Archive for the ‘web design principles’ Category

A New Dawn in Web Design

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

Does the web designer of today need to be someone that can formulate great looking interactive design and super charged creative concepts ? …or does it require much more than that ?

Web designers in today’s 2.0 web landscape should also be communicators of sure-fire function and logical, simplistically elegant end user experiences.

Did someone say “strategy” …or is that the internet marketer’s job, or the digital strategist’s responsibility? Does your web design crave an inbound marketing strategy to generate leads for your clients, a content rich search engine friendly environment, viral marketing features ? A blog that has purpose? A web designer will need to know exactly where to inject these web design strategies into the work, or we risk the marketeers claiming ‘form without function’ and I can hear some people-who’s job it is to say this “it looks nice, but….where’s the value?”

“We want motion and animation” an excited client calls out!

And…what about getting it all done? Without knowing which technology or combination of technologies we should be use, to effectively and efficiently produce the web design, so that it’s on budget and on time, you need extensive knowledge. Knowledge in this case is a catalyst for creativity.

So — what does all this mean? An even newer breed of “interactive art director” and “interactive writer”. In some interactive design firms – we call this person a “hybrid”, or a person with the special talent to seamlessly integrate both the right brain thinking and left brain thinking principles of good web design and development. Some web design companies employ an acting internal “bridge” group, used to translate with knowledge of both languages (design language and development language). The ability to communicate verbally to others encompassing the full vision, and communicate with visual and functional interactive prototypes is now required for anyone that is serious about web design, interactive creative direction, and interactive copy writing.

Without the old school back-and-forth – and the days when the developer and web designer pass projects between each other while the vision is attempted to be matched — can now be eliminated. Without the elimination of this, often time consuming balancing act (too often work that is either sub-par or way over budget is the result) we are left still in the stone ages of web design. Besides there is so much creativity in web development mixed within a web designer. A true feeling of acomplishment can be attained when you can communicate with the full range of tools web design is ment to encompass, not to mention self-reliance, and the potential to create something that has never been tried before!

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Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

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trust and the web design firm

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

Trust and forming relationships is the key to keeping people interested in your services or information on the web. But how do we do this without a typical one-on-one interaction with the customer? Actually it needs to be a one-on-one relationship that we form with our web designs, even though it is not face-to-face.

Web site visitors negotiate their relationship with the vendor in much the same way they negotiate relationships with any stranger: by seeking information. Offering solutions, information, sharing tips and best practices before a sale or without a sale is a path to creating trust and in turn formulating the relationship you need to foster a sale.

Customers will need to feel secure with the relationship or they will turn around and seek another web designer, We should be prepared at a very basic level to assure our potential clients about
* Quality of the product
* Quality and reliability of your customer service
* Adherence to time lines
* Is this site secure (privacy, credit card information)?
* Is this really the best price?

Consumers want complete specs, and they want to know the online vendor will be there for them if something goes wrong.

Uncertainty about the stranger causes anxiety and distrust, and so seeking out information is a natural way of decreasing uncertainty and anxiety, and of building trust. So sharing information and being as human as possible when communicating with our web design is an essential element to forming the relationships we need, whatever it is we are trying to communicate or sell online.

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web design and HTML emails

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

For years and years web designers have heard this from web developers “…if you thought getting a web site to display well in all web browsers was difficult, wait until you try email newsletters.” This is true to a point, and as things in the web design world are always changing this is no exception.

There are many reasons to send HTML emails, but it should be done in the simpilest form possible and with the ability to choose plain text. Our customers don’t need to see the whole website in their email. They pay for bandwidth so some people will automatically prefer not to download all the HTML and images.

Developing HTML emails is a real challenge, and we should pay real attention to simplify code as well as our web design. Here is a link from sitepoint which illustrates these points rather well: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters/

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