Archive for the ‘Web design’ Category

Web site design portfolio: a new addition

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Calpe villa home page Recently, I have been doing a lot of Web design and development work “behind the scenes.” There hasn’t been much that I could share with readers of this blog. But around Christmas I did create a Web site that you may like to glance at—and I have finally found the time to add it to my Web design portfolio.

Actually, I have mentioned this site before, when it was just a one-page Web site. It’s a property site, but for a single property. Liz, the owner, is keen to sell her villa fast. She has called on the services of a few estate agents, but also wants to see if she can manage a private sale.

She had dozens of photos I could use, and I took another fifty or so myself.

For colours I very quickly hit on black, to offset the photos. I also used some pastel colours to highlight and distinguish information for 2 different kinds of buyer—those looking for a villa for themselves, and those looking to rent. For the final effect, you can have a look for yourself.

Of course, if you look at my portfolio, you will see I have pinched one effect that I used before: an orange gradient that remains fixed in the viewport. (But it is is a different shade of orange!)

Moving a Web site based on a proprietary CMS (part 1)

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Ad for a propietary CMSCan you move a Web site based on a proprietary Content Management System to which you have only a customer’s access? The short answer would seem to be ‘no’. One UK Web company includes this question among its FAQs: “Can I move my CMS site to another hosting company?” The answer it gives is “This is not possible as the CMS software that we have developed must remain on our servers.”

There is a general summary of the position on an Australian Web site. This is (part of) what they say about CMS sites:

Content Management Systems – a mixed blessing
An alternative to a personal web designer is a CMS or Content Management System. The main benefit of a CMS is the ability to update your site yourself – within certain parameters – over the internet, and rolling all your costs into one monthly payment. But you need to go into a CMS contract with your eyes open.
1. CMS do not provide distinctive sites. They are, almost by definition, formulaic. Look at some and see what you think.
2. You don’t own your CMS site in the same way that you own a site designed by a web designer. With CMS you own the content but you cannot walk away from your CMS contract with your site intact – your site can only operate on the CMS operator’s platform.
3. With a CMS website you are locked in – you cannot change to a hosting company that provides more competitive rates or better features without losing your website.”

Point 3 in effect repeats what the English company say about their own sites.

So what was I to do when I was asked to ‘move’ exactly such a Web site, by a potential client to whom I had been recommended—by people I would prefer not to let down?

Of course I said ‘yes’. I committed myself to recreating the site, i.e., constructing a completely new site that would look just like the client’s current site, with a completely new database, a new set of scripts (PHP rather than the current ASP), all the existing images (several hundred of them) and a client interface that let her do everything she had done with the old CMS.

How did I get on in this foolhardy enterprise? Answer in Part 2.

One-page Web sites

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

The one-page Villa Calpe Web siteHow do people feel about one-page Web sites? For myself, I think they are pretty important, while a real Web site is being developed behind the scenes.

I have a couple of Web sites in this position right now. One is for two karaoke presenters: brookies karaoke. The other is for a friend who wants to sell her unique spacious villa in Calpe. I am doing plenty of work behind the scenes, which the website owners can check out, but neither of the full Web sites are ready yet to go public.

Obviously, you can’t go anywhere further on the site from the home page of a one-page Web site—but at least you can find contact details. What is more, from a website designer’s/owner’s point of view, the minimal Web site is available to be noticed. (And, to my astonishment, Web search engines often find one-page Web sites quite fast.)

3 wishes for a successful Web site

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

search engines The Web Fairy is hovering over the cradle of your new Web site. She has granted you three wishes. What do you wish for? What does every Web site need?

  1. The Web site has got to be found.
  2. The Web site has got to be attractive.
  3. The Web site has got to deliver.

OK. You look at these wishes, and you think, “How obvious! This is just common sense.”

So how come so many Web sites fail on at least one count—and some on all three? Let’s look at what may not be so obvious.

In the first place, the Web site has got to be found by the people you want to find it. That means designing the whole Web site for those specific people, and calling on SEO and marketing skills to catch their own specific keywords—every time you add text.

In the second place, the Web site has got to be attractive to the same specific people—not to the website owner, not to the website designer, but to the website visitor. You have to deploy the colours and the layout and the design which will engage the visitors you want, and make them want to explore your Web site. If we were all attracted in the same way, we would all be pining for Marilyn Monroe. Personally, I was always more attracted to Jane Russell. (You get the point.)

Finally, the Web site has got to give the people that you want to visit exactly what they are looking for. They came to your Web site because they were looking for something. You can bet every cent you have that they weren’t looking for an advertisement. Advertisements are what people fast forward through when they record TV programmes. So why would they be looking for one on the Web? Just give them what they want—no less, and (this is really important) no more.

So there you have it, and now you know what I mean. Your Web site has got to be found. Your Web site has got to be attractive. Your Web site has got to deliver.

What’s wrong with website templates?

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

DesignLots of Web sites are based upon pre-designed templates, with placeholders which a website owner or website designer can fill in: “Company name,” “Your tag line here!” Some Web design companies on the Costa Blanca even publish portfolios of sites based on website templates—at least they look like website templates to me. Is there anything wrong with using such templates, instead of having a bespoke Web site?

Let me admit, to begin with, that many website templates are elegant and professional.

I still don’t like them. And here are 5 reasons why.

  1. Elements of the template—and sometimes the entire template—may be inappropriate. The imagery may not be right for this particular Web site, or the colour scheme, or the layouts, or the navigation. In extreme cases an entire site has to be created following a formula dictated by a given navigation scheme. Or the number of top-level pages is limited by a given set of navigation buttons. Visitors may find it harder to do what they want on the site, because the template isn’t designed for specific visitor tasks.
  2. Even where the look and feel of a template is OK for a particular Web site, and visitor tasks are not hampered, the website template may not express what is most important about a business or organisation—its own character, its unique selling point.
  3. There is no real design input from the client—no chance for her or him to stamp their own wishes or personality on their own Web site. The best they have is a choice between templates.
  4. There is no real call on the website designer’s craft. The client gets a supermarket ready meal instead of a menu of chef-prepared dishes.
  5. Most important: the template Web site will not work for the client as it would if it were the result of serious preliminary analysis. Before design comes analysis: what will count as success for this particular Web site? what visitors does the client expect or want to attract? how are these specific visitors most likely to join in the campaign/sign up/part with their money (whatever)?

No template-based Web site will ever work for a client the way a bespoke Web site can.

Website design rule 8: be 100% obvious

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

Rule 8As website designers, our first job is to work out why people will visit the Web site we are designing. The second is to work out how their experience can be made so positive, even enjoyable, that they do what the website owner wants them to do.

I recently signed up for a local business directory. Since I am using it as an example of what not to do, and since the people who run it are such nice people, I won’t name it. When I looked at my entry I saw the word Website, but no website address. Also the word Email, but no email address. I wrote to the directory to protest.

Before they wrote back (actually, they haven’t written back yet) I checked my entry again. Then I thought, ‘Maybe the bare names are links.’ And so they are. By clicking on the word Website you can go to the Web site. Click on the word Email and you can compose an email.

So I was being stupid, right? You can make up your own mind on that. The important point is that it is the job of the communicator to communicate. If a Web site doesn’t communicate, to every relevant visitor, it fails. Here, the bare words were not enough to communicate that there was hidden information. There was no underline to indicate a link, and in 2009 no colour is enough. (Check out my earlier posts about links.) As it turns out, there’s even a tool tip—but you’d have to move your mouse to the words to find that out. So this is rule 8.

8. Be 100% obvious.

And 100% means 100%. Everything a website visitor can do must be crystal clear. All information must be up front and visible. There are plenty of ways of making even an email address visible to human visitors without its being visible to spambots. And if you hide it, you must say so, in an obvious place that a human scanning the page will see at a glance.

If a website visitor has to guess or work out what to do, the Web site is not 100% obvious. If a website visitor has to do something off their own bat to find information that is on the page, the Web site is not 100% obvious. Remember, 100% is 100%: 99% won’t do.

Web design is like kitchen design

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

Kitchen design Earlier this week I was asked to look at the design for a new Web site. Since the designer was only asking for the views of established website designers, I won’t add a link here.

The site was lovely to look at, with elegant illustrations, sophisticated typography, and plenty of white space.

Of course, even as a visual design, it had a couple of problems. The menu system wasn’t exactly proportioned, and the balance of the page wasn’t quite right. But that wasn’t its real problem.

The designer had concentrated on making visually attractive pages. He hadn’t spent time thinking about the purpose of the site, who he really wanted to visit, what those visitors would be looking for, etc., etc. There was no focus, no site concept other than to look good, and it was barely useable.

I have written before about how website design is not about creating pretty pages. In a follow-up post, I compared website design to designing teacups or bridges, but in formulating my response to this designer’s site, I was hit by a much better analogue: kitchen design.

What really counts about a good kitchen design is that everything a kitchen needs should be in the kitchen, that the person who is going to be using the kitchen can find everything easily, that everything is really easy—even a joy—to use. And what matters about the look of the kitchen is that the kitchen user, plus her/his friends, feel at home in it, enjoy being there. (The designer is not going to be cooking in that kitchen, nor drinking coffee with friends, nor having breakfast, etc.)

You can spell out the similarities for yourself. Once again it underlines how good Web design is visitor-centred Web design, not client-centred Web design, and certainly not designer-centred Web design.

Website design and spicy curries

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Gurkha House restaurant home pageThe recession is continuing to have an impact on work and business on the Costa Blanca. For my latest design work, I am being paid in curries! (After the initial payments for Web hosting and domain name registration, of course. But just as well I was a regular customer at the restaurant before they asked me to design a Web site for them.)

I have recently finished the Web site: for an Indian/Nepali restaurant in Calpe. You can now inspect this Costa Blanca restaurant Web site yourself.

A fellow Web designer that I met in a bar in Calpe suggested I should use a template for such a site. It would have been easier, and maybe quicker, but I wanted to give the owners an individual site with a character of its own. You can once again check out my design notes for it if you browse my website portfolio, on my personal Web site.

Website designer still at work

Friday, April 10th, 2009

English Medical Clinic Albir home pageGiven the credit crunch and the competition, website designers are fighting for new work. So it’s always nice when you get some, and for such deserving clients.

I have just finished a Web site for a medical clinic in Albir, near Benidorm on the Costa Blanca. You can now inspect this medical Web site yourself.

You can also check out my design notes for it if you browse my website portfolio, on my personal Web site.

Website design rule 7: one Web page, one focus

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

Rule 7As the title suggests, this is the seventh in a series of rules for website design, which began in June of last year with Rule 1. In that post, and in the second post in the series, I explain what I mean by a rule, so I won’t repeat the explanation here.

The rules are supposed to be in some sort of logical order, and focus on visual design for the Web—assuming that the all-important work of analysis has already been completed. So the last rules were about choosing and using colours, throughout a Web site. Time to look at individual website pages at the moment of creation. Here then is rule 7.

7. One Web page, one focus

In other words, decide what is the most important feature of the page you are working on—and make sure it looks the most important. Make it stand out. Make it the focus of attention.

There are lots of ways to do this. Variations in size work: make it the biggest element on the page. Or it can be the best-placed element, or the most strikingly coloured—or it can catch attention by being intriguing. Attention-grabbing contrast will often work: a reverse block of colour, an oversize font, a juxtaposition of colours…

On an ideal Web page, there is something a visitor can take in in the first second of the page loading. This should be the most important thing on the page. Similarly, if a visitor stays after the first second—they may not—she or he should be able to see what the page has to offer without reading any text (except maybe a header).

It follows from this that there shouldn’t be two or more elements competing for attention. There should be only one ‘top dog.’ This may mean taking risks: so take them. As design guru Jim Krause says, “You must be decisive.” As (designer) Robin Williams says, “Don’t be a wimp!”