Best Website Design Review Blog

Affiliate Programs is important for Internet businesses to find potential customers and establish the reputation. This is actually a type of promotional means and a lot of owners of online business would love to join affiliate programs. However, there are only a few programs on the Internet which is reliable. One of the reliable sites of affiliate programs is the SEOP.com. The website has a team a professional staff to serve the clients. They would try to identify the type of programs needed by the business and they would match the suitable programs for the business. They would also try to connect the business to other potential clients because the company has a sound background and long history so they have a lot of networks. Therefore, the company could help buyers save money from training their own promotional manager and they could focus on the production of the business instead of the promotions.

Earlier this year, we were asked to design a new website for Chappelsons who are a local company that supply and install fitted kitchens, bedrooms and home studies. The existing website was quite old and we jumped at the chance to redesign it based on the company’s newer logo.

As part of this project, we wanted to highlight several examples of different styles of kitchens, bedrooms and home studies that Chappelsons can provide. Rather than a list of images in a gallery, which can take up a lot of page space, we chose to use a JavaScript content slider called Easy Slider [which I blogged about here]. This is an attractive but compact way of displaying page content. This type of script using jQuery as its foundation has the added advantage that the slider content is still visible in the page for search engines to index. I think it works quite well.

I am reading a new jQuery book from Sitepoint at the moment. It’s called jQuery: Novice to Ninja and it promises to take you from beginner to expert. If you have copied and pasted jQuery code up to now without thinking or knowing how it works, this book could be for you! The book covers a whole range of examples so it’s also very good for intermediates. I have used some of the code from the first chapters already!

The book weighs in at just over 400 pages and is divided into nine chapters that start with the basics of jQuery, and its use for selecting, decorating and enhancing your HTML, and moving on to chapters about, for example, animations, images and slideshows, menus, tabs, and tooltips, and Ajax. The book also includes a final chapter on creating a jQuery plugin and advanced methods for extending jQuery.

I’ll post a more in depth review when I have read through the whole book.

Over the last week or so I have come across several websites that allow users to navigate using the left and right arrow keys. I think this is an interesting approach and I really like this method of navigating a website. Perhaps it’s just me but I like using keyboard shortcuts (because they seem to allow me to do things faster) …. so it’s interesting to see websites using the left and right keys in this way. Here are the website examples I have spotted that use this method.

• Crush + Lovely. This is a fantastic design and the left and right keys enable you to scroll between the various content sections. Try it and see!
• Pictory is a photo story website and it uses left and right keyboard navigation in a similar way.
• Thinking for a Living uses left and right keys for horizontal scrolling between sections/pages.
• OnSugar uses a left-right arrow key method to navigate between images in a gallery.

There is an adding keyboard navigation tutorial at jQuery for Designers which explains how a similar effect is achieved with an image slider. The jQuery Tools website has Scrollable which enables a content slider to be navigated with left-right keys.

There may be disadvantages to this method but I’m keen to find out more about it so if you know of other websites that use this approach, let me know.

Here’s a little plug for an ecommerce website that we launched recently. The La La Card Company sells decoupage card kits, single card kits and other card-making items for download.

The design was created from Photoshop images provided by the client and we used SugarSync to share a folder between us. SugarSync is a back-up and synchonisation tool but you can also use it to share folders with someone else. It worked really well.

For this project, we built a demo product listing page on a testing server so that the client could see how the product might be displayed. This work was paid for by the client but it served to highlight a number of issues that were addressed in the website itself. I will probably do this with other clients if there are questions that cannot be answered before an ecommerce project starts.

Now that the The La La Card Company has been launched, we may not be doing as much work with it but I think it’s important to say that an ecommerce website (or any website for that matter) is never actually finished. There are always items that can be added or pages to be tweaked and the shop software can be updated. In fact, most websites would benefit from a continual programme of improvements but often this is not done. If you are a small business with a website that has been static (ahem) for a while, I would urge you to consider allocating someone from your company to update the website or get someone on board to carry out a maintenance programme even if it’s only for an hour or two every month. After all, you wouldn’t ignore other parts of your business would you?

One thing that I have been pondering recently is whether to use web templates or (WordPress) themes more regularly in web design projects. Yes, you might view this as a cop-out or some indication of lack of creativity. On the other hand, if you want to jump-start a website design and get straight into the front-end build CSS and HTML, perhaps a theme/template is a good starting point?

Whilst I was thinking on this, imagine my surprise (perhaps surprise is too strong a word but you get the idea) when Sabrina Dent, a designer whose work I have often admired, wrote this blog post called Confessions of a Template Whore where she outlines some of the advantages of using templates. One of the main reasons cited is for clients who don’t have a large budget. Hey, I get that all the time!

In my experience, a client is rarely satisfied with a template off-the-shelf and customisation will always be required. However, when a template or theme ticks most of the boxes, customisation becomes easier than starting from scratch. In addition, you can always learn from the way that another designer does things. Just because you always float a specific element does not mean that is the only way of doing it!

Now, I’m not saying you just choose any old template here. The client’s objectives, budget, and type of business will all influence your choice of theme. You might decide to spend quite some time at the start of the website design process choosing one or more themes or templates. Although a template can be a quick start for your web design process, don’t rush the template selection process. I like to look at a variety of themes and assess which might be best.

So, what’s your take on this? Are templates bad for web design or are they a smart way of getting the basic structure and design established quickly, with client customisation to follow?

We’ve just launched a new website for the Red Lyon, a pub in Slinfold, which is a small village in West Sussex. It’s one of our local country pubs near Horsham so it was good to get involved with the redesign.

For this project, it was quite important for the website to be updated by the pub landlord so we chose to use WordPress as the content management system and a theme from ThemeForest as the basis for the design. WordPress has traditionally been used as a blog platform but after customisation it’s equally suitable for a brochure-style website with individual pages.

We also wanted to make sure that the website is effectively indexed by search engines and that a Google sitemap is automatically generated when the website is updated. There are many plug-ins for Wordpress which enable you to tweak the core functions and these are the search engine-related WordPress plug-ins we used for this project:

• The Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator
• Add Meta Tags.

We also modified the page titles using a custom field and several other plug-ins were used, in part to give more flexibility with the page sidebar if we choose. WordPress is a very good website content management system but it usually requires customisation to get the best from it (in my opinion).

collect website screen shots in a Flickr set called Website Inspiration. I use the screen shots to remind myself of some fantastic website designs that I see on my travels round the web. Each design has aspects that I love, for example the colour scheme, the typography, or even one specific element that I think works really well. I have never really featured the websites or screen shots on this blog in any detail so this is the first of what I hope will be a series of regular posts that highlights some outstanding website designs. Up this week are Rainbeau Mars and Art in My Coffee

Rainbeau Mars

Website by fluidesign

What I love about this design for Rainbeau Mars is the pastel colour scheme which is driven by the purple, watercolour paint effect of the header. The watercolour splash is in contrast to rest of the page which is comprised of carefully arranged content, with some rounded corners, and a large slideshow image that dominates the page. I also like the semi-transparent captions on the smaller images.

Art in My Coffee

Website by Meagan Fisher

This is a beautiful mixture of brown, coffee-related colours, together with some subtle line shadow/depth effects. I also like the rounded corner borders, and their bottom arrow, for the images. The main content is organised into a three-column grid which really suits the website’s purpose. The logo has a cool hover effect as well. I love this design! And there are some great examples of coffee art featured!

These two are great website designs…

Here’s the story: Not so long ago, I was asked to redesign a client’s website that, to be frank, was long past its sell-by date. Great! An exciting new project and I was looking forward to it! Unfortunately, there was some ‘baggage’ with the job, namely the client’s logo. Without going into detail, it needed a redesign as well but this was not within the project scope. So, how should I work with the logo? Here are some options that I explored:

• Use high quality images in combination with the logo. Professional stock photography, as long as it is not too clichéd, can enhance an older logo. A montage effect, although not very original, can confer an attractive surrounding or background for the logo.
• Modify part of the logo to minimise its effect. Perhaps there is an element of the logo that can be removed to improve the overall look without detracting from the company’s identity?
• Make the logo a smaller part of the overall design.
• Add an attractive background colour or image to the element that contains the logo.

In an ideal world, none of these options would need to be considered because a logo redesign would be part of the website work… but small company web design isn’t always like that.

What have you done when faced with this situation? There may be better options than mine. Let me know if you have other suggestions.

I like to browse a lot of websites with the aim of learning from how others do things. I figure that this is part of my job as a freelance web designer/developer. However, sometimes it is difficult to know what went on during the design process of any website you look at. That’s why I particularly like blog posts, articles, and other case studies, where a website design is explained. Normally, this will deconstruct the website in question and I find these really useful. Here are a few case study ‘design stories’ that I have been reading recently:

• Simon Collison recently redesigned his personal website and in this blog post called Redesigning the Undesigned he explains the design process, including the eventual idea to base the design on a miscellany/journal approach, why he chose Times New Roman (brave choice?) as the main font, and the use of black and white animal illustrations. I must say that I love the design of this website and it’s great to see it explained.
• CoffeePowered is Paul Stanton’s personal website and he describes the redesign process in this post. I like the description of the font choices, the colour palette, the use of Modernizr, and the description of the sketching and design approach that was used.
• In the new second edition of CSS Mastery (» Amazon USA · Amazon UK) by Andy Budd, there are two case studies by Cameron Moll and Simon Collison (him again) that are well worth reading. For example, these studies (Roma and Climb The Mountains, linked from the CSS Mastery website) include explanations of new CSS methods, the grid structure, style sheet organisation, and the typographic choices.
• Jeremy Keith explains the design and build of Workshops for the Web including why he ditched the initial design idea and the use of HTML5 and microformats.

All these chaps are talented designers and more than likely they will also do things differently to you. It makes sense to try and learn from them….