Helibo

It should go without saying, that you should insist on getting your web design exactly how you want it, first time round. When I say first time round, I don’t mean that you should expect your designer to produce exactly what you want in your first concept, I mean, that you should be sure he delivers to your exact requirements after the number of revisions required. In the past, I have foolishly approved a design, finished payment and received the files, only to decide a couple of weeks later, that the design was going in the wrong direction, and wouldn’t be suitable for my site. This, is a pain. It poses two fundamental issues: Time, and money. Not only have you wasted time waiting for it to be completed in the first place, and sheded out money that has now gone to waste, but you now have to wait longer for a new design to be completed, and pay yet more money. We can only blame ourselves in this situation, but there are some ways to avoid it!

Get the opinion of other web developers, and even peers.

Post your design up for critique on forums. See what the buzz is, and what kind of feedback you’re getting.

Choose a design you plan to keep.

When reviewing your design: you should have the mentality that the design you choose will be the design you keep and use for a reasonable amount of time. Don’t think “This bit’s not that good, but I’ll get it redone in the next version”.

Make sure YOU know exactly what you want.

Might seem an obvious thing to say, but if you don’t know what you want: how can you expect your designer too? You need to make sure your designer is clear on exactly what they need to produce for you. Which brings me nicely onto my next point.

Write a fully detailed brief.

Write a document briefing your designer on what you want. It’s good for you both to have a reference to check back to. This makes the design process a great deal smoother, and certainly works much better than briefing your designer over an IM. IM is good for things you missed out or revisions: but I don’t recommend it as a way to brief your designer.
Remember: It’s much easier to change a design before the coding stage, or better still, as a revision. So get it right - first time!

Time and time again, I find sites that look appealing to the eye, but lack structure or consistency. As web developers, we should be building sites that are easy to navigate for our users. That should be our top priority, and then come to the aesthetics.

The best way to do this is keep things simple. First, start by planning a logical structure to your site. Ask yourself: What should visitors see first? Where should their attention be drawn too? Also ask yourself: Do I really need certain things? Don’t put something in for the sake of it, or if you think that your design “should” have it. If you want to be unique, you should aim to be different – not have the same old design features every site has! It over-clutters the design, and leads to a not-so-user-friendly site!

You should also try and create designs that can be achieved easily through CSS – make it easier for the coder, or if you are the coder too – really produce something that fits nicely together overall, as a design and code piece.

A short article from me today, but I can’t tell you what to do with design – it’s an art form; a way to express oneself. I can only point you in the right direction, and let you do the footwork.

Wordpress made a great move on their face. The websites design is a huge improvement from the old one, much more aesthetically pleasing I must say.

Even the Wordpress Admin Panel and User Login has been updated. Just like I said in a previous post as well, Getting Fresh works!

Read more about what exactly has been upgraded on Wordpress.

From something I read a while ago, “Shiny and Glossy elements are now officially outdated!”, I see it now as a fact. However as a designer myself, I must admit I still do create these shiny and glossy elements, but one way you could look at it, is that this old web 2.0 (Shiny and Glossy) trend, has become a smoking addiction to many players of Adobe Photoshop.

In event to this, I took action only weeks ago where I made my final glossy design. Many people commented that it was nice, but those comments were only from other designers of this shiny and glossy web 2.0 trend. In result, I asked some of my old clients what they thought of it, amongst other designs that I had done to this style, and they’re comments were negative.

I didn’t ask why, I already knew the answer. The answer, is that the clients I did ask were corporate companies, meaning professionalism and usability was the key to there type of websites. So web 2.0 is not the way to go, for any professional sort.

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Regarding a previous post of mine about 3D becoming unpopular, I looked through my bookmarks earlier today and found this amazing website that I almost had forgotten about.

Gnomonology is a fantastic website that provides a tremendous amount of tutorials. The tutorials are done by video, which the only downside is that you have to pay for them. But looking at the quality, they’re quite reasonable.

So if your looking to get into creating 3D models, sculptures or scenery, I would highly recommend Gnomonology for tutorials. They don’t base the tutorial around one type of software either, there’s many. From Maya, Photoshop, 3D Studio Max to After Effects, Headus, Lightwave and more!

I’m definitely going to be sitting down and going through them sometime soon.

A great way to keep your website up to date, is by shedding some light in different areas. By maintaining the corresponding elements but manipulating the way it draws attention, you should see a significant change. Let me show you.

A great example I found today, was the re-brand of Eden.

You can the rest of the above image on their homepage, and it shows they’ve even manipulated the logo as well. And doing this can give your website another boost in freshness. What I would suggest is don’t do this continuously, but perhaps every 6 months or so. Keep your website the same from a very long period of time can start to turn peoples heads away. It’s true!

Design and the web itself is changing on a daily basis, so by keeping your websites design clean and fresh, you should be able to keep up with standards of that time.

I believe people could save a lot of money by doing this, instead of after 2 or more years, having a complete re-design of ones website. Wouldn’t you say so?

9 years in the web industry and I have seen the web separate into 4 sections. The most popular section now is the use of vector illustration, and flat based websites with gradients, points and blended shapes. Many websites being somewhat glossy, also known as the web 2.0 design trend. In the beginning of 2008, being a CSS gallery watcher, I had started to recognise that a lot of these websites are becoming more popular by the day. And the way these websites are being built design wise, is improving dramatically. Question is, “How far is web 2.0 going to go, will there be an end?”

The second section would have to be flash. There are thousands of websites being built in flash every year, but are not widely recognised compared to web 2.0. A question that I ask myself all the time is, “Why is flash not the best way to build your website?”

Many people will argue at the fact that Flash should be used depending on the websites type. For example, Ford. Ford could have been done in either plain html/css, using a content management system, however they chose to give the user, that wow factor when visiting the website. So why do designers, tend to ignore the use of flash today?

Now for the third section, I decided to give this to very informative websites, one’s which are built with no styling, or no design at all. These are still widely popular when searching in Google. We have all seen these, and I doubt there will be a day when we can discard them.

I decided to put the 3D section at 4th, because we are not seeing many websites at all with the use of this. Ignoring the use of 3D in flash websites, just 3D alone is becoming unpopular. The only genre I have seen 3D being used very well, is in the gaming industry. A very great example of 3D being used, would have to be at High Fidelity, which was designed and built by the guys at 9dots. I believe that this sort of website immediately attracts the users attention, where the great use of detail is immense.

So here’s the question for you readers, “Do you think the use of 3D should come back?“