Website Customization: What can we do?

Professional Looking Websites

Nowadays, in this trendy world, people get very uptight when they do not look entirely presentable. This would also be the case in web designing. Every individual would definitely want their website to look custom, if not, to the best they can. Here are a few things we could look out for when wanting to create a custom looking webpage.

Color Schemes, Themes, Fonts and Pictures

When designing, always choose matching colors. An example of a matching color would be to have a dark background, with visible words and designs. With the dark theme, try not to mix too many bright colors into the design. What we should NEVER do, is to mix two very different colors, such as purple and yellow. Now, of course, it would depend on the purpose of the website, but those two colors are too striking for one who wants it to look more professional.

Themes

Themes must always suit the company or rather, the organization / etc. If the website was made to cater for a food company, it would be wise to stick to that particular category, rather than to revert to a different theme, such as machinery.

Fonts

Fonts should be used in regard to the formality of the website. A simple sans-serif font would suffice in most cases. Exceptional cases such as design and art groups might want to use fanciful designs and fonts. Of course, that’s only if you know what you’re doing.

Visitors

Finally, we must always try to think of our visitors, see the way they see. The resolutions and file sizes of the pictures must not be too large in terms of size. This is to allow maximum compatibility and cater our visitor’s needs.

So, planning is something we should always do, before attempting something.

Using Icons for a Better User Interface (UI)

UX Design

Self-explanatory icons

Today’s applications – either for the Web or standalone – are starting to focus more and more on the user interface. The time when you had to write lines and lines of commands or go through several menus to execute a certain task has passed. Developers have now implemented simple wizards, with on-screen help near each important element of the application, which will make even the most complicated task look like a walk in the park. And the easiest and most efficient way to create user-friendly interfaces is to add self-explanatory icons. These small images that take a couple dozens of pixels will most of the times have more meaning than a full paragraph of text. It’s more comfortable and efficient to insert an icon than it is to write some text explaining a certain function.

Icons are very important to the user-interface. People want to use an application’s features to the maximum and don’t like it when they can’t find how to complete a specific task. This is why developers should always create shortcuts to the main tasks that can be accomplished using their application. These shortcut items must catch the user’s attention, so adding icons will do the trick in most of the cases. The icons must be related to that certain task, so, for example, a disk icon would be a great visual enhancement for a “Save” button, as a printer icon would fit perfectly inside a “Print” button. A good set of icons in the interface will greatly improve the communication between the user and the application. Icons are colorful and, in most cases, larger than the description text of the application feature they relate to; this way, they are a lot easier to be spotted.

Applications use icons

Most of today’s applications use icons, even though pretty much all developers don’t bother to implement custom designed icons into their applications. Actually, settling with the operating system’s default stock icons is not such a bad thing as some people might think. Computer users might sometimes have some problems adapting to new applications, especially if they have different interfaces than the applications already installed on the users’ computers. What happens if you want to save and you’re looking for a disk icon, but you can’t find it because the developer decided to use a star icon? If so, there will be a poor communication between the user and the application, because the interface’s icons are different from the ones the user is used to. Application developers should not fall into this trap just because they like some other icons and they don’t want to use the same old default system icons because it would do more bad than good. The default system icons are preferred because most applications use them, so users will learn to use your application a lot faster. The functions and commands will be easier to understand because users will be able to faster identify the iconic symbols.

If a developer wants to give their application a distinct look, they should use professional, custom-made icons, specially designed for their application. Today, such services are affordable, and you will be able to tell the designer how you want the icons to look like. In most cases, you shouldn’t go with a completely different look than the system’s icons (for the reasons described above), but you should try to give them a unique, personal touch; the application will stand out from the crowd and will look a lot better than the other ones, thus attracting more users. Changing colors, for example, is the easiest way to get new, yet similar icons.

Predict all problems

To have a good communication between the user and the application, developers must predict all the possible problems that the interface could cause its users. Are the buttons too small? Are they too big? Can the toolbars be moved around the screen? How about the menus, can users add new items to them? Also, can they replace the icons and other graphics with some of their own? How about users with special needs?

Unfortunately, there are a lot of developers that disregard such problems and create rigid interfaces, which cannot be changed by the users to better suit them. A simple answer to this problem is to create multiple skins, with different colors and different icons. The application should have a “standard” skin to start with, and then a few different skins, for example, a minimalistic skin with only a few main buttons and large icons, or an “expanded” skin with many toolbars and buttons, each with their own small icon.

Also, a skin with high contrast colors and icons will be very appreciated by the users with eye problems. Apart from all these, developers should also allow users to create their own custom skin and use different icons. There are multiple benefits from using icons in an application interface. No matter whether an application uses the operating system’s default icons or has custom-made icons designed especially for it, there must be some form of graphics in it, otherwise, people might find it harder to use. This may happen because most of the today’s application use icons to ease the learning of the application. Because most applications use similar icons in certain tasks – for example, a printer icon for printing or a disk button for saving files – it’s a lot faster for users to click on those buttons, therefore they will remember it next time they use that application or any other application for that matter. Even if later on advanced users will choose to use shortcut keys on the keyboard instead of clicking with the mouse on buttons in the toolbars, it’s really important that for starters they will use the toolbar, so icons will be very important in the communication with the application.

Web Design Tips And Techniques For Site Usability

UX Design

Website design is most important

If you are a web designer or a UI designer, website design is one of the most important tasks you do. In designing a site, you need to create a design that is easy for users to use, is compatible with different systems, and is search engine friendly.

Making a site that is user-friendly:

In some ways, creating a user-friendly site is just common sense – other aspects are not so obvious, though. Obviously, you’ll want to make the text easy to read, the navigation links easy to find, etc. Here are a few other tips:

Put contact information on every page.
Make it obvious what you want the user to do after reading a page.
Make it easy for the user to reach your homepage from any other page

Making a site that is cross-platform compatible:

The main factors you need to consider in platform compatibility are the user’s browser, screen resolution, color depth, and plugins.

Browser compatibility is easy – just test your site in various browsers, and fix any incompatibilities. The same for screen resolution – just be sure that your site looks good and is easily navigated with any common screen resolution. Color depth is also relatively simple. Just restrict your design to using web safe colors.

Plug-ins can be a little more complicated. If at all possible, try to use media that is compatible with most versions of a plugin. For example, try not to use a flash movie that requires the latest version of a flash player.

Making a site that is search engine friendly:

The biggest thing you can do to make your site friendly to the search engines is to give it a good link structure. Be sure that each page on your site is linked to from at least two other pages with a plain text link. Image links are OK, but not as good as optimized text links. Javascript and flash links are very bad for search engine usability.

Web Design, Development And Testing

UX Design

Building web applications

Many organizations are interested in building web applications for their business but are unaware of the various steps that are needed to build a compelling web application. In this article, I will attempt to put together the various pieces of the puzzle. Application development involves several distinct efforts that need to come together to build a compelling end product. A compelling end product is the combination of design, development architecture, development implementation, automated regression and functional testing and performance and load testing.

Design:

People often confuse design with development. Moreover, even within the design, user interface design is often confused with graphics design. Web user interface design involves the design of the flow of the website and the layout of the specific web pages within the website. The web user interface designer concentrates on the usability of the application. The user interface designer will typically develop “wireframes” using tools like Adobe Photoshop to convey the design. These are often initially developed as prototypes and usability testing is carried with user groups out to ensure that the web application will be intuitive and easy to use. Graphics design, on the other hand, relates to the aesthetics of the page. The graphics designer is responsible for the aesthetic layout of the pages and the creation of the various graphical objects inside the pages such as images and flash objects. The graphics Designer will typically use a combination of tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Captivate to create the actual graphics objects. A designer will need to work closely with other groups to make sure the design process does not compromise the performance of the application by making sure that the graphics objects are small thus ensuring that the various web performance metrics are unaffected.

Development:

This involves converting the design into an actual application. The development typically involves an architectural phase where the underlying modules that make up the application are scoped out. If persistent data storage is needed, a database schema should be designed to accommodate the data storage needs. The choice of the operating system (e.g. Windows, or Linux ) where the web application will run, the web server (e.g. Microsoft IIS, Apache or Tomcat) which will run the web application and the back end database (e.g. Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL or MongoDB) which stores the data will need to be made. Various development frameworks are available to build web applications. The most common ones are ASP, JSP, PHP, and Perl that are open source. The choice of the application framework is typically dictated by the strengths of the members of the development team. The architectural phase is followed by the implementation phase. This is typically the longest part of the project and during this phase, the actual code is written using the design specifications and graphics objects developed by the design team. The programming will typically be done using a combination of the application frameworks mentioned earlier together with HTML, JavaScript and CSS style sheets.

Quality Assurance and Testing:

A surprising number of people are of the view that quality assurance and testing is desirable but is not actually needed. Unfortunately, this view has its roots in total ignorance of the process that is needed to build a good end product. Regardless of how pretty or slick we make the application, if it does not work as expected, users will reject it. Quality assurance and testing involve two different kinds of tasks. Functional and regression testing is used to verify that the developed application is doing what it is supposed to do. This is achieved by test automation using a functional testing tool. Load and Performance testing is used to ensure that the application performs as intended when it is subjected to the typical load of a production environment. Load testing is practically speaking impossible to perform without using an automated load testing tool since it involves the simulation of a large number of concurrent virtual users. This effect cannot really be achieved manually and needs the assistance of an application that is designed to subject the application to a specified load and then measure its performance when it is subjected to that load. Quality Assurance teams will need to track the bugs or defects in the application using bug tracking tools. Such tools will allow defects to be tracked by all members of the team.

The three groups mentioned above tend to be specialized for their skill set. As an example, people often make the mistake of using developers as quality assurance testers. This is not a wise strategy because most developers who are good at writing software are quite poor at finding bugs or defects in their own software.

Writing good and compelling web applications requires an understanding of all phases of the process, design, development and quality assurance. Skipping phases or taking shortcuts will result in low-quality software that will generally cost more in the long run.

Top 3 Most Used Tools in Photoshop

UX Design

Most used tools in Photoshop

In this article, I will show how to use the Top 3 most used tools in Photoshop (Magic Wand Tool, Move Tool, and the Crop Tool) and once mastered you’ll never be without them.

1. Magic Wand:

The Magic Wand Tool (W) selects areas of similar color You can change the tolerance (how close the color values should be to the sampled color in order to be selected) of a Magic Wand selection, and choose whether you want the selection to be contiguous (pixels that are touching) or not (in which case, matching colors across the entire document will be selected)

Tips and Shortcuts for the Magic Wand:

Hold the Shift key to add another selection to the first.
Hold the Alt key (Option key on a Mac) to subtract your new selection from the first.
Hold Shift-Alt (Shift-Option) to select the intersection of your first and second selections.
Use the arrow keys to move the selection pixel by pixel If you feel that this doesn’t move your selection quickly enough, hold down Shift and use the arrow keys to move the selection ten pixels at a time.
Press Ctrl-J (Command-J on a Mac) to copy the selection into its own layer.
To cut the selection into its own layer, press Shift-Ctrl-J (Shift-Command-J)
If this seems familiar to you, it’s because I mentioned earlier how to copy a layer using the same keyboard shortcut Now that you know that not selecting anything sometimes means that everything is selected, it makes sense that simply by selecting a layer in the Layers palette, you can copy the entire layer by pressing Ctrl-J (Command-J)
To deselect a selected area, click outside of it with one of the Marquee tools, or press Ctrl-D (Command-D on a Mac)
To reactivate your last selection, press Shift-Ctrl-D (Shift-Command-D)

2. The Move Tool:

The Move Tool (V) moves a selected area or an entire layer. You can invoke the Move Tool temporarily when using most other tools by holding down the Ctrl key (Command key on a Mac)

Tips and Shortcuts for the Move Tool:

For most tools, holding Ctrl-Alt (Command-Option on a Mac) and dragging a selected area will temporarily invoke the Move Tool, allowing you to move and duplicate the selected layer quickly
You can also duplicate a layer by holding down the Alt key (Option key on a Mac) while using the Move Tool.

3. The Crop Tool:

The Crop Tool (C) is used to trim images Create a selection using the Crop Tool, then double-click the center of the selection or press Enter, to crop the image to the size of the selection To cancel without cropping, select another tool or press the Esc key

Tips and Shortcuts for the Crop Tool:

You can use the Crop Tool to resize your canvas Expand your document window so that it’s larger than the image area, and create a crop selection that includes the image and extends onto the gray areas “outside” the image Applying this crop will resize your canvas to include those extended boundaries, making your canvas larger.

The Key to Better Website Navigation

UX Design

Importance of the latter:

One of the primary implications of a well-organized / good website is to keep your visitors on the website. A website is definitely created for a purpose unless intended for personal use, which is the minority. For example, a portfolio website would want to be visited and it’s content viewed. For companies and internet businesses, your website certainly aims to provide product information, to make sales, or somewhat similar. However, most individuals undoubtedly prefer visually captivating designs, so on and so forth. It is undeniable that this causes no harm, but one must put himself/herself in other people’s shoes, as to understand how a visitor to the website might think, do and react.

The Navigation Situations:

As I said, a web designer has to learn how to think the way your visitors think.

Situation A: Website with good navigation (2-3 hyperlinks to target page ), well planned in terms of placement, and design.

Situation B: Website with poor navigation ( takes forever for the visitor to reach his/her target page ), hard-to-read navigation fonts and poor placement of the navigation buttons/bar.

In Situation A, a visitor will always want to be able to access his/her target page. For example, the individual comes across your website, and is interested in the product sold, but wants to find more information. He/she finds the navigation with no trouble and enters the particular product information page.

As for Situation B, a visitor stumbles into the website, and would also like to find out more information about the product. Unfortunately, due to bad placement and fanciful font-types, the visitor takes forever or even fails to find the navigation bar. Even when he/she does so, links to the product information are nowhere to be found, (example: home > about > products > product image > etc…[a few more clicks] > product information ).

VERSUS

Analysis:

In both situations, wouldn’t a website with characteristics similar to the Situation A be more rewarding ergo better?

10 Tips To Design The Most Creative Website

UX Design

Website first impression

If we would like to develop your company on the web, then it’s necessary to create the most creative website, so people can visit your website and want to take the information about your services and products. It is said that the first impression is the last impression and your website is the first impression to your target prospective clients. The impression should be developed by your creative website in visitor’s mind so it’s essential to create a more creative website for the first impression on our client’s mentality so they want to visit our site again. To design the most creative website, follow below tips.

1. About Pages

If you want to get the ideas of your visitors, then feedback is necessary. Contact us page is also advisable to start a relationship with you and your clients. You must give a contact form so visitors can contact you directly and you can give support completely. About us, the web page must be included to provide the information about your company. The information can be the year of establishment, your growth, and the name of the country from where you operate. Homepage must be included with links to all the other Web Pages. All web pages must be given and the link to home page.

2. Attractive

Your website should be attractive. The color selection for the pages has to look nice. The color of background has to be light and design has to be attracted by visitor first look.

3. Professional

Your website should be professional, in proper title pages. The content must be placed and unnecessary content must be avoided in a proper way. At first sight, it should be able to show the visitor’s interest in continuing your website.

4. Small size of web pages

Web Pages should also be good looking and creative as well. Web Pages must not be very comprehensive. Surfing of these types of websites will be simply avoided.

5. Content

Content is not an issue; the issue is to look at expressions in Web Pages. The background of the web page should be light and text should be dark, it will be impressive. To read the text easily, the background should not be dark. All the fonts of the Web Pages should be chosen properly which are easily available on every computer. In this case, visitors do not need to install new fonts in the computer to read your text of your webpage. They can surf and read your site easily.

6. Headers: H1, H2, H3

To separate content and if you want to emphasize something, you should use header tags. Don’t use header tags in every sentence, it is hard to read.

7. Grammar

You should not be careless in the text which is written on the webpage. You must not make any mistakes which may prove your ineffectiveness. Before finalizing the text of your Web Pages, you must check it. Any grammatical mistakes must not be made.

8. Background Images

You should keep minimum background images. Generally, it makes your pages harder to view and read.

9. Image Formats

Generally, designers are using two types of formats GIF and JPEG. Let’s know the difference between both formats. GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. For different types of images, this format is better with only some different colors like drawing, black and white images and little content that will be little pixels high. It is also supporting transparency. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. It supports 16 million colors which are the best suited for photographs and complex graphics. It does not work well online drawings, lettering or simple graphics.

10. Frames

When you are using frames on your website, it makes website ugly, confusing and more complicated. Thus, the expert web designing companies have the best skills to design and online marketing skill and know that how to develop a website that should be one of the most favorable advertising tools in the biggest market in the world.

Photoshop is Changing The World

UX Design

Adobe Photoshop

“To see is to believe” is what most people say. However, this old adage, like so many others, has been negated by technology. Today, with Adobe Photoshop, you can create any image you want and share it with other people. This way, Adobe Photoshop is changing the whole world’s perspective on reality.

For those who do not know, Adobe Photoshop is a program designed to let people edit various images on their computers. Its primary purpose is to let people perform touch-ups on pictures before printing them. Of course, each succeeding version of Adobe Photoshop included more and more tools which let people add effects and do various other things to their photographs. The Adobe Photoshop of today actually allows people to add sound and animation to their photographs for sharing on the internet.

Beyond image editing

In the past, people who took bad pictures were stuck with them. A lot of things can go wrong in a picture. There’s the usual red-eye, skewed angles, shaky focus, and others. Adobe Photoshop was the tool that made all of these things disappear. With Adobe Photoshop, people can take pictures like amateurs and still produce images like pros!

However, Adobe Photoshop today has gone beyond image editing. Today, the software is labeled as an image manipulation tool. This somehow gives people the impression that Adobe Photoshop actually gives them a greater degree of freedom than other image-editing programs available today. In fact, it actually does.

If the sight is the reality, then Adobe Photoshop can help you create any reality that you want. With Adobe Photoshop, you will be able to create images of other worlds. You will be able to capture the beauty of the universe inside a glass jar. Your creativity will be unleashed. That’s how much Adobe Photoshop can change your life.

Photoshopping something

In the world today, one can easily observe the impact that Adobe Photoshop has wrought on culture. Just like Google, Adobe Photoshop is now being used by people as a verb. When a person is said to be photoshopping something, it is always assumed that the person is editing an image of some sort, whether he or she is actually using Adobe Photoshop or not.

Adobe Photoshop has also led to a whole new level of art and animation. Did you know that tablets were developed specifically with Adobe Photoshop in mind? Artists of today have gone beyond using paints and a canvas. Today’s painters make use of tablet sensors and Adobe Photoshop to produce their masterpieces. With the technology of Adobe Photoshop, people are able to take the art of drawing, add a bit of computer technology, and come up with a whole new genre of animation.

In the past, images had to be saved as specific file types in order to be usable for Adobe Photoshop. However, because of the proliferation of digital cameras and camera phones today, Adobe Photoshop can actually import the photographs directly from the sources. This means that the gap between taking the picture and sharing it is reduced.

Adobe Photoshop might just be a tool for some people. However, you should know that tools, when used by enough people can change history. In this age where everything is defined by computers, Adobe Photoshop is just another tool which, in the right hands, can change the world!

6 Basic Website Design Tips

UX Design

6 Simple website design tips

1. Use CSS (cascading attraction sheets).

If you follow through not apperceive CSS, ferret out it. CSS allows you to maintain the formatting of your town (e.g. the color or size of a blonde of text) on a disparate at variance page – a CSS document. Thus, with CSS you can impinge the formatting of a common-element by simply updating one piece of code on one page, rather than updating all the pages of your site. For example, if you want to change the background color of your website, you could just change your one CSS sheet and your entire website’s background color would change. Another great aspect of CSS is that you can use it to set the default properties of HTML tags. This can be used to counter browser compatibility problem – that different browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, etc.) use different default settings.

2. Test your website in all browsers.

Just now your website displays a singular rubric in one browser, doesn’t cruel it commit an act that disposal in an also browser. You should permit that your website displays properly in all of the primary following browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome, and Opera.

3. Use opens source scripts if you need to plunge into an energizing website.

Even if you undergo influential languages (such as JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL) absolutely enough to lead your receive software and features, you do not want to do that if you are a beginner. There’s no reason to create your own dynamic scripts (e.g. shopping carts, chat-rooms, etc.) if you can find full-functioning customizable open source scripts. A great benefit of this method is that the customization options will separate the code that changes your website’s look and feel from the functioning code. If you design the code yourself, you’ll be tempted to mix the look and feel with the functioning aspects. So, if later you want to update the look and feel, you’ll have to dig through the long software scripts. If you’re going to be using freeware or any other code that you didn’t design yourself, you should still be familiar with that language.

4. Don’t benediction for free or tasteless web-hosting.

Okay, this isn’t necessarily a star tip. However, hosting is the twin to design. Free hosts may emit your website with awkward ads. So, you won’t be adequate to task your region as is. Also, free and cheap hosts often don’t support dynamic websites. Unless your website is supposed to be a joke, don’t use a free host.

5. Don’t compose your email superscription on your website.

If you have a mailing directions that your customers can betterment to discharge you or your business, make public that on your website. Website’s with a phone embrace or mailing directions loom much more reliable and honest than websites without contact information. However, don’t publish your email address, because spammers will use web-crawlers will to pick it up. Instead, design a form on your website that customers can use to send messages or questions without giving your email address.

6. Take it slow.

Unfortunately, the own disposal to alter to a brilliant designer is considering experience, but your vim can’t render sloppy pages. Don’t go to generate confused and dynamic websites without the ability. If you try to design a code, but find it hard and the code begins to come out sloppy, don’t hesitate to just throw it out. It’s better to have a simple, sleek, and functional website than to have a complex, sloppy, dysfunctional website.

Where to Find Graphic Design Jobs

UX Design

Good graphic design jobs abound

Whether you are just out of school or simply feeling ready for something new, good graphic design jobs abound. We are living in a visual society; most of us spend hours on the internet perusing site after site. Every one of these sites has visuals, and those visuals were designed by someone. That someone could be you. And even if you don’t want to explore graphic design jobs centered around the web, there are so many other areas, packaging, print design, advertising, marketing and within all of these areas there are graphic design jobs that you may be able to fill.

Where do I start?

Start looking on the internet. Enter “graphic design jobs” into your favorite search engine and start exploring. You’ll find many different types of sites – almost all involve job searches by type of job and location. If you want to apply for any of these jobs you will need your resume and portfolio. So be ready. Some will be standard job search sites and others will be professional organizations. Spend some time just looking through the sites and saving sites that you will want to return to. I recommend making a “graphic design jobs search” folder in the “favorites” or “bookmarks” section of your browser. Use this when you save the links you want to return to.

If you are a member of a professional organization this is a great place to go first. As a student, you can join reasonably. Often there are o associate memberships that are also economical. Being a member of a professional organization also looks good and adds credibility to your resume.

Preparing for your graphic design jobs search.

You know where you want to go. Now you need to get ready. Is your resume ready? You can find sites on the internet that show you how to write resumes and give you guidelines for assessing the one you currently have. If you think you need more experience to include in your resume, volunteer to do some jobs for non-profit organizations. Make sure you do an excellent job and ask them if they will be a reference you can include on your resume.

You will also need a portfolio in your search for graphic design jobs. There are several kinds of portfolios – paper, web and DVD/CD portfolios. Again, you can learn a lot about refining your portfolio by searching the internet for information about designing a portfolio. Many of the job search sites, especially professional organizations allow you to upload your portfolio to their site, along with your resume. With others, you can post your resume, but not the portfolio.

It may be worth the time and money to have your own website so that you can put a link to your portfolio in your resume. If your search for graphic design jobs includes web design, then make sure that your website is a reflection of the work that you can do in this area. Take time with it. Keep refining and changing it. Ask people to view it and give you comments, especially past instructors or mentors. In fact, it’s a good idea to have your present or past instructors or mentors review all your job search materials, resume, portfolio, DVD/CD, and website.

Now, you are ready to find graphic design jobs that fit your skills and talent.