Designing the layout for a website is a lot is like painting a masterpiece. The information is like the paint, and the Worldwide Web is your canvas. Just as painters like to make sure that their works will capture the attention of their audience any other painting before it is revealed to the public, web designers want to grab the attention of their audience as well. Here are a few tips that will keep viewers returning to your spectacular website.

1. Be Intriguing from the Very Start

The top of your homepage is where your site reputation begins. Most of your visitor’s will rest their eyes first. Make sure all of your essential information is dynamically displayed from the very start. Tidbits you’ll want to add include your logo. Logos solidify a brand name and make the company easily recognizable.  You could also include links to other websites and commercials. If the site will contain a   sign up and sign in area then the top of the homepage is an excellent place to start.

2. A Logo is Crucial

You can’t include a logo in your web layout if the company doesn’t have one. If you discover that the business doesn’t have a set brand, then develop a unique logo that captures the nature of the business, and incorporate it into the design.

3. Keep the Fancy Stuff to a Minimum

This tip may be against your natural instinct, but keep images, flash, and java scripts to a minimum. While it is an excellent idea to add visual appeal to your website, you don’t want slow down the viewing process with unnecessary bells and whistles. If a visitor has a slow connection, or if your heavy graphic content is taking long to load, then you’ll risk losing your audience.

4. Don’t Be Longwinded

Instead of using long paragraphs try shorter paragraphs that have links to a full article. You don’t want to lose your viewer’s attention span due to monotonous type.

5. Fancy Fonts Should Also Be Functional

Although expressive fonts can add to the theme of your layout, don’t go overboard.  Choose a font type that is legible. Also make sure that the font size is not too big or too small in size.

6. Keep the Navigation Logical

Visitors should be able to navigate through your webpages effortlessly through your webpages. Keep the layout logical, and leave a trail for your viewers by incorporating subtle clues to guide them where they want to go.

7. Keep Your Theme Consistent

There may be a plethora of exciting themes you could use for a website, but that doesn’t mean you should multiple themes for one site. When you just use one theme throughout your web page, you can maintain consistency and give your web site a clean professional look.

8. Don’t Forget About Screen Resolution

A professional website design should be able to fit any screen resolution. Keep the various vantage point of your future viewers in mind as you design.  

9. Color is Always Important

Color is an important aspect of most artistic projects. If you truly want your website to be spectacular, then avoid using colors that don’t blend well with each other.

Web designers everywhere want to grab the attention of their audience and keep it. When you follow these tips for web layout design, you’ll encourage viewers to return to your amazing website.

If you are looking for unique web layout design, brief the Exchange now!

Kathleen

It’s not a surprising factor that the development of Broadband internet has revolutionised the way we use and interact with the web. With developments such as fibre optics and more and more providers promising connections of 50mb +, we browse and download more than ever before. Gone are the days of painfully waiting for an image to steadily display being replaced instead by information there when you need it. 

It’s exciting that as designers, we are presented with more opportunities to push the boundaries of image and idea presentation enabling us to spin these technologies in our favour. With the power of a faster connection and technological advances in screen resolutions, an emerging trend amongst web designers is the use of over-sized photo’s or illustrated images as a website’s background.

Adding more life and dynamism to a website enables us to present ideas with both clarity and stunning visual effect. A breath of fresh air compared to traditional tiled background graphics, we feel we will be seeing a lot more of these type of sites.  

If you’re looking for a website with life and stunning visuals brief the Exchange now!

Paper Boat Creative

I wrote on blur Group’s blog how Crowdsourcing is finally coming of age.

And one of the key points this tapped into was that as part of the Creative Services Exchange Crowdsourcing is a valuable tool that ensures companies always get top creatives working across all their projects.

But that doesn’t mean companies should take our word for it. For example, when assessing the quality of web designers and developers, there are key questions that can be asked to give peace of mind that, well, the creative professionals ARE professional.

Now, we’re not suggesting a full interrogation, but a handful of conversational questions can always help gauge a creative’s level of expertise and whether you have the right people for your projects.

Industry knowledge

You want a proper web developer, not a hobbyist. A simple way of assessing a developer’s knowledge-level and how up-to-date they are with industry trends is to ask what industry publications they read – this could be magazines, blogs or journals. If they read none, there may be some key knowledge gaps.

Personality: team-player or loner?

This is a key question. If a project requires close, tight-knit interaction between creatives from a multitude of disciplines, you may want a developer with big-project experience and who likes working with people. If interaction isn’t needed, then a developer with a leaning towards lone-working will be fine.

W3C: who?

Any developer worth their salt will know all about the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). You don’t need to dig too keep into the candidate’s W3C knowledge-level, but you can ask them to summarise what W3C is generally about.

Tools of the trade

Ask what a developer’s favourite platforms are. If the conversation is more ‘Microsoft Frontpage’ and less ‘Flash’, that tells a story.

Portfolios: the proof is in the pudding

Any professional designer and developer will have a portfolio. And this will normally form a big part of any proposal offered to you once you submit your creative brief.

Don’t be afraid to ask for more examples though – you may like to see very specific examples before deciding on your creative team.

What web-browser do you use?

This is another big question. Why? Because a good web professional should understand cross-browser compatibility. And they should be able to gauge that the reasons for the question extend beyond curiosity and explain that they regularly use all browsers as part of their rigorous testing, even if they do prefer Chrome or Firefox for personal browsing.

There are many more detailed questions you could ask, but these will go some way towards helping non-experts ensure they have the right people working together across all their development projects.

Whilst the usability and look-and-feel of any website are key considerations throughout the planning and design stage, the invisible elephant in the web-design room is most certainly SEO.

This guide won’t make you an expert in web design or in SEO – it takes aptitude and years of training and dedication to master either of these arts.

No, this guide is designed to make you just that little bit more knowledgeable on the inextricable link that exists between how a website is constructed, to how it performs on Google, Yahoo!, Bing…in fact, any search engine.

If you’re a Marketing Manager charged with setting up your first website, this should arm you with enough facts to talk knowledgeably with your agency, or to the Crowd if you’ve really got your finger on the world’s creative pulse.

And if you’re a web designer, well, this will act as a friendly reminder that bells and whistles are great, but it’s traffic that ultimately counts.

Don’t be a Flash in the pan: search engines love words

Okay, we love a good Flash animation as much as the next guy, but building a website entirely from Flash isn’t a smart move from an SEO perspective. Search engines simply love words…in fact, they can’t get enough of them.

Any text embedded within a Flash file can’t be detected by search engines, so you’ll find it’s incredibly difficult to rank for any keywords. Flash is fine in moderation, but each page of your website should contain at least a few hundred words of normal text, with a smattering of relevant keywords to help search engines ‘discover’ your wonderful brand.

Oh, and avoid frames too if you can – they’re not cool anyway, but search engines in particular don’t dig them all that much.

Architecture

The relationship between web design and SEO is a natural one. By building a website to be easily accessible, this does help humans find their way through your site. But it also provides an easier path for the search-bots to index your website.

Search engine algorithms may change, but simple navigation and good site architecture with quality content (HTML) will always go down well.

Try and keep your key pages as close to the root directory as possible. Deeply-nested subdirectories can make search-bots’ lives hard, so try and avoid this. And humans don’t like to veer too far from your homepage either, so as a general rule of thumb, if you don’t think a human would like it, there’s a reasonable chance a search engine won’t either.

What’s in a name? URLs and domains

If you can manage to squeeze a keyword into your URL, fantastic. Though with a .com or .co.uk you may struggle to find a URL consisting of single keywords or even multiple keywords. There’s a good chance they’re all taken.

So if you’re an insurance broker, for example, you should ideally have the word ‘insurance’ in your company URL somewhere, even if it is accompanied by another word.

Logo.com recently sold for $500k, to be used by an online company selling logo design services. This helps to illustrate the value to some people of including keywords in a domain name.

As a slight aside, the word ‘Logo’ means the same thing in many languages, from French and German, to Italian, Romanian, Polish…and many more. This will help the company’s SEO in many languages.

Search is also affected by the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) you choose. So if you wish to rank highly in the UK, then a co.uk website will help your efforts. And if you’re seeking to optimise your rankings in Germany, then a .de domain is the ideal solution.

The host with the most: where does your website call home?

Search engines consider the physical location of the server(s) that host your website(s), both in local-based searches and general searches. So if you’re building a website for your local business and you expect people to search for it by location (e.g. UK/London, US/New York), find a web hosting provider nearby.

Content is king…

Okay, it’s a cliché…but content is king. Well, fresh content that is. Update your website regularly with original, fresh text and this will guide you some way towards SEO success.

John Mark Herskind

Candy

Lacko Illustration

Andrei

Viet Huynh

El Designo

Ben Lawrence

Want to use one of these designers for your next project? Submit a brief

- Do you think mobile devises such as the iPhone & iPad will effect how you design websites?

It is an interesting question, because when you discuss desktops/notebooks, bandwidth is increasing, baseline monitor resolution is improving, and coding languages and standards are allowing many cool effects. (Namely transparent PNGs, CSS and a host of others.) So I see the desktop/notebook ‘sphere allowing us to create beautiful, sophisticated, designs within a valid framework.

But on the other hand, I see the handheld arena growing and becoming extremely important.

Not for every vertical, but for many. But designing for the iPhone gives flashback…

flashbacks to 1993 when we had no bandwidth, no resolution, and had to optimize everything to a single palette. (Do some of you remember the standard gray background?) Not quite as restrictive, but reminisant of those early days.

So the short answer is yes… and no. My standard designs will continue to take advantage of the technology platforms available, but many sites will need a little brother that packs in all the content, ease of use, and speed… just in a smaller package.

- Do you think the benefits of having a full flash website stand up against HTML and it’s obvious SEO benefits?

This is a discussion I get into often with clients and friends. I will first assume those reading this understand the intrinsic pros and cons to each format.

That said, I think you need to ask examine the following first:
• What are the goals for my website?
• What is my core user group expecting when they visit my site?

I’ll use my site as an example, www.markus-id.com. It is a full Flash site, and my decision to go this route was very deliberate. I decided the cost of SEO optimization is acceptable because Flash I wanted to create a site that provided a more immersive and graphical experience that integrated video seamlessly. My site is a destination visited by people that get the address by word of mouth and personal referrals. For that reason SEO is not critical for me. And finally, as a designer, the people visiting my site already have an expectation that my site will be rich with rich media, and other content. I also find the font control to be very important.

On the other had, I just talked a client out of using a full Flash site in lieu of a CSS/XHTML site design. It is a start-up retail website trying to increase market share and eventually dominate a particular vertical. SEO is critical, and the user group probably wouldn’t appreciate the nuances of a full Flash site. The flexible format, and ease of updating the CSS/XHTML site is also very appealing. Most importantly, SEO is a critical component of their success.

While the answer depends on the nature of your business, goals, and core user group, I still think SEO is critical to the success of real companies competing for business today. You want your site to do some heavy-lifting, everyday to stay ahead of the pack, and you can’t do that without an aggressive SEO strategy.

I think SEO does trump what Flash has to offer if your business is in it to win.

- If you could meet someone living or dead, who would it be and why?

Winston Churchill. Savior of the free world as we know it.

- Do you have any favoured projects from the portfolio?

• Currently I like the University of Arizona CEAO website. Massive project, tons of content, but very usable and easy to look at. http://www.ceao.arizona.edu/

• I also like the Motto productions site very much. For it’s simplicity and look.

• This one is pretty old, but I’m still proud of it. I designed the website for the Counting Crows and it won “Best of the Web” 2 years in a row.

• I have 3 very exciting projects going right now, so if you ask me this in 2 months I’ll point you to those then!

- If you didn’t become a designer, what would you have ended up doing?

I’d be an Air Force Pilot

Want Markus to work on a project for you? Contact us here ]]> http://blur-designs.com/blog/designer-spotlight-markus-beaumonte/feed/ 0 http://blur-designs.com/blog/crowd-designs-of-the-week-9/ http://blur-designs.com/blog/crowd-designs-of-the-week-9/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:24:53 +0000 Tom http://blur-designs.com/blog/?p=805 Another selection of top designs from our wide range of designers.

Igor Marisko

David Enker

Dina Barbosa

Warren Prasek

James Owen

Glenn Tucker

Want to use one of these designers for your next project? Submit a brief

]]> http://blur-designs.com/blog/crowd-designs-of-the-week-9/feed/ 0 http://blur-designs.com/blog/guest-blog-design-inspirations-from-vancouver-olympics-2010/ http://blur-designs.com/blog/guest-blog-design-inspirations-from-vancouver-olympics-2010/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:41:47 +0000 Tom http://blur-designs.com/blog/?p=758 This weeks guest blog is from crowd member Anne Katzeff

The Olympics always excite, intrigue, and inspire me. I’m an athlete who’s competed in organized sports for most of my life. I used to say I was born into this life to play softball, because it was that important to me. These days, my athletics consist mostly of yoga, biking, walking, and dancing. My self-identity now includes graphic designer, artist, and teacher. The Olympics act as a confluence of all my passions and provide an interesting mix of inspirations for me.

The graphic identity of Vancouver 2010 captures the beauty, personality, and spirit of the Canadian region perfectly. There’s a great video “Transmoflection” that explains the graphic team’s process of research, brainstorming, sketching, illustration, and design. I enjoyed sharing this video with my students.

It’s fun to see how the Olympics’ graphic identity has evolved over the years. Here’s a webexpedition18 blog post showing Winter Olympic Games Posters from 1924 to 2010

The website was comprehensive and impressive on several levels: design, interactivity, information technology, and scope. The infrastructure included 800 servers, 6,000 computers, 4,000 printers, and over 100,000 hours of testing!

Many thanks to Anne Katzeff for contributing to blur Designs blog.

]]> http://blur-designs.com/blog/guest-blog-design-inspirations-from-vancouver-olympics-2010/feed/ 6 http://blur-designs.com/blog/designer-spotlight-kellie-matheson/ http://blur-designs.com/blog/designer-spotlight-kellie-matheson/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:39:35 +0000 Tom http://blur-designs.com/blog/?p=64

Kellie Matheson is a web designer with a diverse range of clients. She talked with us about freelancing, web design & superpowers…

You have worked on some exciting projects, which one are you most proud of? Um, I think I would have to say the website for S-Trip, which is a Canadian youth travel company. The agency I was contracted to at the time gave me the freedom to really do a lot of visual exploration, which led to me taking over their kitchen and manically rolling paint onto bits of paper (queue the insane laughter). I was also fortunate to be responsible for developing the sitemap and the wireframes, and working closely with the client throughout the process.

If you were a super hero, what would be your super power? Haha! To be able to get up every morning, click my fingers and instantly look fabulously stylish in full hair and makeup. Is that a super power? If not I’d go for the ol’ invisibility powers. He he he!

Freelancer Vs Permanent? Ah, the age old question. For me personally, I don’t think I could ever go back to permanent. I’ve been freelancing in London for three and a half happy years without one single dry spell (touch wood). The things I love most are the freedom, the time off, the meeting new people and the continuous first days. I used to be so nervous starting at a new agency, but the experience has really made me calm and confident. It’s not for everyone though. As Fabio stated in the last Spotlight, networking is everything, and I think you need to be quite personable and give people your time. One good tip is to send your recruiters cupcakes when they get you a good contract, they love it!

Having worked on interactive websites, does the web allow designers to be more creative? Hmm, well I’ve never been a print designer so I can’t really compare, but I think the thing that excites me about the web and where I would like to take my career is the human-centred approach or User Experience as some call it. I don’t see this kind of methodology as hindering creativity; moreover it ensures that the end product will be successful as well as beautiful.

If you weren’t a web designer, what would you be? Oh my god there is so many things I want to be!!! I’m studying Thai language and one dream I have is to become fluent and to be able to live in Thailand for 6 months to a year, teaching English or maybe designing. I have Thai in my family who live in Bangkok so it would be great to spend time with them. I would also love to make clothes and run a market stall, I’ve recently become obsessed with vintage 1940’s fashion so that would be my inspiration, I just have to learn how to make clothes first… I also love science, psychology, economics, and puppies!

Want Kellie to work on your next project? Contact us here

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