Constant improvement of skills is the basic requirement of survival in the website design industry. Since Internet is an ever-evolving field, you need to upgrade your designing skills consistently so that you can face the challenges of coming era with confidence. Success comes for a price in this domain and it has a short existence. Therefore, you need to be on the learning track throughout your career; otherwise, you may find it extremely hard to cope with the complex requirements of the clients. Here in this article, we are going to discuss some tips that can prove highly effective to hone your designing skills to a great extent.

Learn SEO: - You know the basics of SEO and can make a website SEO friendly. But still, you are not sure how SEO works. What are its parameters? So, it is the high time to increase your awareness about SEO, so that you can incorporate the concepts of SEO while designing a website and that will definitely increase satisfaction level of your clients. Since SEO is an emerging field, you need to have a fair level of authority on it. Creativity along with SEO knowledge will definitely considered as an added advantage.

Know The Topography: – Web topography is a complex field since it includes some advance technologies such as Cufon, SIFR etc. Topography descries the basic structure of a website. Unless you are good at handling web topography, you are bound to make a mess with the structure of a website. Try to go through some articles and tutorials such as Typetester, Typechart, Better CSS Font Stacks etc to get the hang of it easily.

Jump On JavaScript: – Obviously you are not a coder and we do not expect you to be. But as you are into website design industry, it is your moral and professional responsibility to learn some basics of JavaScript application since it will help you to speed up a website design as you would not have to ask a JavaScript developer for making some minor changes in a website. Moreover, JavaScript is no longer a Greek to Google and therefore, its usage in website is bound to increase in coming days.

Use a Sketchbook: – There is no better way to give expression to your thoughts than sketching ideas in pen and paper. At first things might appear incoherent and clumsy but gradually things will start taking shape. Try to get into the idea of brainstorming your loose concepts in paper because it will help you to organize different ideas into perfect shape and finally you will be able to produce something inspiring and creative.

Go Through The Basics Once Again: – Most of us likely to forget some of the basics of website design as we are leading a fast-paced life all the time. So, take a sudden break from your career and devote sometime for learning the basics of website design that includes “Design principles”, “Color theory”, “Web Usability”, “CSS techniques” and many more.

Attend Conferences and Events: – The importance of attending website design conferences that are held throughout year is often overlooked blatantly. But attending these conferences can help you to learn what are current trends and where our website design industry is heading.

Be Inspired: If you are finding your room stuffy, it is time to shut down your PC and go for a small stroll in the garden. Inspiration often times does not come so naturally. Sometimes, you have to find it in open place and taking a break from your daily duties can help a lot to get that inspiration.

Like every creative sphere, website design industry is too fraught with limitations both in terms of creativity and in terms of professionalism. As a designer, you know how frustrating limitations can be. Limitations in web design can have crippling effects on your creative impulse that can maim you from designing an esthetically pleasing website. There are limitations over screen resolutions, users interface and browsing platforms and many more that force you keep your creative impulse in check while designing and developing a website.

Limitations are All Over: Limitations are not bad all the time. They guide us what to do and what not to do, and thus make us aware of the possible negative outcome of following a non-standard method while developing or designing a website. For example, is you are using large background images as opposed to gradients for adding a creative touch in your website, you are driving it to the brink of being becoming invisible to most of the search engines since search engines abhor low loading websites.

Here in this article, we are going to cover some restrictions that we strongly believe to have positive impacts to express ourselves in a better way. It may sound oxymoronic but this is the truth:

Freedom is not a good thing: Well, this may sound a bit wacky but the fact is that if there is no restriction, things can go haywire and turns things utterly ridiculous and crazy. The same goes true with the basic website design principles. If you do not abide by these rules, you are certainly going to face the music. You might have to face a barrage of problems with the funky structure of the website, even you might find it overwhelmingly difficult to tame CSS etc. The same thing happen with flash based website if you make it extremely heavy loads of animation.

Limitations Over Color: – If you want to be a professional website designer, you need to limit your color palate as it is highly important for designing an aesthetically pleasing website. You might find your calling in bright colors but you should not ignore the fact that bright colors are a big turn off for most of the visitors. What visitors look for is an ideal atmosphere and not something glossy that can dazzle their eyes. So, you need to apply colors judiciously to ensure a better browsing experience.

Topographical Limitations: – Web topography is something that can make or break the fate of a website. Since most of us are accustomed with standard web topography, we find it hard to go through a website where the structure is turned upside down. Unless your approach is exceptionally good and impressive, visitors are mostly likely to bounce back from your website once they bump on it.

Minimalism: Minimalism is a new trend in website design industry where the force is on applying an extra layer of limitations in website design voluntarily by using simple structure and by shunning complexity and redundancy as far as possible.

You might have mastered the art of website design and possess a certain level of authority on Photoshop but still you find yourself struck in the middle of a project. This is not uncommon given the ever-increasing complexities and cutthroat competition in web design field. Since you are not getting enough time to hone your designing skills, you will run the risk of losing your creative edge that can cost you dearly in the long run. Therefore, we suggest you to take a short break from your busy schedule and try to refresh the basics of website design. Here in this article, we are going to discuss 7 basic website design tips that will help you reinvent your passion for website design:

1. Use of Contrast: – A slight change in the contrast can make a website look elegant and great. Sometimes, you might find that there is something missing in the final design. At that particular moment, you can try out something different by making some subtle changes in the contrast. If there is anything that deserves to get the attention, you should make it look prominent by making subtle variations in the contrast.

2. Try Gradients: – This technique is widely used and employed by a sizable section of website design for giving a website a stark visual twist. It can yield an impressive outcome but you need to how to use dexterously. This technique should be employed judiciously and with meticulous precision and it should complete the theme of your website.

3. Make Your Website Colorful: - Choosing the best color scheme for a website is certainly a challenging task. It requires intuition and an eye for details otherwise; you might find yourself wasting hours after hours fruitlessly while making a decision in this regard. It is nerve-wracking and often time drives a person to the brink of insanity. Remember one thing that you should not spill colors on a website all the time. All you need to do to use color properly and shun variations if it is not required.

4. Letter Spacing: - Spacing between letters can play a crucial role in determining the look and feel of a website. There should be enough space between letters otherwise visitors will not be able to figure out what you actually want to convey through it. Make some changes in the letter spaces and you will be in for a shock.

5. Case: - Chance in Case can be done fairly easily but have you ever thought it immediate impact on the design of a website. Use of uppercase, lowercase or both of them can make your website look dramatically different. But sadly enough there are not many website designers that try to utilize the advantages of this and even some do not think it worthy enough to give much attention.

6. Blur: – Blur is a powerful and highly effective tool that will let you put emphasis on certain element of a website by blurring something just next to it. The impact of the project can be increased dramatically by blurring different objects either in the background or in the foreground. This is a case of shifting focus to an object by blurring one object.

7. Focus On Alignment: – Give your website something extra that will help you website to stand tall in the crowd. You can make slight deviation while maintain clean and straight line to give a pleasant surprise to your viewers. By alerting alignment in the design, you make a design memorable and highly effective. This technique does not apply to text only but it is now used extensively in the field of template design.

Designing a website is simply the best way to showcase your creative impulse and passion since it allows you to get connected to a much larger section of audience which is still unthinkable in any other traditional methods such as exhibiting your works in an Art Museum or something similar to that kind. Moreover, there are options to make changes in a design even after the completion of the project and this is what has given it an edge. This might sound good for the website design industry but the same does not hold true for the website designers since, it ruffles their feathers a lot to make major changes in the structure of the design to make it look all the more interesting and impressive. You know how irksome it is to make changes in the design of a website but iterations have almost become an inseparable part of website design. If this is not enough, they have to deal with some algorithms, not mathematical of course, and that do not give them enough room for  making experiments.

Iterations: Do They Impossible To Avoid?
Well, it seems, there is no way to escape iterations. No matter how efficient or talented you are as a designer, you might find it overwhelmingly difficult to come to term with your clients. Usually, it is the communication gap that leads to umpteen number of modifications and if you fail to put a tap on it, it will sooner or later snowballed into a major crisis that can have detrimental impacts on the creative process. Though it is not that easy to translate the requirements of your clients properly, you need to try your best as far as possible. But the number of iterations can be kept to a minimum by if you can manage to master the art of some simple design algorithms that can prove highly effective in the long run.

Here are some of the common elements of web design algorithms that you need to give utmost attention before proceeding further:

Theme: – Choosing the theme of is certainly one of the few crucial steps that you should give utmost attention. You should take different approaches while designing different websites.

Style: – The style of a design can be bracketed into a specific category. Depending on the style and pattern of a website, you need to bracket a website in any of these categories:

• Artistic
• Photo Manipulation
• Professional
• Cartoonish

Now if you have to deal with a design project that does not fit in any of these categories, it should be categorized as – “Other”. But first of all, you need to scan the proposed requirements of clients thoroughly before putting it in any of these categories.

Elements: – A wide variety of elements are used in the website design process. As these elements directly correspondence to the theme of a website, you need to be a little bit particular. For example, if you are to design a Tech website, you should not use any element that is not related to it. Make sure that the elements are going to play constructive role and not the other way round.

Take Criticisms In Your Stride: – Be open to constructive criticisms because it will help you to hone your skills. Asks other designers and give attention to their feedbacks.

Flash is always fraught with frivolous issues that often play spoilsport with its popularity. First, it was the indexing issue (it is still having problems with this issue since most of the people have not yet shrugged off their usual inhibition toward flash) and then comes the loading speed. As Google has declared its apathy towards heavy sites, most website owners are not showing any interest to have a full flash site. But flash based website design does not necessary have to be heavy and non-indexable all the time. You can introduce some dramatic improvements in your flash-based website by following and implementing some simple flash website design tips that can help your flash website to get maximum exposure:

Do not Use Only Images: This is one of those few mistakes that is recurrently committed by most of the flash website designers and developers. Google is unable to crawl images and therefore, the less your will use images the better for your website. By adding text as oppose to images, you will be able to make your website SEO friendly.

Use Alternate Version: – If possible, try to use an alternative HTML version of your full flash website because that will enable you to optimize it properly. Furthermore, visitor will get an option to view your website either in Flash or in HTML depending on the speed of his internet connection.

Use and Utilize HTML Tags: – It is quite obvious that a full flash website is not half as good as other HTML websites, but still there are rooms for improvement. Since you all know that Google cannot crawl anything that is included in the <embed> </embed> tags, you should try to utilize some HTML tags as much as possible. Flash sites usually come with this below-mentioned structure:

<embed>Your Non-Indexable Flash Code </embed>

Therefore, if you add something within this structure, it will never get visible  to Google or any other search engines. To make it visible to search  engines, you need to use this below mentioned structure for this purpose:

<html>
<head>
<title > SEO friendly Flash Web Design Meta Title </title>
< — use other meta and header elements in this space — >
</head>
<body>
<embed>Your Non-Indexable Flash Code </embed>
</body>
</html>

Now, these are all you have to make your website a little bit more SEO friendly. Try to be accurate while writing the Meta Title and Meta Description section since, this is what Google is going to get from your website. Continue reading ‘Optimizing A Flash Website: Better Exposure in Search Engines’ »

The popularity of social networking website design and development has reached such a pandemic proportion that it is now virtually threatening anything that dare to stand in its way. Just try to remember how many hours you have spent in the past week on your favorite social networking site and you are sure to have a shock. It is a fact that an increasing number of people are visiting social networking sites than checking their mails and this is probably the reason why iPhone is charting a different growth story by focusing more on social networking sites rather than mail. Therefore, it is no wonder why a sizeable section of website owners is making a beeline to launch new social networking sites to cater to the needs of this changing trend. However, before making your social networking website live, you need to check out these issues:

Review Others: – This is the very first thing that you should do before you start designing and developing your social networking website. First, you need to figure out why Facebook has so many followers. How MySpace has managed to retain its popularity. Do they have anything extra-ordinary in their design? What services they are providing to their members? If you can manage to unravel the secrets of their success, you will be able to make it large in this domain.

Make Them Engaged: – Making your visitors engaged is the most crucial element to success in the field of social networking site design and development. Great content, elegant design etc are some of the things that you can try out increase interactivity in your social networking site. To be plain, you need to make your site presentable to your visitors. As visitors do not have the time or the patience to wade through a long article, you have to be straightforward in your approach.

Add Interactivity: – You should make the home page of your social networking site a little more interactive and this can be done by adding some highly engaging elements in your social networking site. You should allow your visitors to take a look at your website without signing in and try to explain in simple English why they should be a member of your community. In short, you have to build up a strong relationship with your visitors if you wish to taste success in this domain.

Make Friends easy To Find: – You should develop your social networking site in such a way that should enable members of your site to get in touch with their friends whenever they want or wherever they want. People will like to see what their friends are doing in your sites and if you are unable to provide that information, you might lose these potential members. You need to make it easier for your members to find information about their friends before anything else because it is sole purpose of joining a social networking website.

Give Them Freedom: – Do not pose too many restrictions on the members of your website if you wish to popularize your website. Give your visitors a chance to express themselves. To make your visitors glued to your social networking site, you need to give your members a chance to customize their profiles as well.

These are some of the prominent features of a good social networking site. But if you want to make it large like Facebook or MySpace, you need to do something unique.

Use of grid is anything but new in the sphere of website design. Grid offers a certain level of stability to the structure of a design and that means you are likely to have a logical structure on which you can build the site on. However, using a grid-based layout does not necessarily mean that you will have to follow the standards of grid based website design rigorously. You can break away from the tradition if you wish as long as you are sane in your approach. Though grid comes with certain level of restrictions as far as the layout of a design is concerned, it equally offers designer an opportunity to find a niche for his creative impulse without making any strenuous effort. Here are some other crucial aspects of Grid based layout design that you will definitely like to explore:

Learn The Basics: – Grid is nothing but margins that helps designers to position different graphical elements precisely and meticulously. In simple English, it offers a framework for organizing content, images and other graphical elements in a design layout. Importance of grid is still palpable in Print industry and it still has its importance in website design industry since it helps to create a uniform structure. In short, Grid is a useful tool and as a designer, you have the moral responsibility of mastering the art of using it.

Follow The Rules: – Even if you want to break the rule, you need to have a fair idea of what the rule is. The same holds true for grid based layout design. Those of you, who are at the initial stage of your career, should have a clear concept of what grid based website design is. You need to learn how to apply the rules and how to give an unruly design a perfect shape by using grid. Try to maintain proper alignment in the design by positing different graphical elements judiciously in the structure. And one more thing, you should not keep your creative impulse in check for the sake of maintaining structure rather, you should learn how to fuse them together.

Creation of New Grid: – Setting up a new grid based layout is certainly one of those few things that can unnerve you at times. However, there are different theories on different approaches but wading through these endless number of theory is literary a hard nut to crack. You need to find out what is best for you based on your intuition and your experience as a designer.

Grid comes with an equal amount of complexity and freedom. An elaborated grid layout is surely to be followed by a complex structure. But if you are truly passion about the structure of your design, you can continue your tryst grid layout. But how far you will go with it is entirely up to you.

Check Layouts of Others: – If you are trying your hand at grid for the first time or want to get a glimpse of some improved version of grid layouts, you should download some popular grid layouts that are easily available.

The purpose of having an FAQ page is to make it easier for the visitors to get answers to their queries. However, most of us usually nurse an unusual grudge against designing a sober FAQ section for a website. This apathy usually leads to a lackluster design that prompts visitors to bounce back from that page within a couple of seconds. But if you judge it from the users’ point of view, you are likely to realize the immense importance of FAQ Page in the website design industry. FAQ page usually features content and therefore, you might find it all the more challenging to give it a nice little facelift. By making some changes in the structure of your FAQ page, you will certainly be able to give it a new lease of life. Here in this article, we are going to discuss some tips regarding FAQ page design:

Give It An Organized Look: – Try to give your FAQ Page a different look this time around. Do not make it look like a dumping ground. You can give it a nice little visual twist by arranging questions and answers neatly in proper order and categories. However, you need to make sure that the categories are logically crafted. Do not feed too many information in the FAQ Page because it can turn out to be ugly at the end. While organizing your FAQ page, you should not overlook what visitors would likely to see there. Give respect to their views and you will definitely be able to design a nice FAQ page for your ongoing website design project.

Be Focused: Since FAQ page usually features information and nothing else, you might find it overwhelmingly difficult to keep things under order while jazzing up its interface. Here, you cannot use too many images as it can have disastrous impacts on the visitors. Furthermore, you cannot use fancy fonts here because of the same issues. Make sure that the quality of the content is good and that the language is easy to understand otherwise, you might lose a sizable section of your visitors that most of us simply cannot afford in this cut throat competitive market. Try to shun gimmick in the layout of the design, avoid flashy layout etc. Use those type fonts that is easy to read and do not forget about the contrast in the design.

Make Them Clickable: – If the FAQ Page has more then 10 questions, you need to make each of these questions clickable so that visitors can find them easily whenever they want. Furthermore, by making questions clickable, you can encourage your visitors to explore your site further. You can use JavaScript for this purpose.

Find Inspiration: – A great design does not come naturally. You need to concentrate hard before you start designing your FAQ page. The best thing that you can do is to check the design structure of other FAQ pages and try to find out their flaws and strong points. This will definitely help you to design a masterpiece.