Web Design

Miracle product solves design problems

If you’re unhappy with your current website or your latest brochure, why not try the Make My Logo Bigger Cream. Who says design takes skill and creativity? Pshaw!

Thanks to Karole for sending the link.

Web Marketing is about Serving Searchers

If you’ve read our blog for a while you might have noticed we often quote Gerry McGovern. His article Honest Marketing Works on the Web contains not only a good rant about the frustrations of airline ticket pricing, but some words of wisdom as well:

The Web shifts the balance of power away from the organization and towards the customer. It is the customer who searches. It is the customer who compares. It is the customer who evaluates. It is the customer who is highly impatient, with their finger always on the Back button.

Web marketing is not about finding fools. It is rather about serving searchers. We go to the Web because we have a question and we want an answer. Please answer the question, Mr. Marketer.

The importance of the text on your website cannot be overstated. You might be tempted to focus on how pretty or cool-looking it is. But if your text isn’t doing it’s job, there’s less of a chance that people will find the site in the first place or stick around once they get there. Here are some of the things we recommend to make the most of your site’s content:

• Ensure the important text is visible to search engines in the way the site is built. Your site should be built with current web standards and including text alternatives to any images or flash that contain important text.
• Avoid linking to PDF or Word documents, which the search engines can’t scan as well as a web page (if at all).
• Consider using the services of a professional writer who’s experienced with writing for the web and search engine optimization of content.
• Aim for a design that supports the text rather than undermining it. Part of that is making it easy-to-use: clear navigation, standard scrollbars, allowing the text to be resized without breaking the design, etc.

Let the music inspire you

Back in the old days of vinyl and 45s, people used to look at record albums for inspiration. CD covers just don’t seem to be as exciting, but the music industry as always been at the forefront of design. The folks at Tutorial Blog have put together a list of 30 music websites which are just beautiful to look at. If this is the look your after, you’re bound to find inspiration here.

Don’t think that what you are seeing is what everyone else is seeing

One of the most difficult things about building websites is getting it to look the same on all browsers. This task can be very challenging and frustrating. Before trying to achieve the impossible and making your website look great on every browser, you may want to look at your audience and your stats. Looking at stats is a great way to narrow down your list of browsers that you should support. If you haven’t done it already take a look at Google Analytics or Mint and start collecting statistics.

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Finally the perfect web design showcase!

When designing websites there are always a few components that are more difficult to design. Navigation, icons, call to action items, forms and headlines come to mind. When setting up blogs, headlines, comment forms and the entry metadata is often just straight from the design template. Looking at different websites and blogs is a great way to be inspired but finding the right site takes a lot of time and effort. After reading Smashing Magazine article today, I came across Elements of Design, the alternative web design showcase. This wonderful resource is the design showcase of Christian Watson. Instead of displaying great looking websites, he provides us with snippets such as great icons, headlines, pull quotes, calendars, search boxes and even code display. I’m bookmarking this site right now and subscribing to their RSS feed!

Creating Newsletters Just Got Easier

Thanks to the folks at FreshView who brought us Campaign Monitor and MailBuild, you can now download ready to use email newsletter templates which have been tested on all major email clients, including Outlook 2007. These are a great starting point for your next newsletter.

Here is where you can find out more about the Campaign Monitor templates and the MailBuild templates.

Highlights from An Event Apart Seattle

One of the things I love about being a web designer is that there is always more to learn, be it from other web specialists or your clients. Last week at An Event Apart Seattle Tzaddi and I had the chance to learn from some true experts. The speakers were not only masters in their fields, but engaging and generous with their knowledge.

Here are some highlights:

• Watching Eric Meyer write CSS (you know you’re a geek when…)
• Jeffrey Zeldman’s talk on “Writing the User Interface” confirmed my experience: the words in a web design matter much more than you might think and can really make a difference in how visitors use your site. So long as it invites clicking, it matters more what a button says than what it looks like.
• Peaking into other designer’s processes, from beautiful sketchbooks to user research.
• I enjoyed Jeff Veen’s succinct message which shows the benefits of doing your design research up front vs. the cost of changing your mind partway through the build. He also discussed why web design is so much more complex now than it was in the early days of the web, when everyone using the web were of the same type (geeks).
• Shawn Henry shared insights for ensuring your site is accessible to varying abilities; from folks who read the web with braille or speech readers to limited vision users — who magnify screens to an amazing degree, but want the same site that was designed for regularly sighted users. Bottom line: there is no substitute for engaging disabled users in the design process if you want to build truly accessible sites. Her book on accessibility is free online.
• Andy Budd shared how a delightful user experience is worth more than the sum of it’s parts in the loyalty that can create.

11 Great colour legends

Ever wonder why stop signs are red, black is associated with death, blue is a colour for boys, while pink is for girls? Darius at Colorlovers wrote a great article explaining where these colour associations came from. A fascinating read for anyone interested in the meaning of colour.

Enhance your website with video footage

We recently launched a new website for an innovative new development project on the Fraser River in Coquitlam. The Village at Fraser Mills will be a mixed-use community that integrates industrial and employment uses with residential, commercial, and recreational opportunities. The purpose of the website is to inform the community on the progress of the development as well as educate. One way this is achieved is by displaying a link to an interesting video which talks about the history of the Village.

Adding video is a great way to enhance your website and is simple enough to do. Professional organizer, Linda Chu, has appeared several times on TV and using her VCR, recorded the videos on tape, we converted them to Quicktime and posted them on her site. The process couldn’t be more simple.

More and more, we’re seeing video that has been integrated in flash. I recently discovered the RouxBe website which does this superbly. RouxBe is the ideal resource for people looking to expand their culinary repertoire and improve their skills in the kitchen. They offer online instructional cooking videos that walk you step by step through each delicious recipe. Their videos are some of the best I’ve seen on the web.

And more importantly, my husband has been doing much more cooking these days!

The Meaning of Colours

Following up on Christine’s recent post on colour inspiration, I thought I’d share this neat tutorial I came across recently: Colour in Motion. The Movies section in particular is a good little bit of edu-tainment.

This site is an entertaining way to learn about the meaning associated with different colours. In addition to the feeling you might get from a colour, it’s good to keep in mind that colour meaning is not only an individual thing but a very cultural thing as well. The author alludes to that in “The Stars” section, by listing some associations from around the world.