Tag Archive for: Web Design

9 Tips For Better Website Design

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Effective visual communication is as much a part of web design as any other aspect. It is crucial in making a site look appealing, but it also does a much more important task. Effective presentation of information and functionality is an essential aspect of having a good site.

Think of it this way – if a site presents information effectively and has a user-friendly interface, it is still useless if the site is ugly or doesn’t match with the client’s brand image. Conversely, no one will wait to see a nice looking page if it takes forever to load or is a pain to navigate.

Remembering that, here are some simple and short tips to help you build a website with better visual communication.

  1. Don’t make users work – Make sure all your content is well organized and easy to get to. Visitors don’t like to waste their energy trying to find content. Your design should be a helpful conduit between the user and the information, not a hassle they have to work past.
  2. Don’t make them wait – Try to optimize your graphics so that they load quickly. No matter how fancy a feature of your site is, users will be unhappy if they have to wait for it to load.
  3. Make sure your navigation is usable and easy to find – This is similar to point one, in that users don’t like to be forced to work to navigate a site. They want to be able to travel anywhere on your site with just one or two clicks. Having a lot of content isn’t worth anything if users can’t get to it easily.
  4. Keep a consistent theme – Make sure every page looks like it belongs to the same site. you don’t want to confuse your visitors or make them think they accidently left the site.
  5. Remember the basic rules of design – No matter how much you like a design, keep in mind what the client and the audience wants. As much as you want to make sites that are fun to make, the designer is usually not the target audience.
  6. Be aware of emerging technology – There is a bit of conundrum with keeping up to date with the latest web technologies. They tend to make better looking sites and are more fun for designers to play with, but they also tend to not work well with older browsers. However, if you learn them now, you will be prepared to implement these technologies when they finally are made compatible with the wide range of browsers.
  7. Try to make your site as accessible as possible – You never know when visitors may have special needs or disabilities and you never want to make them feel left out. Make your site easy enough that children can operate it. You won’t ever have a customer complain because the site was too easy to use.
  8. The site was made for a purpose – Sites are made to sell products and services, showcase work, distribute news, and a number of other things, but few are made to simply look pleasing. You are trying to appeal to an audience, and your design is supposed to serve that purpose.
  9. Design is all about the user – Try to think like a user and not a designer. Keep it simple, appealing, and most of all, easily usable.

If you remember these rules, your visitors and clients should always be happy.

Spyros Thalassinos has even more great tips at Make Your Ideas Art.

 

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6 Expected Web Design Trends for the Coming Year

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In a constantly changing industry, it can be difficult to predict trends for the future. For designers, this means heightened responsibility during transition periods. Designers have to be able to create client pleasing designs based on what has been popular this year, while also constantly learning new tricks to innovate for what is to come. Hopefully, these predictions can help you be prepared for some trends that should become popular within the next year.

  1. Responsive Web Design – At this point, this prediction is more of a foregone conclusion, as new kinds of mobile and desktop devices are constantly being released into the market. Each device has a unique screen size, proportion, and resolution. To create specific websites for each device would cost you a fortune in time and money, and responsive web designs eliminate all of these problems by responding to the size of the device accessing the page. Designers won’t need too make new layouts for different devices, when a single layout will work smoothly with all devices.
  2. Designed Typography – There have never been more fonts and variations for designers to work with than there is today, and choosing what typography to use is always an important decision. In the next year, it seems this will only become more important  and typography may finally cement its place as an essential part of design. Typography is the foundation of any website, and it is time it received recognition.
  3. Vertical Scrolling – Optimizing websites will continue to lead to crucial decisions for layouts. Many websites are still using vertical and horizontal scrolling, but through the next year vertical scrolling will become dominant. Vertical scrolling is convenient and easy. It also allows implementation of vertically scrolling buttons and header menus. All of these features combined make for user friendly navigation across your entire website.
  4. Big Buttons – More and more sites keep optimizing for “touch and tap” on mobile devices, which means buttons are getting bigger. Originally, these large buttons were being used to try to streamline pages and make them more visually pleasing, but they also make using pages on mobile devices infinitely easier. The only drawback is these large buttons require more graphics, which slow down sites. Hopefully designers can find ways around this, or this prediction may never come to full fruition.
  5. Branding Will Take a Hike – All business want their brand to be recognizable, and the year ahead of us seems more likely to focus on designing the brand, rather than trying to build a website based on the newest trends. Designers will choose things that complement the brand rather than choosing features that seem popular at the moment. It will become more important for designers to focus on translating a webpage business through the webpage and represent the brand’s image.
  6. Parallax Scrolling Will Rise – Parallax scrolling has been around for some time now, but it has mainly been used in video games  This year, it seems likely to finally transition to the web. This feature allows designers to control the depth of design objects on the webpage being designed.

While these are only predictions, many of these seem undeniably likely to come true. By studying what looks likely to become popular, you can be on the cutting edge of web design, rather than always playing catch up.

For examples of these predictions, check out Ali Qayyum’s article at Smashing Hub.

 

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The Comprehensive Responsive Design Infographic [INFOGRAPHIC]

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It is becoming undeniable that responsive websites are becoming the norm. As more people use tablets and smartphones to browse the internet, responsive web designs that easily adapt to different devices are becoming the smartest way to design a site.

The problem, as with any new design method, is getting started when you don’t know much about making your site responsive. Luckily for anyone with this issue, we have a comprehensive infographic from Helen Bailey at Demortalz that covers all of the basics of responsive design, from basic vocabulary and suggested reading to free PDF books and a suggested toolkit. There is even a dynamic version available that is designed like a game.

No matter which version you prefer, this infographic will help you get started making responsive designs which are quickly becoming standard.

 

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3 Reasons to Learn Online Marketing

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As a web designer or developer, it’s always important to understand what the client wants. That’s why it is strange how few designers and developers understand online marketing.

Understanding and implementing online marketing give any developer or designer a great advantage in the marketplace and promises much more of a long term reward than those that fail to learn about online marketing. This isn’t to say neglecting your designing or developing skills is a wise decision, but by combining your skills with online marketing, you can do three things:

1) Get more clients – When clients post ads for developers or design jobs, they often get responses detailing what features and formats the person could implement. They promise so many pages, or list how they are proficient in HTML5, jQuery, and W4C standards. This may seem like a great approach for contacting potential employers, but it has a great weakness.

Potential employers want to know what you will do for them, and what they want you to do is make more money. Employers want to hear that you will raise the number of subscribers a certain percent, or will raise their revenue. Wether you use HTML5 or jQuery is not of much importance to them.

There are plenty of good web designers that can make nice looking websites, but there are way less designers that know how to increase sales. Those that know online marketing will get the better clients, and higher rates.

2) Build Your Brand – The biggest problem for every freelancer is building a base of clients. It would be great for clients to just come to you ready to pay however much you want, but that is a fantasy. Or is it?

Building a strong personal brand online attracts clients by exhibiting your skills to them beforehand. This can be fairly difficult and requires a lot of perseverance, but there is a basic pattern. First, you build a popular blog, followed by establishing a decent social media following. Then, you participate in outside activities like conferences, and make yourself known about.

This path does two very important things for you. It establishes you as a reputable expert, and gains you tons of publicity many would pay for. When employers need work done, they go to the experts they know first, and if you’ve built a strong brand, they will know about you.

If you want to know more about building a personal brand, I highly recommend watching the TED talk by Jacob Cass.

3) Earn extra income – Freelancing is far from a stable career and anyone should be prepared for unexpected problems. That is why it is important to make yourself as financially secure as possible before the problems arrive.

One of the best options for securing your finances is to diversify your streams of income between client work and passive income. If you are already perceived as an expert in your field, creating a passive income shouldn’t be difficult. There are a slew of monetization options, such as creating and selling your own products or even simply displaying ads on your site.

It does take effort to create a product, and even more to market and sell it, but it could be extremely important in your future.

Think of it this way, if you want to run a local bakery, you have to be as good at business as you are at baking. Otherwise, the business won’t get off the ground. The same goes for creating a business online. If you want to be successful online, learn online marketing.

 

If you want to learn more about online marketing and the mistakes you can make while starting out, read more at 1stwebdesigner.

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8 Design Practices Web Designers Should Avoid

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No other industry has benefited from the internet more than the business industry. The internet has given businesses easy ways to market their products or services to a wider audience, and now the creation of websites that appeal to specific audiences is one of the most important aspects of business marketing.

If you are in charge of creating a website, you want to make it eye-catching, but you also want to avoid simple mistakes that make your audience want to go elsewhere. Lewis Hooker at Graphic Design Junction has a list of 8 things to avoid if you want people to keep coming back.

  1. Do not make the design complex – It’s easy and sometimes fun for a designer to be a little overzealous and include a lot of features in their design without considering if these features are really necessary. Going overboard is never good in the long run. Complex designs with an abundance of features make navigating websites difficult and confusing for many visitors. Even worse, it makes changing and adjusting your site later a real pain.
  2. Do not exaggerate the use of Flash – It is a common mistake for web designers to over-do it when using Flash animation. Flash can certainly be a nice touch on a site to make the page a little more eye catching, but too much is always a bad thing. Too much flash slows down your website’s loading time drastically, and visitors often leave if they get tired of waiting for a page to load. If you want to use Flash, just remember that less is more.
  3. Do not use “fancy” fonts – Some designers like to use highly stylized fonts to class up their pages a little. While a nice font can help grab visitor’s eyes if used right, fonts that are difficult to read frustrate viewers. If you want to use a distinct font, go for it, but if you can’t immediately read the text, go with something else.
  4. Do not use music of audio files without permission – Lately many website designers have been including music players within their sites that automatically play music when the page loads. Many visitors find these annoying, and worse, they can get in the way as well as slowing down load times. If you feel it necessary or relevant to include a music player, always remember to give users control to pause or mute the music.
  5. Do not hide the links – Some designers often forget to highlight links on their websites properly. Links are obviously essential to navigation, and users want to be able to navigate websites as quickly and easily as possible. Therefore, always highlight links properly so users can get around.
  6. Do not use pop ups – I don’t know why any designer would use pop ups anymore. They are annoying, and most browsers have software built in to block them.
  7. Do not ask for registration – There are times when asking users to register before accessing content is necessary, but if it isn’t absolutely required, avoid registration. Most viewers will be put off by having to enter their information to see content that should be readily available.
  8. Do not subscribe the visitors to newsletters without their permission – Doing this will make your visitors angry. Period. No one wants e-mails from a website unless they signed up for them. Just don’t do it.

These tips are simple and to many visitors, they may seem like common sense. However, we still see them everywhere. If you want your website to be a success, just follow these rules. Your visitors will be happy and so will your clients.

 

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4 Tips For Improving Your Site’s Design

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Neglecting design is unforgivable in the online world. Having a good design is the difference between a good user experience and a frustrating one, which in turn makes the difference between success and failure for your site.

Good design is a main component of what made Facebook and Twitter rise above other social media sites. Using attention grabbing compositions keeps people reading. It also improves your site’s reputation. Hopefully these design tips will help you attract visitors to your web page and keep them there.

  1. Don’t crowd your page With Ads – Advertising may seem like a great money making method, but if you go overboard with ads, your site will look bad and users will be put off. Your sidebars should be places of content, not clutter. You don’t want to distract people into leaving your page, do you? If you decide to go the ad route, remember that less is more. Integrate the ads into your site’s appearance and try to only allow ads that are relevant to your content.
  2. Use Images Strategically and Professionally – Having high quality and professional pictures on your page can be a great boost to your aesthetic. Too many photos, however, and you run into the same problem as with ads. Too many pictures can overwhelm the viewer, and more importantly, they can make the site just look like a mess. Choose images carefully so that they add to your content, and not distract from it.
  3. Use a Professional Header Graphic – Your header graphic is at the top of every page a visitor sees. It affects their interaction with your entire website. So, you could say having a professional header graphic is fairly important to your user’s overall experience. If you aren’t a professional designer, this is one area where hiring someone is for the best. Make it clean and simple. You want to draw in visitors with a stylish and classy header, not bare down on them with clashing graphics and text.
  4. Use a Color Scheme That Highlights Your Content – The best color palettes for web sites are those with a few relatively similar colors. Complementary colors or colors close to each other on the color wheel help make sure nothing clashes, and that you don’t distract from content. You want your design to bring attention to the content in a positive way and not overwhelm.

Making sure you follow these rules for your site’s design can help improve your visitors’ experiences. Happy viewers makes for return visitors and more time spent on your site. By using a design that complements your content, your visitors will feel naturally drawn to it and they’ll be much more likely to stick around.

For more suggestions on web design, look at Sarah Arrow’s article at Sark e-Media.

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Why You Need a Mobile Optimized Site

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Where is your phone? If you’re reading this, there is a good chance it’s in your hand. Over the past few years, Internet users have made a huge shift to mobile browsing as tablets and smart phones have made it easier to access the web while running errands, dining out or even talking with your friends.

This is why it’s important to make sure your website is optimized for mobile browsers. With almost fifty percent  of your audience using mobile devices as their primary way to browse the web, not having a mobile optimized website can cost you serious traffic and money.

So what do you do if you don’t have an optimized site for smart phones and tablets?

Well first, don’t just create a miniaturized version of your site. Users don’t want to be forced to try to pinpoint tiny buttons with their clumsy fingers and they definitely don’t want to read walls of text. Even more important is making sure the site loads quickly. Over half of all mobile users expect websites to load as quickly, if not even faster, on their mobile devices as they do on their computers. To make your site load quickly, make your mobile homepage streamlined with only essential content with minimum JavaScript and CSS files.

When optimizing your site for the Internet, it is also important to make sure your website works properly on every device. Ensuring your site supports every mobile operating system protects every visitor from having a bad experience with the site.

If you don’t already have a developer with experience in mobile sites, it’s time to get one. If anything, it is a little late. Your competition most likely already has an optimized version of their website for mobile devices and if your site isn’t ready for mobile browsing, your customers will leave you for your competition.  While it may seem daunting and costly to update your site for mobile surfing, making sure your customers have a pleasant experience with your site will save you much more money.

 

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Seven Mistakes That Can Kill Your Site

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Anyone that has built a website from scratch knows how much effort it takes to build an audience, raise your traffic and generally get your site known about. So, what happens if suddenly all that traffic disappears? All of that work can be undone in a single moment. Why does this happen? Usually it is because of mistakes you never knew you were making. Here are 7 common mistakes that could make your website fail.

  1. Pointing All of Your Backlinks Into Your Home Page – Link building is an essential part of any website’s SEO and doing it well means improving your search engine performance. The most common mistake with backlinking is directing all of your links back to your home page. Search engines think it is strange if all of your backlinks point to your homepage and will penalize your search rankings and your traffic. Instead, spread your link distribution and point backlinks to different pages within your website.
  2. Unnecessary Clutter – If you’re getting a lot of traffic, it’s natural to want to maximize your profit by monetizing your website. But be careful if you try to do this. Many add unnecessary clutter to their page while trying to monetize content, which changes your pages appearance and the way the public interacts with it. Too many advertisements and other clutter, will soon send the public elsewhere.
  3. Giving Too Much Content at Once – Content may be what the public is seeking on the Internet, but giving them too much of it in one place can be a bad thing. You want to keep your audience comfortable. Don’t make them feel overwhelmed by putting too much information in a single page. If you are going to be giving lots of content at once, split it across several pages so you will keep visitors’ interests.
  4. Amateurish Design – If you want your website to be respected, don’t put the design in unexperienced hands, even if they are your own. No matter how good your content is, if the design is off putting, you still won’t get visitors. It’s easy to find good website templates for cheap and there are always designers for hire. Don’t risk your reputation on a shoddy design.
  5. Being Disorganized – Visitors will always want their experience with your website to be as easy as possible. This seems simple, yet many still provide confusing and disorienting sites that frustrate their visitors. Those visitors won’t care about what content you are offering if they can’t find it easily.
  6. Trying to Advertise Before Your Content is Finished – Search engines will notice if you try to push for traffic before your website content is finished. Search engines favor content that is geared towards their audience and no audiences favor unfinished content. It seems amateurish, and you are focusing on the popularity and money before you have a proper product to offer. Instead, get some great content before you start trying to attract the public.
  7. Going Plain Text – It’s simple: people get bored quickly. Failing to add graphics, means your audience will get bored almost immediately. Give your visitors something to catch their eye everywhere you can. Keep them interested.

These ideas may seem like common sense, but websites continue to make these mistakes every day. Avoid them or one day you may notice your traffic has gone somewhere else.

 

For some other more information on how to keep your website running smoothly, go to Sathishkumar Varatharajan’s article at designrhub.

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The Pros and Cons of jQuery

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jQuery is the biggest open-source, CSS3 compliant, cross-browser, JavaScript library available. What makes jQuery stand out is its simplicity and ability create Flash-like animations that are viewable on iOS, which doesn’t work with Flash. The popularity of jQuery is growing quickly, so we think it’s important you know the pros and cons of using it.

Pros

The biggest upside to jQuery is its simplicity. It takes only a little bit of programming knowledge to create crowd pleasing animations. It is also incredibly flexible because jQuery allows users to add plug-ins. If you don’t know how to do it in CSS, jQuery can help you.

It is also a very fast solution to your problems. While there may be “better” solutions, jQuery and its development team work to make sure you can implement jQuery quickly and effectively, which saves money. Those in the open Source software community support jQuery because it has great technical support, interacts well with other types of code, supports plug-ins and makes basic animation as easy as can be.

Open source software means quick growth and the freedom of developers to provide the best service possible without corporate red tape.

 

Cons
Open source software does have some problems however. There is no set standard amongst providers, which means if you or the developer do not have the money, time or ability to fix issues, you may never find a solution if you have a problem. Also, frequent updates mean community members are also unlikely to provide solutions.
There are also many versions of jQuery available right now and some are less compatible than others.
Also, jQuery’s lightweight interface may lead to problems in the future. Not being able to actually code can lead to many problems in implementation. Not knowing how to program means not knowing how to fix issues that arrive with jQuery and it doesn’t pick up the slack for you. While jQuery is seemingly easy and impressive, making it actually work can be much more troublesome. To make jQuery work, you have to keep up with community developments and realistically understand your skill level.

 

jQuery is  slower than CSS in many cases. Its simplicity is its curse, as it is not meant for client-side interactions. If you misuse jQuery, you get code that multiplies and multiplies until it is unmanageable, which means a few simple lines of code can quickly make maintaining your site a nightmare. The community is working to fix this issue but for now it is a very real problem.

Conclusion

While jQuery is easy, know if you can handle it before trying. It is meant to simplify tasks for skilled programmers and not to be used as a crutch for beginners. While the less experienced may be able to make jQuery work for them, they will most likely need a lot of assistance.

 

For more information on jQuery, look at Richard Larson’s article for webdesignerdepot.com.

 

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How To Make The Best Design The First Time

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No designer wants to spend hours and hours doing unnecessary revisions and redesigns. You especially don’t want your client to throw out an idea at first glance. We know making the “best” design for your client’s specific needs on the first try is almost impossible but that doesn’t mean your first designs can’t have the potential to become the best design. With these few simple steps, you can make sure your designs have potential from the beginning and, hopefully, provide better designs for your client.

  1. Know Your Brand: Designers often ignore this step. It’s easy to think, when starting out as a designer, that the brand you’re working for doesn’t matter on the first try. They will just give you tons of revisions either way, right? Wrong. Knowing the business and the brand you’re creating for gives you a better understanding of what they need. Once you know what they need, you can give them what they want. Knowing a brand means knowing who they want to attract. By doing the research, you can help solve the client’s problems.
  2. Know the Industry: There are a few reasons you want to know what is happening in a client’s industry. To begin with, design is incredibly trendy and what is “in” right now varies by industry. You want to make sure your client sticks out in a positive and logical way. Don’t try to blend in but don’t let your design be the equivalent of a Hawaiian shirt at a formal event. Secondly, while knowing what is popular with your client’s industry is important, it is also essential to know what is attractive to their customers. Your design should focus as much on their needs as it does the client’s.  Researching the industry lets you know what people in that industry want and reveals what needs to be improved.
  3. Be Creative: When faced with creating something new, we all look for inspiration. Designers usually go online and look at other designs anywhere from blogs to showcases. After finding something that inspires us, many accidentally end up copying the original source. Using inspiration does not mean changing small features of another design to make an almost identical but subtly different design. It means being creative with what inspired you. You can borrow some things but you want your inspiration to push you to try something new. Good creativity and good design lead to innovation.
  4. Details, Details, Details: Rushing to get a design finished can lead to silly mistakes that are absolutely avoidable. While focusing on the layout is important, the details are just as essential. You don’t want to have a beautiful design with a misspelled banner or a typo in a sidebar. Some clients will brush off little mistakes like these, as they are easy to fix, but many will be less forgiving. If these mistakes are easy to fix after you’ve shown the design, they should have been fixed before you showed it.
  5. Explain Your Design: We, as designers, love to understand what we create and why we did it. The problem is, we’re often bad at communicating this to others. Sending an explanation of your design when you submit it allows you to answer most of the client’s questions before they can ask them. It shows intent and purpose behind the design. While a confusing design with no explanation will almost certainly be refused before you can defend it, allowing the client to understand it from the outset will help them see potential in the design, and offer their own opinions,

Every design will need revisions but there is no reason to fear them. However, if you make the best design you can for your client’s needs on the first submission, you will likely find they are more willing to work with what you created. Communicating with clients and trying to give them what they want, rather than what you like, will make your clients happy and could open up more room for creative freedom later.

 

For more ideas on how to improve your designs, go to Kendra Gains’ article at webdesignerdepot.com

 

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