Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

Interior designers design rooms with grids. City planners design metropolitan areas on grids. And print designers design print layouts on grids. If you use a grid to design your Web page layout, you’ll create designs that look right and feel comfortable to most people.

One of the things I really enjoy about games is their physical presentation. I’m much more likely to enjoy one that has had a lot of thought put into the design of its box, rules and components. Often there will be a clever idea or method used that makes you wonder why all publishers don’t do it that way. With this in mind I present the following list of ideas and suggestions that I think greatly increase a game’s appeal.

When deciding what to include here, I’ve limited myself to ideas and concerns that do not (for the most part) require extra expense beyond time. Using hand carved wooden pieces would be great but the cost could hardly be justified. Similarly, advice along the lines of “use only fabulous artwork” is not all that helpful. Rather, the points I’m trying to state fall into the category of things that cost exactly the same to do the “right” way as they do the “wrong” way.

Further to this, it’s not my intention to make a definitive set of “rules” for good design. There are some suggestions made here that will not be practical for all games. For example, Murder at the Abbey contains a lot of information on its Monk cards and it would be impractical to index it on all four corners. Instead, I think it best to view this as a check list, either implementing the suggestion or deciding why it would be impractical to do so.

The number and quality of links pointing to your website are terribly important to your Google rank. There are a number of different strategies and techniques to pursue at this stage. Some of our highest-ranking examples on this list have made a habit of including a small credit link back to their site on the websites they design. Those links add up quickly, especially if they are included on a page footer that appears on each page in a client’s website.

Enforce parental control settings you’ve entered on Windows Vista with Firefox 3—stop unwanted downloads and more. Firefox’s intuitive design keeps you from second-guessing your setup.

Ultimately, the goal of any Web page is communication. You are trying to communicate through words, pictures, and layout your site or company’s goals. This might be information or it might be to sell something, but you have to communicate to be successful.

Design is all about communication. When you’re a designer, you’re not an artist first and foremost (even if you thought you were), you’re a communicator. Sure, it would be nice if you could create works of art for your Web pages. But most of us don’t have the time or the need. Instead, what you need are concrete rules to follow so that your pages look good and get their message across.
Basic Rules for Design

1. Every element on the page needs a purpose. If you put an image on the page or a block of text or a line, there should be a reason for it to be there. If the reason is something like \”because I like it\” take it off. Your design elements are part of your design to communicate the message of the page. Anything that doesn’t contribute to that message should be dispensed with.
2. Don’t make your customers struggle. Your fonts should be a legible size and a reasonable scan length (no more than 7-10 words on a line). If your customers have to struggle to read your page, they won’t. And they won’t be your customers.
3. Make it obvious what’s important on the page. Use styled heading tags to call out the important sections of your pages and use images to highlight important features.
4. Use the best images possible, the fewer the better. One awesome image will do more to enhance your message than three mediocre ones. And simple styled text will go further than one poor image.
5. Visual aids communicate more quickly than blocks of text. Tables, charts, and graphs are easier to grasp quickly than a block of text. And readers of Web pages are typically in a hurry.
6. Don’t be afraid to be bold. Hesitant design, whether it’s colors or layout, makes the customer feel hesitant as well. Make your sites stand out so they’re memorable.
7. Simple designs have more punch than complicated ones. A one- or two-column layout is easier for your customers to grasp than multiple columns.
8. Sometimes you need to hire a professional. If you’re creating something that needs to last a long time, hiring a professional designer, brand manager, or marketing guru will help make sure that you get the best possible site.

These twenty mistakes are the difference between a very poor website and a very good website. You may know some of these mistakes already, but if you have avoided or corrected all of them you are almost certain to keep visitors coming in and coming back.

This list is especially important for new designers, amateurs or the experienced but sloppy who need a list to work from for a website spot check.

1. Bad Layout and Design - Yes, there are some ugly, unbalanced or overloaded webpages out there. Make your page a pleasant viewing experience. If you are not sure about the looks of you design, then let some people see a screenshot of your webpage.

2. Non-Standard Links - Why confuse your visitors with links that are different colors or fonts that vary from page to page. Don’t frustrate your visitors, it shouldn’t be a guessing game.

3. Iffy Navigation - Take it easy on the moving objects, trailing images and other stuff you see on kids websites. It’s just not that entertaining and it can get in the way and distract your visitors. Keep it stable easy to find and read.

4. Slow Pages - Who wants to watch your dumb load meter rack up the percents of loaded kilobytes or megabytes? Keep your pages lean and fast, under 50k if possible. Do not bore your visitors.

5. Wild and Crazy Color Schemes - Some pages look idiotic with overly bright colors, maybe even revolting. Your texts must be easy to read, not a sensational nightmare.

6. Spelling and Grammar - Errors in spelling and grammar make your page look amateurish or childish - always spell check.

7. Page Text - Keep your pages easy to read. Break texts into paragraphs or blocks. People scan pages more than they read them, make it easy on them.

8. Font Style and Size - Choose easy to read fonts and use the right size - not micro reading or headlines on every line.

9. Dumb, Out of Control Music - select background music that fits the subject matter and make sure it can be turned off easily.

10. Under Construction - Avoid having a visitor coming to you closed or not yet opened website. What’s the point? Give them a single page of content with a notice as to when the whole site will be available.

11. Untested Web Site - Always look at your website in multiple browsers and make changes accordingly before uploading your site to the web.

12. Sloppy Texts - Make sure all the right words are in all the right places - “Content is King” for readers and search engines.

13. Old Content - Updating your website is important, visitors need to see something new once in a while.

14. Too Many Clicks - Why should a visitor have to jump through page after page to find anything on your website. Make sure everything is only 3 clicks or less from the homepage.

15. No Contact Information - Keep your contact information easy to find and easy to read.

16. Free Hosting Service - When you see a webpage that has a name so long that it has at least one period in the middle of it you know it’s a free hosting situation. Everyone knows the limitations of free hosts and the limitations that they place on a webpage. Don’t use a free web host if you want to be taken seriously.

17. Advertising - Do not overload you page with ads, especially the big grotesque banners. Well placed, well designed ads are okay if you don’t overload the page.

18. Bad Images - Don’t make a visitor suffer missing graphics file or badly shaped or cropped images. Optimize your images and use the best heights and widths, and keep your files in the best formats - jpeg for Photographs and gif for artwork.

19. Website Best Viewed - Don’t say this on your website, it looks like a beginner’s website.

20. No Prices - If you sell something don’t waste your time hoping you will get email inquiries on your prices - just include a price with the item description.

That should do it. Follow these directions to correct the 20 most common mistakes in website design to make sure your webpage is in good shape.

Some people seem to have been born knowing creative design principles. Others, maybe you included, have to struggle to develop even the tiniest creative skills they do have. One thing is for certain, you can learn to be more creative. And you can discover the creative design ideas that other artists use for inspiration, even if you were not born with a single creative bone in your body.

There are several principles of design you must consider when you begin to learn the creative design process. These principles give an over riding basis on how your design elements will interact with one another, in your artwork and your designs. Each one influences the others in an endless tug-of-war within your mind and on your creative canvas. Your challenge is to learn to create harmony out of all these principles in your artwork, and to give your designs that unique blend that can only come from within you.

The creative design principles are…

Balance
Balance
Rhythm
Dominance
Unity

Dominance
Unity

Now, let us look at each principle as it relates to your creativity and your designs.

Balance is the arrangement of different design elements, on any given piece of artwork, so that there is an equal distribution of visual weight to the whole piece. Art that doesn’t have balance can leave the viewer uneasy, almost as if there is something wrong with the piece.

Rhythm has to do with repeating elements and patterns in your designs. It also involves variations on those patterns to provide freshness, and to keep your art from becoming boring. Repetition can help to unify a piece, or bring different parts of your artwork together. It can also provide the basic textures for your design work.

Dominance refers to emphasizing certain parts of your design so that they get noticed first. Every piece of artwork needs a focal point which determines where your eyesight goes first, when you look at it. If you do not have a focal point your viewer quickly loses interest. Having too many points of interest will also leave the viewer with no place to focus. There are many ways to emphasize parts of your design, but the most important point is to select your focus based on your main message and, secondly, in consideration of whom your audience will be.

Unity is the final aspect in design, which gives a feeling that all the elements belong together. Unifying a piece can involve using various elements, including matching colors, shapes, textures, groupings, weights, typographies, or sizes. Unity, in your art, is the overall feeling that brings your piece together, and gives it wholeness or variety, whichever you are trying to convey to the viewer.

When you consider each of these design principles, while creating your artwork, they will have an impact on everything you create and do in your piece. No matter where your creativity takes you, if you will try to incorporate balance, rhythm, dominance, and unity into your artwork, you will be building on the solid basics of creative design.

The Most Useful Design Tips of the Year

The Internet is changing with the development of Web 2.0, and the changing marketplace reflects a need for increased usability, easier functionality and design that is visually appealing but that still lends to an easy to maneuver, content-rich website. The following is a list of ten top website design tips that made a difference in 2008.

1. Know the audience: The design of your website should cater specifically to your target market both in the visual sense, and in usability. It is critical that the design of your website reflect the values that your potential customers will hold.

2. Personalize: Even if your website is designed by the greatest professionals in the business, if you do not allow your customers to get to know you, or to believe in you, you will have difficulty selling your ideas.

3. No uncertain terms: Clearly identify what the purpose is for your website, and ensure that every facet of your website focuses on this goal. Are you conveying a message, selling a product or offering a service? Make this obvious from the beginning, and keep your focus until the end.

4. Keep it quick: You have between ten and thirty seconds to capture the attention of your customer, so keep graphics small in order to minimize the time it takes to load your website. Compress images when possible, so that your loading times stay low.

5. Design is important, content is more so: Good content is what sells your ideas and products. Is your copy delivering the message you intended for it to? Grammar and spelling ARE important; so proofread everything you write before it goes live.

6. Map your Site: You can make your website’s navigation much more easy and intuitive simply by creating a site map, or a directory web page. If your customer cannot navigate your website quickly or easily enough to find what they came for, they will go elsewhere for solutions.

7. Strive for consistency: Your website should be consistent in the design, the look and the feeling. Colors, themes and ideas should stay constant throughout every page on the website to make the best impression on your visitors.

8. Keep track of links: You should make sure that your site is fully functional at all times, which means checking out your website links on a fairly regular basis. If you have dead links on your site, there is no telling how much of a negative impact will transfer to your search engine page ranking, or the opinion your visitors have of your website.

9. Make a simple start: When you begin your site, take everything one page at a time, and optimize each page for the best results before moving on to the next. This means that you should make sure that every page is perfect before leaving it for the next one.

10. Optimize: The top search engines are responsible for helping more than 85-percent of all web users to find exactly what they are looking for. If you want to be one of the websites that is considered when users look for similar products or information, you must make sure that your pages are designed to maximize your search engine placement.

If you are looking to hire an SEO firm, here is some of what you want to look for in that firm.

Keyword Research and Copywriting Skills

Both SEO and search engine advertising require keyword research and copywriting skills.

With ad copy, writers deal with only a limited set of words, including:

1) Query Words

2) Unique Selling Propositions

3) Calls to Action

In Web Site pages (including landing pages), writers have much more to deal with like page titles, meta tags, headings, a higher word count, site navigation schemes, calls to action (above and below the fold), and cross-linking. Though some of these features should be available on ad landing pages, many of these landing pages aren’t an integral part of a site’s information architecture.

Many copywriters come from the print world or, advertising, or journalism background. These copywriters might not specialize in the Web and search engine copywriting. Search engine copywriters know how to write with keyword phrases and incorporate these phrases into sales copy without diluting either their brand or copy. Search engine friendly copy has a certain level of redundancy that most likely will not be acceptable in a print medium or for that English paper you wrote in college. So it is important to find search engine copywriters for web site work, otherwise inevidibly you will most likely have problems if you try to hire a print copywriter.

Web Site Design, and Interface Usability

Placing keyword-rich text on Web pages won’t increase search engine visibility unless crawler-based search engines can easily access that text. A site’s design, page layout, navigation scheme, and information architecture are just as important as search engine friendly copy. That’s why you will notice a site that is primarily designed in graphics will not rank well in the search engines.

Finding an SEO firm that specializes in search engine friendly design is difficult. Not only must this firm’s staff have design skills, their staff should have programming, marketing, Web analytics, and interface usability skills. Very few SEO firms have staff with technical and marketing skills.

Even if an SEO firm doesn’t have individual staffers with multiple talents, make sure it has staffers with these five skill sets: web design, programming, search, Web analytics, and interface usability.

Inbound and Outbound Link Development

Link development is often an ongoing process that goes far beyond site development completion. For a new site, link development often begins with directory paid inclusion. Since it’s very difficult to modify a directory listing, a search engine friendly copywriter should know how to research categories and write appropriate descriptions that will enhance a site’s overall search engine visibility and be an accurate directory description. Many Web content writers don’t understand directory submission. It’s a special skill.

Unfortunately, link development isn’t a skill PR firms currently provide. Link development requires search, publicity, and e-mail skills. For example, an article opportunity might arise in an online publication. A qualified link developer knows how to:

1.) E-mail a publication to pitch the article
2.)Write the article so keywords naturally appear in the copy
3.)Ensure the article links back to the Web site in a search-friendly way.

In Closing

Sometimes, SEO can be a simple process. Maybe the title tags need a little tweaking. Adding text links and a site map might solve the problem, or creating a URL structure the crawler-based search engines can follow. However, if you need to outsource or hire an SEO firm, make sure the firm has staff that specialize in search, copywriting, design, programming, marketing, and inbound link development.

While setting up a site to display a news RSS feed and I found that Tables don’t handle extra long URLs very well. They stretch the TD cell and break your design. So much for doing markup with tables.