KillerSites Blog

Web Design in 2014 – what should you learn?

January 7, 2014

Hi,

Let’s start off this article with the conclusion – web design in 2014:

• Code – learn more code: HTML, CSS, HTML5, CSS3, PHP and JavaScript.
• Usability – learn to make websites easier to navigate.
• Simplification of design.

Code:

In the last few years, the web design world (finally) totally embraced the importance of understanding code. The move in that direction started back during the web-standards evangelizing days … in about 2002-2003. There was resistance, but my feel for it now, is that the vast majority of web designers accept the fact that you can’t just rely on point-and-click web visual web design tools, if you want to build sites on a professional level.

… Yes, if you just need to build a brochure website that promotes your raspberry muffins, you can use simple website builders and a template. But if you are building a website that will have any depth to it, code is king and is required. Why? In a nutshell: control and optimization.

Usability:

Usability is as much as art as it is a science because each site requires it’s own innovation (if you will) when comes to making a website easy to use. That said, there are simple conventions that people come to expect:

• Top left logo is always a link to the homepage.
• Navigation is found at the top and footer of the pages.
• Breadcrumb navigation is fantastic for deep sites.

I would argue that the hardest part of building a website is in making it usable. It also probably the most important aspect of any website because if a site is too hard to navigate, no one will use it.

Simplification of design

This trend towards simpler minimal design I believe is a reflection of the growing understanding in the importance of usability. Usability is hard enough, but making a complex visual design easy to use it mega hard! Simple design means:

• More whitespace – more ‘breathing room’ on the page.
• Use larger sans serif fonts – less fancy.
• Less images, but larger and higher quality.

Putting the money where my mouth is, we kept all this in mind when building the StudioWeb e-learning website.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook
killerSites.com

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Website Design Battle Plan

October 15, 2013

Building a website can be a daunting process … there is a lot to do! And sometimes, it’s hard to figure out where to start!
No worries though, after nearly 20 yrs experience, I’ve figured it out for you!

The steps:

1. Diagram the site:
Create a hierarchical map of the website. This will allow you to properly plan out all the pages and as an added bonus, the main menu for the website becomes easy to map out.

No need to use any special software … just a pen and paper will do! Draw boxes (that represent web pages) and connect them with lines that represent the links between pages.

2. Create the Content:
Write out the content (text only) for each page in the site diagram. Be sure to include sub headings and sections on the pages. You can use any simple text editor (MS Word, Apple Pages etc …) to do this.

3. Usability:
Once you have the websites content in place, it’s time to look at how you can rearrange the order/placement of page elements … to make it easier for people to find things.

Hint: logical menus can play a big role in this. So again, the quickest way to get this going is to draw out your pages on paper.

4. Design:
With the first three steps complete, you are ready to consider the design/look of the site. Though the design phase of the process is largely about making your site look good, a lot of consideration for usability has to be kept in mind – be sure that the design does NOT get in the way of how easy the site is to navigate.

In the PDF attached to this blog post I’ve included a couple of images that I was too lazy to link embed directly here.

🙂

If you want to learn much more about web design, you may want to check out my popular training package: Complete Web Designer

Thanks,

Stefan
killerSites.com

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