Web Design and Web Development Articles| DesArt Lab Blog

How Long it Takes to Build a Website

February 16, 2016 Design

You are a small business and you have decided to build a website to mark your online presence. Or, most probably you already have one, but which is out of date, as technology advances at a fast pace and until now it was not a priority for you. Now that you have seen the high rate trends of surfing the web and the advantages that a good web presence brings to a business, you’ve made your decision that it is the time to redesign your website and give it a new breath.
In this article we will focus on the timeline that is needed to build a powerful website from scratch.

Before setting a launch deadline, there are a couple of things to consider:

You need to choose the web design provider;
You need to decide on the size of your future web project.

How to Design Mobile Apps that are Engaging and Appealing

February 9, 2016 Apps Design

Designing mobile apps has become one of the fundamental tasks in a world in which mobile usage rate shoots upward day by day. It is understandable that mobile internet will gain popularity as it does not limit the user to a certain location.

Whether in a bus to school or college, in the park, or at the gym, people use mobile devices to surf their favorite websites and be up-to-date on everything that happens around the world.

According to a Harvard Business Review article, a person interacts with his/her mobile device an average 150 times per day. And when we’re talking about interacting with the smartphone we mean that the person accesses different mobile applications. Due to the user’s high interaction rate with the smartphone, mobile app designers are challenged with the task to develop user-friendly, user-interactive applications that entice them to click on it more frequently.

The Smart Road to Successful Logo Design

February 2, 2016 Logo Design

Logo is the symbol that identifies you in the world of countless businesses and makes an impression on your potential buyers. Although it might seem that creating a log is as easy as pie, there are several important elements that play a fundamental role on the success of the identification sign of your organization.

Logo design, as web design, is a difficult task that the designers deal with whenever facing such challenge. Often, companies forget about the meaning the logo must translate, focusing on dressing it into complex, sometimes worthless elements that have no relation to their business mission and culture.

How Colors Can Impact Website Success

January 26, 2016 Design

Every brand identifies itself with one or more colors that speak for its mission. Whether it is about a restaurant, shoes or luxury items’ company, the websites colors are chosen carefully to represent the brand visually. Most companies research the meaning of each color to choose the one that best identifies with their goals and objectives and the audience they want to target.

There is also the cultural factor that must be considered. Did you know that certain colors have opposed meaning in different countries? Let’s take white, for example. Although identifiable with purity and innocence in Western countries, white symbolizes death, sickness and unhappiness in China, India and Japan.

Facebook Image Sizes Guide

November 11, 2015 Cheat Sheets

There are very few social networks that can compete with Facebook in terms of popularity and advertising possibilities. Therefore, it’s only natural that overwhelming majority of businesses that have or even don’t have digital presence want to exploit a magnificent opportunity of advertising via Facebook. Although it’s not cheap, if you play your cards right, your investment will pay off in spades. All that’s required from you (apart from payment for the advertisements) is skillful representation of strong points of your business, which must also be the most relevant features of your business for the audience you’re targeting. In order to organize an advertisement like that you will most certainly need a vivid and engaging photo or image that will entice people to visit your website (by the way make sure it’s responsive or mobile-friendly – it’s a must if you want to build a successful marketing campaign). This Facebook Image Sizes Guide will help you choose correctly the right images for advertisements.

CMS Comparison Chart: WordPress, Drupal and Joomla

November 9, 2015 Cheat Sheets

CMS (Content Management Systems) are applications that allow organizing, updating, changing, deleting and adding content. They are the most frequently used applications for running blogs, business card and e-commerce websites. One of the greatest advantages of CMS is that they allow managing the workflow in the most collaborative and productive environment, which is why they are also frequently used by marketing and corporate websites. At the moment, the most widespread and most frequently used CMS are WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. They have appeared approximately at the same time – Drupal in 2001, WordPress and Joomla in 2003, but vary in complexity and technical background, necessary for their management. While WordPress requires very little technical background and can be considered intuitive, Drupal, which provides more possibilities for plugins addition, is also much more demanding in terms of technical preparedness of the staff. This comparison chart will help you determine, which CMS is the most suitable for your website and corresponds to your resources.

WordPress Mega Cheat Sheet

November 4, 2015 Cheat Sheets, Design

WordPress is the most popular and most widely used Content Management System. It’s free, open-source and very easy to manage. WordPress is based on PHP and MySQL. One of its greatest advantages is its relative scalability, which is achieved with the help of corresponding plugins. At the moment there exist over 40 000 plugins that help to expand the possibilities of your blog or website. These plugins can be easily used for simple and complex tasks alike. For example, you can optimize your website for SEO with plugin analyzing the SEO-friendliness of your pages. You can even receive corresponding recommendations on what to update in order to get the best results for SEO. All in all, it’s clear that websites or blogs created on WordPress possess multitude of options, can be expanded if needed, can boast a modern and stunning look and are easily deployed on server. Nowadays, knowledge of WordPress is crucial for designing cutting-edge and affordable website, which is why this WordPress Cheat Sheet will help you easily learn its basics!

How to Unlock your Creativity and Wake up from a Creative Slumber?

October 31, 2015 Creativity, Design 2

Every once in a while we all find ourselves falling into creative slumber. Nothing seems exiting enough and it feels like you have nothing else to offer to this world. This is exactly the time when you need to take a step back and think about your priorities and things that make your life happier. You can be positively creative only when you’re happy and to reach that level of joy and happiness you don’t need to dwell on the negative things that you cannot change, you have to live one day at a time, finding happiness in small things and dismissing the upsetting ones. Below we’ve collected over 20 ways to help you with unlocking your creativity and waking up from creative slumber.

Image Formats Mega Cheat Sheet

October 30, 2015 Cheat Sheets

It’s not a secret that visual content is highly important, especially in terms of marketing. People like bright and unusual images, be it the Hero themes or simply engaging and interesting photos. We all love eye-candies and they’re the main driving force of sales and conversion. Image can communicate something that a thousand word won’t be able to describe. Nevertheless, not all websites and browsers support all types of images. For example, IE6 doesn’t support PNG images. TIFF images are used mainly in printing of highly qualitative digital photography. Therefore, in order to create optimal content for your purposes you need to have a good understanding of all image formats. This Image Formats Mega Cheat Sheet will help you get a better grasp on how and where to use images, be it on your website or use them for any other purpose.

jQuery Mega Cheat Sheet

October 28, 2015 Cheat Sheets

At the moment, jQuery can be considered the most popular free cross-platform JavaScript library. It’s an open-source software, developed to facilitate client-side scripting. This library is a perfect software for creation of dynamic and fluid web apps and pages. It provides opportunities to develop plug-ins, create animations and widgets. One of the greatest advantages of jQuery is that it’s extensible, which means that it allows nearly unlimited opportunities for adding events, elements and methods. Another important advantage is the fact that this toolkit eliminates cross-browser inconsistencies, greatly facilitating the work of the UI across various browsers. Developers prefer to use jQuery because it allows full separation of JavaScript code and HTML markup. Debates on whether designers should or should not know the basics of programming are still on, meanwhile why don’t you do yourself a favor and learn the main principles of jQuery?! We promise that you won’t regret it! This jQuery Mega Cheat Sheet will definitely help you with that.