Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category
Thursday, August 5th, 2010
As your website grows and expands its content and user base outside the initial scope for the project, it often becomes necessary to consider a re-design or re-organization in order to keep navigation intuitive and get the most from your content, preventing it from getting lost in a hard-to-navigate-to location. Usually a content re-design starts with your sitemap and grows from there, but when you have too many pages sometimes it’s quite difficult to simply re-organize them in your head or even on paper. The Card-Sort method is a great way to fluidly alter sitemap organization on paper to achieve the most intuitive organization for your users when re-designing. It all starts with a stack of index cards, and a big black marker. Read more... (415 words, 1 image, estimated 1:40 mins reading time)
Tags: Canada's Web Shop, Card, Card-Sort, Chris, Chris Savoie, design, Organization, Re-Design, Re-Organization, Savoie, Sitemap, Sort, TheWebShop, Tips, Tricks
Posted in Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Design, Web Development | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
Before the invention of movable type and printing, simple grids based on optimal proportions had been used to arrange handwritten text on pages. One such system, known as the “Villiards Diagram,” was in use at least since medieval times. Interior designers arrange rooms based on a grid system, and city planners work on a grid too. It’s a wonder what took web designers and developers so long to show interest in a system that has been essential to the printed word since the ‘30s. Read more... (244 words, 1 image, estimated 59 secs reading time)
Tags: 960, design, grid, Illustrator, mockup, PhotoShop, tools, Web, winnipeg
Posted in Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Design | No Comments »
Friday, May 28th, 2010
It’s always a good idea to design or wireframe a website or application before jumping straight to the coding or graphic design part. Wireframing, prototyping, mocking it up reduces the time to decide which part goes to which part.
The importance of it has always been taken for granted by many designers and developers to speed up development not knowing that it actually increases the development time because of revisions, missed user cases and sometimes simple user interface design mistakes. Read more... (368 words, 9 images, estimated 1:28 mins reading time)
Posted in Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Design, Web Development | 1 Comment »
Friday, May 7th, 2010
Your Business Needs Quality Design
Experienced web designers can tell amateur design by many marks. Observing heavy, thoughtless drop shadows and harsh inner bevels is perhaps the easiest. Google knowingly sported both for 12 years.
Google’s home page is legendary for its simplicity. The recent arrival of the new search results page, and other visual and functional enhancements, is accompanied by my favourite Google move yet. Google Docs is great. Google Earth? Super cool. But finally updating the worst logo to ever emblemize a company not headquartered in a car? Brilliant.
Read more... (304 words, 5 images, estimated 1:13 mins reading time)
Posted in Web Design | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
Flash is a very misunderstood and misrepresented part of SEO. Designers and even developers tend to love it and SEOs try to avoid it like the plague. I tend to fall into the latter side of things (no big shocker since I’m an SEO) but I do believe that Flash can be utilized in a way that will have your entire web team singing Kumbaya in no time.
Like any conflict, it all comes down to compromise. Finding the happy medium. Read more... (290 words, 1 image, estimated 1:10 mins reading time)
Posted in Online Marketing, Web Design | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
First things first, what is a wireframe? Wireframe: A basic visual guide used in interface design, to suggest the structure of an interface and relationships between its pages. Think of it as a detailed blueprint of a building, showing things such as fire escapes, rooms, and layout.
Wireframes over time have become the starting point for pretty much any custom website design/interface I make. There are many different options when it comes to making wireframes. You can use wireframe programs, mock them up in Photoshop, etc. the list goes on and on. But I find the best, and fastest way to get things done is to draw it out with a good old pencil and paper. With pencil and paper you can quickly make changes, write down notes and things along these lines. It’s both fast and easy. Read more... (667 words, 2 images, estimated 2:40 mins reading time)
Posted in Web Design, Web Development | 2 Comments »
Monday, March 1st, 2010
VANOC commissioned an awesome website for this historic event. Everything from the art to the technology is extremely well done. Here’s quick roundup of the noteworthy stuff.
Great layout, great design: The content organization and navigation is intuitive: find the sport, scores, venue, read the news, etc. It appears cluttered, but it’s got a lot to do! But more fun is the design. Notice the modern lineart used in the large backgrounds (peaking out the right side of the content) and through the header. The sport featured is random on the home page, and sport-specific on the sport portals. This original art is seen all throughout graphics at the venues and in associated advertising. Watch for it on the boards in the hockey and curling highlights we’ll be seeing for some time. Read more... (423 words, 3 images, estimated 1:42 mins reading time)
Tags: Olympics, Vancouver
Posted in Web Design | No Comments »
Friday, February 26th, 2010
Today, I was wondering how I could ever search for something if Google didn’t exist and I asked myself, “How do I look for answers without using Google?”
I certainly wanted to answer my own question really bad so I dug up a few worthy search engines out there that can be my alternative to Google search.
Here are some of my early favorites (in no order):
1) Yahoo!
www.yahoo.com
No introduction is needed for the 3rd largest website in the world.
2) Bing
www.bing.com Read more... (345 words, 9 images, estimated 1:23 mins reading time)
Posted in Random Musings, Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Design, Web Development | 1 Comment »
Monday, February 8th, 2010
A plain desktop can really kill creativity, and there is nothing good about that. This is why I have made this list of 10 websites to search for some killer desktop graphics to get your creative juices flowing! Read more... (386 words, 11 images, estimated 1:33 mins reading time)
Posted in Web Design | No Comments »
