Tag Archive for: Web Design

How to Make Retina Graphics

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Retina capable displays don’t seem to be going anywhere, and every new analysis of mobile browsing shows that Apple dominates the mobile browsing market. Add to that the number of people using new MacBook Pros, and you have a fairly large audience using very powerful screens.

For the designer, this poses an issue. How are you supposed to go about creating graphics at high enough resolutions for these screens? Even worse, how are you supposed to make your old website look good on these new screens?

Well Chris Spooner has made a tutorial available at Line25 to help you through this, and he makes it much easier than you probably thought. From creating new graphics to optimizing those old images, the tutorial covers just about everything you need to know, including the code.

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Who Are Web Designers? [Infographic]

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The UK web hosting company Heart Internet wanted to find out who web designers are and what their opinions are on their profession. They asked 500 designers and while that is far from being representative of the entire industry, the results are pretty much in line with what you would expect.

Firstly, Heart Internet found that 78% of all web designers are male. There are definitely female designers out there, but I think most figured web design was still a male majority.

Eighty-percent believe work is hard to find, and three-fourths don’t expect it to get better in the near future. That makes it shocking that 77% feel secure in their job security, probably because most designers are freelancers anyways.

The rest of the results are compiled into this infographic. There are some very interesting findings.

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Answering “Why?” – The Most Important Step in Design

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In the design community, every step of the creation process becomes a tale we tell each other to establish our own know-how, as well as trading insight and tips. What we don’t seem to discuss is the “why” side of things. We share what happened and how, but rarely do you hear designers explaining why they decided to do what they did.

It is possible we just don’t realize how important that question can be. Sometimes, it doesn’t seem relevant while trading stories “from the field”. Unfortunately, not answering these questions holds everyone back.

This is the issue Rob Bowen brings up in his article for Webdesigner Depot, and he makes some important arguments for why to be sure you can answer “Why?” Most importantly, answering why you did something helps a client understand your professional opinions and decisions.

If you have thought through why you selected a certain layout or tool, you will be able to argue for it better if your decision is questioned by your client. Sometimes, that forethought is all that can get some ideas past the boardroom. Thinking through every step, also helps ensure you create the best design you can.

The good designer can make a solid website, but the great designers can tell you why every aspect of the design was chosen. If your vision or understanding of the design are blurry, you won’t be able to back it up when the pressure is on.

 

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Great Resource: Website Migration Checklist

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Any time you are trying to launch a site on a new platform, there are tons of things and details to keep track of. Thankfully, the folks at SaleAMP have a great website migration checklist (PDF) to help you keep track of everything. I found it thanks to Smileycat Blog.

There are plenty of these out on the net, and the best checklist is one you’ve made by yourself by going through the process multiple times. But, this is a great place to start until you’ve got your own list made up.

 

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The Easiest Ways To Lose Clients

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One of the biggest priorities for designers is creating and maintaining a client base. Without one, the designer is out of work. Unfortunately, even after months of work with a client, you can lose them with just a single, simple mistake.

Alexa D’Agostino has a list of 15 mistakes you can make that will lose you clients. Most of the mistakes seem like common knowledge, but they are also mistakes we all still make.

From not responding fast enough to having a messy office, these small issues are enough to drive you out of business.

 

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Does Color Affect Your SEO?

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Do you understand how color affects your website content? Do you know color can affect how your site is interpreted by commercial search engines?

Most people don’t. Normally, for designers, color selection comes down to aesthetic preference or corporate color palatte. What they don’t realize is color selection can have a negative effect on your conversions if it isn’t well planned.

Shari Thurow examines the link between SEO and color selection in her article at Search Engine Land. Beyond impacting the usability of your site, color selection can cause different cultural understandings of your site. More frightening for the developers out there, improper color usage can even be considered search engine spam. Make sure you think before you paint your site the wrong colors.

 

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The Reason Your Design Got Rejected

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All designers have concepts or designs that have ended up on the cutting room floor. The reasons vary; maybe a client didn’t like the color you chose to work with. But, sometimes, the reasons the design didn’t get chosen is perfectly reasonable.

Maybe you didn’t understand what the client wants. Some clients aren’t looking for a complete overhaul. If a client wants a small area or one aspect of a page changed, don’t let yourself run away with your concept. It is also possible to just go too far technologically. I think every designer has come up with some “masterpiece” only to realize it is not entirely feasible.

There are lots of different reasons a design can not be selected. Issac Pinnock from Made By Many has an article where he pulls out specific examples from his portfolio that never made it to publish. The main reason is usually the same, however. The designs don’t give the client what they wanted.

Understand your client, and ask plenty of questions to make sure you know what they want. That is the secret to making a design that gets chosen.

 

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Responsive Design – Pros and Cons

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Here we are, gathered around again for another article on responsive design. You’ve heard me say why responsive design is great, how easy it is to implement, and the different ways you can approach it. Now I’m going to tell you why you shouldn’t use it.

Okay, not quite, but I am going to focus on the pros and cons of using responsive design. Every design system has its drawbacks, and this is no different. The question, of course, is do the positives outweigh the negatives? And the answer to that is, it depends what resources you have and what your needs are.

The Positives

  1. Low Maintenance – One of the biggest upsides to responsive design is the need to only maintain one website. Every device gets a different layout, but the same content simultaneously. This is important if your website goes through frequent content updates. If you are updating numerous times a day, this makes your work much more streamlined than having to update your desktop page, your mobile page, and maybe even a tablet or middle range page.
  2. Brand Consistency – Having only one webpage to maintain allows you to also keep an incredibly uniform brand representation across your pages. The look and feel of your page, and all of the brand image imbued within it, will remain consistent for all screen sizes, and you won’t have to spend time ensuring similar representations across different versions of your site.
  3. Usability – Responsive design is known for being user friendly, mainly because visitors only have to learn your site once. Their navigational abilities aren’t stunted when they decide to visit your page on another platform, and they get a uniform experience from anywhere.
  4. No redirects – This aspect seems insignificant at first glance, but helps ensure your users always have a positive experience with your site, especially if you are sharing content on social media platforms. Having a uniform URL for all versions of your site means that you can link to content elsewhere with one link, and no longer worry if users will have compatibility issues. Mobile users won’t be directed to the desktop version, and vice-versa.

The Negatives

  1. Development Time – Obviously a responsive website can take more time than a regular page, and require more testing than others. It also takes longer to convert an old website than to create a new one from the ground up. You will still likely spend less time than building multiple versions of one page, but if you outsource your mobile page to a seperate designer, you may actually end up increasing your load by taking on a responsive page.
  2. Different Devices are Still Different – While responsive design allows users to have a more uniform experience than different versions of the same page, there is no way any website will ever work equally well on every platform or device. Different platforms have different needs associated with them, and having only one version of your page actually limits the ways you can tailor your content to their needs. Sabina Idler from Webdesigner Depot uses the scenario of a public transportation website. Desktop users will either be planning trips or looking for deals, with plenty of time to look at options and explore. A mobile user on the other hand, may be relying on the mobile site to get on the correct train at the last second. If you only have one version of the page, you can’t cater to both.
  3. Scalable Images Lose Details – Scaled images lose detail, which strips them of meaning. With responsive design, images and text are scaled by screen size rather than context, so things you want to be big may not be. There are ways to get around this issue, but it still takes time and planning to avoid.
  4. Designing Menus – Desktop pages anymore tend to have fairly complex menus with multiple layers. Trying to design a seperate version of this for a mobile user is hard enough, but designing one menu for both is downright intimidating. The rule to follow is to try to find a balance between easy access to info and unobtrusive design.

Conclusion

If you have the time to invest in responsive design, it is very possible it will benefit you. To know if it will however, you have to take a long look at your business and decide what is needs are. Do you have customers who may have drastically different wants based on what platform they are on? Do you have numerous updates going out every day? Answer these questions, and you will be much closer to knowing what path to take.

 

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A Guide To Design Briefs

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Do you ever find yourself wondering how to achieve that perfect design you see in your mind? You can get it. You just need a design brief. If you are a designer or a client, the design brief will be the largest determining factor in deciding the success of a project.

This guide will help you understand the benefits of a design brief as well how to create an effective one.

What is a Design Brief?

A design brief provides your designer wth all of the information needed to reach or exceed your expectations. It should focus on the results and outcomes of the design you would like to achieve. Business objectives and goals are important to make sure your designer knows what to strive for. A design brief however shouldn’t deal with aesthetics. That is the role of the designer.

How To Write an Effective Brief?

Jacob Cass, writer for Just Creative, has a list of great questions that will help you make a great brief. If you can answer the questions I’ve compiled here, you will be 90% done. Don’t try to think of one sentence answers, but think of the questions as jumping off points.

What does your business do? Your designer will not necessarily know anything about your business. Avoid jargon, and address what your company does, as well as its history.

What are your goals? Why are you hoping to achieve those goals? The designer needs to know what you are trying to communicate, as well as your motive to decide how the design should address these issues. Let them know what makes you different from competitors. A good idea is to also provide old promotional materials to give them an idea of your promotion history.

You designer should also be given knowledge of your target audience. What is your target markets demographic? Which audiences are more important than others?

What is your budget? Knowing this will help designers reach benchmarks without wasting time or resources, as well as helping inform what size and specifications you desire.

Conclusion

Give the designer as much information as you can to help inform them. You won’t get what you want, unless you inform them.

 

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Targeting Your Audience Effectively Through Web Design

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Anytime you have an industry where creativity meets business, you face the conundrum of who to target with your work. Do you want to make something exciting and fun that other people interested in design will like, or do you want to make something consumers will enjoy?

The good news is that web designers can do both. If you have just a bit of marketing knowledge and some strategy, you can make a solid design that was as fun for you to make as it is for consumers to explore.  Any good designer should already be attracting their potential audience while making interesting designs. But what do you do if you aren’t?

The first step is to identify your target audience. If you can spot who your demographic is, everything else will fall into place.

Thankfully, identifying your audience has never been easier since you have tools like Google Analytics at your disposal. This isn’t to say this is a walk in the park, but pinpointing your customer base is much more simple and precise than it used to be.

By doing a keyword search in your analytics dashboard, you can also see what people are searching for, and what kind of people they are.

Another way to identify what your visitors like is by simply asking them questions. Blogs are a great platform for this, because you should already be trying to interact with your audience, and you can leverage to ask them what they think about different topics and to offer their opinions. It is also important to note, if you are struggling to interact with commenters because of spam overload, adding a simple Captcha is easy and rids you of most spam.

Social media also offers a huge opportunity to interact with your audience. It is easier to connect with readers on Facebook than it is to interact in the comments sections of articles. Taking advantage of social media also means your content is easier to share, which will attract more readers.

Once you know who you are designing for, you can find ways to make a great site they will enjoy, and you won’t hate making. Christian Vasile has great design tips if you’re having trouble getting started.

You don’t have to sell out and make boring websites because you are designing for a company. In fact, if you do, you are just making bad websites and your clients won’t be happy anyways.

 

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