Category Archives: Web Design

With the Webby Awards Deadline Looming, We Tip Our Hats to Top Web Designs

responsive web design, Small Business Marketing, Web Design, , ,

Webby AwardsThe entry deadline for the next Webby Awards is Nov. 1, and next spring’s ceremony marks the 18th year in a row since the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences organized the event to recognize achievement in Web design and Internet excellence. The Webbies represent one of several major events celebrating top web designs, including the CSSDA, the Interactive Media Awards and the WebAwards, among others. Studying the winners of such awards is a great way for designers to learn secrets of the field.

Winning Criteria

What makes for good Web design in today’s mobile-oriented environment? Awwwards.com, which gives top Web designers recognition and prestige, identifies 10 trends in contemporary Web design. These include:

  • Putting content first
  • Simplifying design interaction and content
  • Centering on user experience
  • Providing app-style interfaces
  • Unifying desktop and mobile appearance.

Ultimately, any design is only as good as its functional delivery. If customers find designs too slow to load, their visual value will be lost. Choosing a fast hosting provider using resources at www.InternetProviders.com can help ensure site visitors appreciate your aesthetic efforts.

Winning Web Designs

This September, digital advertising agency LIQWID won the Web Marketing Association’s 2013 WebAward for Best Advertising Website. This marks the fourth major recognition LIQWID has received over the past year, making its site a design model to pay attention to.

LIQWID offers advertisers a solution to the challenge of responsive Web design. Where design once centered around desktop displays with fixed width in Internet Explorer and Firefox, today’s mobile orientation means design must display across screen sizes ranging from smartphones to HDTVs as well as a diverse collection of operating systems and browsers.

For ad designers, this poses the problem of how to make the same ad display equally well in different venues. LIQWID solves this problem by using fluid Web design principles to create ads that automatically collect information from the displaying device for instant resizing to any size, resolution or screen location. This enables the same ad to look just as good on a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone.

Appealing Apps

Each year, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference hosts the Apple Design Awards to recognize apps that further design, technology and innovation. One of this year’s winners was the Yahoo Weather app for iPhones and iPads, which provides a great case study for blending aesthetic appeal with functionality.

Apple strives to combine beauty with simplicity, and the tech giant praised the Yahoo Weather app for embodying this ideal. The app provides a high-quality background photo based on the geographical location of the place the user is querying about. This combines with elegant foreground typography, which supplies the relevant functional information, including place, time, current temperature and sky conditions and forecasting outlook. Compare the result with the generic ugliness of many weather sites, and you’ll see why Apple recognized this app for its visual achievement.

By Peter Marino, Owner and CDO of the SEO & Inbound Marketing company reelWebDesign.com.

Quickest Methods To Design A Dreamweaver 8 Website In 5 Minutes

Content creation, Small Business Marketing, Web Design, , ,

Quickest Methods To Design A Dreamweaver 8 Website In 5 Minutes

Like many other programs available on the market Dreamweaver 8 is a software program that helps people to design different websites. This kind of program is quite suitable for both experienced or beginners because it is quite efficient and at the end anyone can have a great result in an optimal period of time. Dreamweaver 8 includes an interface that allows a person to see how the initial web page will look, while editing it. But here are some great tips about how to design websites in this program in five minutes.

Layout Of The Web Page

Usually, a web page in Dreamweaver 8 includes three sections where a person can edit facts like the logo of the website. The page also includes footer at the end of the page, where you can still have a text box for writing the wanted words. That is how you can type in a few seconds the wanted words and make the website look more familiar. Also in the layout sector a person can choose to work on the bulk section where there are two parts that include the skeleton of the future menu. Therefore anyone can replace these spaces with the wanted information in order to start having a nice page.

Work At The Page Title

For any websites, the page title is also quite important in order for other visitors to see exactly what the page contains. So usually the title of the page appears as “untitled document”. A user just has to put the mouse and click in the box where are written these words and include there the name of the page without any problem. Still, the words will not appear in the body of the page, but it will be quite useful for the searching motors to find your website and make it available for anyone.

Adding Content To The Web Page

In addition, to modify a text in your web page you have to work with the right column available. Any kind of content can be put there either if is about describing your activity or putting some interesting quotations. Adding text is quite easy in Dreamweaver 8, as it works similar to other programs that are based on writing, like Microsoft Word for instance. Sub-headings can be also done by the help of Dreamweaver 8, by making an entry in order for the cursor to move to another line. After that you can write the wanted text and format it in sub-heading type.

Finally after doing the right edits, you just have to save the page. Then it will have to be uploaded on a web server in order for the web page to be visible in any kind of engine motor, and be accessible for the users that want to visit it. Also remember to check if the page works properly, right after you have added your page to the web server. That is how you learn from dreamweaver 8 training and create a great website that will be quite accessible to any person.

Author Bio

Ashley Gardner is a private tutor and advocate of continuous education. She writes for the local paper and writes tips for college students.

Businesses Turning To Minimalist Web Design

Business Tech, HTML5, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Web Design

minimalist websitesOver time, websites have used a wide variety of methods to capture and keep attention. A few years ago, flashing banners and sound effects were common. But now many Internet destinations, including such sites the New York Times, are choosing a “less is more” approach and realizing that many of today’s viewers would prefer clean layouts as opposed to bombarding the senses with movement and noise.

A Responsive Attitude

Since ideals, design, attitudes, and design analytics often change, web design specialists keep their finger on the pulse and strive to know what’s on the horizon before clients even ask for it. Despite some fluctuations for what’s in demand at a given time, some things remain the same.

The New York Times website design will follow suit with what other similar news outlets like The New Republic and USA Today have already done. It’s thought that the streamlined approach will drive advertising dollars because website visitors will have fewer things to distract them.

In many cases advertising dollars keep websites afloat so even as some preferences change there’s a near constant effort to keep advertisers satisfied. But advertisers are only satisfied is their marketing expenditures return the desired results. Whether it be building their specific brand in the marketplace, establishing themselves as an industry expert, or simply driving sales revenues, web design plus function has to be successful in the minds, and budgets, of the advertising community.

Successful web design firms consistently look for ways to stay abreast of website changes. Often, it’s easy to do that by watching to see how some of the most highly trafficked national websites are making alterations and responding in appropriate ways that suit local clients.

A Different Approach to SEO

Both businesses and enterprising individuals looking for online success commonly focus on ways to drive traffic to their websites and encourage visitors to interact with content in meaningful ways that align with their business objectives. However, optimization strategies have shifted over the years, too. Some of the most popular search engines, like Google, change algorithms several times a year and what worked in past years isn’t always similarly beneficial now.

A skilled SEO company will be well aware how over-populating a webpage with certain keywords can quickly cause it to drop in rankings or even disappear from results pages. In this regard, search engine optimization is leaning towards minimalist techniques as well.

Recent algorithm updates have favored websites that use keywords sparingly and instead focus on valuable content that makes sense for particular search strings. Now a website that only uses a few specific keywords could rank much higher than one where the emphasis is on keyword usage over quality.

Some companies that provide SEO services can also create a beautiful and user-friendly website for your needs as well as help you appeal to mobile audiences too. Keep up with recent developments and help viewers enjoy a simpler experience by remembering that it’s not always necessary to go over the top to get the top rankings results.

Our guest blogger, Sandrine Cachette, has worked in the web design industry for the last 8 years. She enjoys reviewing web design portfolios. She writes industry articles for MDesign Media on regular basis.

Do You Have What It Takes To Run A Website?

Blogging, Content creation, content marketing, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Web Design

Running a website is no easy feat and it’s something that a lot of people underestimate. How hard can it be to draw a few pictures and upload a few articles on a topic you find interesting right? Well quite hard as it turns out, and it actually takes a certain kind of person to handle the unique pressures and challenges of running a website. If you’re thinking of getting into the world of blogging/webmastering then, or if you’re building a website in order to promote your business then, the question is simple: do you have those skills? Are you the right kind of person?

Here’s what you need to be in order to thrive online…

Driven:

motivationOne of the most difficult things about being a webmaster is also one of the things that can make is so appealing as a full time job. You see you’re not going to have anyone breathing over your neck and telling you what needs to be done, and this can actually make life quite difficult when you need that bit of motivation or when you’re feeling tired.

It’s all too easy as a webmaster then to wake up feeling rough and to decide that today you’re only going to write five articles rather than ten. In order to succeed you need to know that very few excuses are good enough, and you need to be able to force yourself to work even when you don’t fancy it.

Business Minded:

Running a website is essentially running a small business. There are overheads to consider, there’s marketing and there’s administration. In order to make your site a hit, you need to be a jack of all trades and you need to know how to quickly and efficiently create something that’s going to make money. If you have experience as a businessman or woman, then this is actually one of the things that will help you the most in making your site into a hit.

Analytical:

You also need to be someone who’s analytical and who’s able to look at the statistics and maths behind what you’re trying to accomplish. While you need to be a ‘big picture’ person, you also need to be able to slow down and to look at the finer details in order to find bugs in your code, or to understand why your clicks have gone down in response to recent changes. Mathematicians will have a big advantage in running a website.

Creative:

That said, having an analytical brain with an understanding of business isn’t what you really need to make a compelling website – that’s just going to result in a spreadsheet. As well then you also need creative vision and an eye for attractive graphics. The main way that people are going to interact with your site is through vision, so you need to make sure that your site looks beautiful and eye catching and you need to give it a UI that you can feel proud of. No pressure then…

Optimistic:

While running a site can be highly rewarding and a lot of fun, there will be days when you want to pull all your hair out. In order to be successful then it’s crucial that you can deal with those days and that you don’t let them get to you. You also need to be hardy, resilient and ultimately quite confident in order to believe that your site can succeed. Because if you don’t believe in it, then no one else will and you’ll eventually end up just giving up. Go and watch Rocky then apply his attitude to your site…

Passionate:

 

Perhaps most important of all is that you’re passionate about what you do. You need to be bringing a website into the world that you care about deeply and that you’re incredibly proud of. If you’re not, then the end result is always going to be disappointing and you’ll have a hard time marketing it too. When you’re passionate it will come across in your marketing, in your content and in the quality of the end product. Everything else on this list can be learned and developed (or just outsourced). Passion though is something that you need from the start.

Our guest blogger, John Miller is a freelance blogger who enjoys sharing his personal and work experiences online. He writes for Webfirm, a renowned email marketing company based in Australia. His hobbies include painting and calligraphy.