Tuesday, 8 September 2015

How to Be a Good Web Design Client

Everyone is looking for a good web designer but do you ever wonder if you are a good client? Apparently not,given the number of designer blogs telling stories about frustrating clients.Why is it important to be a good client (and I do not mean simply paying you bills on-time)? Well,it is not simply about preventing yourself from getting on someone’s Worst Clients list,it is also about getting the best website you can.


There is no question about it,if you want to have a great looking website,you need to communicate with your web designer efficiently and clearly,to offer feedback,to provide the content (text and photos),and so on.Today’s article will focus on how to be a good client.It will help you build and nurture a good relationship with your web designer and get the best website from your designer.

#1. Be Clear And Specific in What You Want

There are a variety of clients that only a vague description of what it includes on its website,and want what they want to do. Some just do not know what they want and look at your web design company that is thinking for them.Others,believe that if they leave out specific details of the designer to make you to be free Super creative and something extraordinary,about their expectations.

This is not how a good customer relationship designer works.They are for the help, your designer clear guidelines on what you're looking for do the website for you to enter responsibility.The designer will guide you through your experience,but can not read your mind.If you have specific brand colors,for example,you have a sample of the exact color to be used.

#2. Provide The Content The Designer Needs

Web designers can only move so far through the website creation process using just sample content.Text,photos,audio and video materials must be provided by the client.The more organized you are with your content,the better the designer will be able to lay it out for you (and deliver it on-time).Attention: you must own the copyright for all of your content! You cannot take photos from Google Images, this can lead to legal issues and it’s a huge headache.

#3. Provide Helpful Feedback When Requested

Web designers often give their customers access to the Work in Progress website on their own servers.This makes it easy for you to track the progress of your website at any time.Feedback should be evaluated during the siege very important process,but interrupting the progress of your web designer to prevent,to give feedback only when requests (or when it comes something new ) .Remember that you have a designer,not an automated machine design that works at your service in question.You pay for talent,ideas and execution.You can send a color change or the elimination of a graphic element that is not proposed,but look to them to provide information when they should.

#4. Trust And Respect Your Designer

A web designer is not a dreamer artist,but a professional.Trust your judgment and decisions in design and respect as a professional.Would you go to your dentist and say that the teeth should be removed, or go to an auto mechanic and tell you how to replace the brakes? Probably not.So why do you do this with your web designer?

#5. Remember,You Get What You Pay For

There are reasons why web designers working for $10 an hour and another $100 per hour.For skill and quality,you must be willing to pay for it.If you choose a designer in the price range of low-end, have realistic expectations about the final product.They are probably not as experienced as an expensive web designer which means they could not accompany can also use your website and is not,how could it possibly.

Apply the common commercial judgment with the appreciation of the work you can expect for every price range and no disappointments.The core of every good relationship is the customer design communication and respect.Make your expectations clear from the start and have had problems undisputed murky.Each project successful web design requires teamwork, and who have contributed a major role in the success of the project of a good customer.

Wednesday, 5 August 2015

Be Sure To Balance SEO And User Experience In Your Web Page Design

In the list of the philosophies of Google, first of all is to "focus on the user and all else will follow." But in the past, many SEO professionals have ignored this advice, the development of web pages designed primarily for web crawlers and full of keywords.


As one of only Pass4sure 810-403 SEO strategy worked well 10 years ago, Google and other search engines have already come a long way. In particular, the sophistication of Google is such that the design of UX (user experience) is much more valuable than just design for SEO (search engine optimization).

That said, abandon SEO entirely in favor of a UX-focused approach is a mistake. While it is true that the SEO and UX have become more and more complementary - and UX design often does result in improved SEO - UX are some elements that affect Google's ability to track a website and some areas that benefit each other.

Web designers would be desirable to design for, and take both, mind, but focus on the user above all.
Going Mobile

In April 2015, Google released an update to Mobile easy to increase the ranking of websites to be readable and, above all, functional, on mobile devices. Now it is absolutely necessary to ensure that a website is designed not only for desktop but for phone screens, too.

In fact, the search engine said on his blog Inside Ad Words "More Google searches occur on mobile devices that teams from 10 countries, including the US"

There are three recognized-Google ways to design mobile devices: responsive design, dynamic portion and separated URLs. Of these three, responsive design is the best choice for both SEO and UX. With responsive design, the site is essentially the same, only serves different screens depending on the device. Separate URLs is the least favorable option as mobile, then you must qualify for himself.

UX and SEO go hand in hand when it comes to mobile sites. Not only is it sensible to use easy web design: users are not redirected to a different site with which they must meet. And the mobile update makes easy newly launched SEO-friendly, too.

If you must use infinite scroll, use it wisely

Infinite scroll, which continues to load more content as the user scrolls to the bottom of the page, has been thought to be a pleasant and elegant design for UX. Many popular web site uses this feature:
options and Buzz Feed are examples.

However, web crawlers cannot mimic user behavior in this way and the content that would be visible to users remains invisible to Google. If infinite scroll is a design element rather not lose, Google recommends creating a paginated series (content pages) with infinite scroll, ensuring fast load times and allowing users to easily find the content they wanted in the first place.

Moreover, there is a misconception that the design is best served content "above the fold", ie, the content that can be viewed without the user having to scroll. In fact, research shows that users move. And besides, with so variable screens these days, it's hard to know what will be visible without scrolling.

Avoid click-to-enlarge


along the lines of infinite displacement it is click-to-expand or tabbed content. This design uses links or tabs, clicking, more content "open". Although Google has not definitely known whether this hidden content is ignored, there has been much discussion about it: that is, that Google does not index it.

The safest practice is to use sparingly. Click-to-enlarge certainly appeal to minimalist web design content, but appealing to UX in this case could be detrimental to SEO.

Do not go (too) heavy Image


Images are a great way to transmit information at the same time attractive to users. However, in a video "Slate Friday", founder and CEO of Moz Rand Fishkin explains that only text pages perform better than pages of heavy images, especially if the images are photographs of generic stock or design elements poorly executed . UX design makes images for it, but only if they are well made.

Google can read images - and can appear in Google image searches and provide SEO value - as long as you:
  •     Give descriptive images filenames.
  •     Include appropriate alternative text.
  •     Surrounds the image with the corresponding text.
  •     Do not hide important text within the image.

The key text in the balance against the images of a web page is to use your best judgment: Are these attractive images? Earn users to move beyond a lot of unspeakable images to get the text? Is sufficient information transmitted verbatim in the page is valuable?

Thursday, 2 July 2015

Cracking Social Media: How Facebook Decides What Is On Your NEWS Feed.

We all know the power of social networks, how can We not when we spend much of our lives flicking through countless pages of content. Some of the worth, but most tenuous part at best.

Marketing your business on social networks seems simple enough; create a presence, publish relevant content, likes and get critical mass to do the rest.

Just looking at the number of monthly unique visitors on active social media gives us all hope:

    Facebook:   1440000000
    Instagram:  300 000 000
    Twitter:       236 million
    LinkedIn:   187 000 000

Ironically, overcrowding of the contents will be one of the biggest obstacles will be overcome. There are more than 18 million business pages on Facebook alone. Users are much more stimulated and plenty of choice.

Having a basic understanding of how the media, manages content could give you an edge.

Many of us pretend to understand the algorithms they use Facebook to calculate what appears on your news, but as Google’s, no one has any clue.

Lars Backstory, Facebook engineer says that there ae more than 100,000 individual weighting parameters which determine what the content of their food is.

However, there are some elements that are common knowledge:
  •     Types of emails that receive the most user interaction; photo, text or video.
  •     What messages a user hides.
  •     How a user does interacts with paid advertisements.
  •     And finally, the device and the internet speed.

The three pillars of Edge Rank also play a key role in determining whether to show on a news service:
  •     Affinity, or the amount of a user interacts with your page.
  •     Weight, Facebook priority in videos and photos.
  •     Decay, the older you publish less likely it will be shown in news channels.

When you thought it could not be more complicated, Facebook also monitors user behavior to determine the visibility of news:
  •     How does a user interacts with the page authors and post.
  •     The types of message to a user interacts.
  •     How users interact with a pole.
  •     And the most obvious, the number of complaints or negative comments received.

There are some key strategies that can help gain maximum exposure:
  •     I post-peak: the less content that is shared, the more they stand.
  •     Share photos of you and your team: people can relate to real experiences.
  •     Participate with your followers with questions: do not try to connect your product, just listen.
  •     Share valuable information; Facebook loves pictures, so try to graphics or pictographic.

Succeeding 400-101 Pass4sure online is always a battle of numbers. Not implement any strategy without understanding how you will measure your success.

Make informed hypotheses and validate analysis and conversion metrics. As a start-up would the life cycle model MVP; build, measure, learn.

His strategy will be developed alike to discover what works versus what does not.

Sunday, 21 June 2015

How To Overcome Creative Stalemates

Any time you've been looking through directories of design or other publications, keep up on what's happening in the industry, when it happens to a working group of the most creative and technically competent strides than anything I've done so far?

I do not mean a little better - I'm talking about working in a completely different stratosphere well.

I know I have. More times than I'd care to admit now. But stop for a minute to consider why this happens. You're a creative person. It creates for a living - so why your work is seems to hit a 'glass ceiling' creative occasionally, and his colleagues think you are surpassing light years?

I will explore some of the reasons that designers can knock creative stagnation and what you can do to get beyond its limited design.

You keep looking at the same subject

This happens in all creative disciplines, from design to the fine art of writing music. Creative people tend to see a lot of creative work they like, and tend to avoid work they do not like or understand very well.

While this is normal, it has the unfortunate side effect of making your job boring and generic. As a command input into a computer, which is what comes out. So if you only eat a certain type of work, that's all you're going to have to base their creativity.



Expand your horizons design. Read new things and see new genres of art and design that normally you would not mind. You never know where you'll find inspiration. Even something as strange as natural phenomena or Sky Mall catalogs, you can unleash a creative storm in his brain.

Bad Design Makes You Sad


It's true: glaring design work is depressing. And when you're sad, it is less likely to produce good work. A few years ago, I went through a period of wondering if I still wanted to be a designer more as my job and all the work I was seeing seemed to be stuck in mediocrity.

It was not until I stumbled upon a treasure of incredible work being put out by my colleagues that my enthusiasm for the design came back, and plunged headlong into a new creative project.



We humans, being social animals, we tend to imitate everything we see our fellow humans do. If people around you are doing wrong, boring, boring work, which not only will begin to adopt the mindset that the design is boring, you will also begin to imitate that kind of work. Do not get caught in that trap. Look great job and be inspired by it.

You have bad taste

Ira Glass famously that "taste is why your work disappoints." I would say it's worse if your job did not disappoint him because that would mean that the taste is not good enough to know when your job is bad.

This is another reason why it is so important to get out of your comfort zone and challenge yourself to look at new CAS-002 dumps and different work.

This applies even if what is next is worse than what you've been looking for. It can actually be a good thing, because at least you know that there is something worse than no. Crappier only to find work, your taste and ability to separate right from wrong have improved.

The secret to truly original designs

Good. Now that we have reviewed some of the reasons why people run into brick walls of inspiration, I'll just come out and tell you how to create more original designs. Ready?

The secret of originality is to do things that are completely unrelated to the design. When you travel, read a book, painting, cooking, playing an instrument, learning a language, write a short story, or play a sport that is doing more to enhance their quality of life in general. You're actually giving your brain a much needed creative thinking about their problems rest.



Many people think that simply can "break through" through a challenging design problem, but this is especially true. All you'll end up doing is wearing yourself out, and so-called "creative block" will be closer to being solved. Often, a simple break from the workstation will fire these creative neurons and give an avalanche of new ideas.

When you're busy doing something else, it does not mean your brain has stopped thinking about the creative challenge. By contrast, still chewing back - only now you're dealing with something else and leaving her to really think.

Upon return to it, like a download runs in the background on your computer, your brain has worked its way through the maze and reach a new solution.

Tuesday, 16 June 2015

Freebie: Responsive Sports Icon Set (40×4 Icons, AI, CSH, PNG, PSD, Sketch, SVG)

Free icons are always great to liven up our work with minimal effort. Today, we are delighted to launch a free set of 40 sports icons in four styles and six formats. Each icon in this set comes in four styles: flat color, glyph palette Google materials, and the dashed line. In addition, icons are transformed line of response in four sizes, comprising a single icon on each breakpoint. Thus, details are adjusted according to the size, preserving the style and identity of the icons.

All icons are included in six formats: AI, PSD, SVG, PNG, CSH and Sketch. We have optimized the SVG format, producing very light and small files to improve their websites and applications' performance. It also facilitates the creation of web fonts much easier. The set is still in its infancy with a lot more icons currently in production. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.



Each icon in the set is called and is filed in the appropriate folder, making the search for icons very easy.

Monday, 8 June 2015

Web Design: The Fast Track To Optimizing User Experience And Visibility

Graphic design once existed as a single entity for commercial activity, a form of static visual communication through the use of typography, space and imagery.


While the role of graphic design not initially changed with the advent of the Internet and website development, graphic design soon evolved to meet the demands of screen-based applications, and this progress continues in order to meet the changing demands.

Design-driven user experience

Graphic design can see that they have really evolved, and is now integrated into the infrastructure of the very modern, skillfully constructed websites. Now not only simple static graphics or brand identity is offered, but in the heart of the great user experience and visibility of the site itself.

Today and in expert hands, web design really offer facilities like web browsing, based on actions to design web response (RWD) or high performance search engine optimization (SEO) networks.

It's intuitive, stupid

High quality, well designed graphical navigation involves not only intuitive navigation panel or button design, and therefore a good user experience, and it also impacts on other grounds.

These include SEO, graphic design, where the navigation button, your naming convention over the fate of the button, we all know that the search bots to crawl your website. For example, if the button is embedded in an image, the robots do not drag most images, making navigation appointment carefully crafted will be invisible.

What will be swept under these circumstances is the alternative label (alt tag) and this could easily reduce their search rankings and website visibility.

Now you see ...

But the issue is not limited visibility to the naming conventions navigation and alt tag. Some search engines now occupy more compatible websites to mobile search rankings than conventional desktop sites.

This means that you need to design using RWD design techniques and technologies. RWD Web design techniques to create websites designed to provide optimal user experience in a wide range of devices, from desktops through tablets, to mobile phones.

RWD websites are designed to fit graphics to a display device using determined based on the proportion and flexible images to provide a simple and very visible navigation content easy to read, and with minimal scrolling, panning and networks size switching.
Words and pictures

While web design technologies and design techniques discussed here will deliver a great user experience, they cannot save you from other issues that revolve around the visibility of the site.

While on-page SEO relates to the content of text instead of web design, content that is shown through graphic design can be critical to the aesthetics of web design, but is also key to the visibility of the site.

Wordless

As most marketers know, techniques are known in the SEO pages for maximum visibility, and these include securing key phrases appear in areas such as headlines and the first parts of paragraph and sentence.

However, this key should be embedded SEO content critical in an image for aesthetic effect, the words become invisible to the search engine robots and die, which significantly reduces the search rankings of your website.

Therefore, a good web design is much deeper than purely aesthetic. While still a graphic medium, web design can make or break your website in terms of user experience and search visibility.

A good web design begins with a graphical input, but to be truly successful, web design reaches virtually all areas of marketing communication.

Thursday, 21 May 2015

How We Redesigned Yelp’s UX With Remote Usability Testing

Usability testing with real users, is one of the key areas that many web designers skip. Often, there is little money in the budget for testing, but usability testing distance can be relatively inexpensive to implement, and the results can make a big difference to a site conversions.

To demonstrate the power of usability testing in the design, we partner with User Testing and optimal Workshop to run some tests on Yelp as part of a redesign exercise.

Specifically we chose remote usability testing because they are quite fast and quite affordable to run, compared with focus groups and other testing laboratory based design. These tests were all unmoderated so users can interact with the Yelp website in the comfort of your own home for the most natural results. Encouraged to think aloud and then recorded their reactions.


User research is not writing complex reports - it is asking the right questions and use evidence to support design decisions. In this piece, we'll see how we elect our users, how we set the tasks and what were the results ...

Selecting Users:

One of the first steps is to find out who is testing their designs. In our experience, we have found that demographics are not as important as the behavior and familiarity with technology. How often they do use similar platforms, and how comfortable they are?

Yelp has a base of large users (138 million unique monthly visitors, according to the Q2 of Yelp 2,014 numbers) to our redesigned site still it had to be familiar to the average current user - no sense to alienate power users for there to woo first-time users.

We do not focus on age, sex, income level, or experience in the use of the Web, because Yelp users come from all backgrounds. Because we are handling qualitative data, no need to worry about statistical significance. We follow the best practices in the industry and we ran our study with a total of 5 users who help reveal about 85% of the usability problems (good enough for exercise).

One task required users to log into an account. This meant we had to create two segments of our test base: one with accounts Yelp (3 users) and one without (2 users). For Yelp segment accounts only selected participants who were users Yelp for less than 6 months to clear even more likely to be power users.

Finally, for the sake of simplicity, we only tried the website Coffee in desktop, not mobile devices. (If this was more than just an exercise, we would have tried the experience on as many devices as possible.)


Creating tasks for our users

Each usability test should start with the question: "What do we learn?"

For us, we wanted to learn Yelp semi-frequent users complete common tasks (to identify what features were most important) task and at least one less common (to test the intuitiveness of advanced features).

We gave all users of such common tasks:

  •     Focused task - Find a very specific parameters based on business
  •     Open-ended task - Find a business without giving many guidelines
  •     Very specific task - Find a specific place to learn a specific piece of information

We wanted to learn when both groups of users chose to look in front of sail, how they interacted with filters, and how the decision about which business to visit was taken.

As for less common tasks, we provide a different task for each user group.

As we had heard several complaints from users about Yelp registered Bookmark and lists features, we ask the registered users (Group 1) to save companies for later reference. For unregistered users (Group 2), we ask them to find an event.

Then all the tasks we have assigned to both groups are presented. After each test, we ask users if they were able to complete the task successfully and the level of ease or difficulty (known as the question Ease Individual).

    Imagine you need to book a private dining room for a group of 15 people. Are you looking for an Italian restaurant with an elegant atmosphere? Its budget is about $ 20 per person. Try to find a restaurant near you that matches all these requirements.

    Imagine you are driving through Boise, Idaho, and your car starts making a strange sound right when you're about to stop for the night. His companion recommended 27th St Automotive. Use Yelp to find out if they are open at 8:00 pm Tuesday.

Task Group 1 (account holders Yelp)

    Imagine that your best friend is having a birthday soon, and you be planning a party. Find 10 bars or lounges near where you live would be interesting to study later for the party. Save them so that you can easily find it again on Yelp.

    Go to the place where you saved the 10 bars for the party of his best friend. Keep your tastes in mind, choose one that would be a good match.

Task Group 2 (non-account holders)

    Use Yelp to find a new restaurant near you that you have not been to yet. Do not spend more than five minutes looking for.

    Imagine you are looking for something fun and unique to do in your neighborhood this weekend. Try to find a concert, play, or other event using Yelp.

Once this was done, it was time to begin the Pass4sure SY0-401 test. It took about an hour to get the results before we could see the reactions of users and analyze data.


The breakdown of data usability

To compare qualitative data we had now, we have a quantitative test with 35 users with a closed-type card and proof of first click. You can learn more about quantitative user tasks, but we'll just summarize the main points of view:

    The search bar was the starting point for almost all tasks. It was also the option preferred backup when users were unsure of how to interact with the site user interface (for example, search for "Bars" instead of clicking on the category). Our new design definitely need to prioritize the search bar.

    The Events tab not noticeable. When asked to find an interesting activity, a user was to search bar, while the other sailed through the top section of Yelp. If we wanted users to interact effectively with the events told in Yelp, we need to make it easier to find.

    Price categories were unclear. When a budget is administered find a restaurant, some Users were not sure what they meant dollar signs. In our new design, we have added price ranges to symbols.

    Filters are not prioritized correctly. People are not used 7 Coffee filters 47, and the most popular filters that emerged in the tests (eg, "accept credit cards" and "Open Now") take multiple clicks to access. Our redesign reorganized in groups of 4 filters for easier access.

    The photos are a key part of the experience. When asked to find restaurants with a certain environment, users relied on photos. Our new design makes more visual Yelp.

    Markers need be simpler. Currently, you cannot just keep a restaurant or business directly from the search results - you need to visit each individual page marker. Our new design allows you to save a company with a single click on the search results page.