Dynamic website design: The creative group design their dynamic website for growth.
Dynamic website design: The creative group design their dynamic website for growth.
Tackling each web design project with passion and determination, we’ve
been working hard to turn heads for our partners. Here are a few of our
projects that not only deliver great customer experiences, but have
driven a minimum of a 40% increase in organic search traffic.
Overview
Web design, a relatively new
discipline within the design field, is concerned with designing Web pages and
sites. While Web designers usually need to possess general design skills, such
as an understanding of drawing and a knack for creating aesthetically pleasing
combinations of color and form, they also need to have an understanding of
Web-specific design factors-screen resolution, image compression, usability,
accessibility, and website architecture. Web designers are responsible for
everything from designing a website's "look and feel" to incorporating
features such as e-commerce, online community, search engine optimization,
animations, interactive applications, and advertising hosting into the site-all
while ensuring that the site's design is optimized for the specific
technologies supporting it.
Every satisfied customer on every website starts in the hands of a talented web designer. This professional has the ability to capture the client’s vision, bring the design elements to life, and ultimately create a website that appeals to consumers. This is no easy task since it involves both creative and technical abilities, so a top web designer is experienced in many different disciplines.
Likewise, an in-demand website designer will also have insights into the business and marketing worlds to understand how a website can meet a client’s needs, convey their brand, and help embrace new customers online. This knowledge is used to maximize things like lead generation and overall engagement levels.
The work that Web designers do determines whether people stay on a site or leave, and whether they do what the site wants them to do while they're there.
If the website's goal is to generate e-commerce, sales results ultimately provide the measure of the success of the Web designer's work.
If the website depends on advertising or subscriptions for its revenue, then metrics like online ad click-through and new subscribers will provide the measure of success.
If the website's primary goal is to increase brand value... well, that's a little harder to measure, but the sites perceived success in doing so will be the measure of the Web designer's work.
Web design is a specialized function within information technology, and a key role in Web development. Web designers create the look, feel, and navigation for websites using HTML programming, which is the basic computer language for creating Web pages, as well as a number of computer graphics programs.
Their work includes defining the user interface (UI-what people see and interact with when they come to a site and the navigation by which they move through the site), creating catchy graphics or animated images, and choosing the style, fonts, and other visual elements to make a site appealing and help a company advance its business goals.
Because Web surfers are increasingly accessing the Internet via wireless devices, be they Wi-Fi- or Bluetooth-enabled computers, cell phones, or personal digital assistants, Web designers are increasingly facing the need to optimize the pages they design for wireless devices.
What It's Like
If you're a Web designer, you'll need to stay abreast of the rapidly changing technology in the field. New technologies, techniques, and design standards are constantly being developed in an effort to meet the ever-increasing demand for more exciting Web designs and functionality.
If you're a prospective Web designer, you should realize that designing pages is not just a creative role, it also supports a business end, whether that's driving e-commerce or building your company's brand. A good website can be many times more effective than a brochure, delivering the exact type and amount of information that a user desires-and allowing clients to order without filling out a form or dialing a phone number. Along with orders, a site captures relevant user data: pages viewed, time spent at the site, and other information that can allow for targeted marketing, thereby improving a company's business.
As with design in general, a Web designer's job is to make a product (the website) functional and pleasurable for the user. At the same time, a corporate website should help sell or market whatever the business that sponsors it is selling or marketing. A Web designer working on a corporate intranet site, for instance, will want to ensure easy access to relevant information. A Web designer working at an e-commerce site will want to make sure users recognize what the company is selling and help make the process of buying it as easy as possible.
Requirements
Many job descriptions for Web
designers require a bachelor's degree in graphic design, visual arts, fine
arts, or similar fields. Increasingly, however, universities are offering-and
employers are demanding-specialized degrees in such fields as user interface
design and information design. Moreover, many master's degree programs in
computer science now offer concentrations in site architecture and other
specific Web design-related fields.
However, the Web is evolving so
quickly that traditional university programs may still be too cumbersome for
potential Web designers. If you are looking to get into the field as quickly as
possible, then consider taking some specialized courses in the areas that are
of interest to you-either from a college, nonprofit, or private
computer-training school.
At a minimum, Web designers need to
be familiar with HTML and JavaScript, and understand the way Web graphics such
as JPEGs and GIFs work. You should also be proficient with industry-standard
graphic-design software such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and Web layout
tools such as Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe's (formerly Macromedia's)
Dreamweaver.
The multimedia design field has many
companies that are developing new and better design tools all the time, but the
industry is dominated by applications from Adobe, including Director, Shock-wave, and Flash.Where designers
used to hand off massive packages of static images and specs, they’re now
sharing dynamic visualizations enabled by tools like In Vision, Marvel, and
UXPin —“The future of front-end development is
designed”
Remember: A career in Web design
means that you never stop preparing. New products, new standards, and new
conventions emerge every day, and the only real requirement is that you be
handy with the latest and coolest design tools and concepts available.
The Context and Challenge
Project background and description:
The Creative Group, a Californian , division of staffing leader Robert Half specializes in matching creative, interactive and marketing talent with the best companies on a freelance and full-time basis. They understand not only the desire to produce award-winning work and successful brand initiatives but also the challenges that freelance consultants face day to day and week to week. I was recommended by a professional colleague whom we use to have conversation on social media to TGC. When the TCG team asked us for help to design an eye catching website for growth, we knew two things: we had to respond and we had responded in a way that injected The Creative Group brand values of fun and connection.The problem:
The complex challenge/problem of The Creative Group is likely faced during the phases of their website design project were put into consideration to avoid mistake in the nearest future such as Poor traffic performance to their website through social media such Facebook, Twitter,Linkedin and Google+, looking to drive more revenue from their website, increase engagement with their online content and optimize product pages for higher conversions through search engine optimization(SEO). This is to ensure that online media presence is available to the global audience for business growth. The interest of The Creative Group can not be guarantee if the above mention is not well implemented.
Every satisfied customer on every website starts in the hands of a talented web designer. This professional has the ability to capture the client’s vision, bring the design elements to life, and ultimately create a website that appeals to consumers. This is no easy task since it involves both creative and technical abilities, so a top web designer is experienced in many different disciplines.
Likewise, an in-demand website designer will also have insights into the business and marketing worlds to understand how a website can meet a client’s needs, convey their brand, and help embrace new customers online. This knowledge is used to maximize things like lead generation and overall engagement levels.
The Goal and Objective
Where to Start
Regardless of your business, start by listing specific website goals and corresponding objectives that fit your overall marketing strategy and capabilities. Examples might include:The client wants more traffic to their website
- Increase the amount of weekly sessions by 20%
- Grow proportion of new monthly traffic to 40% of total
- Increase daily revenue by 50%
- Grow the total average order amount by 25%
- Reduce cart abandonment by 15%
- Reduce average bounce rates by 10%
- Increase the average number of pages viewed per session by 25%
- Increase average time on page per user by 15%
The client want to Increase sales
- Search engine optimization
- Well-organized content,
- User-friendly site,
- Effective calls to action,
- Increase conversion rate.
The client want to becoming an authoritative resource.
- Providing quality content on your website,
- Regularly adding new information,
- Establishing trust,
- Marketing your site on other websites and social media.
- E-mail marketing lists,
- Online support (live chat),
- Webinars,
- Content designed to give your visitor a reason to come back.
The client want to build your brand.
- Active social media program,
- Promotions,
- Reputation management.
Design requirements
Firstly, we met with The Creative Group for a planning and strategy session and put every detail in place to ensure the live website would go off without a hitch. So now let take up steps that we deploy in the process of designing the website with the client.
1. Layouts that let content shine
The arrangement of design elements
within a given structure should allow the reader to easily focus on the
message, without slowing down the speed of his reading.
–Hermann Zapf
It’s been an amazing evolution to watch.
And a fascinating element of that evolution has been the shift back toward a focus on content: the meat on the bones of the web. Designers worldwide have realized that people visit websites for their content — whether it’s raging tweet storms, thoughtful long-reads, or the latest “user-generated” meme — and that design’s ultimate role is to present content in an intuitive, efficient, and “delightful” way.
That’s one reason for the shift away from skeuomorphic design toward “flatter,” more minimalist design approaches, as seen in Google’s Material aesthetic, and really, across the web and our various devices.
Of course, as Newton’s third law states, for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Many designers feel that the flat design trend has taken the “soul” out of design. We expect to see this conversation continue across 2017, but look forward to it becoming a productive dialogue that never loses sight of the heart of our design work: the content.
2. Better collaboration between designers, and developers
As design has taken a greater and more influential
role in shaping businesses, more and more attention has been paid to designers’
collaboration with both their fellow designers, and their developer colleagues.
The emphasis on designer collaboration has arisen
in part from the massiveness of the web and mobile apps we’re building these
days. Gigantic platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn require
not only huge design teams working on disparate aspects of the platform, but
also better ways for designers to stay on the same page — and that means more
collaboration, and better communication.
On the designer-developer collaboration front,
lots of attention has been focused on the all-important hand-off stage. Where designers
used to hand off massive packages of static images and specs, they’re now
sharing dynamic visualizations enabled by tools like InVision, Marvel, and
UXPin —
“The future of front-end development is
designed” according to Carson Miller recently put it in his TechCrunch
article:
It is only a
matter of time before design and prototyping tools replace front-end
development altogether, seamlessly producing a high-quality front-end code base
for your framework of choice
3. Improved design-to-development workflows
As design and prototyping tools for the web gain maturity and sophistication, the traditional handoff deliverable has transformed from the aforementioned static files to more dynamic visualizations that range from animated Keynote files to fully functional websites. These more dynamic deliverables shorten the feedback loop, simultaneously improving design and dev team agility and lowering frustration. They also facilitate better communication with clients. In fact, for many users of wordsmith-exchange, client meetings have become actual live working sessions, where designers are able to quickly bring ideas to life so everyone can experience them almost immediately.4. Big, bold type
As the design world comes to the consensus that our focus should be on content, more and more websites feature lines of resonant, inspiring copy set in type that’s just as big and bold as the statement itself.As you’ll have noticed from the sample screenshots, “big” and “bold” doesn’t necessarily refer to the weight of the font! Rather, it’s about dedicating significant screen real estate to a single, simple yet all-encompassing statement about the product or service. And, refreshingly, a lot of these statements seem clear and to-the-point, free of the bloviated claims to disruption and greatness we’ve seen a lot of lately. (Okay, “design the impossible” might be bloviated, granted.)
In a world that’s as fast, busy, and information-overloaded as ours is, these concise yet powerful statements will become bread-and-butter for companies of all kinds.
5. Complex layouts rooted in graphic design principles
If we want to predict the evolution of web design (at least in visual terms), we should refer to the evolution of graphic design.For the past few years, web design layout has been constrained by CSS’s limitations, but new tools like flex box and CSS grid (is allow for much more expressive layouts on the web. Our main challenge now: understanding how these new web layout methods should work in the world of responsive design. You can see some examples of what we can expect here (as long as you’re using a browser that supports CSS grid, like Firefox Nightly, Safari Technical Preview, or Chrome Canary)
6. More SVGs
SVGs (scalable vector graphics) present web designers and developers with a lot of advantages over more traditional image formats like JPG, PNG, and GIF.The key advantages of SVGs come through loud and clear in the format name itself: scalable and vector. Instead of being raster or pixel-based, SVGs are composed of vectors: mathematical descriptions of the object’s shape. This means SVGs are resolution-independent, so they’ll look great on any screen, on any device type. No need to worry about making everything retina-ready.
But that’s not all. SVGs also rock because they don’t require any HTTP requests. And if you’ve ever run a page-speed test on one of your websites, you’ve probably noticed that those HTTP requests can really slow down your site. Not so with SVGs!
7. Constraint-based design tools
Responsive design has completely transformed how we browse and build for the web.But, oddly, it hasn’t really changed how design tools work, in general. With obvious exceptions like wordsmith-exchange, most of the popular design tools require you to simply rebuild the same screen over and over for different device sizes and resolutions.
In an industry that’s all about rapid development, idealization, and launches, that massive time sinks just isn’t sustainable.
Hence a new wave of design tools (such as Figma ) that use the idea of constraints to lessen the amount of repeated work designers have to do when building cross-device layouts. These tools focus on the spatial relationships between elements and strive to preserve them as composite elements are resized by devices and users.
Less work for designers for the win.
8. More and brighter color
As movements like minimalism and brutal-ism came to the fore in 2016, designers sought ways to infuse more personality into their design work that still worked within those stripped-down aesthetics.And in at least a few cases, bright, bold color became the natural answer.
As you can see, it’s not just about bright, enthusiastic color either. Gradients also came back in a big way, blending and blurring those exuberant hues into spectra reminiscent of a noonday sky or a splashy sunset.
9. More focus on animation
Animation has long played a key role in our digital interfaces, and there’s no reason to think that’ll abate in 2017. In fact, as designers get more and more visual tools to help them build engaging and smile-sparking animations, we’re sure to see them become both more prominent and more refined.The latter characteristic will become particularly important as it becomes easier to create animations. At 2016’s Design & Content Conference, animation guru Val Head stressed that designers should look to their brand voice and tone documentation when building animations to ensure that they reinforce the tone content creators are aiming for. This helps ensure that animations perform meaningful, on-brand functions for users, instead of just inspiring migraines.
10. Unique layouts
The year 2016 — much like the last several years preceding it — featured an ongoing debate about web design either dying, or losing its soul.Over-dramatic as the web-design-is-dead argument may be, you can’t blame any creative for seeking innovative ways to present content to readers. And one of the most enticing methods for breaking out of the box-eccentric layouts many blame responsive design for is the broken grid.
This approach seeks a way out of the meticulously aligned and “boxy” layouts we’ve been seeing a lot of lately with a variety of what might seem like visually jarring techniques.
11. Flexbox
If you haven’t dived into flexbox yet, you’re in for a treat. This relatively “new” CSS layout module offers both incredible responsive-friendliness in its functionality, but also makes a lot of sense to visual designers used to manipulating objects on the canvas with the align and distribute tools offered in the likes of Sketch and Illustrator.And with every modern browser (and no, I’m not counting IE11) now fully supporting flexbox, there’s no reason not to dive in — as long as your audience isn’t full of IE diehards.
12. Complex CSS grid layouts
Coming up hot on the heels of flexbox in the race for newer, better layout modules are CSS grid. As Chris House, creator of “A Complete Guide to Grid” puts it:Grid is the very first CSS module created specifically to solve the layout problems we've all been hacking our way around for as long as we've been making websites.
While flexbox helps us solve some seriously aggravating and long-standing web design problems like vertical centering, it really wasn’t intended for use in full-page layouts. (Though it’s certainly capable of them.) Grid, on the other hand, was built for full-page layouts. And like flexbox, it allows you to easily rearrange content order for different media queries.
Grid isn’t yet ready for use in the wild, but that just gives you some time to familiarize yourself with the spec. Which is great, because it’s going to be big?
13.
A focus on designing for content delivery, personalization, and conversion
One consequence of an increased focus
on design as a means of effectively delivering content will be a stress on
delivering said content to the right person at the right time — all with an eye
to increasing desired actions, naturally. (All good news for you content
strategists out there!)
Personalization of content has been
an extremely hot topic in content circles for quite some time now, but no one
seems to have perfectly cracked that nut yet. Essentially, the goal is to
serve up content based on characteristics like:
- Demographics: Who is the visitor (professionally and/or personally) and where are they coming from?
- Behavior: What is the visitor doing now? What have they done on your site in the past?
- Context: What device and browser is the visitor using? How did they arrive at your site? Are they logged in or logged out?
We’ve seen some interesting
experiments in this direction across the web, many of which revolve around a
manual professionalization of content recommendations by the user, recommendation
of “related” reads, and some algorithmic solutions more akin to what Facebook
is capable of doing.
Fubiz features manual professionalization through its “Creativity Finder,” a conversational-style form
that lets you pick from a range of predetermined options about you, your
location, and what you’re looking for. It’s a bit “low tech,” but it does offer
a feeling of agency most content platforms don’t really offer.
A step up from that is Auto-desk’s new Red-shift blog, which deepens the level
of user agency by offering a range of manual customization options like:
·
Following topics and authors
· Customization feed
·
Highlighting for comments and sharing
·
Bookmarking
If a lot of Redshift’s functionality sounds familiar, it might be because it’s largely replicated from Medium. Unlike Redshift, though, Medium has the advantage of a much larger base of readers and writers, not to mention tight integration with Twitter — all of which boost its ability to algorithmic ally recommend content to you.
All of these content personalization methods epitomize a view of product design as a method of finding the intersection between user needs and business needs. Readers want to be able to save, share, and customize the content they see — and the company can use that data in a host of ways. So, win-win.
Of course, it’s worth remembering that conversions aren’t the only metric content professionalization can drive. Personalization of help documentation can help lower support request volume. Educational materials can lower churn and improve lifetime value. But it’s not like conversions will ever not be valuable.
14.
More focus on conversation (yes, bots, but also...)
You might call 2016 the year of the
bot — though whether it’s been the beginning of the bots’ triumph or just a
somewhat underwhelming launch is very much open to debate.
That said, if the volume of
bot-related launches on Product Hunt and Google’s deep integration of Assistant
into Android are any indication, 2017’s going to see a lot more bots popping up
across your life.
But bots are really just a specific
instantiation of a more abstract, and thus more pervasive, idea: that
conversation is an interface. And we’re likely to see that idea shape a lot of
2017’s top design work.
What this might mean, exactly, we’ll
have to wait and see. But possible impacts include:
- An even greater interest in “human” language (more good news for content strategists!)
- Increased capacities for writers and content strategists to act as UX designers and bot developers
- Even more investment in so-called “user-generated content,” creative communities, fora, etc.
- More conversational/natural-language forms (at present, the form is the fundamental unit of product design — in 2017, we might see that paradigm shift from form to conversation)
- Attempts to transform the comment section from the Internets sewer into fonts of “engagement” and new content — an effort already kicked off by the Coral Project
Hopefully, this continued interest
in bots and AIs will help them better understand what the hell we’re talking
about.
16.
More peeks inside design (and content)
Over the course of 2016, a number of
design teams created and popularized their own blogs as a way to offer insights
into process and, perhaps, humanize the brand to a certain extent.
Content like this used to be focused
primarily on recruitment — attracting new hires by conveying a sense of what’s
it like to design, or engineer, or write within a particular company.
But in 2016, the focus appeared to
shift in 3 new directions:
- Brand
- Humanization
- Helpfulness
These 3 strains can be pretty hard
to untangle, and the most popular of these design blogs do all three with
panache. They also tend to have a particular focus that sets
them apart as more than “Brand X’s design team blog.” But again, it’s not
always obvious.
With the success of the following
design-and-content blogs, brace yourself for many more in 2017
17.
A new designer deliverable — code — created in new ways
Coding is going to look dramatically different in the
future. In fact, the line between design and development may no longer exist.
A conversation about the article
sprung up on Twitter, where Austin Knight noted:
Many designers and develops that I know would prefer to work
visually, but work in code out of necessity.
There are many drivers behind this
emerging reality, including
- The need for fast, iterative product development
- User need for more equivalency between outputs and inputs (i.e., most painters don’t paint with code)
- Increasing sophistication of code-free design tools
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