The color green represents balance and well-being, it’s among the colors that are easiest on our eyes, and it’s up next in our color inspiration series. Take a look at these sites that use the color really well…
Nothing influences the overall design/feel of a web page more than the background. Unfortunately, many sites often overlook this element.
Here are a few sites we’ve come across that deserve recognition for their great use of background design.
The Hotel Bellwether:
Elitist Snob:
Kris Nyreen’s Twitter Page:
Dara’s Garden:
ndesign Studio:
Doghouse Wines:
Jobs on the Web Designer Wall:
Not Your Average Joe:
Scrapbook Your Memories:
Philippe Plaideux:
Like what you see? Here are a few resources for finding or creating your own site backgrounds:
Oustanding Website Background Guide: 60 Impressive Resources
Free Background Textures
13 Sites for Beautiful Patterns & Backgrounds
It’s a question we hear all the time and one that doesn’t have a straight answer. Here are a few of our favorite resources to point you in the right direction:
First, read Joe Gillespie’s post Web Design as a Career over at WPDFD, he takes a stab at why this particular phrasing of the question is so hard to answer and talks about the many jobs that fall under the broad term ‘Web Designer’.
WetFeet.com gives a more generic description of the career path, but it’s a great place to start out and is geared towards the student or recent grad.
As for actual resources to help you on your way, Design Mentor Training has a great resource page specifically for Graphic and Web Design. A traditional career research tool is a ‘job outlook‘ – you can look at employment trends, how the industry is growing, and salary ranges.
For more reading, About.com has a great collection of articles on professional web careers.
Finally, experience is key and freelancing is a great way to build up your portfolio and continue to develop your skills. Check out The Monster List of Freelance Job Sites (2009) for where to go to find jobs. A few of our favorites: Freelance Switch, ELance, and Guru.
Comment forms are one of the few ways readers and visitors to a site or blog can interact with those ‘in charge’, so its a little surprising that so many bloggers/designers throw together these forms and leave it at that. Once a user is at the point of commenting/contacting they probably won’t stick around much longer – that form is one of the last things they’ll see on your site. Why not leave them something to remember you by…just don’t get too carried away. Most often you’ll want to strike a balance between creativity and simplicity, forms that are confusing can lead to a drop in your conversion rates.
It’s always nice to see designers who put some thought into their comment or contact forms. Here are 10 of the AgencyTool staff’s favorites:
The comment form on NatalieJost.com is in a different layout than most, and the graphic down the side gives it a nice look.
Sometimes it is best to keep it simple – it may not be the most exciting design element on the page, but it serves a purpose, and this well-designed comment form won’t deter any users from interacted with the site.
The call to action of this comment form from RobGoodlatte.com changes; “Enlighten Me”, “Shout It Into The Forest”, “Sound Off!” and “Out With It!” are examples we took the time to find. It’s ok to have a little fun with your forms…
We love how this one looks. An interesting font choice or experiment with texture can pay off big time…
The post-it look. It can be hard to be creative while still keeping a form super simple, this option pulls it off nicely.
This one isn’t live on his site anymore, but Edward Pistachio’s contact form is one of the most creative we’ve seen (thanks to swiss-miss.com for keeping it up!) While this obviously wouldn’t work for a corporate-type site, it fits in great with his site’s tone.
Simple, to the point and just enough texture in the background to keep it interesting…well done.
The comment form from Tentangrifai.com is bright, colorful and fits in with the rest of their site. It’s becoming more common for designers to throw in little extras commonly seen on forums, like the little smileys…its a trend we like.
This one is from BlogDesignBlog, a pretty standard layout but we like the step-by-step instructions…and it’s always nice to let your visitors know you follow!
Last but not least, JankoAtWarpSpeed has a great tutorial for creating a comment form from images of old postcards…
Most people not in the industry think about SEO as something that is done outside the actual website, if they’ve done their research then it will be all about link building, blog posting, PPC, etc. The truth is there are an awful lot of things that can be done within the coding of a site that can make or break any SEO effort – we call this ‘On-page SEO’. For more specifics take a look at our Simple Guide to SEO post, but it suffices to say that ignoring this type of SEO can kill a campaign before any ‘off-page’ effort has even started.
Ideally your web developer will know about these practices, but you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who has the time to stay up-to-date on the constantly changing SEO world AND continue to move forward with the latest design techniques. ViceVersa, don’t expect your average SEO consultant to be able to design and code your entire website.
There are people out there who are experts in both areas and can effectively build your site and manage your SEO, but they are few and far between. Nine times out of ten attempting to cut costs by having one person do both will backfire. Another option is to hire different people/agencies for each component. It is a valid strategy, but there are inherent potential problems with this type of set up. Any SEO consultant worth his salt will want to take a look at your website’s code, and will probably want to make at least a few changes. Suddenly issues of file access and permissions pop up that can really complicate, not to mention drastically slow down, the process.
The best possible solution is to have your site designed by an agency who employs both designers/developers and online marketing specialists. You’ll end up with a coherent and more successful website because of the smooth communication between the two camps.
Recently we’ve gotten in a ton of great suggestions for our dashboard from users, here is a sampling…
We all know SEO is an important component of web design, but do you know how well your page is optimized for your targeted keywords? SEO Content Solutions offers a Keyword Density Checker tool and SEO-focused copy-writing services.
Also just added is another solution for running email marketing campaigns. TailoredMail can help you create, deliver, analyze and keep track of all your campaigns. In keeping with the Marketing/SEO theme, we also got in a tip for a new FireFox add-on AdWords IDs. This add-on is designed for savvy AdWords professionals who need more insight and transparency when using the web front-end. It brings account, campaign, ad group, keyword and creative IDs up to the front-end.
We are constantly updating the Web Design Dashboard, make sure you don’t miss anything by checking in often. While you’re at it, check out our Web Designer Directory as well, it’s free to list your company and we send quality traffic your way…example: over 100 people have clicked through on the first few companies listed in California Web Design this past month.
Today’s job market is competitive to say the least, and you need to be able to stand out from the stack of resumes to make overwhelmed interviewers sit up and take notice. Here are a few resume and interview tips that can help you land a position in the web industry.
Once you land the job check out our post: 5 Great Pieces of Advice for Aspiring Web Designers
Modernista! did it first, but Skittles got the attention.
This week Skittles changed their homepage to a Twitter feed of anyone who tweeted anything with the word ’skittles’ in it and it’s created a lot of buzz. Some people love it, saying its perfect advertising in our struggling economy. Some hate it, more than a few social media types have called it a ‘cheap publicity stunt’ because of Skittles previous non-involvement with any sort of social media. But, ignoring all social media banter and looking at the new skittles page from a web design perspective, we see some potentially serious problems.
First of all, control. Your homepage is usually the #1 place people go when looking for information on your company. Is it really a good idea to essentially give up control of the majority of the content? Skittles has already run into this problem. Once word got out you could get on their homepage by simply typing ’skittles’ somewhere in your tweet more than a few inappropriate links and offensive language popped up.
Usability. The nature of this type of feed (and the sometimes inappropriate things it shows) caused Skittles to put up an age verifying pop-up before entering the site. True, if a person can add or subtract they can trick the program, and the screen is a pop-up so you can see the content behind it anyway, but putting up a barrier to entry like this is a no-no in terms of usability. Many users will simply not spend the time to fill it in and move on. Also, what happens to the people who were genuinely looking for information? They are bound to be more than a little confused on where they should go next or whether they are even on the Skittles site…not good.
The actual site navigation looks too much like a spammy pop-up for comfort. Once you get past that and realize that it is meant to be their site nav the way they’ve labeled things can confuse people further. ‘Chatter’ takes you to the same page you’re already on (’Home’), ‘Friends’ pulls up a Facebook page, and ‘Media’ brings in a Skittles focused feed from YouTube. The only parts of the entire site that still resembles a company website is a contact form and somewhat lame ‘Products’ section with a few links to their parent company, Mars‘ site.
They’ve created buzz and we really do applaud them for attempting to utilize social media to get their brand involved. However, abandoning current web convention all together and sacrificing usability is probably not the smartest move in the long run…guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Navigation is one of the most important elements of a website design. It provides your users with a road map and guide to your site and gives them a sense of direction. Therefore, well-designed sites tend to have navigation menus and bars that are simple. But as we’ve seen before simple doesn’t have to be boring.
The sites below have succeeded in creating nav menus that are creative and fun, while not confusing (and thus probably losing) their visitors.
Everyone wants to be heard, chances are it was one of the reasons you started blogging in the first place. A lot of beginner bloggers seem to have the “If you build it, they will come” mentality, and this just isn’t the case. The sheer amount of blogs that exist today ensure that you will have to go above and beyond to attract readers. This is where SEO comes into play.
Let’s assume that you are relatively passionate about your blog’s topic – which means that you are producing quality content on a pretty regular basis. Great, that’s step one – here are a few extra things you should be changing to make the most of the search engine traffic.
The terms may not be familiar, but you already know what these are…you see them every single time you do a search!
Title Tags should be short and sweet, they should be unique and include the main keywords you want to rank for. For a blog, the Title Tag is usually the post’s title, but you can tweak it by going into the page’s code and looking for these tags: <title> </title>. If you use Wordpress these are located in your Header file. The Meta Description is just a short sentence that describes what the page or post is about. Again, it wouldn’t hurt to stick in a keyword or two and it should be kept short, under 30 words or so. You can write unique Meta Descriptions for each post, but to save time using the first sentence or two of the post can be a good starting point. Wordpress even has a plugin that will do the job for you: Head META Description.
It is good to link out to other resources and blogs. You’ll provide added value to the readers you have, and by linking out you’ll increase the chances that other bloggers and websites will link to you as well. You should also be creating internal links – this means linking to other posts on your blog or pages on your website within the post you are writing. Use your main keywords as anchor text in those links and it will help those pages rank for the specific keywords you are targeting. Having quality links to both your own content and outside pages is important, just be careful not to over do it. Having too many links on a page will look unnatural and ’spammy’.
People use the search engines to look for images as well as web pages. If your blog uses pictures often it’s a good idea to optimize them as well. First of all, give your images names that mean something when you save them – for example, SummerHouseFront.jpg instead of image13.jpg or the date. You should also use alt tags to give the image a short description (ex. alt=”Summer House”) and long description tags for more detail (ex. longdesc=”Summer House on Lake Michigan viewed from the beach”) This will help the search engines determine which keywords your images are most related to.
Being aware of the search engine optimization strategies used for blogs can lead to much higher referral traffic from Google, Yahoo and other search engines. If you use Wordpress download the All In One SEO Pack wordpress plugin, it does a good job of optimizing your content and avoiding duplicate content. Finally, be patient! It can be a slow process and take weeks (perhaps months if your blog is new) to see increases in search engine traffic. Trust us – it’ll pay off eventually.
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