3 - 2018 - DESIGNIRVANA

The Most Embarrassing Designing Mistakes You Should Be Aware of

March 12, 2018 John Wells 0

Designing a website can be a Herculean task, but the real challenge is how to make it useful and pleasing in the eyes of its visitors. The problem with most of the web designers is that they follow only what is “trending in”. They often forget that it’s the users and their needs which should be their priority. Once you enter into a creative field there are a lot of things that you shouldn’t do. Giving away usability and experience in front of creativity is what that most of the web designers often do. This can have a serious impact on the overall quality of a website and can prove very costly in the long run.

In the mad rush of creating a “trendy” website, designers often sacrifice the basic elements that contribute to the overall design and experience of a website. Users don’t like to get puzzled as they crave for simplicity and design practicality. Therefore, it’s the responsibility of designers to ensure that whatever they design looks not only impressive but also offers value to its user.

In this post, we are focusing on some of the common mistakes that web designers often commit while designing a website. Hopefully, you find the post useful and learn from the tips provided. Happy reading!

1. Try Not to Confuse Your Visitors

There is a tendency among website designers that they very easily get carried away by “over-the-top” designing elements. Design is not only about beauty, but it’s also about arranging various elements in such a way that can capture the clear view of your customers’ experience. While overwhelming them with cumbersome or time-consuming elements can alienate them fast.

There is no harm of using artistic designs unless until you are making sure that they are revolving around the core of your website. Anything that’s not complimenting the objectives of your business can make users confused and thus forcing them to navigate off from your website.

2. Think About Search Box

You just can’t overstate the fact that the web is an archive of information. Irrespective of what kind of website you are designing – be a corporate or a casual one for blogging, giving a neat and clean way of information searching is a perfect way to start. A nicely designed search box helps your visitors to explore your website in the most effective manner. Take Google’s search box as an example; the box looks clean and gives an efficient way for searching anything visitors look for.

3. Too Much Advertisements Suck

True, advertising is an effective way of expanding your customers reach and take your business ahead. But, overloading your website with a variety of third-party ads can negatively influence the perspective of your customers.

The biggest problem of displaying third-party ads is that in a way you are giving an opportunity to some other brand to make revenue through your website. And the worst part is, the random appearance of these ads generally lead to customer frustration and ultimately force them to navigate off from your website.

4. Font Overload

A clear and well-organized design attracts user’s attraction and therefore it is important to make use of the fonts that give a neat and clean look to your website. You need to ensure that your type appears consistent, so don’t complicate your user’s experience by overburdening your website with loads of different fonts.

As the rule of thumb, make sure you choose one or two readable fonts on your website, which can be used to differentiate and highlight significant areas. This helps your visitors to understand the most important sections of your website and make them grasp the content in the best possible manner.

5. Pages Loading in a Rag-tag Manner

Paying attention to the speed at which your pages are loading in front of the visitors will serve you well. Customers find websites frustrating that take too much time to load or break up while responding. If a website fails to display the key content right to the audience, it can be assumed that the set of code used while developing it are not compatible with all types of browsers, or it can be said that the codes are not organized properly. This type of problems can make a website vulnerable to security attacks and dropping from search engines.

6. Inconsistent Design of Interface

There is a tendency among web designers to take creative elements to another level by creating different designs for each and every page. This is something that really confuses your visitors, something which is utterly annoying. No matter how attractive and over-the-top website you have designed, if the overall look and feel are not in-tune with each other, users cannot establish any link with the website and feel less committed towards it.

Therefore, it is crucial to make use of a consistent theme in every page provided with the links for the main section of the website. Design should be friendly enough to make your visitors feel controlled and directed towards your website.

7. Outdated or Grammatically Incorrect Content

Websites that include old, outdated content often fail to leave any positive impression in the mind of its users. It is crucial for web owners to ensure that their website uses fresh or updated content for desirable results. Fresh content helps in a good website ranking and also shows your active participation in reaching to your customers.

Not only this, but the content you publish on your website should also be grammatically correct. Make sure you proofread each and every article before publishing it finally.

Conclusion

Your website is your business, therefore it is necessary to show visitors that you are serious about your business by giving them a clean, friendly, and easy to navigate website, thus open up new possibilities for you.

Whitespaces- A must-have design element for enhancing website usability

March 10, 2018 John Wells 0

The world of web design is evolving at a faster rate, making the emergence and fading away of different web design trends. Originally coined in the print design industry, whitespace is a design element which has gathered a tremendous amount of recognition among website designers residing in different parts of the world. Keep on reading this post as I’ll be unveiling everything about whitespaces and their role in enhancing the overall usability of the website.

What are Whitespaces?

Popularly known as negative spaces, white spaces are basically the portions of a web page which have been left unmarked or blank. To put it simply, white spaces are the spaces between graphics, images, columns, margins, graphics and a collection of elements spread all over the web page. These are the spaces which have been left untouched intentionally, so as to make the page more readable and thoroughly understandable.

Unleashing the potential of Whitespaces in enhancing a website’s usability

Whitespaces are in a way the welcoming signals for website visitors, encouraging them to stay on the site for longer durations of time.

Here’s a look at some of the ways in which including whitespaces in your web design can increase the user experience for your website:

1. Enhanced readability is guaranteed with the use of whitespaces

The more readable your site is, the more number of customers you can expect to visit your site on a regular basis. Well, content readability depends on a number of factors including font size and color, font type, text structure and many more. With the use of whitespaces, you can easily organize the arrangement and alignment of different text elements, right from large paragraphs to single letters.

2. Whitespaces add an emotional touch to your design

White spaces don’t necessarily have to be white in color. They can be of any color or pattern you like. Since background colors have a huge emotional effect on us, you can conveniently opt for using parallax scrolling for adding interactivity in your designs. Moreover, the tone that you set for your whitespaces will play a pivotal role in affecting the way site visitors receive your content. Considered as an autonomous design element, whitespace undoubtedly has a brilliant effect on your design.

3. A high level of comprehension is guaranteed with the use of whitespaces

As per recent research, it has been found that white spaces have the capability of increasing comprehension by a whopping 20%. By including white spaces around the text blocks and between paragraphs, you can easily improve the understandability of your web pages.

4. Whitespaces come with a contemporary look and feel

A web page filled with the right quantity of whitespaces can easily enhance the usability of your site. Moreover, it can also add to its visual appeal in the most refined manner. Ever since the trend of minimalistic websites has come under focus, whitespaces have been regarded as the best tools for achieving a perfect trustworthy look for the sites. Specifically talking about e-commerce websites, rendering extra space to the display of products makes them look stunning and more tempting.

5. Logical grouping becomes feasible with the use of whitespaces

Irrespective of the main theme behind your site, there are situations when you need to group some particular names, categories etc. It is here that the role of whitespaces comes to play. By adding white spaces between different lists, you can opt for creating groups which are fully logical and easy-to-interpret.

6. Legibility of a web page is determined by the use of whitespaces

Using white spaces at the micro level i.e. during kerning, leading or tracking can easily help in improving or destroying the web page legibility. If you need to accommodate a lot of content in a small amount of space, all you need to do is simply increase the leading or tracking for making the text easier-to-read.

7. Maintaining tidiness throughout the web pages is possible with whitespaces

It is with the correct use of whitespaces that your site can attain that perfect tidy look and feel. Apart from choosing the right layout or color scheme, including the white spaces in the right proportion can add a unique tint of individuality into your website.

Wrapping Up

There have always been arguments regarding the significance and usage of whitespaces. Here’s hoping after reading this post, you’d have gathered a detailed understanding of the same for all your upcoming web design ventures.

Using An Appropriate Coloring System While Designing Your Website

March 10, 2018 John Wells 0

Buying and selling are no longer a haggle and waggle process. We have reached to such an advanced level of web development that we are not just using it for doing our work easy, but to disseminate and cater clients of business outright. To sell better, online sellers are now delving into neuromarketing to expand their customer and are covering intricate nuances that can plausibly affect the buying decision of a user. One of the important factors is color.

The first impression is the last impression! Quite a cliché, but you cannot ignore this, and I am not the only one saying this, as a study tells the same.

“If a good color sells, the right color sells better.”

Color theory is a proper guide to mixing proper color to come up with a proper color scheme that can help us to create imposing web designs. It is not just the functionalities that work in tandem, but even the colors also work in tandem to create an imposing effect on your website.

Color theory is a comprehensive guide that allows the users to pick up colors. Colors are further classified into three categories such as primary, secondary and tertiary and are also defined accordingly.

This is not a new concept, as it was discovered back then in c.1435 in the journals of Leone Battista Alberti and then in c.1490 in the writings of Leonardo da Vinci. However, the vision sciences and colorimetry gained grounds back in the eighteenth century.

Now in this century, we have come across the fact that colors invoke emotion and affect the purchasing decision of buyers.

Basic issues in the Color Theory

Pure or ideal colors were the basis on which the color theory was built, and it was dependent on the sensory experience rather than considering the attributes of the physical world. This has resulted in the inclusion of several inaccuracies in the theory, and this cannot be at times not remedied in the modern usage as well.

One of the most important problems is the mixing of the behavior of light mixtures, and they are known as the additive colors. Further, the mixtures of paint, ink, dye or pigment mixtures are called as subtractive colors. The prime reason for this is that the there are different rules that work between light by which light gets absorbed by material substances.

The second problem is that it does not describe the luminance contrast in which a surface reflects a color which is different from the color of lights. For instance, we have colors such as ochres that cannot appear in the mixture of light. Due to strong brightness and lightness contrast, there are times when colors appear different from what they actually are.

Lastly, the third problem is the tendency to elaborate the holistic effect of colors. For instance, the contract between “blue” and “yellow” is perceived as generic colors. Mostly the color in contrasts are based on three attributes that are:

lightness (which can be said as light vs. dark),
saturation
hue or color (e.g., red, orange, yellow, green, blue or purple).

Color harmony

All in all our basic motive as a web designer is to bring the colors in harmony, which implies that when the colors are seen together, they tend to produce a pleasing effect on the viewers’ eyes. Though achieving color harmony is quite a complex task as colors have a cognitive as well as an effective impact on users, and thus, emotions come in to play while judging things.

The way we respond to color and the impact of color harmony brings us to a series of different factors. Further, these factors are categorized into individual differences such as personal likings, monetary condition, gender, age, and others. Further, there are places where colors also invoke social stigmas depending on the religious or cultural beliefs of people. This must also be put into consideration which picking up your hues.

Along with this, the context has always played a crucial role in the response to users and color harmony. Moreover, factors such as emerging trend and perceptions that affect the human responses,

Mentioned below is the model to with the color harmony nowadays:

{Color harmony} = f(text{Col} 1, 2, 3, dots, n) cdot (ID + CE + CX + P + T)

Function (f) denotes color harmony within colors that are specified as (Col 1, 2, 3, …, n) and the factors that impinge positive responses.

ID- stands for individual differences
CE- cultural experience
CX- context
P- obtrusive perceptual effects
T- time as in the trends that are in vogue.

How many colors should you use?

Picking a color for your website is quite a contentious questions as there might be situations where the designer do not like a particular color or you being the website owner do not like what the designer has picked up for you.

However, it has been recommending using only to use three colors that must be quite visible to the website. One of the most logical ideas behind this is that the lesser color you use, the lesser efforts you need to put in while bringing all these color in harmony.

As designing is a part of aesthetics which means that while designing a website we can take inspiration from the famous 60-30-10 rule used by fashion and interior designers.

As per the rule, you need to select three odd colors and when it comes to usage make sure that you use to incorporate them in a ratio of 60%, 30% and 10% on your website.

This means 60% of your website will be using that particular color which is also referred to as the primary color or the overall tone in which your website will be painted.

The second color that will cover the 30% of your websites needs to be a contrasting color of the primary color and this will create a visually striking appearance.

The last color that will cover 10% of your website is termed as ‘accent color’, and this color needs to complement any of the two colors.

Tools for making your task a tad easier:

Adobe Color CC

Adobe Color CC formerly known as Adobe Kuler is an incredible tool to select a color scheme for your website. It is a web-based tool that can select a theme for your website. Though they have changed the name of the tool, the nature of the tool remains the same. Color CC allows you to create multiple themes, and each of these themes comprises of five colors. You can get desktop versions as well as browser-hosted sites. Those who have used a desktop version can directly import the color scheme formulated by this software into their designing software such as Photoshop, InDesign or any other.

Check my Colors

To check whether you have chosen the right color combination for your web design then you can make use of this incredible tool. Using this tool you can check the background and foreground color of DOM elements. This also helps to find out the contrast when viewed by a differently abled person. This software is created by Giovanni Scala, who happens to be a web designer and uses algorithms that are attested by World Wide Web Consortium.

Color Hunter

Color Hunter renders a color palette that can be of your chosen image.

In the beginning, the tool would not be work apparently quite effective. However, it is helpful in finding out a particular color if you cannot find one. What you can do is to enter that you like into Color Hunter, and then you can use this tool to create a color palette from the image that you have picked up.

Isn’t it an amazing tool to create one’s own custom theme.

All in all!

Be it an automatic design tool or your choice you need to make sure that you create the best possible impact on users. To master the art of persuasion as a developer you need to make sure to cast a good impression on your users. To attract the users, you can make use of color as bait.

This Case Study is a guest post written by a Senior Web developer. In this hyper-interactive, IT space you need to only look for comprehensive custom web Development not just of high aesthetic value, but one that renders incredible functionality.