Web Design Articles

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.

Process of Web Design Creation

Oftentimes people who are in need of professional web design have a very vague notion of what exactly the process of work on their website’s design encompasses. While some realize the extent of work and approximate time frame, others consider that it can be accomplished in a couple of days and shouldn’t cost much. However, everything depends on the type of design you need and on the professionalism and amount of people you intend to hire. Professional web design studio will charge more, but will provide clean cutting-edge design that will yield lots of new customers, while a simple and amateur work, made on a napkin, will not have the desired marketing effect. “A Web Site Designed” chart below will give you a definite and clear notion about the process of web design creation from the very start to finish. You’ll be able to find out about milestones, degree of your involvement into the process, timeline and the important aspects that need to be considered.

25 Ideas for Designing a Profitable E-Commerce Website

October 12, 2015 Design, E-commerce design

With the flow of time shopping became something that we like to do in the comfort of our home. Why wouldn’t we? E-Commerce websites offer multitude of useful options, such as comparing items, looking through the product’s descriptions and their preview, comparing prices and so on.

With the help of the well-designed e-commerce website you can find and order anything you need. However, despite their identical purpose some E-Commerce websites are popular and can boast of having terrific conversion rate, while others are lagging behind, barely making both ends meet. So what determines the success of the E-Commerce website? Pure luck or detailed research into the user experience and usability? Our bet is on the latter, which is why we’re offering 25 useful ideas on how to improve the structure, user experience and usability of your E-Commerce website and correspondingly boost your conversion rate.

Improving UX on a Budget

October 9, 2015 Design, UX/UI Design

User Experience is no longer a stylish trend, it’s a practice and a “must” for every website that hopes to attract a fair share of visitors. However, despite of what the majority of resources will try to convince you, you will actually be able to create qualitative UX even if you don’t have lots of funds. All you need is wits and ability to exploit the recourses that are at hand.

As a rule the process of UX improvement implies conducting tests and correspondingly paying the participants, purchasing the advanced UI design tools or even taking a usability test lab for a spin. However, in case you have no means for all that, what is your strategy? Is it productive to get upset and give up? Of course not! You need to pull yourself together, analyze resources that you have and make do. It’s not that hard, especially if you follow the tips below on creating affordable and qualitative UX.

Popular Web Design Trends for 2016

October 7, 2015 Design, Interactive Design, News 4

Responsive website design becomes increasingly popular, practically a must for companies that wish to extend their reach across numerous platforms and attract visitors with various devices. Knowing the new tendencies is extremely important for web designers and design studios in general. Nevertheless, it’s worth to read the research papers on the new trends to see if they actually pay off and work as they were intended to, attracting masses. Sometimes, people think that they want something, while actually they lose interest to this item/action very quickly. You need to design your website in a way that will appeal to customers and attract them whether they like it or not.

For example, people just love information, especially interesting one. We are all information junkies, it gives us some sort of rush, like tasty food or sex. However, we’re unable to process big volumes of information, despite our desire to have it. This is the reason why text on the websites is presented in short blocks with clear and large headlines. Thus, you will pay your full and undivided attention at least to one of the presented articles and won’t divert it to some eye-candy: shiny and engaging.

So, in order to be on top of your competition you need to know for sure what tendencies are and will be in next year. What innovations and web design trends are we to expect in 2016? Let’s take a look at the most popular ones.

10 Psychological Aspects of UX Design

October 5, 2015 Design, UX/UI Design

While creating a website design, taking into account user experience, it’s crucial to consider psychological aspects. Before you design your website in a certain way you need to know what people like and don’t like in general, what makes them tick. It’s actually a tremendous issue, considering that even a little feature may cause customer’s displease. So how does one determine what features need to be included and which ones are better left alone?

Attention is the key

Attention is a cornerstone of successful UI/UX design. Your main goal while creating a successful UX design is to capture and keep the attention of users. Whether we want it or not – we pay attention to anything that stands out, anything that is innovative and unusual. You can use this fact to draw visitor’s attention to the most important information on your website – you have a vast row of tactics to do so: vivid colors, bold font, sounds, blinking and so much more. Remember that if you use the same attention-grabbing techniques in several places of your website – users’ attention will shift and none of the items will get full, undivided attention you would like it to get from a visitor to fully grasp the concept.

How the Illusory Perception of Time Changes User Experience (UX)?

October 1, 2015 Design, UX/UI Design 2

Time is everything. There is no next time, it’s now or never, which is why the best design is the one that helps you save time.

In our age of ever-evolving technologies, the demand for fluid and attention-grabbing designs is higher than ever. But why business owners and experienced marketologists are so hell-bent on introducing certain elements of design? The reason is quite simple. In compliance with Amazon research even 1 second delay in loading costs around $1.6 billion in sales. According to Google reports if the page loads even 0,4 of a second slower Google looses approximately 8 million searches!

Knowing that it’s impossible not to ask how this problem can be rectified. Some companies, whose conversion rate heavily depends on the loading time (such as search platforms), estimate special budget, undergo various optimizations and buy servers in the countries you’ve probably never heard about. However, as it turns out – even that is not enough, because we all have various time perception and the fastest loading page doesn’t guarantee that your end users will perceive it as one. The only thing that really matters is how people perceive the waiting time and what emotions they experience.

Pre-made Template or Custom Design – which one is for you?

September 28, 2015 Design

It’s not a secret that no matter how small or large the business is – website is a must as it provides the online presence and gives your customers an opportunity to find you and order your products/services. Digital presence is important even for individual freelancers, aspiring to become business owners. Your website is the representation of your business, your digital business card, which is why it is crucial for it to look modern and function without any hiccups.

One cannot underestimate the urge to make an exclusive website with custom design in order to attract your audience, however, such strategy can rarely pay off. If your website is going to be an eCommerce one, your first decision will be whether it’ll be hosted or non-hosted solution. While both have their advantages, non-hosted solution can be used only by those, who are tech savvy, otherwise one will just get lost in technicalities and quit his startup before it even took off. The next step will certainly be website’s design – custom or pre-made template. Although sometimes it’s quite hard to choose, we will try to shed some light on the ways that can help you decide whether to go with custom design or pre-made template.

The Cost of a Website

September 25, 2015 Design

The inevitable question that arises at some point of website discussion is: «How much it will cost?». However, the answer usually doesn’t work for clients as it cannot be precise. Whether you’re hiring a freelancer or an agency the cost of your website will depend on many aspects and can vary from around $750, when hiring an oversea freelancer to 5K-10K if you decide to go with a professional agency. It’s impossible to wrap your mind around the difference in pricing if you’ve never been familiarized with the process of website building. We’ll try to provide a general notion of the website pricing components, but this article can by no means be taken as a guide to determine the cost of the website you want.

Prices on websites seem to be very high, why is that? The mystery of high prices lies in the website building process. If you take time to familiarize yourself with it, you will be able to to outline the aspects that are of the most importance to you. It will allow you to budget properly and focus your efforts on aspects that are essential for your business. Knowing exactly what you want will help you find a great team of designers, uniquely qualified for the task at hand.