About The Website Development
This website was created to detail why ethnography is a viable research method to use for driving marketing strategies. As such, I opted to design this website using industry standard principles and present the information in a visually appealing way, tying it to the concept of marketing by using business related photos.
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I used Wix, the free website building platform as it provides a simple drag and drop method for designing and optimising a website. The website is mobile optimised, which is an important element due to the large amount of users who browse the internet on their mobile devices (Westfall 2018). Mobile optimisation was achieved by carefully examining all pages and aspects of the website to ensure they worked correctly on both desktop and mobile devices. The website also features fast load times and responsive buttons, as the Wix platforms provides fast hosting for your free website creations (Wix 2018).
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This leads to one of the most important aspects of my website, UX/UI optimisation. UX is User Experience, which is how people feel when using a website, effective UX design includes ensuring a website works properly, is easy to use and provides pleasure during the interaction (Lamprecht 2017). UI is User Interface, which is the compliment to UX. User Interface design provides the look, feel, interactivity and the overall presentation to a website (Lamprecht 2017). Both go hand in hand and are crucial to the development of an effective website. Therefore my website is simple, easy to use and provides an interactive element through the various buttons and the parallax scrolling effect of each pages background (Idler 2012).
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My website is also reliable and trustworthy, as all the research I have conducted has been referenced correctly so users can find the information I have used from the original sources. This is an important aspect of UX design as users are less likely to browse a website they consider unreliable or untrustworthy (McAshan 2016). All of these aspects assist in making my website optimised for search engines, a process known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO is how well your website can be found on search engines such as Google, this is a crucial part of developing a successful website as you want your site to be seen by people interested in the topic your site is based around (WixBlog 2018).
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Keywords are an important part of SEO, the keywords ethnography and marketing a quite heavily used throughout my site, this will help my site be found when users search those terms through Google. Keywords also need to be implemented naturally, for example, if my site featured sentences such as 'Ethnography is a research practice good for marketing, companies should use ethnography for marketing', Google will know you're trying to pad your site with keywords and will actually reduce your SEO as a result (Digital Firefly Marketing 2015. Visually appealing and easy to use sites also benefit SEO, which is why I have implemented a long scroll effect on my website, providing all the important focus points on the main page with buttons leading to their respective relevant pages.
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