In large-scale corporations, the process of offering and receiving feedback is formal and systematic. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the web design industry. Website designers usually have to seek feedback on their own. Moreover, providing designers with feedback depends on the attitude of users. This further complicates the issue.

Despite the problems associated with offering and receiving feedback in the website design industry, its importance cannot be discounted. We explain why feedback is important and how to make the most of it.

Importance of Feedback

Website designing is a creative activity. However, web designs are usually used to fulfill practical goals. These can include increasing visitors, enhancing conversation rate, and fulfilling business targets of a company. To meet these goals successfully, website designs should be able to connect with the audience and fulfill their requirements. Herein lies the importance of feedback.

Receiving feedback regularly sharpens your skills and helps you to polish your craft. Furthermore, it helps you to understand pulse of the audience and thus, modify your designs accordingly. Feedback is somewhat similar to the trial and error method. It helps you to realize your weak areas, work on them, and finally, improve.

How You Can Use Feedback Constructively ?

Receiving feedback is not enough. You have to understand the point of view of the users who have provided you with feedback, evaluate it, and select the right suggestions. In brief, you should take informed decisions.

Here are few tips that will help you to use feedback constructively and improve your skills.

• Start early

Many web designers ask for feedback, only after they are completely done with website designing. If you opt for this method, changing anything in the website (at a later stage) will be a more tedious process. For this reason, you should request for feedback, soon after you start the work. Consider feedback a critical part of the web development process.

• Be open towards feedback

Web designing is a creative job. Therefore, it is natural that some will love your designs, while others will hate it. Even if you receive a negative comment, do not take it personally. Remember that visitors do not have any personal grudge against you. Understand the fact that negative feedback will help you to realize your weaknesses and grow.

• Do not ask feedback from experts, always

Many people may find the above suggestion surprising. After all, most of us look for experts’ opinions about web designs. Despite the craze for suggestions from experts, fact remains is that common people can offer you a fresh and interesting viewpoint about your designs. Remember that, when it comes to feedback, honest suggestions always score high.

• Approach directly

While asking for feedback, adopt a direct approach. Avoid wasting time of the respondents. State your objective clearly and keep the questions short.

• Understand that it is an ongoing process

To grow as a designer, you need to ask and evaluate the feedback regularly. This will help you learn new things and stay in touch with the latest trends. Consider the fact that receiving and evaluating feedback is a continuous process.

Feedback helps you to understand weak areas of your designs and improve them. While asking for feedback, keep your questions brief. Do not target only the experts as your respondents. Rather, ask for feedback from people who may not possess an in-depth knowledge about website designing.

Adobe has been in spotlights in recent times owing to its product launches at much awaited annual Max Conference 2011. Not only it has announced of its upcoming Cloud service, but Adobe has also made designers excited by unveiling a number of tablet based apps. Incidentally, these Touch apps are meant to be used in sync with its Cloud service.

Among six design apps targeted at Honeycomb Android tablet users, Photoshop Touch App has garnered maximum interest and spotlight at Max 2011 Conference. This is natural given Photoshop’s huge user base and unmatched popularity among graphic design professionals.

Like other 5 Touch Apps, Photoshop Touch also costs $10 and this will make it accessible for most tablet users. Initially people using Honeycomb 3.1 tablets will be able to use this app and later Adobe will release a version made for iPad 2. Photoshop Touch app may not serve as a replacement for Photoshop CS 5, which is used by millions of graphic and web design professionals worldwide but it will act as a complementary tool.

Even though Photoshop Touch was shown at this conference on a prototype tablet made by Samsung, chances are there it will run smoothly on other tablets with Honeycomb. It responds to both finger and stylus inputs nicely, which is a boon for designers. It has a nice layout with Layers palette placed at right side and tool palette appearing at left of tablet screen. There are icons on screen’s top with menus to edit and manage images. Image adjustment options offered in this app are nowhere close to a full – fledged PC based image editor but a step ahead of Photoshop Express, available for Apple users.

To aid users, this app comes with a built-in tutorial set. Images can be accessed using this app from various sources. Images stored in a tablet can be opened. Users can also import images from Facebook and Google searches easily into this app. Adobe’s Creative Cloud is also a source for importing images into Photoshop Touch. As expected, pinch and zoom works smoothly for resizing images on tablet screen. Adobe has made all tools in this app intuitive and user friendly, making it ideal for web development as well.

Scribble selection tool in this app resembles Photoshop CS’s Magic wand it works with amazing accuracy. Even selecting complicated edges like human hair is not tough with this tool. Making gradients is easy with finger swipes and users can define gradient directions as well. Some users may find operating familiar Photoshop tools without a mouse a bit daunting but designers using stylus will love these. Stylus can be used with this app for making drawings with varied strokes.

With an app like Photoshop Touch and Cloud service, Adobe wants to turn tablets into content creation devices that aid designers in streamlining workflow and sharing content on the move.

There are some limitations of Photoshop Touch that designers will have to put up with. It converts any text element to vectors and so it cannot be edited as text. Photoshop Touch does not support any third party plug-in, as of now.

People may face various problems in your website due to poor internet connection, technical fault in the server or because of your own design mistakes. As a designer, your duty is to avoid these problems and retain site visitors. To help your audience, you should create a defensive website design. Here are a few things you can do:

404 Error Pages- You should design a useful error page to retain a visitor and encourage him to try again:

• Not many users understand the meaning of “404 error” and you should not use this as a headline for your error page. To make things easily understandable for your users, write something like “page not found” or “oops…you made a mistake!” in the error page title.
• Explain the reason for the error and guide the user to find the right page. For instance, you can ask him to verify the spelling of the URL or check the domain extension.
• You can use a search box in the error page and help your user find what he is looking for. For instance, a user may have clicked on a “web development” link in an article in your blog and not found it. The search box will help him find articles on the same topic on insertion of the same or related keyword (like web programming).
• You should also give an option to your viewers to report the problem. Give your contact information so that viewers can inform you about the problems they have faced.

In Line Help- When people are buying from your website, you need to assure them that they will not be cheated. When users hand over their personal data, credit card details to you, they are often skeptical and you can earn their trust with the help of “in line text”. For instance, if a user wants to know the security of your shopping cart, don’t direct him to another page. Instead, use in-line text. The in-line text is connected with an underlined text; when a user places his mouse on the underline text, the in-line text appears with a brief description of the underlined topic.

You can also offer contextual help to your users to make your site user friendly. Offer guidelines to users to help them fulfill their purpose on your site. WordPress offers this type of help in the admin area.

Make the Site Accessible to Slow Internet Connection User- Flash and jQuery can make your site amazingly attractive, but it will also increase the page load time. To maintain a defensive approach, you should design the most important parts of your website in CSS and HTML. This way, you will make sure that those with slow connection will also be able to access your site. A completely Flash-based website won’t appear in many smartphones and tablets, including iPhone and iPad. You won’t like to lose a huge customer base for the sake of video and animation.

Implement Search Option- Especially in ecommerce websites, the search bar helps users locate an article or product from a very large website. This makes sure that nobody leaves your site disappointed.

Help the User to Fill Forms- Almost every website has some kind of form, such as sign up, subscribe, etc. Wherever you use a form in your site, make it user-friendly with intelligent design. If a user misses a mandatory field, highlight that box with red color and show a text beside the box indicating what he missed. Don’t scare the user with just an error sign. Explain to him what he did wrong and guide him to do the correct thing. For instance, if his capslock is on, show a message “turn off the capslock”. Nobody likes to fill up a form twice for a small mistake they made in the last part of the form. You should store datas filled up earlier and ask users to fill only the part where they made a mistake.

Detect the Problems- Before you make the website live, check it for any mistakes or bugs. Sometimes, a broken link or missing page can destroy the site’s reputation, and to be absolutely sure about your website’s functionality, you should check it thoroughly.

These defensive designing tips will help you retain your viewers even when there is a problem with your site. Make sure whenever a user visits your site, he is satisfied with the small, yet important usability features.

HTML’s latest version, HTML5, builds on the highly successful features of HTML4. Although, currently supported by only few web browsers and is not expected to complete before 2014, HTML5 features have already gained widespread popularity. Undoubtedly, the gen-next HTML can improve website design by adding many attractive and excellent elements. Also, because HTML5 builds on HTML4, web developers need not suspend the existing markups. An improvement on the old markups will be seen to allow the new features to better website appearance and usability.

Here’s a look at what the next generation HTML has to offer:

HTML5 Features

• The doctype specification that was used by HTML4 has been simplified for HTML5. Browsers will continue to render pages in standards mode.

However, with the simplified doctype  declaration, it is now only <!DOCTYPE html> to be used in the HTML5 syntax.

•  HTML5 provides outstanding support to   audios and videos. When all browsers fully support HTML5, it will be manifolds easier to add videos and audios to websites without using outside plugins.

•  HTML5 allows simplified content editing of your website. The ‘contenteditable’ attribute allows you to easily and quickly edit/change your text. All you have to do is add ‘contenteditable=“true”’ to change any element.

• HTML5’s canvas element is good news for web designers. This feature allows you to bypass Photoshop by allowing you to directly place 2D images in the code.

• You can still navigate web applications when offline by virtue of the HTML5’s application cache feature.

How the Use HTML5 can Help Web Designers

• Because it implements WebSockets, HTML5 loads quicker than HTML4

• For mobile phone companies creating applications for mobile phones, HTML5 could be the solution to faster applications that will be accessible universally across all mobile phones.

• HTML5 makes web development faster, easier and more flexible to modifications/changes.

• With HTML5, the need for third-party software to write codes for media tools like audio, video and images, is obliterated. Media tools can now be directly written into the codes.

• The growing popularity and wide use of HTML5 is going to get better and faster with new features. It only makes sense that designers shift to this improved coding language to produce advanced websites.

• Together with CSS3, HTML5 can create designs that are smarter, more attractive, and load faster.

HTML5 can give your designing skills a serious boost. In a world where competition rules and online businesses are fighting to stay alive, a stylish website, combined with the correct SEO factors, can pull your business from the muck of competition to a place of distinction.

There is no doubt in the fact that modern men communicate through the World Wide Web. As a result the number of website design companies are growing rapidly, in fact each day new companies are seen to be established at different corners of the world. People who are associated with these types of work are mainly known as web developers. They concentrate on characteristics and quality of the web and provide their clients with standard communication channels.

In reality, professional web developer of a reputed website design company has to give emphasis on different aspects of the website. Some of these include graphic design, technical matters, keyword as well as content. It has been observed that if all those things are balanced properly your website will definitely get a professional look and there will also be a possibility that your site will get good ranking in the search engine result page. Continue reading ‘The Value of Web Development in Online Business’ »

In a website design different formats of graphics are used. But using the proper formats can give your site a different edge. A well-planned and properly designed site makes use of the different file formats judiciously.

There are quite a few types of graphic design formats that you can use in your designing. Mainly JPEG, GIF and PNG file formats are used. The JPEG images offer compressed file types and provide high quality appearance. The GIF format is one of the oldest graphic formats used for designing sites. The use of this file format ensures quick loading of the images used on the site. The features like transparency and interlacing are possible with PNG images. If you require superior quality of images, you can use PNG file format. Continue reading ‘Using Proper Format of Graphic for Website Design’ »

PHP is one of the most used programming languages. It is believed that the key reason behind the popularity of PHP is its unquestionable flexibility and uniqueness. Since a long time this best server side scripting language is considered to be the best-suited one for developing dynamic websites. Added to this, PHP is able to effectively interact with the information provided by the users.

In the year 1995 Rasmus first developed this web programming language. PHP not only creates dynamic websites but also ensures its accurate functionality. This is why; with the course of time this language is acquiring more and more acceptance from the web developers. Being an open source software, PHP can also be used free of cost. In the true sense, it ensures stability, security, simplicity and of course fast accessibility. Continue reading ‘PHP- A Popular Programming Language’ »

By the term “Website Development” we mean the entire procedure involved in development of a website. For effectively developing a website, one needs to have proper designing and programming skill.

Some of the useful tips that a novice web developer should follow are mentioned below:

• Purpose should be Clear- Before starting work, be sure about the purpose. This is because; if your focus is clear you can be able to represent the business organization successfully.
• Understand the Requirements of the Target Audience- If you are writing for kids, you have to make your content interesting. On the other hand, if your target audience is adult your writing approach should be different. The website design should also vary on the basis of the varied requirements of your prospective clients. Continue reading ‘How to Develop a Website?’ »

Enhancing the performance of a website simultaneously with its design is a tricky task that cannot be achieved without using CSS. Before you opt for designing your website with CSS, you have to remain well aware of its usages and advantages.

What is CSS?
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet, which is generally written in HTML or in similar kind of mark up language. It helps designers to use a separate document for defining some crucial designing elements such as fonts, layout, color etc. Therefore, using CSS in a website design can add flexibility and reduce complexities in the designing process, which is beneficial both from the point of view of search engine optimization and website design. This is the reason why every website development company is opting for CSS for smoothening the designing process as far as possible.

First one has to define the CSS rules that will be stored in a different file with the extension .css. After that one has to link that CSS file by adding HTML tags in the source page. There are a number of advantages for separating the designing code, which are discussed below:

Creating Rollover Images With CSS
Previously, complex JavaScript was used for creating rollover images. Now, this long and complex code can affect your website adversely by making it heavy. Another major drawback of JavaScript is that, search engine robot cannot index or crawl JavaScript. Therefore, it will definitely have a negative impact on your website online presence. Continue reading ‘Search Engine Friendly Web Design By Using CSS’ »

Since a long time, there is a controversy regarding the advantages and disadvantages of using frames in a website. According to most of the experts, frames do not serve any purpose. Instead, it creates trouble in the functioning of a website. On the other hand, there are some people who think that frames are beneficial for websites. However, it is always better to use frames, in case of a genuine requirement.

Advantages of Framed Website Design

Framed websites, have certain advantages. Some of the most remarkable among them are mentioned below:

• In a frame one can keep company logos, important information and messages. So, that it constantly remains visible to the visitors.
• Often, frames make a site navigable. Throughout the time, it makes static navigation visible on your website.
• Often, design-related problems are sorted out by using frames. Added to this, the frames also can make a site easily accessible to the visitors.

Disadvantages of Framed Web Design

In spite of these advantages, there are several disadvantages of frames. Some of them are as follows: Continue reading ‘Pros and Cons of Using Frames in Website Designing’ »