Hmmmm, Good Advice For Being A Good Client…
We jumped when we saw the title of this post: How to be a good client, but then when we read the content, it wasn’t what we had in mind. Don’t get us wrong, it’s all good advice, but we’d really like to take this time to advise readers on how to get the most out of hiring an online freelance web designer:
1. Link to an example of what you want. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. You can talk to a designer all day, “I want an arty header and a side link bank, but it should move with the scrollwheel and have green and blue colors…” That can still be interpreted 100 different ways. Find a picture to start with, then detail how you want it different.
2. Take the designer’s / developer’s word for it. We don’t know how many clients out there have made their own lives miserable by saying “I want the whole site in Flash.” or “Can I get it with animated GIFs and use this big image as the background?” You hire an expert; if they say that something isn’t a good idea, listen to them. That’s what you’re paying them for is to know their stuff!
3. Be clear about your purpose. You need to detail what you’re going for in a business model. Something like “We sell lady’s dresses, so we want a site with a virtual wardrobe where they can try on different styles, a section with articles about fashion tips, and a social photo sharing section where customers can upload photos showing how hot they look in our outfits.” The virtual wardrobe helps buying decisions (sell lady’s dresses), the articles draw search traffic (bring ladies to buy dresses), the photo-sharing part encourages customers to come back (so they buy more dresses). Each part of the site should make some kind of business sense.
Things like that… readers, do you have any more ideas?
How To Use Passion In Web Marketing
When we spotted the post In Praise of Passion over at Boing-Boing, it got us thinking. As Internet marketers, we all know that our digital strategy should include website design, search engine optimization, advertising, and so on. But how many of us think about whether we’re inspiring passion?
Some ideas for generating passion around your business:
If your service solves a problem, state how devoted to solving that problem you are. Talk about it a lot! Explain how it’s the central driving force for you being in business. If you run a graphic design agency, you can make your motto something like “Ending Ugly Web Design, One Graphic At A Time!”
Your business does good with a blog. A blog is a place where you can be looser and casual. You can be funny or you can whinge a little! Most of all, you can dump your soul into sharing your passion with the world. It’s not just a business, it’s a mission, and you’re the general inspiring the troops…
Your advertising, marketing, and email newsletter can be designed to convey just a touch more drama. Remember, your audience is exposed to more media content than it can digest every day; to stand out, you need to grab some attention!
What Can a Bathroom Teach Us About Web Design?
This is going to seem very unintuitive to post on a web design blog, but bear with us. HowStuffWorks posted this Top 10 Mistakes in Bathroom Design, and all the way through, you can apply it to analogies in web design!
- Web designers can identify with “Small Budget for a Big Project,” right?
- “Improper Installation” can apply to having the wrong version of PHP installed on the server.
- Spacing is important in web design, too. For almost the same reason.
- “Lack of Storage” – or as the late George Carlin would say, “A place to put your stuff.” How many times have you tried to squeeze a section in as an afterthought?
- “Thinking Short Term” – Boy, can we ever identify with websites that don’t scale with the business! How many jobs have we had where we had to come back and restructure the site to handle increased volume?
- Trends can be dangerous in design, too. A design that’s too married to 2009 will look badly dated in 2012.
- “Choosing the Wrong Materials” – Also known as trying to make the whole site out of Flash, trying to build a shopping cart app using only Javascript, and trying to use tables to lay out the site.
- Environment has us stumped. “Ignoring the culture” would be the web design equivalent – you wouldn’t design a website for a mortuary the way you’d design a website for a nightclub.
- Inadequate lighting – Also known as “not enough contrast between text and background.”
- Aaaaaand: “Improper Ventilation” has the web design analog of having the page be too crowded, busy, and stuffy!
Web Design – CSS Lifesavers
Found this handy list of “10 CSS-Lifesavers For Efficient Web Design”. It’s nice to have these all in one list occasionally. Even if you know them, there’s so much to keep track of that it’s good to refresh your knowledge.
One of the points addressed is an area that frequently gets ignored: font options! Sure, you can specify font and size – everybody does that. But so many designer fail to explore the other 80% of what CSS can do with typography. Indenting, spacing, first-letter and first-line properties, and even tweaking the font weight.
How to Adapt to Web Design from Print Design
There’s a joke that goes: “I want to learn web design. How long will it take?” “A year or two.” “Great! That’s much less time than it took me to learn print!” “Oh, you used to be a print designer? In that case, it’ll take five to seven years.”
We’re crazy about this post about introducing print designers to web design. It is quite helpful, and isn’t nearly as sarcastic as we’re going to be. So when you’re done with that, come back for our footnotes on five things we wish print designers would learn faster:
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Mock-Up Solutions That Are Not Photoshop
This may come as an astonishing shock to some people, but Adobe Photoshop is not the only application in the world! Perhaps we could bring some fresh viewpoints to our design process, if we tried another tool just once…
- Illustrator – Scalable Vector Graphics, for instance. That’s actually closer to what the final product looks like anyway, and SVG editors are ever so much more graceful handling text than Photoshop. You might also try the free (and excellent) Inkscape.
- Fireworks – Superior for some functions, such as object handling, vectors, and the slicing/exporting of images.
- Xara Xtreme – Never heard of it, did you? Check it out, it’s a vector editor on steroids. It can even handle Flash and build web prototypes right in the app!
- Balsamiq Mockups – Another new player in the field, this one was designed by an ex-Adobe employee. It’s specialized to just do web design mock-ups.
- Pen and Paper! – Too many people knock this. Drawing on paper lets you stop thinking about the interface and tap your artistic thinking. People forget that creating a web document is an art. It’s also much more satisfying to tear up a design you don’t like than it is to delete it!
Web Design Tips and Techniques for Site Usability
It is important for you to have a professional website in order to compete on the Internet. One of the most important factors in a successful web site is the site usability. Your website must be easy to use and more importantly, you must be able to convey this ease of use to your visitors. Many surfers will run away from websites that they may deem as too complex to use. Hence, you will have to be aware of several techniques in order to create a successful web site. This way, you can make sure that your website is one of the winners.
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Dynamic Site Design
Many websites like those of newspapers constantly update the website. These websites will have different content every time you visit them. Such dynamic websites need to provide you with the latest content. What these sites require is to pull information needed from a database or a form. The information is normally populated when the static site is created. However, for dynamic websites, it is populated when the individual page is requested. The design has to be such that it adapts and maintains a professional appearance even when there is a large amount of information on the page.
More On Dynamic Site Design
Dynamic websites have generally different amount of content. If the page size is kept limited to a specific level then the page may appear crowded when the content is huge.
To ensure that the pages do not appear crowded and to make the design SEO friendly, the design may be made using a combination of JavaScript and DHTML that can help create tabbed browsing within pages. The content for the dynamic websites can be taken in two ways namely server side includes and client side includes. With server side includes you can have the server read the information from a database in the format that would be suitable for the website design. With client side includes, servers send information to the web page. The client’s browser receives the programming and the command is performed. For example, if you have list of images for display and want to change image when your visitor moves the mouse over it then such a script is useful.
PNG Images And Your Web Design
The task of designing a website is incomplete without putting images on its pages. However you need to be careful choosing the image format that you intend using.
There are currently three types of image formats which are supported by all the browsers. They are JPEG (joint photographic experts group), GIF (graphic interchange format) and PNG (portable network graphics).