Colors are the very essence of website design. They set up the tone, prepare the background, create an inviting atmosphere for the visitors, and inspire them to explore more of a website. However, it is not mandatory to celebrate riot of colors in your website, but if you wish to make your website look a little bit different from the rest of the others, you can go for it. Colorful websites are not rare these days and a good many of them are enjoying brisk business and prominent presence in the virtual world thanks to the brilliant use of colors. Here in this article, we are going to take a sneak peak at some of the best colorful websites that might give good reasons to add some colors in your website:

Boomerang TV
This website looks sizzling with its prominent use of color and the placement of images are mind-blowing. Despite using glossy and bright colors, Boomerang TV manages to keep the visitors engaged by clearly positioning crucial elements to the fore.

Dreft
This is another head-turner website that keeps its faith on the use of bright colors. Green is the predominating color here and what is interesting about this website is that it looks perfectly sober despite the use of bright color.

Design Fabrika
This website sports a rainbow of colors and it adds a special touch to its otherwise ordinary portfolio. Just click on to its navigation and explore more about it.

MattSalik
It looks somewhat wacky in its structure and theme but the use of colors is truly awe-inspiring. Though the colors are not prominent here, the website still looks good and impressive.

Rareview
This website keeps its focus on the bright color combination. Though here flash is used, the website does not take long time to load. Use of near black background creates an enviable contrast that very few viewers can ignore easily.

The Red+White Sale
With a glaring red header that stands prominent against the plain white background, this website is making its presence felt. Viewers are likely to click onto the buttons that are positioned prominently in the website.

CtlOnline
The design looks sober and though different colors are used, they never become obvious. The entire design is based on white color but it never overshadows other colors of the website.

Online photo gallery has always been a rage among those professional photographers who take this particular job seriously and who are a bit conscious about promoting their creative collection through an enticing and exciting medium. Previously online photo galleries were somewhat taken for granted and in majority of cases they lacked artistic values and touches, but thankfully, now there has been a dramatic development in this sphere. Photo galleries now look more sophisticated, elegant and more refined courtesy the efforts of some website designers who are always striving hard to do something interesting and visually appealing. Here in this article, we are going to explore some of the most happening trends of online photo gallery design:

Interactive 3D Interfaces
Love for 3D has never ebbing ever since it made its appearance in the website design and development sphere. A 3D interface means it is highly engaging, interactive and immensely interesting. Moreover, a photographer is likely to have different options for featuring his favorite images in a 3D photo gallery. One can use squares, spheres, stacks, photo tunnels or 3D walls for presenting their information in an interactive way.

Scattered Images
Random of use of image layout can generate an effective outcome. With this effect, you can make your pictures over all-around the screen of your PC. It may look a bit strange but it can prove immensely exciting to them who want to explore something new. It comes with a unique zoom in and out feature. You can make a picture move or can make it large or small by navigating your mouse over it.

Gallery With Multiple Vertical Lines
This structure is certainly unique of its kind that gives an online photo gallery a structural strength that it requires. It features thumbnail images of a photographer’s chosen pictures and the user can make them enlarged by simply clicking on them. It is particularly useful where the photographer wants to display as many of his picture in the gallery as possible. By employing contrast and dark background, you can make it look truly impressive and elegant.

Horizontal Image Content Slider
This technique comes with an unobtrusive and minimalist structure that make the visitors click onto the images. Extreme simplicity is certainly one of its main features that make it different from the rest of the other types. Sliding horizontal menu is particularly useful for browsing through its images. It appears to be highly interactive and engaging.

Grungy Look
Use of grunge effect is certainly a common practice among designers. It gives designers a certain level of liberty to fuse their creativity without any apparent restrain. It is mainly employed as a heavy or subtle textured background that is powerful enough to give an online photo gallery a surreal look and feel. Moreover, it is good for adding an individual note to your website.

Website design is one such industry that is embracing new features and spurning old boring and inconvenient features almost every day and thereby keeping website designers virtually on their toes. We have seen the deluge of new trends and their unceremonious exit when they become obsolete or when new trends come knocking at the door. This is what has given this multifarious shape of modern websites, which have profound impacts on our daily lifestyle. Here in this article, we are going to give you all an account of some obsolete trends that were once considered the glorious features of website design industry in 1990s and even in the first half of 21st century.

Grunge Backgrounds: It seems that people in those days had a deep love for grunge effects. Grunge background was universally employed by a large section of website designers and often times that did not make any sense. However, grunge design is not ugly nor it looks unimpressive. It was its omnipresence that eventually precipitated its oblivion. Though grunge style is still used by website designers in some cases, its usage is largely limited to portfolio or personal websites.

Non-Modal Pop-Ups: Pop ups are certainly one of those nagging features that can alone drive away your visitors. Though they are rarely seen these days courtesy Firefox’s built-in pop-up blockers, it was once considered to be the standard feature of website design and development. This feature was mainly employed for advertising purpose but later it started failing from the favors of the visitors and eventually became extinct.

Modern website designers are now employing innovative techniques for this purpose. They are now using overlay boxes, single browser window and more such innovative techniques.

Strong Love For Flash: When Flash made its first public appearance, it was quickly adopted (absorbed would be perfect expression) by hundreds of website design as it was highly interactive despite the fact that flash was making a website virtually invisible to search engines. The delude of flash header, flash intro, flash banner seemed to change the very topography of website design but this era is drawing to a close as flash makes a website heavy unnecessarily and as HTML5 is revving up to give it a tough competition. Mac and iPad are also making it tough job for Flash to sustain since it is not offering any support for Adobe. Web 2.0 Design: The concept of Web 2.0 has been relegated to the bin as people now turning their attention to the newer concept that is Web 3.0. Some of the unique traits of Web 2.0 design are as followed: rounded corners, clean and tidy background, readable page elements and glossy design. But designers are finding the concept of Web 3.0 to be more interesting, engaging and exciting.

Non-Standard Link Text: – Use of non-standard link is itself a crime. Previously website designers intentionally used unusual color scheme for text links. They intentionally avoided standard blue link for text link and started using other colors such as green, red etc.

But thankfully, this trend failed to keep its momentum for a long time and eventually got rejected by the designers who emphasized usability rather than showcasing their designing skills by going to the extreme.

Every designer needs to have a portfolio where he can display some of his outstanding website design works with meticulous precision. Since you are going to showcase your strength and your designing skills there, you will certainly like to make it look as elegant as possible. You should not make it look overtly complex rather, what you should try to do is to add freshness in it. A good and impressive portfolio can serve as a lead generation tool that can go long way to give a boost to your online credibility. Here in this article, we are going to share some golden rules of designing a beautiful portfolio website that can add dramatic twist to your existing portfolio:

Give It a Strength: Prospective clients consider a wide number of factors before sorting out the most eligible candidate for their projects. Now, they are not going to contact you right away. They will check whether you will be able to deliver the best service that they want or whether you will able to deliver your best even when you are under extreme pressure. So, it is clear that you need to show some character in the designing style of your existing portfolio. Your portfolio needs to have an innate convincing capability so that the clients do not think twice before sending you a business mail.

One more thing, you should get intimated by the sheer magnitude of the work because clients would definitely lathe the idea of hiring a website designer who is not confident of the successful completion of the project.

Clear Communication: Try to give your portfolio a voice. It should be designed in a way that can build up an effective communication with the prospective clients and you. The basic purpose of featuring sample works in portfolio is to educate the visitors about your designing strength. Try to add as many varieties of your work as possible in your portfolio as clients will definitely like to have a glimpse of your creativity.

Give it A Creative Twist: – Flaunting a different look is not the only option to make your portfolio look interesting and engaging. Unless you are adding your creative inputs in it, success is sure to elude you. Since competition is steeping up in every single day, you need to do something different otherwise, you are likely to get overshadowed by others.

Make It Visible: – You have a good website and your portfolio looks superb but you are not getting any business queries. Sound bizarre. Now, you would not have to be a rocket scientist to solve this mystery. The reason is your portfolio is not drawing that amount of traffic that it needs to convert visitors into clients. This cannot be done by featuring a mind-blowing design in the home page rather, this can be done by increasing the visibility of your portfolio by incorporating some techniques of search engine optimization.

Do Not make It Overcrowded: – Try to eliminate unnecessary elements from your portfolio section since these elements can make your portfolio look like a clutter. A minimal approach is what people expect from an experienced designer.

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 can be a die-hard blogger but that does not necessarily mean that your blog will be flooded with visitors who will keep visiting your blog for finding interesting information for time and again. No, it is not that easy. Your blog needs to acquire a distinct identity otherwise, it will likely to get sidelined by other blogs who are into the same field. Therefore, it is quite clear that you need to make your weblog look interesting and elegant if you wish to create a niche for your blog. Now, you do not need to spend sleepless night for giving your website design blog a different look. Here we have compiled a list of common tips that can help you to cruise though some common problems:

Keep It Simple: Making a website or a blog overtly complex is certainly not an ideal option. You need to work hard to make your website look simple yet elegant. You should never try to experiment with the navigation systems of your website since it can have serious backlash later on. Try to keep the overall structure of your website as simple and as straightforward as possible.

Keep The Content Clear: Do not use any fancy fonts just for sake of giving it a visual twist. Try to use web safe fonts since people will come to your website for gathering information. The information has to be presented in an organized way. The bottom line is that texts should be good to read at otherwise, your visitors are likely to bounce back anytime soon.

Try a Different Color Scheme: – Color scheme of your blog needs to be pleasing to the eyes and therefore, you need to give it an aesthetic touch. Use of bright colors is a big turnoff for most of the visitors and therefore, you should try to use a sober color combination that will encourage visitors to spend more time on your blog. However, if you are not sure about the color scheme, you can try some other options.

Use White Space Judiciously: – White space in a website plays an all-important role by shifting the attention of the visitors to some other important elements and therefore, you need to be a little careful while using white space in your website.

Feature Images: This is probably the most vital thing that you should not overlook. Texts, no matter how well written it is, are bound to make people bored unless you are using it with some relevant images. Images are like sauce to a curry; they give a post an interesting twist that can go long way to keep the readers engaged for a long time.

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.

A search engine friendly and user-friendly website is an asset of an organization since it can help an organization to get better exposure in the virtual world. But making a website search engine friendly is not everyone’s cup of tea. Unless you have a fair level of authority on search engine optimization, you might find it overwhelmingly difficult to design an SEO friendly website. Having a good website is certainly an advantage but you need to master the art of drawing traffic to your website by making your website visible to search engine and that should be done from the initial stages of the website design. Here in this article, we have discussed some of the golden rules of SEO website design:

Make It Light: Google has already made it clear that it will eliminate those websites, which take awfully long time to load. So, it is clear that you need to improve page speed of your website at any cost if you do not want your website to be knocked out Google or any other search engines. Moreover, users usually avoid those websites that take long time to process a request.

Avoid Java Script: – Google and other search other search engines cannot read JavaScript and that means, you need to avoid this script in a website as far as possible. Try to use it sparingly or at the footer section of the website to have minimal impacts on the visibility of a website in major search engines. Do not embed text in the Java Script because Google will never be able to read it or index that text.

Use Text In the Flash: – Until a few days ago Google was unable to read or crawl anything that is embedded in a flash file i.e. SWF file. But the scenario has changed a lot recently. Google crawler is now powerful enough to read texts of a flash file. Therefore, if you are designing a flash website, you need to use as many texts in the flash file as possible to get better exposure in different search queries.

Do Not Use Inline CSS: – Use of CSS has become a common practice among website designers and developers since it offers a number of advantages and amazing flexibility. But you should not use Inline CSS instead you should create a separate CSS file that should be linked with the HTML page.

Do Not Use Too Many Images: – Never use too many images in a website. You can make a website light by using gradient instead. Try not to use textures if you can manage without them.

Do Not Use Frame: – Frame website design has long become a passé. Frame websites have a peculiar structure, and they fetch information from internal files and that means a sizeable section of the website will remain invisible from search engines:

Give Proper Names To Images: It is quite common among website design to name images as: image01, image02 etc. But if you want to make your website more relevant to search engine, you need to give them proper names such as websitedesign-footer, web-design-header etc.

These are some of the tips that you can try to increase the visibility of your website a bit further.

Modern designers are getting increasingly dissatisfied, disillusioned and enraged with the limitations of web interface. Though the transition from type-led minimalism website design to detailed and elaborated interface, as in the case of some highly sophisticated movie and video game websites, is giving them a chance to give wings to their creative impulse, they are finding themselves tied up, when it comes to choosing fonts. Either they have to make a choice from the fonts that are already been installed or they have to covert the entire thing into an image, which is utterly ridiculous and unrealistic.

Clash Between Usability and Performance: – Most website designers torn between these two contrasting concepts. For the time being, they have to compromise either on the performance or on the usability, as clarified Jonathan Snook, front-end engineer of Yahoo. This goes true with SIFR (scalable Inman Flash Replacement) which is famed for offering a greater level of flexibility, but it can have detrimental effects on the performance of a website as well as on its usability. Cufón is another application that can convert font files into vector objects. But it has own set of problems that are big enough to overlook easily. But future is not as bleak as it may appear. 2010 can experience a dramatic chance in the use of fonts but there are some technical issues that have to be resolved first before proceeding further.

Why Change is Inevitable: – At present browser-landscape is relatively stable but experiments are underway to make it more engaging, more interesting and more flexible. Web designers are making strong arguments in favor of using different varieties of fonts in websites. If we can use different artistic fonts in print industry, we do not see any reason why web industries will remain immune from these changes.

Similar Sites: – Imposing restrictions on the use of fonts have already created number complex issues. For example, content-based websites are started looking alike. Take a sneak peek at these two sites:

CNN

New York Times

Do they look same? If you think they, time has finally come to give some serious thought on it. But despite this, currently most website designers prefer those fonts that are likely to be installed on majority of users.

The Rise of @Font Face: – @Font Face is giving website designers’ unlimited opportunities to use varieties of fonts without compromising anything on ground. Users will not have to install fonts in their machine for viewing a webpage rather fonts will be embedded within the page.