Web Design

Building, or rebuilding, a website is important if you want to get your brand noticed. But this can be a difficult task. So we’ve put together steps to follow in order to create a successful site. The first website redesign tip we give to clients is to focus on your audience. After you have done that, the next step is to set measurable goals.

Website Redesign Tip: Set Measurable Goals

What does it mean to have measurable goals? When launching, or perhaps relaunching, your website it is important to have reachable goals. Websites that don’t have simple, measurable goals often seem scattered and may not last for the long term. So, a measurable goal is a specific short term goal that can be easily achieved, and help your website. The goal should be a benchmark for longer term goals you want to achieve.

For example, you might want to update your site’s design and color scheme. If you do some research you’ll find that blue is a great color for website design. If blue fits in with your brand, you can change the color scheme. Perhaps you’ll see a change in the amount of people viewing your website. Fixing your layout for better usability is always a good idea. Web design trends shift constantly, so you want to make sure you keep up.

Some other measurable goals include:

• starting a newsletter (if appropriate)
• increase traffic each month, if only by a little bit
• make a few new contacts each month

To Conclude

So let’s review. If you set clear benchmarks for your website, it is possible to set long term goals. If you can fix the simple kinks in your website, you can quickly move on to better, more important projects. This is just one website redesign tip of many out there. And remember, your goals don’t have to be too large. Creating a successful site takes time.

One current web design trend is typography. Typography is a simple yet important part of web design. The wrong font can turn people off from your site. Good type is the difference between an attractive and an outdated website. So while you might have thought the content is the most important part of your site, it turns out that the font you use is just as critical.

Why Typography?

Typography is a specific tool used by web designers to make the website reflect your company’s style. For example, a bakery’s website and a hospital’s website will look completely different. The fonts will be different, the color schemes will be different, etc. This is because different fonts evoke different emotions. There is a science behind typography. In addition to this, certain fonts go in and out of style, so you need to keep up with the latest trends.

Type for Print vs Web

One important thing to remember is that there is a difference between typography for print and for the web. For both mediums, the font should be pleasing to the eye. But there are differences to remember. The main difference is that print is static. In print, type cannot be moved. For the web, type can move, disappear, change colors, etc. Another difference is that on the web, type isn’t necessarily words, but can be signs and shapes as well. So a website’s typography should reflect the theme of the company/person. Another difference is that websites can be viewed on different devices. The type you use should be accessible on mobile phones, tablets, and computers. Print type is only on one medium at a time.

Overall, you should put a fair amount of thought into your typography. This is a very important aspect of web design. In fact, it could make or break your site. So before you choose a font, you should do some research on trends beforehand.

Web design, while important, is frustrating at times. Here at Union Square Design in New York, we can run into a lot of problems while designing websites for clients. Learning how to code is easy. Learning complex programming languages is easy as well. What isn’t easy is actually typing them out on a computer. While creating code for websites, mistakes can be made.

Web Design Frustration: Case-Sensitive Code

Coding is difficult because it is case-sensitive, just like passwords. What that means is that if you put an extra space, or a lowercase letter instead of an uppercase letter, your code will not work. This is just one of the complexities of code. While it is important that everything is perfect, it can be hard to find mistakes. If code does not run, or if the spacing is not right in the design, we have to read the entire code to find the mistake. And if you didn’t know, code looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>

<meta property=”og:title” content=”What I Hate About the Internet”><meta property=”og:type” content=”article”><meta property=”og:site_name” content=”Google Docs”><meta property=”og:url” content=”https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1cNHHU1ErU_k8-85S5tHjYpPi7L7Ffks5ZVjTnB-ZMCg/edit?usp=emb_facebook”>

This is not something that is easy to read. One mistake and you could spend hours reading code for something wrong. Thankfully, there are programs to help find errors. But unfortunately they’re not perfect. The computer can only do so much. You might be wondering, why is most code case sensitive? Well, that’s just the way it was created. The English language is case sensitive as well after all. 

In conclusion, while this isn’t the only frustrating thing about web design, it is the most annoying. Other frustrations include the time it takes to create a site, and occasional clients asking for things that cannot be done developmentally. In a perfect world, creating websites would be a simple task. But unfortunately, this is not a perfect world.