Great 404 Pages
February 3, 2011 at 5:47 pm
Discovered this great page of 404′s via @nicholaspatten on Twitter. My favourite is below, but there are lots of great ones over here.
Whose Site Came First? Concern or Trocaire?
February 18, 2010 at 11:01 am
I always use Trocaire’s site as an example in my web writing training as how to break the number 1 rule of writing for the web.
It’s all about Me Me Me. When you’re writing, you should always spin your content so it’s written to the person reading it and not ‘all about us the business and how great we are… bla bla”. Trocaire is a good example because it carries a beautiful design and is constructed with an eye to the user’s intentions, so at first glance you might think it’s a great site. Only when you engage with the content do you realise that it’s not doing all it should be.
So I’m quite familiar with the site. You can imagine my surprise this morning when I looked at Concern’s site and found… they are more or less the same thing!
Here’s a screenshot of the Trocaire homepage:
And here’s its twin sister from Concern:
I think Trocaire’s design is probably a little older – hence it’s the one that has been ‘heavily drawn on’. So stand up the designer of Concern and tell us – are you the same person who did Trocaire? Or just heavily lacking in the ideas department?
PS – while we’re on the subject of not-for-profits website design, can I just say that now nearly 80% of our work on the Rose Project has been hacked away from whatever pro bono ‘designer’ they’ve got on the job. Am actually going to take that site out of my portfolio as it’s not reflective of the kind of work we do. Note the pictures of the organisers at various ‘do’s’ shoved in above the stories of the real people being helped? We were asked to deliver a site that matched a brief of tell the stories about people that are being helped and make it easy to donate. That’s what we did.
What they’ve done now is insert lots of back page of Tatler type images, hide the donate button and instead feature the organisation’s mission statement.
Tags: concern ireland website, rose project website, trocaire website, website design not for profits
What’s Next in Web Design?
January 8, 2010 at 8:15 am
A good article about what’s next in web design with some decent soundbites (below) from iA the user experience people in Zurich whose blog is well worth watching.
Successful websites such as Google, Flickr, or World of Warcraft show that [the following] is true:
- Do one thing really well
- Simplify
- Don’t rely on random advertisements
Don’t pile up the features. Require less input.
Simplicity is about taking care of the details.
The best way to learn about speedy interfaces is to study everyday interfaces as doorknobs, drawers, shampoo bottles. Web designers need to learn more from traditional product designers.
This one is so important I’m going to give it an indent and a big inverted comma:
The concern about the visual style is the echo of the nineties; the nineties are over. It’s well documented that often top decision makers and silly corporate structures mess with the design process. Let me state this clearly: Just because you drive a car it doesn’t make you a car engineer. In other words – CEO’s shouldn’t get involved in web design, but in web business strategy.
While Flash and a number of new technologies allow the use of non-standard fonts, there is a healthy general tendency to just accept the fact that web sites are read in the few standard fonts that were created to display optimal way on the screen. [Hurray!]
Thanks to @iarfhlaith who brought this to my attention on Twitter.
Tags: web design ireland
Irish Web Design On The Global Map
October 27, 2009 at 7:06 am
Ireland is the second country to be profiled by Smashing Magazine in a global review of local market design and designers. Well done to Alan from Spoilt Child , Eoghan McCabe of Contrast, Ray Doyle of The Creative District, and Sabrina Dent who’s so famous she even goes by her own name! I’d be hard pressed to pick my favourite designer out of that bunch; they’re all extremely talented and have their individual styles – both online and in the flesh!
I’m happy too to see some Brightspark projects included in the showcase of beautiful Irish design in this article.
I love Ray Doyle’s answer to whether education is more important than experience when it comes to design:
I personally feel that in the digital media industry experience is more important than education. I often ask myself would I’ve been a better man, designer, drinker if I had chosen the path of the student and not that of bedroom designer/HTML monkey on minimum wage. I like think to not, well, probably a better drinker.
Tags: Irish Web Design, web design ireland
How To Choose A Web Designer
July 30, 2009 at 10:01 am
I’m sharing my thoughts on how to choose a good web designer because in the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that there seems to be a lack of ability to sort the cowboys from the indians:
- A designer being put forward as a ‘web expert’ for a legal case had a site with over 300 html errors, incomplete metadata, and no clear understanding of user focused design.
- Delegates at the Microsoft Mix Essentials Conference were hung up on this issue in the Q&A after Sabrina Dent’s talk.
- Popularity of Tenderme.ie where people are selecting designers based on (lowest) price. Those kinds of races to the bottom can only end in tears – client is unhappy with their site (you pay peanuts, you get monkeys), and the designer is unhappy because the client is most likely demanding more than their meagre quote allows.
So it’s about time ‘someone who knows’ shares a few tips on how to choose a web designer.
1. What do you want? Design, or Design & Build?
Are you looking for a nicely designed portfolio site to show off your services and encourage interested parties to make contact? Are you looking to sell product online in which case you require an ecommerce site? It’s very important to know what it is you want to do, and what is the primary call to action for people who land on your site.
For larger sites that have more than one inside page design, I like to break them up and give the design work to a designer and the build work to a developer. In my experience, designers that are excellent at the front end colour/font/imagery/style part of the project are not that great on development, ie. the coding. Similarly, you can always spot a site that’s been done (I don’t say designed) by a developer because they tend to be blocky, linear and not very user focused. When you break up the project, you can be sure that both front end and back end will be beautiful!
Another important decision to take is whether to go for a freelancer or a company. Price can come into this as freelancers are often a little cheaper than a company that has overheads and staff and tax and so on. However, you run the risk of a freelancer being flakey. What if they decide to up and leave in the middle of your project? This happened to me a few years ago when I had an early Ruby on Rails developer working on a social networking site. This flakey guy disappeared in the middle of the project and I had to scramble to find developers to take over the project at an exorbitant cost. It was probably the most stressful time ever of running my business, it cost me a lot of money, and it nearly cost me a friendship as the client in this case was a friend. I learned my lesson then not to use freelancers. I used to make a couple of exceptions to this rule, but those exceptions (who are truly exceptional and definitely not flakey) have recently jumped back into paid employment and stopped freelancing once recession hit.
2. Establishing a long list
Have a look around for web designers. Take recommendations from friends and colleagues. Establish a long list. Now, look at those designer’s sites and go through their portfolios to see who will make it to your short list. Don’t bother being impressed by testimonials for they are merely the words that clients spout when a gun is put to their head; or sometimes they may be written by the designer and the client merely approves. Look instead at the designer’s portfolio:
- Do you see a diverse style? That can be a good thing, but be careful that it’s not just fashion! You don’t want to go for a designer whose designs will date.
- Do you see a similar style? That’s OK provided you like the style, the colour palette, fonts, etc. And know that if you go to that designer you can expect something similar to what you’re seeing already. Don’t go to a candy coloured designer looking for dark.
- Visit every site in the portfolio and for God’s sake, click into the site and don’t just form your opinion based on the home page! A good site will have a compelling home page whose function it is to entice you into the site. Inside pages have a different function, for they are there to convey information and convey calls to action. Are the sites doing this? Or does it all look very samey once you get off the home page?
- When you land on the home page, do you immediately know what the site is about? Does it answer the questions: who/what/where/how? Who is this site from? What do they do? Where are they based? How can they help me? If the design doesn’t do this, then, for all the flash elements, and moody imagery, it’s not a success – move on. Web design is about conveying messaging – quickly, and hopefully, delightfully.
- Now sharpen your eye and look for attention to detail – look out for continuity of style in even the tiniest buttons, edging, images. Everything should work well together and work hard to convey a message, ie. the objective of the site.
3. Putting your short list through their paces
There are a variety of web developer toolbars out there that you can download for free and add to your browser. I use this one for Firefox, it sits just above my tabs and allows me to check the following:
- HTML and CSS validation. The W3C lays down guidelines for how to use html and css. Running these tests on a website will show you how many errors are contained in the code. A good way of getting under the bonnet, and a must for anyone considering the low cost tenderme type of designer. Often these sites will look OK on the front end, but will be held together with sticky tape on the back end. That is not what you want. If the code of your site is messy, Google spiders will not be able to come in and spin their magic. What’s the point of having a site that can’t be optimised? Believe me, I have had to hold the hand of many people over the years who came to me with a website done by a cheap designer that they are unhappy with. The problem is that it’s often cheaper to start all over again in these cases than try to make good come out of bad. Beware – if you go for the cheapest end of the market, you could end up paying twice.
- Search Engine friendliness. First of all, don’t expect your web designer to get you a high ranking on Google – unless they are a search engine specialist as well. But do expect them to deliver a site that is created in a search engine friendly way, ie. text and not images are used for important content, meta data is populated, and different meta data is used for every page, internal links hyperlink keyword-ridden text, and not ‘click here’
- Test the sites on different browsers (ie. look at it on Firefox and on Internet Explorer.) If you have access to different browser versions, all the better. Look at the site on different operating systems – check it at home on your mac, look at it at work on your pc. And finally, check how the site looks in different screen sizes.
- Download speed. I use this because it’s one of the tools in the toolbar. Obviously you want your site to be fast to download. And you’d think that most sites would be, but it’s surprising how even the huge budget sites such as some of Ireland’s mobile phone companies take ages to download. Below are the stats for my site, they are good and what you should be aiming for:
4. And now for the money bit
The brief. Write down what you want your site to do. Try and include all the features that you’ve got in your head – such as google maps, interactive forms, flash elements, etc. If you don’t say these now, don’t be surprised when the designer asks you for more money during the project. If you haven’t got the language to describe what you want, show what you want! Provide links to sites you’ve seen that you love and say why. While it can be helpful sometimes to show sites you don’t like, it’s probably better to focus on the positive!
Invite your shortlist to quote for the work. If it’s a small enough project, such as a standard 10-15 page site, then you can expect designers to quote for free. If you are constructing a larger site that requires specification and more planning before a quote can be made, then it’s reasonable for the designer to charge you for their time in meetings and planning and specs. Sometimes this can take a couple of days. What I tend to do is charge for half the time, and absorb the other half as a marketing cost.
When reviewing the quotes, try to be sure that you’re comparing like with like. Don’t just go for the lowest price as that can sometimes contain hidden extras, such as a ‘requirement’ to take that web designer’s hosting package. This amazes me how certain web design companies in Dublin charge astronomical amounts for a commodity like hosting – and people pay it! Do a search for ‘web hosting ireland’, check out the prices and see if you are being ripped off. Are all the quotes including VAT?
Insist on a contract. This doesn’t have to be High Court approved, just a simple confirmation of the quote including payment dates and you should also be looking to retain the copyright on the site once it’s complete. Again, some cowboy designers try to retain copyright and then charge an annual fee to clients to use their own site!! Yes. It happens. It’s a jungle out there! Know that it’s common practice in the web design industry to charge a deposit – sometimes up to 50%. You wouldn’t expect your architect to design your whole house and only get paid at the end? Well same goes for all design. Deposits keep small businesses afloat and you shouldn’t have a problem paying for something you’ve contracted someone to do.
5. Get started
When you’ve made your decision, get started quickly. You’ve got a good awareness of the designer’s style, you’ve agreed a price, so there’s nothing to hold you back. Try and keep a momentum going as designers are human and it’s hard to revisit a design if it has been left to languish for weeks or months. So make time in your diary, give feedback on designs quickly. Your initial gut feel is usually right.
I hope this is helpful for people who are about to embark on a web design project. I know it can be difficult to buy web design for the first time. And with the increased number of crocodiles out there in that web design jungle you’ve got to be careful, keep your wits about you, and go in with knowledge!
Brightspark offers an unusual web design service. We take the pain out of the process by working with you to identify your needs and to set the site’s objective. We can bring ideas to you that will make your site sing. After all, our job is to be on top of what’s happening; we share that with you. Then, when we’ve established a brief, we invite Brightspark approved designers to quote for your work. Our panel of designers are all exceptionally talented, we’ve worked with them over many years. And prices range from the budget designs right up to award-winning excellence. We enjoy great rates from our designers and we pass these on to you.
If you’d like to talk to us about your web project, contact us - but no… first check out our portfolio!
Tags: how to buy web design, how to choose a web designer, web design ireland
3 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Website
January 27, 2009 at 11:56 pm
Continuing in this series of ‘free stuff that you can do online’, this season we’re going back to basics. Before you go marketing your website, you got to first make sure it’s in a fit state to be marketed. That means following these 3 steps to making sure you’ve got a site to be proud of.
1. Website Copy
Google loves frequently changing content. That’s why it’s such a great idea to add a blog to your website and to write in it often. When blogging, you don’t have to write lots – little and often is plenty. All those little blog posts add up and over time, this will significantly help your search engine ranking.
That’s why when you search for “rugby club Dublin” for example, Old Belvedere is the first rugby club in the results. Why? Because they have a vibrant blog in which many members update all the news, results, and updates on the goings on around the club.
Even if you choose not to add a blog to your site, when’s the last time you carried out a thorough review of the static content? Surely your marketing geniuses have come up with new and novel ways of describing your services since the last time the web copy was looked at?
You can either do this yourself, or engage a professional web copywriter to do it for you. We’ll apply a fresh pair of eyes to your content – just like a potential new customer will – and, once we’re clear on what it is you do, we’ll get down to work at conveying that in a succinct and sassy way online. And we’ll do this very fast. Just think you are half a day away from a clever clear site that works as hard as you!
2. Meta Data
While meta data (title tags, description tags, etc.) don’t hold as much weight as they once did, they still have a little role to play. When the Google spider finds your site, you don’t want to leave it all confused and make it go away again. That is why you need to make sure that you’ve got your title and description tags well thought out and in order.
Don’t bother with long lists of keywords for the keywords tag, as none of the search engines really look at that anymore. Title and description tags are the most important. Don’t go putting your company name as the title tag. And worse! If you’ve a title tag of “welcome to our website” do me a favour and lose it now! Think about the keywords that most accurately describe your business and insert them first, then by all means add your company name, and if you wish, your location.
3. Are You Proud of Your Website?
If you’re not, you’re hardly going to be working hard at promoting it. The amount of times I meet people at networking events and they literally cringe when they’re handing me their business card. And that’s before I tell them that I work in the web!
Too many people are still brandishing designs from the last century. Sites that don’t work. That aren’t intuitive. Sites that were developed by people with no love for the web. Sites that still carry a copyright 1999 on them!
If your website design isn’t too bad, consider giving adding some updates. Some newly styled buttons, or links to new applications such as blogs, Flickr, Twitter can give it a lift. Even adding logos of groups you’re a member of can give a little lift. Recently I added logos of all the media sites where Brightspark has been featured, just to freshen up the home page a bit.
If you’re sporting a hideous design, don’t be afraid! It’s likely you had your site built back in the 1900’s – in the days before WordPress. Back then, even small static sites could cost an arm and a leg. You’re thinking – nope I don’t want to even begin to think of how much they’d cost today… The good news is that WordPress, apart from being the much loved blogging platform of choice by the world’s leading bloggers, is also a free content management system.
We create many websites for small businesses using WordPress – you can view a selection here – and the good news is that the cost of production on these beauties has gone down rather than up! Ask me why.
To conclude, these are three ways you can improve the quality of your website for little or no cost. Next week, I’ll be looking at how you can get into more serious internet marketing in Ireland. Techniques that work and that you can put into place yourself.
Whatever you do during these difficult times, don’t stop marketing. Now is not the time to decrease your marketing spend as the following whizzy graphic from Hutch Carpenter clearly demonstrates:
Tags: meta data, website content, website design
2009 Web Design Trends
January 26, 2009 at 11:36 pm
It’s perfectly reasonable to talk predictions for the year ahead up to and including 31 January! The best article I’ve read on web design trends for this year comes from the ever smashing Smashing Magazine. I’ve picked the bits I see as most relevant to our market out of here, and have added to it following discussions with some of the key designers on the Brightspark panel. This list is not exhaustive, I’m looking mainly at the design trends that appeal to me for this year:
- Clean corporate
- Vintage, and
- Hand drawn (although it’ll be gone by year end)
Clean Corporate
Everyone’s in agreement that the Web 2.0 design hysteria will finally leave us this year, and I agree with Heidi Jermyn who believes that
the elements that constitute that style will remain. This is because they are tied in to the ideals of accessibility, usability and web standards – and they work!
Clean corporate is so broad and clearly defined that we’ve focused on the particular design features that will constitute the main elements of the ‘clean corporate look’ for 2009.
- Letterpress – has rarely been used to date, but is emerging across a number of different site types and for different content types. It refers to the printing of text onto a ‘raised’ surface.
- PNG Transparency – closely tied to the magazine style, this is where semi transparent images are superimposed onto backgrounds. Good method of making design stand out, but not recommended for all Irish businesses as it’s not IE6 compatible and until IE6 is dead and gone, you can’t be sure that your beautiful design will be viewed as it should. For example, most of Government departments are still using IE6. So check your stats first before going down the transparent png route. Why alienate part of your audience unnecessarily?
- Large typography – we’re seeing font sizes upwards of 36 pixels, and in many cases quite expensive typefaces. Typography is set to be the number 1 design element this year and rightly so, as large interesting fonts make for beautiful designs and clear messages. Ray Doyle of Intrigue says:
- Font replacement – with more of an emphasis on typography, some designers will choose to move away from the classics of Helvetica, Arial, Georgia and Verdana. Font replacement with SIFR can add great beauty, but in our experience SIFR can cause a nightmare during browser testing. We used it here in 2007 and for sites that still have high numbers of IE6 users, I’m not recommending its use again!
- Light boxes – the second generation of pop-up box, widely used and always triggered by a user action (eg. signing up). They always appear on top of the main content and usually appear semi transparent. Example.
- Video content – while strictly content, video blocks are also a design element used to convey lots of info within a relatively small space. Video content should be short and should always carry a different message to the text. Social entrepreneurs use it here.
- Carousels – image slideshows in which the content rotates vertically or horizontally (hence the name “carousel”). To rotate the navigation, users need to click on one of two toggle elements (usually a left/right or up/down arrow). Depending on the toggle element selected, the content is rotated in the desired direction. Definitely recommended for you if you’ve an abundance of striking imagery and video at your disposal, or if your story is really well told visually. Like we did here.
- Introduction blocks – the upper-left area of a website is the most important block on the page, because it grabs the most attention from visitors. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to place the most important message of the website right there and thus make sure that readers get the message as quickly as possible. We’ve been doing this forever, it’s best practice to state who/what/where/when/why in the top of your home page. See Internet Marketing Ireland specialists!
This will be a year for BOLD and energetic! Typography such as “DF Strand” by Rian Highes, “Geometric Soul” by Jason Walcott and “P22 Bifur A” by Richard Kegler. A geometric moderne with decorative variants, part Art Deco glamour, part Modernist architectural lettering and part latest fashion revival. Pop and glam with a heavy punch.
Examples of Clean Corporate Style
Vintage
Vintage, old school patterns are timeless and look set to be very popular in this coming. In the bright shiny new medium of web, they haven’t been used much to date, but now we’re seeing them used on corporate sites, online shops, and blogs.
Successful vintage design features images and fonts that were popular in the time period they are meant to represent. Vintage recalls the time period between the 1950s and 1980s. Vintage can often be combined with the hand drawn style (see below).
Ray’s looking at:
A geometric moderne with decorative variants, part Deco glamour, part Modernist architectural lettering and part latest fashion revival. Pop and glam with a heavy punch.
Examples of Vintage Style Designs
Please note that the examples above of vintage are a little busy in my opinion and feature too much yellowing/brown colours. But I’ve included them for their images and motifs and for indicative purposes only. If you know any good examples of non yellowing looking ones, please let me know.
Hand Drawn Style
This is one I associate with Heidi, she was experimenting with this as far back as 2006. Matt’s Endless Bender is one she did at the end of last year. Hand drawn (or scrapbook) style features hand drawn elements, torn edges and the odd coffee stain and are usually highly personalised and a little whimsical. Not really suited to corporates, this style will be very popular for anyone marketing to the youth market, as well as personal blogs. They will die off later this year as they will come to be seen as ‘very 2008’.
Examples of Hand Drawn Style
You can read more from the smashing Smashing Magazine here.
Tags: Smashing Magazine, Web design trends 2009
Good Post on Web 2.0 Design Styles
April 12, 2007 at 9:54 pm
I know some say Web 2.0 is dead and gone. Many are sick of it. But for others, Web 2.0 is still a new-ish concept that’s being got to grips with. The basic premise of Web 2.0 development is to get it out fast and refine based on user activity. Charge a little – but charge it often! Get people using your service and make it indispensible. In terms of design, this post is a good one. It pretty much sums it up : it’s about simplicity. Read more here.
