can be utilized for any design work that represents your brand. The colors should be used harmoniously with each other to design your visuals.

3. Color Theory – The study of how colors make people feel and respond. It’s a theory which states that certain colors evoke certain subconscious emotions and feelings in people. For instance, the color blue evokes feelings of trust and dependability. Have you ever wondered why social media brands such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. use different shades of blue in their logo? This is why!

4. Warm colors – Warm colors give a friendly and cheerful vibe. These colors are red, orange, yellow, and various combinations of these colors.

5. Cool colors – Cool colors include blue, green, and light purple. They have a calming and soothing effect.

6. Opacity – The degree of transparency of an element. The lower the opacity, the more transparent the color.

7. CMYK – CMYK stands for ‘Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key.’ CMYK is a color model which is used for print purposes.

8. Gradient – Gradient refers to a gradual change in color from one tone to another.

9. Hue – A hue is a way to describe a color and it could be any color on the color wheel. For example, red, blue, and yellow are all hues.

10. Tint – A tint is a variety of a color. Tints are created when you add white to any hue on the color wheel.

11. Monochrome – Monochrome is an image created in black and white or in varying tones of only one color.

12. Complementary – Colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel are considered to be complementary colors. Example: Orange and Blue.

13. Triadic – A triadic color scheme uses colors that are evenly spaced around the color wheel. For instance, the Burger King logo follows a triadic scheme by using the colors orange, red, and blue. Check these colors on the color wheel above and you’ll notice they are evenly spaced.

14. Analogous – Analogous color schemes use colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. Example: Green, yellow, and orange.

15. Pantone – Under Pantone Matching System (PMS), every hue is given a number, making it easy for people to reference and reproduce the same colors.

Typography

16. Serif typeface – A serif typeface adds a little extra stroke or curves, at the ends of letters. (See example below)

17. Sans serif typeface – “Sans” literally means “without”, and a sans serif font does not include an extra stroke at the ends of the letters.

18. Script typeface – A typeface that mimics cursive handwriting. Example: Euphoria script. 

19. Monospace – A font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space.

20. Hierarchy – The visual arrangement of design elements in a way that signifies importance. A typical hierarchy of a blog post would be heading, subheading, paragraph, etc.

21. Kerning – Kerning refers to the space between two specific letters. Kerning usually aims to achieve a pleasing balance of space between each character which improves its legibility.

22. Leading – Leading determines how text is spaced vertically in lines. Tight leading can cause tension and overlap, making the content unreadable, and loose leading can make the type appear disjointed, so we need to try to find a neat balance between the two.

23. Tracking – Tracking is similar to kerning in that it refers to the spacing between characters. However, instead of focusing on the spacing between individual letters, tracking measures space between groups of letters.

24. X-height – X-height is the average height of lowercase letters. X-height gets its name as this value is usually determined by looking at the height of the letter x in any given typeface.

25. Orphans and Widows – The words that appear by themselves at the top or bottom of a column of type. It’s always a good idea to remove these orphans and widows to improve the readability and legibility of the copy.

26. Lorem Ipsum – Lorem Ipsum is a dummy text used by the design industry. It’s usually used as a placeholder text within designs when the copy isn’t ready.

27. Body copy – The main part of text in your design – the written website content, the book contents, etc.

28. Pull quote – A short quote pulled from the main text and used as a visual element to highlight important text or draw attention to the piece. Pull quotes are common in newspaper and magazine design.

29. Legibility – The measure of how easy it is to distinguish one letter from the next. It has a lot to do with your choice of typeface.

30. Alignment – The lining up of elements to achieve balance and order. There are four common types of typographical alignment – center, left, right, and justified.

Branding and Logos

31. Logotype – A logotype is a type of logo where the name of the company is designed in a visually unique way. Example: The Coca-cola logo.

32. Logo mark or Brandmark – A logo where a symbol is used instead of the company name. Ex: The Apple logo.

33. Brand identity – The visualization of your brand in a way that represents the company’s values and ethos. This can include things like a logo, business cards, letterheads, packaging design, etc.

34. Style guide – A style guide is a set of standards for the design of anything related to your brand, whether it’s a website, flyer, ad banner, or business cards. A style guide ensures complete uniformity in style and formatting wherever the brand is used to avoid dilution of the brand.

35. Grid – A grid is constructed from evenly divided columns and rows. A grid allows designers to arrange elements in a consistent way.

36. Icon – Icons are symbols used to represent an action or an object.

Design Techniques

37. Knolling – Knolling is the act of arranging different objects so that they are at 90-degree angles from each other, then photographing them from above. This technique creates a very symmetrical look that looks visually appealing. Images that feature knolling are usually set against a contrasting solid background.

38. Whitespace – Whitespace (also called negative space) refers to the area of a design left blank. It’s the space between graphic elements or copy on the page. Despite being called white space, it can be any color. An excellent example of whitespace would be the Google homepage. By utilizing whitespace, Google makes you focus more on its search bar than any other element on the page.

39. Resolution – The resolution of an image determines the quality. As a rule of thumb, the higher the resolution, the higher the quality.

40. Contrast – Contrast occurs when two elements on a page are different. Some common types of contrast are dark vs. light, thick vs. thin, rough vs. smooth, etc.

41. Saturation – Saturation refers to the intensity or vividness of a color. The more saturated a color is, the more vivid or brighter it appears.

42. Blur – Blur makes images more unclear or less distinct. Using a blur can be a great technique to make text stand out when overlaid onto an image.

43. Crop – The process of discarding the unnecessary portions of an image is called cropping.

44. Texture – A texture is defined as the surface characteristics of your image.

45. Aspect Ratio – An aspect ratio is the proportional relationship between the width and height of a rectangle.

46. Pixel – The word ‘pixel’ is derived from the ‘picture element.’ Pixels are the smallest basic unit of programmable color on a computer and images are made up of many individual pixels.

47. Skeuomorphism – Skeuomorphism is when a digital element is designed to look like a replica of the physical work. For example, the calculators on our smartphones are made to look like their real-life counterparts.

48. Flat design – Flat design is a minimalistic approach that focuses on simplicity and usability. It tends to feature plenty of open space, crisp edges, bright colors, and two-dimensional illustrations.

49. Rule of Thirds – Rule of Thirds is a theory that if you divide your image with two vertical and two horizontal lines, the areas where your lines intersect will become focal points of your design.

50. Thumbnail Sketches – Thumbnail sketches are rough drawings of potential design concepts or solutions. These sketches are used to visualize ideas and concepts by hand before they’re brought to the screen.

51. Die Cut – The process of cutting areas of your printed design in various shapes to create unique effects.

52. Foil Stamping – The heat-pressing application of foil to certain parts of a design to give them a shiny, metallic finish.

53. Letterpressing – The process of using metal plates to press a design into the surface of paper to create dimensional indentations.

54. Scale – Scale refers to the size of an object in relationship to another object. Two elements of the same size can be seen as being equal. On the other hand, elements with a clear variation in size tend to be seen as different.

We hope you found these design terms and their definitions helpful. These terms will really come in handy when you’re adding design to images using Canva or Pablo.

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