Utah Web Design | 
04 9th, 2007| 
For web designers nothing is more frustrating than lack of inspiration. It seems like writers are the only ones who have coined an “creativity block” phrase. However, web designers are artists and there are often times where inspiration is difficult to find. This “designers block” can slow you down Read the rest of this entry »
Mar
29
According to Hansel and Gretel, if you leave little crumbs along a path you will be able to find your way home. Home like in life, is the place where you want to be. On a website, you start at the home and it is usually the first place you go back to when you are lost or can’t find what you’re looking for. There have been studies that show when most users cannot find what they want; they go back to the home page to start over. There are many ways to set-up your navigation. A popular method is known as Bread Crumb Navigation, and for web design, this is imperative.
Breadcrumb navigation is a way of Read the rest of this entry »
Mar
27
$96 Billion dollars is how much money was spent online in 2003 by American consumers. The year before that was $76 billion. This is significant jump in any industry. That year online sales accounted for only 4.3% of overall American retail sales. This was four years ago and since then the industry has continued huge amounts of growth and internet opportunities are more available than ever before. It looks likes internet shopping is here for the long term. In business the most important factor for success is Read the rest of this entry »
Mar
21
5-10 seconds, that’s how long you have to capture a readers attention.
The internet gives us so many choices that if something isn’t particularly interesting it takes less effort to leave and find something new than it would to actually read through. This is why we need to seize every advantage we can. In web design much emphasis is placed on styles and imagery but Read the rest of this entry »
Mar
14
A conversion in the computer world is when a visitor to a website buys something. Your own website traffic means nothing without conversions, so the question remains how to convert visitors to customers. An internet business is just like any other business; usually you only have one chance to get it right because there are plenty of other places a customer can go to. This is why website design is paramount.
There are three main qualities Read the rest of this entry »
Mar
9
“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” Look at your business. What is your plan? Where will you be in 3 years and how will you get there? If you can answer these questions great you are on the right track. If not there is no better time to start than now. First things first, re-examine your own business, identify what you have to offer, what you want to achieve and most importantly how you’re going to get there. A huge number of small business’s fail within the first 3 years and the reason why is because most of these business have not taken a realistic look at their resources and failed to plan for the future and instead relied on surviving today or this month. The fact of the matter is without a business plan you’ve got rough waters ahead of you.
Whether you’re already operating an online business or you’re looking to expand onto the Internet there are a few things you need to know. Read the rest of this entry »
Jan
29
Well, I’m on the last chapter of a very great book. Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug: A common sense approach to web usability. This book is thin, but completely full of good information. It kept me hanging on every word. I am currently reading 4 books consecutively so I will review those as well. This book has been great. It’s approach is quite simple. DON’T MAKE YOUR USERS THINK!
Don’t Make Me Think discusses how even make your users think for a fraction of a second will add to the frustration total and make them leave your site. Some areas of interest are:
- User patterns
- Designing for scanning
- Wise use of copy
- Navigation design
- Home page layout
- Usability testing
The section about how to conduct your own cheap usability tests on your own site is quite informative. It’s amazing how a slight change to the title, tagline, architecture, or positioning of your site can affect your users taking a call-to-action or making a purchase on your site. I highly recommend this book to ANYONE involved in web design, web development, or search engine optimization. Usability and SEO really go hand-in-hand. What’s the point of all the traffic if you aren’t making you users happy and guiding them to action on your site?
Jan
24
In order to stay ahead of the game as a web designer it takes constant study and research. A career in web development is not like many other careers, once you have your degree and you have your foot in the door your good to go. In web development it’s a constant race, it’s either get in and really get in or get out. There’s allot of dead end web design companies out there that settle for last place and do not wish to or do not have the dedication to advance. Those type of web design companies end up getting buried in the end or try to catch up in the end and constantly trip and fall on their face.
In order to become a good web designer and stay a good web designer it is important to be fluent with all the new standards and innovations of the web. Web design and development is constantly and rapidly advancing, it’s not easy “staying ahead of the game”. With constant and consistent hard work, study and research Wiwork’s advanced web design and development team has managed to “stay ahead of the game”.
Jan
24
When considering your target demographic, for you or a client’s niche market, do you also consider people with disabilities. The 2000 U.S. Census shows us that 49.7 million people in the U. S. age 5 and over have a disability. If you’re designing and developing for large audience you really need to keep this in mind. Not only are you catering to the disable, but you’re showing other people, and search engines as well, that you care about your audience.
Here is a quick breakdown of a few things to consider for web accessibility:
- Alt Attribute - Often referred to as the “Alt Tag”, but it’s not a tag. This attribute is for images and describes to the disabled, using screen readers, what your images are about. It also tells search engines what your images are of as well.
- Access Keys - This helps the disabled navigate easily by using keys. These can be used with a combination of the ALT key and a letter of the alphabet that you assigned to a section of navigation.
- Color Scheme - Make sure your colors contrast. Color blind users need to be able to read text on a contrasting background color. There are many different types of color blindness. Check out Wikipedia to learn more.
- Font Size - Never keep your fonts at a fixed size, and use large fonts. If you’re using CSS, use “em”s or a percentage so users can be flexible in changing the font. Also, make sure it doesn’t break your layout if they do. Use the sliding doors technique for navigation.
- Navigation - Make sure you have your navigation in text and not images. If you must use images make sure your Alt attribute is descriptive.
- Jump To Content - Offer a link at the top for the user to click to jump the content through an anchor. This way screen readers don’t have to keep reading your navigation over and over to the user for each page they visit.
- Languages - Offer your site in different languages. You can achieve this by using Google to translate your page or Geo-targeting with IP addresses.
For more on accessibility check the government’s Section 508
Jan
22
CSS is nothing new. Web designers have been using CSS to style text on their sites since the 90’s. So when a Web developer tells you they know CSS or has it listed on their resume. Do they really know CSS?
CSS now is used to separate style from content. What do I mean by this? Your CSS stylesheet should be used to specify all design elements within your Website, and your content should be displayed in your XHTML document.
Why not just put it together in a XHTML table-based layout? Many reasons! For starters:
- If you want to change an styled element on your site. Just change in in your CSS stylesheet and it will change in every instance it’s in across your whole entire Website.
- A browser only has to render your stylesheet once to use on every page as opposed to table-based layouts where it has to redownload the style of the page for each page it visits. This means quicker load times and a better text to code ratio. A good text to good ratio is especially good for Google AdSense becaue AdSense bases relevant ads to your topic on your content and when all the content it’s scraping is mainly table structured code then it lowers your relevance. Also, a quicker load times means better search engine rankings because it proves better usability and bots can crawl the code quicker and get right to the content easily without sifting through nested tables. After all CONTENT IS KING!
- Everybody’s doing it! All profressional Web designers knows that tables are out the door. They only should be used for displaying data. So hop on board or get left in the dust.
Unfortunately, Internet Exploder’s browser support has been very weak for CSS, and yes, even with the improvements of IE7. There are CSS hacks to get around all that though. CSS layouts take a bit more time to put together due having to hack them to be cross-browser compatiable, but the benefits are worth it.
Here’s a few CSS layout sites we’ve done:
