Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Online merchants could always use some free expert advice from the design community. There is a wide variety of free ebooks available to help.

Here is a list of helpful ebooks on design. There are titles on typography, classic design, color theory, user-experience design, logos, brand building, creativity, and more. All of these ebooks are free.

With a recent surge towards mobile browsing and cool new design options like parallax scrolling, the web has seen millions of websites receive facelifts over the past few years. It has also led to a lot of poor web design choices that prevent consumers from fully connecting with brands.

From unattractive homepages to weak content, poor navigation, and countless errors, there are a number of things that the average website can improve on.

Below, you’ll find the top ten most common web design mistakes and how to keep them from hurting your site’s overall engagement....

When you're new to marketing, especially on a small team, you might have to do a lot of things at a moment's notice. And when it comes to things like blogging and social media, sure, you've got this. But soon enough, you're being pulled onto design projects. One day you're mocking up an infographic; the next, you're designing an ebook. You feel woefully unprepared -- and that design vocabulary? It can feel like a foreign language.

Sound familiar?

We've been there -- and we know we're not the only marketers who have, at some point, needed to become fluent in this vocabulary. So we decided to share a larger glossary, to help us all step up our game a bit. By no means is this the be-all-end-all of design terminology, so feel free to add your definitions in the comments as well. Here's what we have, organized alphabetically....

Why do you want to create a site? Is it to deliver good looking visuals to your visitors? No! The objective is to drive conversions, generate sales, improve brand visibility and ensure your business reaches a wider audience.

Unfortunately, an unnecessary focus on visuals might see you creating a site that is low on ROI. Your target website visitors are interested in getting more information about your business and its products and services from your site. If great visuals help drive brand and business messaging forward, well and good and that should be their primary objective. If they haven’t been picked keeping the website’s goal in mind, they will just serve to distract visitors.

Here are two sites that have made great use of visuals, and they serve to illustrate the purpose of the site. The visuals are arresting but do not distract visitors from what the website is all about and the products/services it is bringing to them....