Looks matter - Why savvy small businesses redesign their websites regularly

Thursday, February 09, 2012

Great design is about much more than beauty. It's also about functionality. And, whether we like it or not, there's an element of fashion too. All you need to do is keep a weather eye on Twitter and you'll notice a constant stream of people announcing site redesigns. Follow a few links and you'll notice how different websites look these days. 

Yesterday I ran across one of those text only sites from the very early days of the internet. Weirdly it was still ranking in Google, but that's another story! 

The page had a white background with four different text sizes and four different fonts, one of which was Times Roman. Which is a lovely font. But it looks very odd in an online context when almost everyone uses sans serif fonts for readability. Big, bright blue headers were emboldened and underlined, with red subheads and black body text. No illustrations or images, no interactivity, no columns... just a page that looked exactly like a very amateur, poorly formatted Word document. It was extremely nasty to look at and didn't exactly encourage trust. Quite the opposite.

Whether you consciously realise it or not, when you spend time online you become accustomed to the way new sites look and over time, ageing sites start to look old fashioned. 

A redesign can make your site work better, load faster and provide a much more enjoyable visitor experience. It can make your sales conversion process smoother, more efficient and more logical when your designer brings the latest technologies and tools into play. A redesign can even help boost your site's visibility in the search engine results by using the latest coding protocols and taking SEO into account automatically. 

An attractive, modern, crisp website with a nice, simple flat structure can do wonders for your bottom line. If your site is more than three years old, it's high time you took another look. 

Our Chris is your man, and he designs directly onto one of the planet's best back end CMSs, the marvellous Adobe Business Catalyst platform. 

What makes a great web designer?

Thursday, September 01, 2011

Web design's a funny thing. In almost every other walk of life a designer is someone who is formally qualified in design. But things are different online, where almost anyone with a basic knowledge of .hmtl code can set up as a web designer. And they do. So what does a real designer bring to the ecommerce party?

They have all the coding skills you could possible want. That's the easy bit, the stuff anyone can learn if they put their mind to it. But professional graphic designers are creatives as well as coders. They understand how to create serious eye candy as well as a fully functional, logical graphical user interface that visitors enjoy navigating because it's easy and intuitive. Which is the perfect combination when you want to make lots of lucrative sales.    

They know how to put colours together to create a specified effect. They realise it's no good putting dark grey text on a black background because while it looks enormously cool and classy, it's almost impossible to read on-screen. They understand that colours have tones and using them intelligently has an enormous visual and commercial impact. 

Proper designers have a keen appreciation of how the human eye tracks a page. They know how colours contrast and play with one another to deliver a powerful message that suits your brand down to the ground. And they're masters at using clear, readable fonts so impatient, time-poor site visitors can read page content without going cross-eyed.

Because they're totally familiar with the power of images, they choose photos and illustrations that support your sales message strongly and reflect your business's culture correctly.  

Last but not least they know how to express your business's sales journey in a graphic format so the design and layout speaks loudly and clearly, driving enquiries and sales home to a positive conclusion.  

If you've ever landed on then left a site because it's too much of a challenge to find stuff, is hard to read, looks like a dog or doesn't really reflect the personality and purpose of the business it's representing, it has probably been designed by someone with good coding skills but very little genuine creative ability. 

Someone like our Chris designs up a storm. His sites look gorgeous and work perfectly to maximise profit. He's been to art college and he's a real-life proper web designer. You can't do better than that. 

Musings on Adobe Muse (Code name)

Monday, August 15, 2011

Designing websites just got a lot more fun, Adobe Muse is now in public beta, well worth a look.

Having had the privilege of being on the private beta for Adobe Muse since February I have really been enjoying getting to know what you can do with it and I have to say for me it's really put the excitement back into designing websites in a much more approachable, intuitive and visual way.

The fact that you can concentrate on your design and leave the code generation to Muse is pretty amazing, it validates and is cross browser compatible from what I've checked, not bad for machine written code! I know this will most likely cause some concern within certain web design circles but more on that later.

As a full Adobe Business Catalyst partner(BC) I am particularly interested in how as Muse develops in conjunction with BC. You already have the ability to add a lot of the cool BC functionality and therefore leverage the power of data capture and the other useful modules but it's still early days, I think we'll see a lot better integration going forward, the Muse team are very proactive.

Of course you don't have use any of the BC features at all, you can export out your site and host it anywhere you like. I have found this useful for creating simple sub-sites and hosting them elsewhere.

I think one of Muse's strong points is the really clean user interface, there's no bloated feature set just useful things in logical places once you've familiarised yourself with the application. As it's now in public beta I'm sure the feature set will grow, there are a few things I would like to see in future releases and I'm sure they'll come but I hope not to the detriment of the interface.

The Muse process is a four step one, Plan, Design, Preview and Publish. The Planning section is where you build out the core structure of your site, you can set-up multiple master pages as required and drag and drop pages onto pages to build the navigation.

In the Design section you set up your header, body and footer section dimensions if you need to and then get on with designing your page, adding elements and image assets as needed.

I'm sure everyone will have different types of workflow using Photoshop or Fireworks etc to create the visuals and then saving out the image elements to be assembled/placed in Muse. I've been playing around designing straight in Muse and it works just fine if you know what you want to achieve in your head or have planned it out on paper.

There's integration with Photoshop placed buttons and images and like other Adobe apps you can edit your images with the original creating app via the assets panel to open whatever image or logo you click on whilst holding down the CTRL key.(Mac) Worth remembering, as this key features a lot in getting to other commands within Muse.

Currently Muse comes with some handy widgets from its widget library, there are some useful standard web elements in here to get you started, and I would think there will be more in time.

• Compositions: Blank, Featured news, Lightbox display, Presentation and Tooltip.
• Menus: Bar, Horizontal and Vertical.
• Panels: Accordion and Tabbed Panels.
• Slideshows: Basic, LightBox and Thumbnails.

All of which are customisable to your hearts content.

There's also some great typographic controls.

The Preview section allows you to see how your pages/site is looking and navigating or you can preview in your default browser. I imagine that a later release will allow you to choose different browsers you may have available. For now you could export the site to your desktop and open the index page with the browser or upload the site and use Adobe Browser Lab.

The last step is Publish, this is where you can log-in to your BC portal if you're already a partner or sign-up for a new account should you wish too. If you don't want to do this you can go to File, Export as HTML and Muse will create a folder with all the relevant structure and files etc where you tell it to, then simply upload to your hosting of choice via FTP and that's it.

Going back to the code that Muse creates, I wrote a post on the Muse portal with my take on this and rather than rewrite it all over again it appears here as well, I'm re-purposing so please excuse a couple of repetitive bits.

Semantic mark-up and well structured code has it's place and all that but I do often wonder who's it actually for, the client or the person that wrote it!

Most clients I deal with wouldn't have a clue what it is and probably wouldn't care much either as long as their site worked, looked good and was found in the first place.

In reality I think if you were to say to most potential clients here's a cost to design and build a site with Muse and here's a cost to hand code the same site semantically only it's three times as much and then explain what the difference actually is, I'm betting most will go for the Muse option.

Speaking as a designer that knows a bit about code (doesn't mean I like it much but I do appreciate the skill of good mark-up) this is where I think Muse is on the money, it's a pleasure to design with and saves a lot of development time. What is also a credit to the skills of the Muse team is that the machine written code that Muse produces actually validates, although I admit that gets a little bit iffy if there's a BC form in there, but you get my drift and I'm sure the integration will get better! (little bias here as I'm a partner on BC!)

I think t.mikael.d's original post is a great idea but I guess in the scheme of things it falls into the nice to have at this point in the Muse development cycle.

I feel that for me, Muse in conjunction with BC does most definitely have the potential to cover most clients needs, it won't always be perfect, I don't think there's such a solution and sometimes it may not be suitable at all but there will always be other alternatives.

Considering what you can now design and develop in a fairly short amount of time with Muse and BC these are powerful tools that allow us to build powerful online businesses for our clients at a fraction of the cost it would have been not that long ago.

Long live semantic hand coded mark up for those business owners that want it and can afford to pay for it. However for those that don't and can't Muse can help get them on the road and I think that can only be a good thing.

So there you have it, my musings on Muse, I think it's a great product that will only get better and better as it moves through the development cycle. It might not be for everyone but for those that choose to give it a go, I think you'll enjoy the experience and hopefully make something you're proud of.

To find out more and to download the beta visit the new public Adobe Muse site here

Great design plus powerful content equals business success

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Ecommerce, whatever sector you're in, is horribly competitive. More than 44 million of us had internet access in 2010. Smartphone use is rocketing. Social network marketing is booming. Millions of new sites appear on the internet every day. And the SEO industry seems to be growing exponentially despite the economy's ongoing woes. 

As a result excellence across the board is absolutely critical if you want your business to be visible and successful. 

Visibility-wise you can build links 'til you're blue in the face. Create the planet's most powerful marketing campaigns. And advertise yourslf into a financial black hole. But unless your site inspires your hard-won visitors to buy, you're on a hiding to nothing. Your site's look, feel, personality, layout, logic, graphical user interface, functionality, messaging and tone are vital for maximising profit.

When you've got a great design and rock solid content in place, you benefit from more than the sum of the parts. They work in sync. The the design provides a relevant, attractive, visually interesting, practical and inspirational structure. The copy sits comfortably and elegantly within the design and, with its support, is allowed to do the best possible job of driving sales conversion.  

There's zillions of website designers out there. Loads of designers can play with code perfectly well. But people with the necessary creative gravitas, formal design education and intellectual expertise are much thinner on the ground. Your best bet is to track down a properly qualified graphic designer. Someone with a Degree in it. That's Chris, that is! So give him a call and get your ebusiness's design working at full throttle.