Web Design is Product Design

Debate is usually an indication of intelligent human pursuit. But not always. 

One issue for design students—this no-brainer, simplest of issues—has ever been kept alive within the inane realm of debate since it first arose. As such, it is an unflattering indictment on those who contest the simple fact that a web designer must craft markup and css.

A designer who does not write markup and css is not designing for the web, but drawing pictures.

Web design is product design. Drawing a picture of the product is not designing the product. Web design is experience design. Drawing a picture of on-screen content or mechanism behaviors is not designing the experience. The functioning html/css (and sometimes JavaScript) is the design.

Graphic design is often important in web design, but only as one component of web design’s requirements. If you stop at the .psd you’ve stopped well before midpoint in the design. The graphic designer who lacks html/css skill is insufficiently prepared as a web designer. A designer who lacks competence should address that issue rather than seek refuge within embarrassing debate.

How Design Fails

It is my experience that design seldom can do much good for most second– and third–tier companies and organizations. The reason for this is that these sorts of entities almost always fail themselves before they even enlist the services of a designer or a design agency.

More often than not, companies and organizations first need business consulting before they need design – else all the design in the world can do little good for them.

For instance, the following scenarios are pretty much regular fare in our industry:
The client comes to us with an ever expanding list of print collateral they need produced. They don’t seem to understand that so much of it is redundant and they insist on spending 3 times what they should. They prefer a scattershot approach to marketing collateral instead of examining what their specific needs are and planning a targeted program to address those needs.

The client comes to us for a website or a site redesign. Their reason for this need is to “keep up” with their competition; to “look competitive.” They so often fail to first make their business competitive and then reflect that difference with their online presence.

The client comes to us for a website or site redesign in order to better reflect the gravity of their brand. They so often fail to notice that their brand is the problem; that the logo lacks gravity, that their copy writing lacks gravity and direction, that their company culture and client relationships are pure boilerplate.

Now, it is quite understandable that this can happen. After all, it is hard for any of us to grasp just how much we don’t know and to take steps to address those issues. What’s so very disappointing though is that when these kinds of oversights and deficiencies are pointed out, they’re almost always dismissed by the client as irrelevant.

In such cases, there is a high probability that the client will end up being unsatisfied with the agency and its work. After all, design cannot produce excellent results when it is being poorly employed. Design should never be the first step in dressing up or “fixing” a business or an organization.

Excellent design coupled with sound business strategy works. One without the other almost never does. But it’s too bad design so often takes the wrap for this failure.

Digital Marketing – A Primer

Digital Marketing nowadays is a major component for Marketing of any Product, Service or Brand. Why Digital Marketing is taking precedence over traditional way of doing marketing is that it’s so fast & quick that it happens on a click of button with very minimal cost & efforts. If not handled properly, it could make or break any Person, Group or an Organization in less than 24 hours. Digital Marketing is nothing but Internet Marketing. Email Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Social Media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc) are components of Digital Marketing.


Digital Marketing is a field which is not restricted only to Sales & Marketing Professionals but now it’s mandatory that each & everyone, whether a Business owner, a Working Professional, Politician, Bureaucrats, Film Star or even Sportsperson’s can’t survive in coming years if they will not have knowledge or habit of using Digital Marketing.

According to Wikipedia, is marketing that makes use of electronic devices such as computers, tablets, smartphones, cellphones, digital billboards, and game consoles to engage with consumers and other business partners. Internet Marketing is a major component of digital marketing.

Digital marketing is a marketing process which leads to the development of any organization or brand by using a variety of digital channels such as email, social networks etc. It can be defined as promoting of brands or products and services using all forms of digital advertising. Digital marketing uses Television, Radio, Internet, mobile and any form of digital media to reach customers in a timely, relevant, personal and cost-effective manner.

A Primer of the term of digital marketing:

What is Digital Marketing - Digital marketing is marketing that makes use of electronic devices such as computers, tablets, smartphones, cell phones, digital billboards, and game consoles to engage with consumers and other business partners. Internet Marketing is a major component of digital marketing.

What is Social Media - Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. Social media is a term used to collectively describe a set of tools that foster interaction, discussion and community, allowing people to build relationships and share information.

What is Search Engine Optimization - SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines. SEO covers all the necessary information you need to know about Search Engine Optimization - what is it, how does it work and differences in the ranking criteria of major search engines.

Why Digital Marketing – With the increased amount of social media platforms, many companies are taking advantage of digital marketing strategies to promote and market their products and services. Since the Internet allows us to communicate instantaneously, launching a digital marketing campaign can take place more quickly than traditional marketing campaigns and are sometimes less expensive. The wonderful thing about digital marketing is that it’s immediate, thus you can monitor feedback, input and actions in real-time from your target market.

Methods of Digital Marketing & Social Media Use- This type of marketing enforcement or implementation is very integrated as various platforms can be utilized at once in promoting products or services. One can use websites, PPC ads, mobile apps, mobile websites, SMS, instant messaging, email among others to effectively communicate messages to his or her target audience. This mode of marketing is not only interactive but also very cost effective.

Email marketing - Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It usually involves using email to send ads, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness.

Blog & Directory Submission - A directory is an Index of websites compiled by people rather than a Crawler. Directories can be general or divided into specific categories and subcategories. A directory's servers provide relevant lists of registered sites in response to user queries. Directory Registration is thus an important method for building inbound links and improving SEO performance. However, the decision to include a site and its directory rank or categorization is determined by directory editors rather than an Algorithm.

Google Analytic - Analytics refers to all the technology, programming, and data used in Search Engine Marketing to analyse a website's performance or the success of an Internet marketing campaign.

Meta Tagging - Also known as a meta description tag, a description tag is a short HTML paragraph that provides search engines with a description of a page's content for search engine Index purposes. The description tag is not displayed on the website itself, and may or may not be displayed in the search engine's listing for that site. Search engines are now giving less importance to description tags in lieu of actual page content.

Pull Digital Marketing – It is a method of advertising companies use to try and get consumers to find the company on their own. The idea is that people will find your company because your company was able to build a successful brand. This would mean that a company has offered a valuable product and created enough social media visibility to become something that a person wants all on his/her own.

Push Digital Marketing - is an approach that tries to put advertisements in front of someone who does not necessarily have any knowledge of your company. Push marketing strategies could involve cold calling, advertising banners, or generating referrals. They are designed to get others to really promote the company and “push” the idea that your company is something of value.

Google AdSense - Google AdSense is a paid service offered by Google that provides relevant text, image, and video-based advertisements to enrolled site owners. Advertisers register via Google AdWords and pay for ads on a Pay-Per-Click, Cost-Per-Thousand or Cost-Per-Action basis. This revenue is shared with Google AdSense host sites, typically on a PPC basis (which sometimes leads to Click Fraud). Google uses its search Algorithms and Contextual Link Inventory to display the most appropriate ads based on site content, Query relevancy, ad "quality scores," and other factors.

Google AdWords - Google AdWords is a paid and often expensive Keyword Submission program that determines the advertising rates and keywords used in the Google AdSense program. Advertisers bid on the keywords that are relevant to their businesses. Ranked ads then appear as sponsored links on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) and Google AdSense host sites.

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Apart from using many of the techniques and practices contained within the category of Internet Marketing, digital marketing extends beyond this by including other channels that do not require the use of the Internet. Due to non-dependence on the Internet, the field of digital marketing includes a whole lot of elements such as mobile phones or cell phones, display / banner ads, sms /mms, digital outdoor, and many more.

Digital marketing is now being enlarged in vast areas to support the "servicing" and "engagement" of customers.

So, Your're A Web Designer, Right?

What is the role of a web designer nowadays? An article about the changes that came with the awareness of responsive web design and the new workflow of designing in the browser.

THE WEB OF YESTERDAY

When I started doing this we were what you’d call a petit-comitè. I called myself a developer and worked with a great graphic designer, one of a kind. Our roles were crystal clear back then. Seasons came, seasons went and we started getting deeper and deeper into it. As our imagination kept moving forward, our websites grew more and more complicated. We soon found ourselves in a crossroads and we were forced to rethink our whole model.

My journey into design started with typography, perhaps the only field where my man was not stunningly fluid. I never called myself ‘designer’, though, until I cut off from Adobe’s Creative Suite cold-turkey. Slowly but steadily my role evolved on to designing for functionality and interactivity, copywriting, structuring content, making layouts responsive, building strange custom web applications… Then I was designing. The Graphic Designer’s role evolved too, as he started getting gradually into development, my former side of things. It was from working together that we both expanded our notions and eventually our process. We were naturally responding to a new kind of situation.

THE WEB, TODAY

‘A designer who does not write markup and css is not designing for the web, but drawing pictures’.

‘Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works’ – Steve Jobs

It’s been a few years now since the Mobile-First/Responsive meteorite shook the Web community. It has been an arduous but beautiful process. Hard in rethinking the way we work but beautiful in that it opened up a wild ground for madly intense collaboration between everyone involved. We’ve seen every field of the profession coming together and sharing their wonders: techies on Progressive Enhancement, typographers on lettering, grids and layout, designers on workflow, content strategists on sensible structure, top-notch freelancers on how to handle clients…
To remain on top of the situation, every kind of Web professional has had to cross enemy lines to create symbiotic partnerships, in some cases lifelong friendships. And of course, the up-and-coming generation finds itself full of strange creatures that don’t fall under any of the previous categories. They are something in and of themselves.

‘Web Design is Product Design’ – Andy Rutledge

Some time ago, thinking of a designer as just a ‘Graphic designer’ wouldn’t have made much sense. Designers were actively involved in obscure parts of the process. Carving wood, painting, modelling, sometimes building, gardening…

So who killed the product designer?

I haven’t been around long enough to have a clear view, but my guess would be compartmentalization. The sudden boom in demand might have driven companies to define enclosed cells of roles and responsibilities, or ‘silos’; then to hire disposable professionals that would fit, silently contributing to the creation of a thick, standardized, leaden model that would stand the test of time and ensure high-level productivity.

Some people are making public the interest of high-end companies in finding a new sort of profile. They call it the Unicorn. They even went as far as creating the Unicorn Institute to groom this sort of designer. He is defining a position, a new Experience designer or UX Generalist, whose skills make them ready for this entirely new scenario.

He makes a clear division between Specialists (experts in one field over others), Generalists (experts in more than one field) and Compartmentalists (having expertise in only one area). He argues that neglecting the possibility of expanding your boundaries and falling into the compartmentalist category is a career-limiting decision. Plus it’s no fun.

Today’s way of things calls for a new kind of Web designer. A Jack-of-All-Trades, master of none. Startups are looking for the kind of folk that can follow the process end to end. Big enterprises for a more flexible worker that can move swiftly between the many aspects of a project, without hiding behind the barriers of their specialty.

THE WEB OF TOMORROW

A designer today has to be able to dodge dangers of many kinds. Today’s Web is dynamic, fast, adaptive, mobile-optimized, ready for the modern consumer, which is pretty much everywhere and thus totally unpredictable, very intelligent and thus easily annoyed; and capable of showing an unbelievable capacity to dive blindfolded, headfirst into information overload and not only survive but make something of it.

We’ve been exposed to some groundbreaking design work recently:

• The journalistic community has seen incredible new layout techniques that may get to redefine the way content will be presented.
• More and more services are going online. We are seeing smarter, faster, stronger web applications that are way closer to software than what a blog ever was. Plus many either benefit from the advantage of being an online tool. Many are based upon collaboration, and what better place than the web?
• Experiments with 3D graphics that resemble high-end videogames, straight in the browser. And so on.
• We are not in a header-nav-content-sidebar-footer scenario anymore.
• The skills needed to achieve the Web of tomorrow will mutate with the scenario. So changing the way we do websites starts by revising our process.

IN SEARCH OF THE HOLY GRAIL

The First step is the hardest

There’s always a phase to devise how to build a product. It is critical that designers and their teams are aware of the technology at their disposal and show little fear in trying something new. Most of the time all this new tech is out there to make our lives easier, and yet you see so many people reject it every day.
Then there’s a time for envisioning the application.

‘Hanging on to older processes that include creating static wireframes and pixel-perfect mockups for design is counter-productive […]. Instead of spending time designing for […] device widths […], designers now have to focus on designing for content’.

The static mockup has seen its time in the spotlight. We are designing for dynamic scenarios now, so we need dynamic prototypes.

‘Designing in the browser’ said: ‘Print tools give you an illusion of control that doesn’t exist on the Web’. It goes on to point out a number of things a Photoshop mockup will never be able to account for:

• Pixel perfection: never happened
• Feature uncertainty: browsers differ when handling effects, even the syntax is different
• Things never designed to interact together will end up interacting
• No control over content: take Google+ as a modern dynamic application. Never will anyone be able to mockup something such as this on Photoshop without a million problems.

So what better way to achieve this than diving straight into HTML? Here are some of her reasons. Out of the box, it makes you able to:

• Design around content and user interaction
• Design for complexity and uncertainty
• Find where design breaks the user experience
• Find where data breaks design
• The outcome is a template ready for any use
• Use print tools later on to optimize prototypes

There are tools out there to prototype in HTML in a very visual and easy way.

DESIGNING IN THE BROWSER

I’ve seen way too many comments on blog posts saying something like ‘But that’s not designing in the browser, you’re using an editor!’. So let’s clear some assumptions first. Designing in the browser is not about using the browser as the one and only tool for designing.

‘Don’t design in the browser, decide in the browser.’ – Unknown

It is all about having direct communication between design, code AND the browser. Start designing, see it in the browser. Change stuff, see it in the browser. And if you get to do it in mobile at the same time, all the better.

There are a number of concerns in Web design that can be cleared straight away with this method. For instance, your site’s readability. It is a great way to gain time too: when you’re deep into designing for different states and screen sizes you tend to focus and lose that habit of moving stuff one pixel up or down. The perfectionist inside of you will be too busy checking relationships between elements, fine-tuning interaction details, etc. The big picture will benefit from this as well, as you are producing something that works, as opposed to a picture of it. It feels like moving from a flight simulator onto the real deal… kinda.
In the browser I learned the value of letting content drive my way of developing.

For example, I stopped using device media queries altogether. I started relying on visual cues when deciding where to insert a breakpoint. There was another time when suddenly it made no sense to make complex calculations anymore to account for margins, paddings, positioning… I started trusting my gut and experimenting with Developer Tools and learning to accept what was happening before my eyes. I grew so used to inspecting elements, rearranging them, playing with measurements, content and interactions that the habit ended up trickling down onto my everyday Internet activity. Now, whenever I stumble upon something that catches my eye – some layout detail, typography or anything interesting -, I find it very difficult to stop my urge to inspect it and play around with it. Questions start arising, like ‘What would happen to this thing if it had more text in it?’, ‘How does this guy float that there?’, ‘How in hell are the inline comments on Medium laid out?’. That last one I just had to include.

In the end, it’s all about learning how the browser handles the Web. It is not only possible but easy to learn to speak its language.

The first website I ever did I did in Chrome. I had no idea that by simply switching to Firefox it would look completely screwed. And my troubles got worse because I started testing it when I felt I’d finished it. It was a terrible week. But I’ll never stumble two times over that same stone. From that moment on I integrated visual testing in the development phase. And later on it became a crucial part of the design process. I ask myself how could I be OK with something if I never knew it would work?

Today I design and develop with my devices connected to the computer and I kind of catch problems before they even appear, this way. It’s become essential to me. I don’t trust my beautiful Apple stuff to fully represent the Wild, Wild Web, though. I never do 480, 768 or 1024px media queries anymore. And it feels liberating. It chooses random values each time (Small-ish. Medium-ish. Large-ish). Your site should look great in all of those. For the mad ones, it includes a ‘Disco’ mode, like those old Casio keyboards, ‘to watch the viewport bounce around like a maniac’. Is your site up to this?

THE LEAP OF FAITH

In Spain, a lot of us speak English. Most of us don’t, really. It’s more like this: we think of something in Spanish, in our heads we translate it into English and then we verbalize it, with an accent. And we look like morons. That’s not really speaking languages. It’s more like half-assed interpreting. The day you start thinking in English you start speaking in English. The more confident you grow, the better you speak.
But the key lies in the method. What makes the fluent speakers different from those who plainly interpret languages? It’s the lack of fear when challenged with a conversation. You learn to speak by speaking.
As I see it, this is very related to a designer learning to code. After all, it’s language we’re talking about. It’s not until you make that leap of faith that you’re starting to truly learn how an application works. It might look scary but there’s many people that have already done it and loved it.

The time you spend in learning to design for the Web comes back full circle.

Back in the day it was an odd feeling for us. On one hand we felt like we were somehow breaking out a proven way of working. On the other hand it felt like we were gradually let in on a big secret. We were making up our own rules as we went along. We were making our journey more interesting and as we grew more confident, the result was becoming stronger.

We were redefining ourselves as designers.

Copywriting Tips to Boost Your Online Marketing

When it comes to online marketing – good copywriting is essential. Flashy websites are great, but copy is what ultimately sells. But, good copy isn’t as easy as slapping a few words on a page. It takes fineness. These 10 copywriting tips will help you take your copywriting to the next level.

Copywriting Tips That’ll Make Your Online Copy Shine

1 – Write your copy first

Often the hardest step is the first one. This can be especially true for copywriting. Get your thoughts down on paper. Don’t worry about making them perfect. Just say what you want to say.

2 – Let it sit for five (or more)

Nothing will kill your credibility like typos. While it’s best to have a fresh set of eyes review your work, even the best of the best have editors, sometimes that’s just not possible. But, there is rarely a time your copy can’t sit for at least five minutes.

2 – Edit. Edit. EDIT

Similar to letting your piece sit, editing is critical. From the simple typo and punctuation mistake to the misspelled and misused word – it can be easy to publish copy littered with mistakes. The end results not only make you and your business look bad, but also can deliver a message you didn’t intend.

3 – Optimise your text

While spending the time to optimise your text with search engine optimisation (SEO) rich keywords may not seem like actual copywriting, in the online marketing world it is. And, it is essential to your success. Why? Because it doesn’t matter how good your copywriting is if no one reads it.

4 – Address the reader

“You” addresses the reader. It brings the reader inside the story and engages them on a personal level. In short – “you” is one of the most powerful words you have as a copywriter.

5 – Tell your reader a story

Nothing bridges the gap from sleazy car salesmen to personal relationship like stories. By telling your reader a story, you speak to their wants and needs. You can address their problems and eventually present your product and/or service as the solution.

6 – Make your headlines catchy

Most people scan web pages. It’s the unfortunate truth. And, if they aren’t engaged they click away. Engage them immediately with a catchy headline.

7 – Use Calls-to-Action

The reason you’re writing copy is to get your readers to act. Adding calls-to-action in your copy shows them and tells them what that next step is. It makes it easy for them. And if there’s anything we all know about readers, they will not work hard.

8 – Call attention to your important facts and figures

Like headlines, calling attention to the most important parts of your copy helps readers navigate the page. You can do this by:

• Putting important facts in bold
• Breaking up long paragraphs
• Adding bulleted lists
• Using reader friendly text size, font and colour

9 – Enhance your copy with images

The old saying, “A picture’s worth a thousand words,” couldn’t be truer when it comes to online copywriting. Utilise pictures to help tell your story.

10 – Get social

Social Media may seem like a big can of worms you want to keep shut. It’s open. Ignoring it leaves you behind. Share your writing on social media platforms. Add share buttons to your copy to make it easy for readers to also share.

Have you used any of these copywriting tips? Have you used other copywriting tips? What works best for you?

Authentic Design – A fad?

The recently popularized “flat” interface style is not merely a trend. It is the manifestation of a desire for greater authenticity in design, a desire to curb visual excess and eliminate the fake and the superfluous.

In its desire for authenticity, the Modern design movement curbed the ornamental excess of the 19th century, making design fit the age of mass production. Today, we’re seeing the same desire for authenticity manifest itself in the “flat” trend, which rejects skeuomorphism and excessive visuals for simpler, cleaner, content-focused design.

Digital Ornament

If we compare the history of modern design with our short history of software and Web design, a parallel can be seen. In the same way that mechanized mass production resulted in an overuse of ornament, so did advances in display and styling technology result in the heavy use of decoration in software interfaces and websites. Designers in the early years of the Web were especially explorative on this front, using animation and sound together with images to produce excessively rich and often garish experiences.
Early operating systems with graphical user interfaces were still fairly basic in their look and feel. As technology evolved, designers were granted greater visual freedom with their interfaces. Styles that imitate real-life objects and textures are said to be “skeuomorphs” — that is, design elements based on symbols borrowed from the real world, for the sole purpose of making an interface look familiar to the user. Recently, designers have started questioning the logic of styling a notes app as a paper pad, or of adding leather and page-turning effects to a calendar app. These effects provide visual interest, but they are also relics of another time, relics that tie an interface to static real-life objects that are incompatible with the fluidity and dynamism of digital interfaces.

Modern Design

With the latest release of Windows 8, Microsoft took a brave step away from such superfluous visuals, attempting to give its operating system a wholly digital and, in its words, “authentic” look. The latest interface is built upon the principles that Microsoft developed for its earlier mobile release, presenting the user with an aesthetic that is almost wholly devoid of textures or imitations of real-life objects.
Instead, Windows 8 relies on typography, spacing and colour to bring order and elegance to the digital canvas. Real-life effects and superfluous styles are discarded, and all that is left is simply the content itself. Much as Muthesius once submitted railway stations as examples of Maschinenstil, the designers at Microsoft point to examples of railway station signs as inspiration for the new Windows interface, previously known as “Metro.”

The Web has seen a similar transformation over the years. Early table-based and Flash-based designs gave developers pixel-perfect control over their interfaces, and so designers did not hesitate to create visually rich containers for their content. As we began to grasp the fluidity of the new medium and to disconnect presentation from content using CSS, Web design became more restrained. Highly decorated containers could not change their width and positions easily, so designers used fewer images and relied more on simpler CSS styling to make their layouts more adaptive and easier to maintain.
The latest evolution of responsive design (which is to adapt a single page to suit various screen sizes and devices) as well as the move among designers to work directly in code from the start, skipping visual editors such as Photoshop, moves us even further towards a simpler, content-focused Web aesthetic, one that derives its beauty from typography, spacing and colour rather than from a heavy use of textures and decorative images.

Authentic Design

What ties the pioneering days of Modern design to the current shift in software and Web design is the desire for authenticity. This drive towards greater authenticity is what moved designers to scrape away ornament from their work over a hundred years ago, and this force is what is moving digital design today towards a cleaner, more functional aesthetic. But what exactly makes design “authentic”?
Authentic design aims to pierce through falsehood and do away with superfluousness. Authentic design is about using materials without masking them in fake textures, showcasing their strengths instead of trying to hide their weaknesses. Authentic design is about doing away with features that are included only to make a product appear familiar or desirable but that otherwise serve no purpose. Authentic design is about representing function in its most optimal form, about having a conviction in elegance through efficiency. Authentic design is about dropping the crutches of external ornament and finding beauty in pure content.
In authentic design, style is not unimportant, but it is not pursued through decoration. Rather, beauty of form depends on the content, with the style being a natural outcome of a creative solution. In digital design, authenticity means a few things, which can roughly be summarized as the following:

• Embrace the digital look.
  We do not have to mimic textures such as metal, wood and leather on a computer display. They are not what a digital interface is made of, so pretending that it is makes no sense. This does not mean that a design should have only plain flat backgrounds colours — rather, it means we should not try to imitate or be restricted by textures from the real world.
• Do away with skeuomorphism.
  A digital book need not imitate physical paper as one turns the page, nor does a note-taking app need to look like a physical paper pad, with a leather cover, torn edges and a handwriting-styled font. Skeuomorphism is not always bad, but it always introduces needless constraints on the interface. For example, while a paper pad is static and one dimensional, a digital interface need not be; but as long as the interface is made to imitate a paper pad, it has to bear the constraints of the physical metaphor.
• Make the style content-centered.
  Focus on the content rather than on its styling and decoration. You might think this point is trite, but how many times have you seen an off-the-shelf theme on a website? A theme is always built on dummy content and so, by its very nature, could never be an optimal representation of the content it will eventually hold. Building themes with dummy text pushes the designer to focus on styling and decoration, rather than on content, because there is no content yet to work with. Only when you work with real content can you begin to truly transform function into form.

NOT MINIMALISM

Design whose beauty lies in function is not the same thing as minimalism minimalist style. With the former, the designer seeks to remove the superfluous, to make the product easier to understand, to make it perform better and to make the most of its medium. The latter seeks to create a minimalist aesthetic, to give the object an aura of simplicity and cleanliness. One is a fundamental principle of design, the other a stylistic choice.

It would be a mistake to rigidly apply a minimalist design aesthetic to an interface as a style in the hope of making the interface simpler and more digitally “authentic.” For example, ruthlessly eliminating visuals such as shadows, colours and varied background styles would not necessarily make an interface easier to use. In some cases, it would achieve the opposite by undermining hierarchy and focus, which were established by those very shadows and background colours.
In The Laws of Simplicity John Maeda posits, “The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. When in doubt, just remove. But be careful of what you remove.” The final warning is important. Removing things often leads to simplicity merely because the user has fewer items to process. But removing visual cues that help the user mentally process the interface — such as graphical elements that group items, that differentiate buttons and labels and that make things stand out — could do exactly the opposite by giving the user more work to do. So, rather than guide the design by style, guide it by principle.

WHY AUTHENTIC DESIGN MATTERS

The Rise app is a perfect example of digitally authentic design. The alarm clock is a problem that has already been solved, but Simplebots decided to tackle the concept from scratch, rethinking the interface in the context of a purely digital canvas.

Rise’s interface features a full-screen slider, with a background colour that changes to reflect the colour of the sky at the time you’ve set. It shows no attempt to mimic a physical clock or a physical slider or real-life textures. Instead, the designers have fully embraced the touch canvas of the mobile phone, creating an experience that is designed from the ground up to make the most of its medium. The innovative design not only makes for a great user experience, but elevates the app above others in the marketplace.
An interface like Rise’s is only possible when you tackle a design problem wholly within the context of the digital canvas, rather than by translating solutions from the real world. The digital screen allows for abstract forms, animation, bright colours and uniform shades. It need not be limited to a subdued palette or static representation, nor must it be bound to skeuomorphic forms. By figuring out how best to represent content using the pixel grid, we can arrive at better, simpler solutions, innovative interfaces that feel at home on the screen, designs that provide a better user experience and that stand out from the crowd.
The recently popularized “flat” design style may be a trend, but it is also the manifestation of a desire for greater authenticity in design, a desire to curb superfluous decoration and to focus on the content itself. Technological progress sometimes leads to excess, as mechanized mass production did in the 19th century when ornament became overused, and as display and styling technologies did during the early years of Web and software design. But ornamental excess was curbed over time by the pioneers of Modernism, who sought beauty in function, and today’s excesses in software will in time be curbed by an underlying desire for authenticity in design.

Make Customer Testimonials Meaningful

Bring out the value of your product or service with compelling user reviews.

Using customer testimonials in your advertising, marketing materials and on your website is a common practice. If your customers are saying great things about your business, then why not publicize those positive testimonials for the world to see?

Not so fast: There are two main problems with customer testimonials--overuse and legitimacy. Testimonials are used so often that they have lost some of their value. Furthermore, prospective customers don't always trust the truthfulness of testimonials. How do you make your customer testimonials stand out from the crowd and make them more meaningful for your prospects? To create effective, meaningful customer testimonials, they must be:

1. Authentic: One of the main problems with customer testimonials is their believability. Prospective customers need to believe the testimonials you provide are real. Too many companies advertise using customer testimonials written by a copywriter with no involvement from actual customers at all. To make your customer testimonials believable, authenticate them by using pictures of the customers who provide them along with those customers' real names. In other words, prove your customer testimonials are real up front so there is no room for doubt in the minds of your prospects.
2. Quantifiable: Add meaning to your customer testimonials by putting hard numbers in them whenever possible. If customers talk about the amount of money or time they saved by doing business with you, find out exactly how much they saved, and ask them to include those figures in their testimonials. A customer testimonial that says, "I saved $100 at XYZ Store" is far more compelling than, "I saved money at XYZ Store."
3. Specific: Customer testimonials are useless unless they give prospective consumers a reason to care about them. Vague testimonials, such as "It was great to do business with ABC Store," provide nothing of value to prospective consumers. Instead, guide customers who give you testimonials by asking them to provide a specific reason why working with your business benefited them. Effective customer testimonials won't leave a prospective customer saying, "Why should I care what that person thinks?" Instead, effective customer testimonials tell prospects exactly what's in it for them when they choose your business based on another customer's prior experience. In other words, prospective consumers should be able to personalize your customer testimonials and apply them to their own lives.
4. Diverse: Not only is it useful to obtain customer testimonials from a diverse audience who your prospective customers can relate to, but it also helps in terms of keeping your testimonials meaningful. If you use the same testimonial again and again, prospective consumers will wonder if this is the only person who had something good to say about your business. The testimonial will lose meaning because the individual who provided the testimonial becomes more of a spokesperson rather than another satisfied customer in the eyes of prospects. Obtain a varied collection of customer testimonials that prospects will relate to, from a diverse group of people and also about a variety of experiences and benefits.
5. Approved: Always obtain approval and written permission to use any customer's testimonial, name or likeness in your marketing and business materials. Remember Step 1 of creating meaningful customer testimonials is to make them authentic by naming names and using pictures. You shouldn't do that unless you have permission from the source first.

In short, don't leave room for guesswork when it comes to your customer testimonials. Leverage the role of your loyal and best customers by asking them to provide testimonials. Make sure your customer testimonials are verifiable, and specifically tell prospective consumers the benefits of doing business with you. If your customer testimonials are honest and trustworthy, then people will respond to them--which translates to positive results for your bottom line.

Is Responsive Web Design The Future?

"You put water into a cup it becomes the cup.
You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle.
You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot"

Web developers and online businesses are constantly looking for ways to improve, enhance and perfect their online presence.

In the last few years, many internet trends signalled to be the “next big thing” have come and gone. So with responsive web design currently making the biggest waves in the web development world, how can we know if it’s really here to stay?

What is responsive web design?

What is responsive web design?

Before the advent of tablet computers and smart phones, the majority of people viewed the internet on a PC or Mac computer. This meant that screen sizes varied very little across the spectrum, so a website could easily be designed in a ‘one size fits all’ manner.

Today an increasing number of people are using devices with differing screen sizes to browse the web.

However today more and more people are using mobile devices to browse and interact with the Internet. This means that a single website can now be displayed on a wide variety of screen sizes, every one of which will present a site in a slightly different way.

Previously, users would either need to pan and scroll across a standard site or be directed to a mobile site to find the information that they were looking for.

Responsive web design allows the content to adjust automatically to whichever screen size it is being viewed on. So the site appears on your smartphone exactly as it would on your desktop computer.

What are the benefits?

Responsive web design benefits both the website owner and the user.

Whereas in the past a company or individual would either have needed two sites – a standard site and a site tailored to mobile devices – or accepted that customers viewing the site on different screen sizes would have had a poorer user experience, now the business can simply create one site that can be viewed quickly and easily by all.

This does away with a lot of the duplicate content that appears when you have two sites makes users a lot more likely to return to your site in the future. As the trend continues to grow many web designers in Jaipur, India and the surrounding areas are adopting responsive site design into all their website builds.

What are the disadvantages?

There’s no getting around the fact that creating a responsively designed site is more expensive than a standard site. And even if you've got an idea about coding and web design, you’ll probably have to hire someone to create and develop a responsive site for you.

There are also some issues when it comes to advertising as any adverts on your site must also shift and adjust to the screen. This can cause problems when advertisers want a guaranteed placement for their ad.

Do you need a responsively designed website?

If you’re not sure if investing in a responsive design will be worthwhile for you, have a look at Google Analytics or another analytical site to see how many of your visitors are currently using phones or mobile devices.

If more than around 5% of your visitors are using devices with smaller screen sizes, it could be a good idea to create a site that will work for them as well.

Responsive web design allows content to shift and adjust to suit the screen.

Is it the future?

Judging by the shear numbers of people now browsing the internet on their phones or mobile devises, the demand for responsively designed site is set to grow.

And unless someone comes up with a better solution, it won't be long until all websites are responsively designed.

When it comes to the internet, the future is incredibly hard to predict. But with current trends moving towards a multitude of devices becoming internet enabled, it seems inevitable that before long, all websites will be responsively and intelligently designed.

Attract More Customers with Quality Website Design

Some Essential Ways to Attract More Customers with Quality Website Design

Where the world is moving so rapidly with the advancement of technologies, today it’s a hugely important to utilize internet to keep pace with the changing trends. For those who don’t do much with internet may be stranded among the wide market, with a void presence and incompetence. And same is the case with any business, as without its proper online presence, it cannot generate more profits. Thus, it’s of utmost importance for any business to successfully achieve its objectives.

And website is the key element when it comes to boosting up any business. Again, with hundreds of thousands of business competing in the market, it becomes very essential to come up uniquely on the part of any business. For this, website design plays very important part to represent uniqueness and credibility of any organisation or business. Thus, a website design for your business or company is an important aspect that will interest and attract more users towards your products and services.

There are certain aspects for any company website design that will go extra miles. Without these aspects, your website will simply turn out to be void. Thus, when planning out your company website design, please go through below explained aspects for a better web design of your business.

Who You Are

When anyone visits your website, he/she would want to know exactly who you are. Therefore, you need to give perfect information in your website so that visitors can easily understand all about you in a matter of minutes. As you may know there are lots of online website scams, so visitors just want to have a look at it any site abruptly. If they don't find relevant information, they will suddenly shift towards other sites. Thus, equip your site with sufficient information to give visitors credibility and a sense of integrity of your business.

What You Do

If visitors land in your site, it means they’re interested to know about the kind of services and products you provide. However, if they don't get the idea about what services you offer, they'll avoid dealing with your company or business. That’s why you need to ensure that your company website design has all the sufficient information explaining your purposes and services explicitly.

Remarkable Content

Make sure your website content is quite gripping and has precise information. Otherwise too much content may disinterest the visitors as they just want to spend unnecessary time in reading all the details. Thus, content should be sticky enough to inform the visitors successfully without any hassle. There you can go with articles, blogs, FAQs etc. so that visitors get what they want to read.

Excellent Graphics

Your website should have excellent images and graphics. They have to go well with the given content as well as your products and services. Beautifully-designed content is always on the top to attracting more visitors. Thus, emphasise much on graphics to make your website more interesting and on the go.

Contact Information

Many people would want to contact you, thus you need to have all of your contact details given in your web page. Ensure that the contact info page is visible, easily accessible so that visitors can easily communicate you.  Hence, contact being an essential part, need to be given full of details. 

Comment Box

Comment box or a contact form or even a feedback form is necessary in your website where customers can present their views. This will make your site more interactive and active. Ultimately it will also help you serve your customer in a much better way.

What to Look for in a Web Designer

Whether you’re a blogger or a business owner, having a great website design that people love is likely to feature high on your priority list. Sometimes, you might feel that designing a website can’t actually be very difficult, and start trying to put something together yourself. However, most of the time we find that it is actually something that is best left to the professionals, and so we start to look for a web design expert.

Although many of us will know of or be friends with a web designer, others won’t be so lucky, and will need to find one in order to get their website looking how they wish. Ultimately, you’re probably not going to know what a web designer is about until you work with them. However, there are a number of things you can look for, and ask questions around, which will help you to find the best web designer for your site.

Are They a Listener?

There are two types of web designer. There is the designer who listens intently to your requirements than gives suggestions based on what you want, and there is the designer who doesn't listen and tells you what they can, and will, do.

Obviously, you want the designer who is going to do as you ask, rather than the one who will assume you want their own favorite design and please themselves.

What Matters to Them?

We can probably split this issue into two parts, too. Some web designers are all about the appearance of a website; a site that looks great overrules everything else in their eyes.

The better designers, while concerned with appearance (it does matter, after all!), place far more importance on how well your website performs, and the user experience it provides. If you want to find the answer to this question without asking a designer directly, just ask for some examples of websites they have recently worked on.

Are they a pleasure to browse and easy to navigate, or are they a nightmare of links and clunky design that leaves you reaching for the close button?

Do They Know Your Industry?

It is easy to take the approach that web design is web design, and that the industry is irrelevant. However, what works on an automotive site isn't going to work on an ecommerce site selling clothes, which similarly won’t be useful on a site discussing medical conditions.

Look for a designer with a track record in your industry, and you’ll find you achieve your objectives much quicker.

Have They Embraced Industry Trends?

The internet is filled with articles that talk about the latest design trends and developments, and you should make sure you're familiar with them. Obviously, you aren't going to ask the yes or no question, because they'll always answer in the affirmative. Instead, ask them about their favorite design features and initiatives that they're currently working with, and see how they stack up against what you've read.

Search for these traits whenever you’re looking for a web designer, and you’ll find that you get the website you want in no time at all. Failure to check will increase the likelihood of you having a bad design experience, and having to spend more money to put it right.

Responsive Web Designing And SEO

The world is going mobile, particularly for connectivity. Smart phones and other mobile devices are becoming the popular way to access the needed information over the World Wide Web. The trend of using mobile devices to make search online is increasing day by day. It has also been stated that mobile searches will take the lead in coming years than the desktop or laptop searches.

This piece of writing will reveal some useful stuff related to responsive web designing, the best option to meet the mobile search needs, and the activities required for mobile SEO.

Responsive Web Designing And Google

Before Google recommended mobile websites to appear in the search results, the ideas about mobile SEO were there in the air. What does Google say about mobile-compatible websites? Here are given the conditions:

• Use different design at an alternate page as mobile version while ensuring their responsiveness for the mobile devices. CSS  3 media queries should be used for a mobile-friendly web design.
• Use a different sub-domain for the mobile version of a website.
• The HTML output should be different as per device used by the user whether it’s desktop or Smartphone.

For having a separate domain to cater to the needs of mobile-based searchers, the users are redirected to the mobile web version. However, it involves some complicated things to do like switchboard tags addition and robots.txt usage to facilitate Google in the right redirection. These additions aren't needed when a website is designed responsively.

Responsive Web Designing: The Better Solution

In the web design industry, responsive web designing is the hottest topic. Big brands are considering the responsive web designing seriously to make their websites easy to access on the mobile devices and Smartphones. These designs are created without compromising the content, it’s kept the same for all platforms.

Advantages Of Responsive Web Designing

Here are given some edges that web designers and developers may have while creating websites responsively.

It’s easy and takes less time

Responsive web designing involves less time to develop to meet the mobile web needs as CSS3 media queries are used in these websites. There is no need to create a complete website for the mobile platform, just the content is resized to appear on the smaller screens for the mobile-based searchers.

Content management is simpler

With many websites of the same business, you may have to manage the content separately. With just one website that is a responsive website, you will have to manage the content of that site only. It’s less time consuming, less hectic, and is easier-to-do task.

Page authority for one website

As responsive website serves the mobile and desktop users, so the page authority is established just for one website. If there is a separate domain for the mobile devices and carries the term "related," the authority would be the same and backlinks would be there to support. However, one page for all devices is the simplest and better option not just for the designers, but also for the SEO pros.

Google’s recommendation is there

After having unambiguous Google’s recommendation about responsive web designing, it should be clear that these websites would be ranked just like normal websites. In actual, Google prefer websites to be responsive in order to cater to the needs of both desktop and Smartphone users.

Responsive Websites And SEO: What To Consider?

Some major considerations of mobile SEO, related to responsive web designing, are given here to enhance your knowledge.

Go local

According to surveys, mobile-based searches for restaurants are increasing day-by-day, and it’s closer to desktop searches. It’s important to know the facts. The desktop searches are on rise when people search from home and mobile searches are more when people are outside. After looking at that situation, going local is the best option to hit the local target audience and to get the desired response. Like, you can target web design, before you go globally, to get quicker ranks not just for mobile-based searches, but also for desktop searches because that’s what Google consider now.

Keyword selection: go for shorter ones

On mobile devices, people prefer typing shorter keywords because of the small screens, so for local optimization, the shorter keywords should be selected. It will help in seeing your website quite often in the mobile-based search results.

Another approach is to consider Google’s recommendations about keywords because users prefer hitting the recommended option if it’s closer to their search, instead of typing the whole keyword. Adwords Keyword Tool of Google is there for your help.

Use mobile analytics

You can check how many visits are made from mobile devices by using Web Analytics of Mobile section. By trying out different keywords, you can analyse which keywords are traffic-friendly and which aren’t. Even a hasty look can reveal some great ideas to improve the mobile web optimization.

Consider the target audience at first

The main objective of mobile strategy is to help the users in finding the relevant information with great ease. Heavy graphics and forced zooming-in should be avoided at a responsive website.

Users, whether of desktops or Smartphones, want websites quick to load on their screens, so that should be given due consideration while designing websites.

A website having rich information and excellent design is attractive not just for the visitors, but also to get the quality links. Responsive web design isn’t just good for the users, but for the Google crawlers to track that. Hence, it makes sense that a website should have similar pages for the desktop users as well as for the mobile users.

Responsive websites, local SEO, shorter keywords, and making use of Google mobile web analytics are the things needed for result-driven mobile SEO. Are you considering all these or any other added factors while performing SEO for your mobile or responsive websites? Share your views in the comments below.

Responsive Web Designing: Edges For Your Business

Responsive Web Designing: 7 Edges For An Online Business

There is lot of buzz of responsive web designing in the web world. It’s not just about the end users demanding responsive web designing, but the businesses can also make huge advantages from this popular approach. How is it possible for a new web design company in Dundee to earn maximum from responsive a website? Read the lines below to know in detail.

1. Accessing The Mobile Audiences

A single site being accessed on multiple devices means a business could win over the attention of the prospects using Smartphones by making a responsive website. Stats reveal that sales of Smartphones may exceed 100 million this year, which means responsive web designing would be on rise in near future. Many websites are already receiving more than 40% traffic from smart devices, so it’s a clear hint for web designers to seriously take responsive web designing.

2. More Sales More Conversions

If users are provided with consistent site experience regardless of the device they are using, it means the conversion chances increase many folds. There are no issues of functionality or site performance with the responsive web design approach.

3. No More Hectic Tracking

With a single site catering to the needs of desktop, laptop users, and Smartphones users, there are no more hassles of analytics or in depth reporting. The conversion paths and funnels are no more different for different sites. Single report revealing tracking and analytics is a great relief for the site owners.

4. Search Engine Visibility

As Google has announced that responsive websites would be ranked higher than non-responsive websites, so it’s another strong point to focus on responsive designing for business websites. To make a website highly visible at search engines, responsive web design is the only choice left.

5. Time And Cost Effective Approach

With a single responsive web design for all devices, one can save the cost as well as time that, otherwise, would incur over designing different websites. The maintenance cost is also reduced in case a website is made responsive.

6. Easy Site Management

If a site is designed with responsive approach, simple workflow and layout tools can be used to manage the site and to keep the content updated for different devices for better optimization.

7. Offline Access Of The Site

With HTML5 browsing capabilities, websites could be accessed even offline. Without internet connection, web applications could be accessed due to hybrid HTML5 website designing.

Responsive web designing is not just trend of the time, but also need of the web designers to learn and business owners to follow. Without responsive web designing, one couldn’t get maximum advantages from online presence particularly in terms of profit.

Take Your Mobile Strategy to the Next Level

You have kept your business up to date with business trends. You have a great desktop website, as well as a mobile one, which is supported by the various social media networks and blogging platforms you use to communicate with your customers. All these factors are the required aspects for companies to succeed in a business climate that has shifted towards eCommerce. However, trends constantly change, and this means that businesses need to stay on top of how trends and consumer behavior changes. The most important aspect to pay attention to these days is mobile strategies. If you want to take your mobile strategy to the next level, you have to begin focusing on making mobile marketing work for you.

Why Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing helps your business target your message to your specific audience. Not being able to reach a relevant and interested audience is one of the major downfalls of traditional advertising methods. The data surrounding mobile marketing speaks for itself. Socialmediatoday.com compiled a list of statistics that proves that mobile marketing is the right strategy for businesses to focus on. According to their data, mobile advertisements perform up to five times better than traditional online ones. Also, when consumers perform searches on their mobile devices, almost each one will take some form of action. Over half of all mobile searches will lead to a purchase. In comparison to print coupons, customers are 10 times more likely to redeem offers that receive on their smartphones and other mobile devices. The data shows that mobile strategies are essential to businesses that want to keep up with consumer behavior.

No Excuse to Ignore

Mobile marketing strategies are not only easy and more successful than traditional marketing, but also more affordable. The best mobile website builder will already have options in place for your business to implement marketing strategies into your mobile plan. Use this to your advantage to help drive your mobile sales and influence business and profit growth.

What Other Benefits Does Mobile Marketing Provide

The Internet and social media have been instrumental in making the business world smaller and more connected. This has provided a lot of benefits by breaking down trade and business barriers across countries and borders. However, the most important audience of your business is your local one. Geo-targeted marketing is the best way to advertise your products and services. Not only does it allow your marketing to reach people within the vicinity of your business, but you are also able to target specific demographic groups, by sex and age.

The data surrounding mobile marketing effectiveness shows that it is a channel that businesses cannot afford to ignore. No type of business is exempt from being able to utilize mobile marketing strategies. If your business has not yet begun to use mobile advertisements, the time to begin is right now. Business marketing trends will continue to change, but mobile business tactics will continue to have sustained importance over the years to come.

Protecting Your Online Accounts

Technology now makes it easy to access your information anywhere you go on a multitude of devices. Your credit cards are synced on your phone. Your bank account can be accessed through a small tablet or hand-held device. Everything is synced up and at your fingertips in a way that is both convenient and dangerous. Instead of a cyber-thief needing to access multiple accounts to have your information, they now only need to access one account. But there are ways to make yourself safe even, as you enjoy the new benefits of being linked at the touch of a button.

Device Management

One thing you can do for every single device you have is choose a different log in and password. You can allow each device to remember only your user ID, but do not allow the device to store your password. If you were to lose that device, or it gets stolen, you will want your accounts to be protected. Also, lock all devices with a secure password to the device itself. If it falls in the wrong hands you’ll know it’s protected. Do not access your account on untrusted networks. Thieves can pull information from these networks to access your accounts, and this includes seeing your passwords. Set up your devices and accounts so that each time any changes are made to your accounts you’ll be notified. If this includes sending an encrypted text message to your phone, then do that. This will let you know if anyone is trying to access your accounts. Securing your accounts through the deices themselves is your first step in protecting yourself from cyber thieves.

Cyber Protection

Next you’ll want to know that you’re protected once you’re online. The government and credit card companies have been working on this aspect of protection for years. The Web Service Security or WSS, was formed as an Web security standard. The way it works is that organizations that handle cardholder information (such as credit cards, prepaid cards, debit cards, and ATM cards) must live up the standards of protection. These were designed to reduce credit card fraud. This can include requiring entering captcha codes to ensure a human is accessing the account and not a remotely controlled computer. Or it may require you to have back-up security questions on your account. If the deice you use to access accounts is lost or in the hands of a thief, this is the next wall of defense for your identity.

Managing Accounts

You can manage these accounts on your own, or you can hire someone to keep track of them. The happy medium to both would be to install software that can keep track of how your devises and accounts are accessed and alert you to suspicious activity. The cost of the software is generally inexpensive, especially for the peace of mind you get with knowing you’re protected.

While technology makes things easier, it also makes us more vulnerable. Cyber thieves are smart and know how to hack into your accounts. You have to be smarter and protect yourself on every level from them.

Tips for Good Website Design

In spite of the constant changes that happen to build a successful website there are some guidelines which are useful.

1. Avoiding Splash Pages:

Splash pages often portray low quality website design and also reflect the operation of the business in volumes. Studies have shown that splash pages attract lesser viewers and lower the traffic to around 25% as it is not much preferred by the regular internet users. The welcome and also the click button that appears in a website give a wrong image of the site. Additionally flash pages cannot be correctly optimized by search engine and lack basic information. The popular search engines cannot take a poor website to reach its optimum results. These pages may lower the revenue amount that is expected.

2. Navigating Easily Through the Site:

Though it is easy for the maker to easily navigate through the site after going through all the contents, it is not always possible for the first time user to do so.  Hence, it is very important and the primary responsibility of a website designer to create buttons that can easily link the title of the service and easy for people to understand. A good navigation button ensures easy clicking of the buy button when any visitor enters the website and wishes to buy any product or services. Generally people lose patience in using and finding out the buttons if they are not specified and up to the point. It builds a natural frustration to the visitor and the site tends to lose its customer. Mislabeling should be completely avoided in designing a website as it will not give any scope to get back the return visitors who will help in getting more earning opportunities.

3. Avoiding Frustration Through Flash Pages:

With proper navigational buttons and website designing tools graphic pages appear great with occasional messages put into it. But in general, traffic becomes lower as the viewers become irritated with using graphic flash pages as they are like a stop button. In case of improvising the procedure of the website design, it is important to have a close button the flash page so that it can be easily moved or forwarded.

 4. Fewer Amounts of Banner Advertisements:

Banner advertisement mode is quite annoying for even the internet users whether new or active. It is hardly anytime that these banners get observed by viewers. For proper marketing tool it is always beneficial to build a customer friendly atmosphere where the push in buying the product is not there rather than it should come automatically with a good design. Banner ads from same companies may reduce the value of website and decrease the revenue by tarnishing the reputation of the site.

5. Reminding the Whereabouts of the User:

A visitor once clicks any button of the website it is a great idea in making him remind his place of interest so that he gets to stay in the page for a longer span of time.

6. Avoiding Audio Usage of Site:

Audio control is highly desirable as it can be muted whenever needed. Using audio in website design is a quicker way to attach more and more visitors in the site.

Function Over Form… or Vice Versa

Function... Form... That is the question???

Designing a web page is often thought of, from the outside, as either a task that requires a creative artist, or tidy-minded planner. The truth is, it is both.

A website needs to be aesthetically pleasing, but functional, and a lot of first-time web designers often fall into the trap of being too much of one and not enough of the other. Their websites either look amazing, but are almost unusable, or are usability incarnate, but make your eyes hurt. It’s not difficult to establish which of these the designer might be in danger of being. If the web designer likes to start designing your web page in notepad, with nothing more than a blank page and their HTML/CSS knowledge, you may find your design suffering. If the web developer prefers to start in Photoshop and code later, you may be in danger of putting too much emphasis on design, and not enough on usability. Both methods are fine, of course; it’s whatever works for the developer. But, if you know their weakness, you can make sure it doesn't ruin your work.

Finding the Balance

The right balance will depend on the purpose of your website, of course. It may be beneficial to put the design before the usability in some cases, but a site should never be so difficult to use that visitors just give up and leave.

It's usually a safe bet to aim for simplicity. This works both for the look and usability of the site. The simpler a site is, the easier it will be to navigate, and simplistic art styles are often more attractive than cluttered or messy ones. Lots of colours, crowded images, and difficult to distinguish navigation menus are all signs that you can expect your landing page to be more like a bouncing page.

Sticking with the simplicity angle, don't be afraid of white space. White space can often give emphasis to parts of your site in a way that a border, line, or image wouldn’t. Also, white space in bodies of text, such as between paragraphs, can really make the text more readable. That said, try not to go crazy. A white screen with one paragraph of text in the middle can look just as bad as page crammed with so much text it makes your eyes hurt.

Stay Focused

It’s important to keep the ultimate goal of the website in mind. If you are looking to move products, that means different design choices to, say, a website that is designed to be informative only. A sales site will need a means to buy whatever product is being sold to be clear and easily reached from any part of the site. You don't want potential customers to have to work to give you their money. On the other hand, a site that is about the content – articles, blogs, information – should have definite emphasis on said content. Don't draw attention away from the important text with flashy design features, or unnecessary reams of text crowding around it.

A common mistake among most web designers who are more into the design aspect of the job is that of not paying enough attention to the performance of the sight. Remember, web pages are effectively uncompiled code, and your browser is rendering that code on the fly. It doesn't take a particularly slow machine to struggle with some of the more code-heavy websites. Avoiding sloppy and inefficient coding can help prevent your site from being bogged down, or becoming slow and unresponsive. Especially where flashy scripting is used for those nice effects.

Responsive Design

On the subject of responsiveness, responsive web design is a must in todays world of varying devices. You can never be sure if a visitor to your site will be surfing there on a thirteen inch laptop, a twenty one inch monitor, or a four inch phone. And there’s tablet PCs, televisions, and a whole host of sizes in between. Make sure your web sites can cope with these differences in screen size.

Try to remember your audience. If the website designer is designing a website for a corporate entity, or some other professional business, like a freelance lawyer, or dentist, make sure they don't stray too far from convention. Things like left-hanging sidebars, and header navigation may seem tired and overused, but they're overused for a reason – because people are comfortable with them. There will be times when the conventions can be played with, but don't try to reinvent the web page when the client just wants a usable website.

Choose Your Colours Carefully

Finally, and, possibly most importantly from an artistic design point of view; choose your colour scheme carefully. You need contrast, otherwise your site will be unreadable, but you don't want your design and text to glare at your visitors. Avoid combinations of basic yellow and green, for example, because they look terrible, but don’t put a dark grey font over a light grey background, because a lot of people will struggle to read it, and inducing eyestrain is a quick way to lose a visitor to your website.

Always Test Your Website

When you think you're done with getting your masterpiece created, be sure to get a second opinion. This is especially important on projects that have taken a long time to complete; when you've been staring at a project for some time, it can be difficult to see problems with the design or function. If possible, usability and business testing your website should be employed to ensure that your site is as user-friendly as possible. Obviously, that won't always be possible, especially in cases of lone, freelance web designers, but, at the very least, you should be subjecting your site to the critical eyes of friends or family who are as close to the target audience of the website as possible.

One of the great things about designing for the web over, say, the medium of print, is that you can always revise your work. Websites can evolve over time as problems present themselves. Of course, you want to be as close to perfect as possible at the start, but don't let the quest for perfection paralyse you into never making your site live.