LinkedIn is the business professionals platform is not always the first choice when we think about growing a business. Growing a business in social media we immediately think of Twitter and Facebook as they have the power of engagement. People interact more on Twitter and Facebook as we can send a @tweet or post on a wall whereas with LinkedIn the direct contact is still via email. The immediacy and also the deeper relationships that exist with Twitter and Facebook do not always lead to business opportunities.
LinkedIn is structured to be a comprehensive professional background platform where users leave behind the husband, kids and pets and concentrate on themselves and their career. This career focus is why creating a profile that is a true representative of your work history and present accomplishments is so crucial. Recently I covered how to give your LinkedIn profile a facelift and also how to pack a powerful punch with your summary. Now that you have updated your profile and summary, what do you do with it? You generate business!
10 Tips to Generate Business with LinkedIn
1. Build your Network. As a permission based platform, we are still able to accept or reject connections. As you start to build your network, there are the obvious places to start.
a. People you know. Your friends, colleagues, people you have worked with, people you have done business with. The key here is to connect with people you trust and will treat LinkedIn as a professional platform and not a personal let’s have a play date with the kids.
b. Outlook Contacts. Do your contacts in Outlook have profiles on LinkedIn? Do you even remember who is in your Outlook contact list? To cross check to see who in your contacts could be a connection on LinkedIn, you can either install the LinkedIn Outlook toolbar or integrate LinkedIn with Outlook via the social connector.
c. People you want to get to know. Are your friends connected to someone that you want to get to know? Is there a 2nd or 3rd connection to you that is connected to someone at a company you want to start connecting with? Ask them for a introduction or see if the person you want to connect with is part of a group that makes sense for you to join and be a part of.
Once you are connected, you remain connected if the person changes jobs. This shows the importance of having more than one connection in a company that you have been eye-balling for a while and also opens the door to connect with some new people when your connection is at the new job. Recently LinkedIn has added a new feature via email where they alert you to how many of your connections have changed jobs. In 2010, 290 of my connections changed jobs. That is a whole lot of new connections that I can take advantage of and grow my network.
2. Join Groups. Groups on LinkedIn are one of the easiest way to to build your network, be active and also learn. Searching for groups via industry or specific keywords is quite advanced. Unfortunately you cannot preview the group on LinkedIn to see if it is the right fit for you by gauging the interaction however the new feature of LinkedIn open groups does give an opportunity to search the group on Google to gain some insight into the members and how they interact. Closed groups does make you have to join the blindly. The larger groups are inviting as once you are a member, you can connect easily with people within the group as a member by asking for a connection through the drop down “how do you know”.
3. Sharing. Sharing an article that you learned from, enjoyed, commented upon, etc through your status updates and within the groups you are a member of is an indicator of your commitment to your industry and also how you network. Sharing articles that you read with others not only showing them who you read and why you read, it also gets you in front of them again.
4. Recommendations. Recommendations are great and show connections that you are trusted and well respected. How do we get them? I am not a fan of asking for them as it can make someone uncomfortable. However ,if you know the person well enough or when it is client, they may just need a bit of push.
5. Blog Linking. Linking your blog to your profile is another way to interact with your connections. While this is somewhat self promotional it gives them a reason to interact through commenting and sharing your post while at the same time learning more about you. Do not stop at blog linking; link your presentations, ebooks and webinars,
6. Status Updates. Updating your status on LinkedIn seems one way as you post and there is not a way for connections to respond as they do on other platforms but this should not deter you from updating your status. A profile that has not been updated sends a message to would be connections that you are not really there.
7. Direct Ads. Ads on LinkedIn are very targeted if you want them to be. They are the traditional pay per click or impression where you set a bid for the keyword and also the maximum for the day. LinkedIn advertising is effective through the targeting and the ability to have multiple ads to see what performs best.
8. Referrals. Referrals are golden. How many businesses on LinkedIn are you using? Is there area within your business that you outsource or will be outsourcing that you could look to your community on LinkedIn? Part of building your network is to create a team behind you that you can easily refer to and receive referrals from. If you are not looking at LinkedIn to build your network for referrals, how could you expect others to do so?
9. Answer Questions. Answering questions on LinkedIn we hear a lot about. Answering questions helps the person asking by showcasing your area of expertise which for them is very useful. Your name is now in front of them again and also everyone else who is reading and answering the question. By subscribing to the RSS of a few categories allows you to take a quick look at the questions posted and jump in to answer them.
10. Ask Questions/Create Polls. Asking questions once again gets your name in front of people and helps you get the answers that you need. The new enhancements to the polls has made this tool more purposeful and useful however be sure that you are promoting the poll or the sample size can be very low.
The common theme here is to build your network on LinkedIn and get in front of them as much as possible – and not spamming or self promoting. If you are answering questions in your industry, promoting articles that helped you, participating in group discussions you are getting a lot of exposure for being helpful. The more we see someone or even with products, the more we see it or hear about it, we are going to go and check it out. Your network will start to grow as people will want to connect with you and build a relationship to either hire you or refer you. The key is to be active to increase your visibility. You cannot expect to answer a question once a month and people will be lining up to hire you. You have to be committed to being there and really useful to the platform and your connections.
Have you had success with generating business on LinkedIn? Is there any additional ways you would like to add?
Sunday, January 23, 2011
What does it take to make your business a success?
Everyone’s a consultant. That’s what my friends always tell me. Everyone has advice, most of the time their advice conflicts with someone else’s advice. Everyone has an opinion and everyone is right. Well guess what! I have a piece of advice as well.
Making your business a success depends on more than one factor. Having a good product or providing a good service is obviously a must. Being able to market your product and service is part of the basics of finding clients. Nevertheless, there is one thing that, for some reason, most small business owners neglect, and that’s the fact that you have to be organized in order to grow.
Keeping your business practice tidy is not an easy thing to do. Being able to follow up on all the leads in time, due invoices, inventory and such can be a monumental and daunting task, and many businesses fail because things get neglected.
Making your business a success depends on more than one factor. Having a good product or providing a good service is obviously a must. Being able to market your product and service is part of the basics of finding clients. Nevertheless, there is one thing that, for some reason, most small business owners neglect, and that’s the fact that you have to be organized in order to grow.
Keeping your business practice tidy is not an easy thing to do. Being able to follow up on all the leads in time, due invoices, inventory and such can be a monumental and daunting task, and many businesses fail because things get neglected.
Capture Visitors’ Attention Through Your Home Page
What made me decide to share with you this article is the experience I had when I was working as a part-time freelancer. I remember that whenever I planned the design for websites, I always made it a point that the home page is the most attractive page on the site. I made sure that the home page can capture each viewer that visits the site, not only to scan the home page but to enjoy exploring the whole site.
The home page is the page that loads when the Home button is clicked and usually the first page you see when a website loads. Therefore, it is one of the most important pages on your site. Do you agree?
A home page is also like a teaser…
A teaser is one way to advertise, and a homepage advertises too (even a website). A teaser “teases” viewers that drives them to be curious. A homepage should have this characteristic too. Viewers must be curious the first time they see the homepage and make them explore the whole website.
In this article, I will be sharing some of my ideas on how can you let your viewers love your site and tease their eyes by making your home page capture viewers’ attention. But let us know first on what should be the characteristics a home page must have.
Must-Have Characteristics of a Homepage
1. Attractive
Every pages of a site must attract viewers. This way, they won’t get bored while visiting each page of your site. But the home page must be more attractive than the other pages of the site because this is the first page your viewers will see. In creating your homepage, you may ask the question, “How can I make the home page attractive?” The answer to this question is good designing.
Appropriate and Attractive Color Scheme
Colors capture viewers’ attention, especially if they are used in an appropriate manner. If your expected viewers are children, the best colors you can use are the bright ones but make it pleasing to the eyes. If you are designing for a company, then you should choose colors that can give a professional look.
rapid xhtml is one of the websites with very attractive color scheme and still remains to be appropriate for the website. The dominating color, which is White plus the nice shade of Blue they used blended well on the other elements of the site such ash the header, the orange mascot and navigations of the site. It’s very appropriate, clean and professional in look.
Creatively Designed Header
Headers also attract people. With modern designing, headers are now becoming very dynamic and really creative. Take a look at the example below. There are different kinds of tools gathered together and on the monitor part, there’s a video clip playing. This is a good concept of telling the audience that the website is related to media such as photography, video, audio, etc.
Easy-to-Understand Navigation
To capture lots of viewers, you need to have a well-designed navigation. Viewers want everything to be spoon fed on your site, so when they see your navigation they should already understand how it works and so.
Carbonica is one good example that has a well-designed navigation. The designer made a nice concept where the buttons are labeled so that people know on what to expect when they clicked a certain button. Like when clicking the motorcycle button, the page that loads is a calculation of a motorcycle’s emission.
2. Focused
Home page must focus on its purpose. For instance, if the website advertises a company’s services then the viewers must instantly know what the website’s purpose is. And that is to advertise the company and its services.
Viewers do not want to waste their time thinking on what could be the site is all about. Instantly, they want to get the information as soon as the page loads. Like when you are searching for a specific book in a library. If you are looking for a PHP for Dummies book, you don’t want to waste your time going around each section, rather you will just go to the Computer section of books to find what you are looking for. That’s what viewers expect on each site, and you can already give them an idea on what your website is with your home page.
Shopify did a great job on putting focus on what they do. From the domain name up to the home page, you can already grasp what services the website advertise.
3. User-friendly.
One thing that viewers expect on a website is how friendly it can be used. It should provide a comfort and fulfilling time when they explore the site. Many people will say that a home page is just a single page, so it is not important if it is easy to use. I tell you, if the viewer finds it hard to explore the home page then they will just press Alt + F4 or Ctrl + T.
What are the criteria of a user-friendly home page?
Speed
Your home page and other pages must be fast in loading. Or else, your viewers will get disappointed on your site.
Content
There are two things to focus on the content: language and grammar.
In terms of language, English is the widely used all over the world. It is very annoying for viewers when they cannot understand the language you use. If I were to ask, I prefer English to be the language to be used on a website.
There are some people who tend to get annoyed of wrong grammar and leave. So before posting, be sure that the grammar is correct.
Buttons
It should be easy to use and understood by your viewers. Especially in the home page, for this is the starting place of your viewers. So if your buttons are not user-friendly, then they might just leave your page and search for a related one.
Custom Toronto is one of the best examples of site that I find very convenient when exploring. The content is well-written and some information teases you to know more of it, while its buttons are not complicated to use.
4. Drives curiosity.
Awhile ago, I have mentioned that the homepage is like a teaser that drives curiosity on your user. I will give you another analogy. The flyers people distribute inside shopping malls offer 70% off on all or certain items. The offer might suit your needs either be it a boutique or a restaurant. If it suits you, you might go. That’s how a home page must work, it should drive the curiosity of your viewers to visit your site and let them get back next time.
Some Tips to Ponder
I have here some tips that can help you create a captivating home page. To give you comfort in reading, I have categorized each tips based on the elements to be found on a home page.
1. Do not be a spoiler
Home pages are intended to tease viewers, and will have the move to explore. Do not spoil them by putting all information they need on the homepage.
2. Attract
Attract to get their attention by:
Choosing a good background. You can use an image, or a graphic for your background or you can also leave it plain and simple. See the websites below as an example.
Writing a relevant information. Information is very important for viewers, even if this is the last thing they notice. Put a relevant information about what you would like your viewers want to know regarding your site. Make your content as brief and precise as possible for viewers hate to read very long paragraphs.
When creating a content, make sure the following are met:
* Your headline is very catchy.
* Use words that are pleasing to the ears.
* Be creative in choosing words, and make sure people understand the terms you use.
* Your words are spelled correctly.
* The content is grammatically correct.
* Your content is relevant to what you want to express.
Focus on your subject.
These questions can help you to decide on what to put on your home page:
* What is your purpose?
* Who you are?
* What are your goals?
* What do you want to convey?
Just focus on what you intend to show and convey on your home page.
Wrapping Up
There you go. Creating a catchy home page is not that difficult. You just need to:
* Know the basic of designing.
* Be appropriate.
* Be creative to be attractive yet remains to look professional.
* Focus on what your website is.
* Do not spoil them through your home page. Tease.
I hope this article can help you a lot in creating your home page to attract your viewers. Feel free to put some comments below :)
The home page is the page that loads when the Home button is clicked and usually the first page you see when a website loads. Therefore, it is one of the most important pages on your site. Do you agree?
A home page is also like a teaser…
A teaser is one way to advertise, and a homepage advertises too (even a website). A teaser “teases” viewers that drives them to be curious. A homepage should have this characteristic too. Viewers must be curious the first time they see the homepage and make them explore the whole website.
In this article, I will be sharing some of my ideas on how can you let your viewers love your site and tease their eyes by making your home page capture viewers’ attention. But let us know first on what should be the characteristics a home page must have.
Must-Have Characteristics of a Homepage
1. Attractive
Every pages of a site must attract viewers. This way, they won’t get bored while visiting each page of your site. But the home page must be more attractive than the other pages of the site because this is the first page your viewers will see. In creating your homepage, you may ask the question, “How can I make the home page attractive?” The answer to this question is good designing.
Appropriate and Attractive Color Scheme
Colors capture viewers’ attention, especially if they are used in an appropriate manner. If your expected viewers are children, the best colors you can use are the bright ones but make it pleasing to the eyes. If you are designing for a company, then you should choose colors that can give a professional look.
rapid xhtml is one of the websites with very attractive color scheme and still remains to be appropriate for the website. The dominating color, which is White plus the nice shade of Blue they used blended well on the other elements of the site such ash the header, the orange mascot and navigations of the site. It’s very appropriate, clean and professional in look.
Creatively Designed Header
Headers also attract people. With modern designing, headers are now becoming very dynamic and really creative. Take a look at the example below. There are different kinds of tools gathered together and on the monitor part, there’s a video clip playing. This is a good concept of telling the audience that the website is related to media such as photography, video, audio, etc.
Easy-to-Understand Navigation
To capture lots of viewers, you need to have a well-designed navigation. Viewers want everything to be spoon fed on your site, so when they see your navigation they should already understand how it works and so.
Carbonica is one good example that has a well-designed navigation. The designer made a nice concept where the buttons are labeled so that people know on what to expect when they clicked a certain button. Like when clicking the motorcycle button, the page that loads is a calculation of a motorcycle’s emission.
2. Focused
Home page must focus on its purpose. For instance, if the website advertises a company’s services then the viewers must instantly know what the website’s purpose is. And that is to advertise the company and its services.
Viewers do not want to waste their time thinking on what could be the site is all about. Instantly, they want to get the information as soon as the page loads. Like when you are searching for a specific book in a library. If you are looking for a PHP for Dummies book, you don’t want to waste your time going around each section, rather you will just go to the Computer section of books to find what you are looking for. That’s what viewers expect on each site, and you can already give them an idea on what your website is with your home page.
Shopify did a great job on putting focus on what they do. From the domain name up to the home page, you can already grasp what services the website advertise.
3. User-friendly.
One thing that viewers expect on a website is how friendly it can be used. It should provide a comfort and fulfilling time when they explore the site. Many people will say that a home page is just a single page, so it is not important if it is easy to use. I tell you, if the viewer finds it hard to explore the home page then they will just press Alt + F4 or Ctrl + T.
What are the criteria of a user-friendly home page?
Speed
Your home page and other pages must be fast in loading. Or else, your viewers will get disappointed on your site.
Content
There are two things to focus on the content: language and grammar.
In terms of language, English is the widely used all over the world. It is very annoying for viewers when they cannot understand the language you use. If I were to ask, I prefer English to be the language to be used on a website.
There are some people who tend to get annoyed of wrong grammar and leave. So before posting, be sure that the grammar is correct.
Buttons
It should be easy to use and understood by your viewers. Especially in the home page, for this is the starting place of your viewers. So if your buttons are not user-friendly, then they might just leave your page and search for a related one.
Custom Toronto is one of the best examples of site that I find very convenient when exploring. The content is well-written and some information teases you to know more of it, while its buttons are not complicated to use.
4. Drives curiosity.
Awhile ago, I have mentioned that the homepage is like a teaser that drives curiosity on your user. I will give you another analogy. The flyers people distribute inside shopping malls offer 70% off on all or certain items. The offer might suit your needs either be it a boutique or a restaurant. If it suits you, you might go. That’s how a home page must work, it should drive the curiosity of your viewers to visit your site and let them get back next time.
Some Tips to Ponder
I have here some tips that can help you create a captivating home page. To give you comfort in reading, I have categorized each tips based on the elements to be found on a home page.
1. Do not be a spoiler
Home pages are intended to tease viewers, and will have the move to explore. Do not spoil them by putting all information they need on the homepage.
2. Attract
Attract to get their attention by:
Choosing a good background. You can use an image, or a graphic for your background or you can also leave it plain and simple. See the websites below as an example.
Writing a relevant information. Information is very important for viewers, even if this is the last thing they notice. Put a relevant information about what you would like your viewers want to know regarding your site. Make your content as brief and precise as possible for viewers hate to read very long paragraphs.
When creating a content, make sure the following are met:
* Your headline is very catchy.
* Use words that are pleasing to the ears.
* Be creative in choosing words, and make sure people understand the terms you use.
* Your words are spelled correctly.
* The content is grammatically correct.
* Your content is relevant to what you want to express.
Focus on your subject.
These questions can help you to decide on what to put on your home page:
* What is your purpose?
* Who you are?
* What are your goals?
* What do you want to convey?
Just focus on what you intend to show and convey on your home page.
Wrapping Up
There you go. Creating a catchy home page is not that difficult. You just need to:
* Know the basic of designing.
* Be appropriate.
* Be creative to be attractive yet remains to look professional.
* Focus on what your website is.
* Do not spoil them through your home page. Tease.
I hope this article can help you a lot in creating your home page to attract your viewers. Feel free to put some comments below :)
For more information on please visit NJ Computer Doctors online at: http://www.computerdoctorswebsitedesign.com/website_design.html
Friday, January 21, 2011
10 Ideas for Creating Innovative and Unique Web Designs
I am a big fan of Twitter. I consider it the one tool that helped me develop from a person who simply knew how to make websites to a web designer because the exposure to fantastic designers, tutorials, recommended readings, and impressive examples helped me build my design toolset and grow my abilities on both a technical and creative level.
So whenever someone asks my advice on how to become a better designer, things such as social networks (like Twitter and Facebook), design galleries and RSS feeds are at the top of my list of things that you should be using to learn and improve.
With that said, I think it is important that we take all of these things in moderation and limit our consumption of design tutorials and sources of "inspiration". While all of this is a great method for keeping up with the design community and making sure you’re using the latest and greatest methods and standards, I find it a poor formula for sparking true creativity and innovation.
I find an increasing discomfort with the idea of starting a project — be it a personal or professional one — by looking at what other designers have done. Looking at how your problem has been solved before in order to come up with a solution is probably a good idea, but here is the problem, though: we aren’t mathematicians, we are called upon as a source of creativity and asked to produce beautiful and unique experiences.
I believe that most designers do strive to be unique individuals. I believe we always attempt to produce new and exciting results to share with this great community. If this is truly the goal, then we mustn’t be afraid to produce bad results. By bad results, I mean terrible, terrible, awful web designs that should never see the light of day. In order to learn, grow, and innovate, we mustn’t be afraid to fail often and fail early.
There are a few things you can do to help you reach this place of experimentation and out-of-the-box thinking; this article shares a few of them.
1. Start with a Blank Canvas
Starting with another design or any portion of work that you have done before is a great way to save time on a project. In reality, a lot of unused design work can be reworked and recycled into new projects, increasing your productivity. This is a practice I encourage as it saves a huge amount of time and pulls what might have been a great idea that didn’t click on a previous project out of the trash bin. But this is not a great way to come up with that cool new design that is going to set the world on fire.
Start with a blank canvas. Don’t even set the background color to white (which is the default in many popular web design graphic editors such as Photoshop); you may not know if that’s the color you want to go with yet. Try not to restrain yourself to starting at the top of the page layout (the header) or starting with a wireframe layout (if you already don’t use this process). Have a great idea for how navigation might work? Found sudden inspiration for a fantastic way to display page or post titles?
Starting with the details can be the opposite of a normal workflow because we typically start from big to small (i.e., layout structure and then content). However, this is a great way to get the creative juices flowing.
You may be surprised by how well working on a small detail can spark new thoughts in your brain about different areas of the site (which Sacha Greif advises to try out as well on his article on busting through web designer’s block).
Before you know it, you will be skipping around your canvas trying to keep up with the great ideas bouncing around.
2. Think Outside the Box; Don’t Use a Pre-Described Layout
Grid systems such as the 960 Grid System are wonderful for displaying web content, not only because they are easy to set up and because they increase your efficiency in deploying and maintaining website projects, but also because they improve the usability and consistency of your web page layouts.
With some projects, there is something to be said for consistency and cross-browser support, especially if you are dealing with a broad, mainstream target audience.
On the other hand, having such a strict layout mechanism may be the biggest handcuff on a designer looking to think outside of the (layout) box.
What if it didn’t matter what size your page was? What if it didn’t matter how it was laid out?
For a change, create the product and then challenge yourself to a new solution. There is no rule that states your site cannot be accessible unless it fits in a 960-pixel box. So instead of curbing your ideas around these restraints, build the idea and find a way to make it work.
Instead of sticking within your comfort zone, explore different layout types, look at how new standards like HTML5 and CSS3 (with progressive enhancement) can make your work better, and so on.
3. Do Not Use a CMS
Much like set layouts and grid systems, content management systems of today are amazing tools that save time and effort while maintaining beautiful design standards and pretty good flexibility. Platforms like WordPress, Expression Engine, and Drupal are very malleable and are used in innovative ways, but they still do provide designers with restrictions. Especially when combined with grid systems, which many publicly free themes do in order to speed up development, content management systems can be dangerous to your creativity.
It is no rare occasion that I find my first iteration of a client’s website design to be my favorite. 99% of the time, the progressive decline of an initial design can be attributed to a client who wants content added, taken away, or displayed in a particular fashion that the initial layout wasn’t meant to do.
If you are working on a creative project or a project just for fun, take advantage of your newfound freedom over content. Think about it: We use CMSs because we want an easier way to deal with site updates and changes, but if we eliminate this concern — at least on occasions where this is acceptable — we open so many new possibilities for the design.
4. Avoid Online Inspiration
For projects we want to be truly unique and innovative, we should probably avoid looking at what other designers have done before us. This means we mustn’t start our innovative web design project by looking at design galleries and design showcases.
Online galleries and blog posts containing inspirational examples of web designs are useful for getting inspiration. I look through these sites and blog posts all of the time — I love to see what other web designers are up to, and I even recommend you do, too.
Really, my big issue with finding inspiration this way is that it’s just no fun to start your new design with someone else’s design in mind.
Admittedly, this is hard. For example, clients who aren’t sure what they want in their website often find it helpful to provide you with links to websites they like in order to visually demonstrate what they’re expecting. It’s also difficult to start completely from scratch when you’re having a bad day, and to get your creative juices flowing, visual stimulation through design-aggregating websites and blog posts can jumpstart idea-generation.
However, if you want to produce a site that’s unique, see what you can come up with on your own. It won’t always be great — and that’s fine — fail often and fail early. Try to avoid the trap that you have to do as good as the competition when you could dig an even better solution out of your own mind.
5. Try at Least One Thing You Haven’t Done Before
Taking advantage of your experience and building projects based on techniques that have worked well in the past tends to become a standard practice for a lot of us — it’s quicker, easier, and efficient. But this gets stagnant pretty fast, and as part of an industry that shifts in nature very quickly, we should always encourage ourselves to try out new things and forge new talents. Is this going to work out well for you every time? You can bet your ass it won’t, but it will work at least once more than it will if you never try.
6. Pretend Like You Don’t Have to Code It
Let’s set one thing straight. In the "Should web designers know how to code?" debate, I’m of the opinion that web designers do indeed need to know how to markup and their own web design (at least in CSS and HTML).
However, web designers that know they’ll end up having to code a web design means we will have experienced-based design hesitation and restraints while producing the look for a new site (e.g., "I know this transparent PNG won’t work in IE6, and I don’t want to deal with that, so I’ll just avoid it"). The more HTML and CSS browser-rendering issues I encounter, the more it affects the way I develop the mockup of my sites in Photoshop.
Knowing how hard an element or interaction design is going to be to implement using CSS, HTML, and client-side scripting shapes the way I execute my ideas on a graphic level. This really isn’t bad at all. In fact, that’s why you should know how to code your own web designs. Knowing what the medium’s limitations are is key to crafting realistic and usable websites. And if you have deadlines to meet and know of a way to alter a design to save time and retain visual quality, you’ll be a more prolific web designer.
But, in terms of creative freedom, constantly thinking about how difficult or impossible things are to implement is a big restraint, and if we want to create something out of the box, ignorance is bliss.
For projects that need to be innovative — projects that are risk-loving — temporarily pretend that you don’t know how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript works. See what you can come up with. Is it realistic? Does it translate well on the web where people need to use your design?
7. Go Old School
Many designers today are well-versed with the idea that using tables in your web design is sloppy and a bad practice. But this isn’t the entire truth. Tables still hold an important place in our web designs, and while I wouldn’t encourage you to use them to develop a web page layout, they do still have relevant applications such as displaying tabular data.
Tables aren’t the only elements left up on the shelf in the garage these days. Using marquees or blinking elements also stirs up nightmares for a lot of designers, and their poor reputations linger from a dark time in web design.
Trying to find a classy way to use a marquee-like element (which you should do using JavaScript or CSS3 because the tag is deprecated), for example, will most likely be a challenge and a productive exercise in producing a creative solution to bring an old option back to the surface.
Revisiting some of our long lost friends in order to restore their reputation can be a fun project and can spark a lot of creativity.
8. Go New School
Browser testing and debugging sucks. It is one of the worst — yet most necessary — tasks involved in every web design project we embark on. Since web browsers (and other platforms that we have no control over) are displaying our work, it is easy to consider them the most crucial constraint on what is possible in web design.
However, competition in the browser market is ramping up, with browser vendors constantly trying to one-up each another (even Internet Explorer’s playing the game). Competition is good because browsers are less likely to accept the status quo, implementing future web standards more quickly than ever before.
Unfortunately, cross-browser compatibility tends to rain on our parade and limits the extent to which we will go when it comes to exploring how HTML5 or CSS3 can improve the form and function of a project. However, with enough understanding of the new specs, you should be able to use them without neglecting web browsers that do not/will not have support for these future standards.
9. Provide Unique Constraints
Most of what I’ve discussed so far are meant to encourage you to think outside of the box and provide your mind with limitless possibilities of what you can do with your designs. However, if you find yourself fighting a mental block or struggling to take advantage of your newfound freedom, one of the best methods for generating some unique ideas is to give yourself some restraints. Of course, we don’t want to slap on the same old limitations we always have; instead give yourself some clever limitations and see how you can bend your design in order to play by the rules you give yourself.
These constraints can come in any form. For example, what if you avoid using 5 colors that you almost always use in your web designs? What if you designed a site using nothing else but Arial font? What about keeping the page weights of your web designs under, say, 95KB? Pulling off an appealing design within limitations such as these will force you to use your skills to work your way around the walls you build yourself.
10. Collaborate with Others
Working as a member of a team can be both a wonderful and a wonderfully frustrating experience. On one hand, dedicating experts into specialized areas of a website’s production will often yield better results in less time. On the other hand, communicating your own thoughts and ideas with another person can be a challenge, along with trying to interpret their take on the problem the team faces.
However, partnering up with another designer (or a group of designers) can be both fun and inspiring. This technique can be seen at its finest in Dribbble rebound challenges. While Dribbble did not invent this idea, it has brought a lot of light to it with a large and very talented design pool to draw from. Designing based on another person’s work is a great way to force creative results based on the unpredictable efforts of a different designer with limited restrictions.
Conclusion
What will happen if we execute all of these ideas?
Well, let’s take a look:
* Your site will not have a standard layout
* Your design might not function in content management systems without a lot of work and tweaking
* You won’t be utilizing any of the experiences you have accumulated
* You won’t be taking advantage of the experiences other design professionals have willingly shared
* Your design will involve experimental ideas that may not work
* You may be using techniques that are considered old-school (like marquee or blinking elements)
* You may end up using code that not all web browsers support (e.g., CSS3 and HTML5)
Sounds like a pretty awful way to build a website to me — but it may just work.
Really, though, if these ideas produce just one good idea, a new technique, or a better gauge of your professional skills, then you have had succeeded in my book.
If you find just one new idea that is your own and that you love, then you have hit a home run in terms of getting better at web design. This will not happen all of the time; it won’t even happen most of the time. The real value in exploring your own creativity is to be able to use just one idea that no one else has done before.
What other methods do you use to spark creativity in your work? Have you tried the ideas discussed in this article before (and how did it go)?
So whenever someone asks my advice on how to become a better designer, things such as social networks (like Twitter and Facebook), design galleries and RSS feeds are at the top of my list of things that you should be using to learn and improve.
With that said, I think it is important that we take all of these things in moderation and limit our consumption of design tutorials and sources of "inspiration". While all of this is a great method for keeping up with the design community and making sure you’re using the latest and greatest methods and standards, I find it a poor formula for sparking true creativity and innovation.
I find an increasing discomfort with the idea of starting a project — be it a personal or professional one — by looking at what other designers have done. Looking at how your problem has been solved before in order to come up with a solution is probably a good idea, but here is the problem, though: we aren’t mathematicians, we are called upon as a source of creativity and asked to produce beautiful and unique experiences.
I believe that most designers do strive to be unique individuals. I believe we always attempt to produce new and exciting results to share with this great community. If this is truly the goal, then we mustn’t be afraid to produce bad results. By bad results, I mean terrible, terrible, awful web designs that should never see the light of day. In order to learn, grow, and innovate, we mustn’t be afraid to fail often and fail early.
There are a few things you can do to help you reach this place of experimentation and out-of-the-box thinking; this article shares a few of them.
1. Start with a Blank Canvas
Starting with another design or any portion of work that you have done before is a great way to save time on a project. In reality, a lot of unused design work can be reworked and recycled into new projects, increasing your productivity. This is a practice I encourage as it saves a huge amount of time and pulls what might have been a great idea that didn’t click on a previous project out of the trash bin. But this is not a great way to come up with that cool new design that is going to set the world on fire.
Start with a blank canvas. Don’t even set the background color to white (which is the default in many popular web design graphic editors such as Photoshop); you may not know if that’s the color you want to go with yet. Try not to restrain yourself to starting at the top of the page layout (the header) or starting with a wireframe layout (if you already don’t use this process). Have a great idea for how navigation might work? Found sudden inspiration for a fantastic way to display page or post titles?
Starting with the details can be the opposite of a normal workflow because we typically start from big to small (i.e., layout structure and then content). However, this is a great way to get the creative juices flowing.
You may be surprised by how well working on a small detail can spark new thoughts in your brain about different areas of the site (which Sacha Greif advises to try out as well on his article on busting through web designer’s block).
Before you know it, you will be skipping around your canvas trying to keep up with the great ideas bouncing around.
2. Think Outside the Box; Don’t Use a Pre-Described Layout
Grid systems such as the 960 Grid System are wonderful for displaying web content, not only because they are easy to set up and because they increase your efficiency in deploying and maintaining website projects, but also because they improve the usability and consistency of your web page layouts.
With some projects, there is something to be said for consistency and cross-browser support, especially if you are dealing with a broad, mainstream target audience.
On the other hand, having such a strict layout mechanism may be the biggest handcuff on a designer looking to think outside of the (layout) box.
What if it didn’t matter what size your page was? What if it didn’t matter how it was laid out?
For a change, create the product and then challenge yourself to a new solution. There is no rule that states your site cannot be accessible unless it fits in a 960-pixel box. So instead of curbing your ideas around these restraints, build the idea and find a way to make it work.
Instead of sticking within your comfort zone, explore different layout types, look at how new standards like HTML5 and CSS3 (with progressive enhancement) can make your work better, and so on.
3. Do Not Use a CMS
Much like set layouts and grid systems, content management systems of today are amazing tools that save time and effort while maintaining beautiful design standards and pretty good flexibility. Platforms like WordPress, Expression Engine, and Drupal are very malleable and are used in innovative ways, but they still do provide designers with restrictions. Especially when combined with grid systems, which many publicly free themes do in order to speed up development, content management systems can be dangerous to your creativity.
It is no rare occasion that I find my first iteration of a client’s website design to be my favorite. 99% of the time, the progressive decline of an initial design can be attributed to a client who wants content added, taken away, or displayed in a particular fashion that the initial layout wasn’t meant to do.
If you are working on a creative project or a project just for fun, take advantage of your newfound freedom over content. Think about it: We use CMSs because we want an easier way to deal with site updates and changes, but if we eliminate this concern — at least on occasions where this is acceptable — we open so many new possibilities for the design.
4. Avoid Online Inspiration
For projects we want to be truly unique and innovative, we should probably avoid looking at what other designers have done before us. This means we mustn’t start our innovative web design project by looking at design galleries and design showcases.
Online galleries and blog posts containing inspirational examples of web designs are useful for getting inspiration. I look through these sites and blog posts all of the time — I love to see what other web designers are up to, and I even recommend you do, too.
Really, my big issue with finding inspiration this way is that it’s just no fun to start your new design with someone else’s design in mind.
Admittedly, this is hard. For example, clients who aren’t sure what they want in their website often find it helpful to provide you with links to websites they like in order to visually demonstrate what they’re expecting. It’s also difficult to start completely from scratch when you’re having a bad day, and to get your creative juices flowing, visual stimulation through design-aggregating websites and blog posts can jumpstart idea-generation.
However, if you want to produce a site that’s unique, see what you can come up with on your own. It won’t always be great — and that’s fine — fail often and fail early. Try to avoid the trap that you have to do as good as the competition when you could dig an even better solution out of your own mind.
5. Try at Least One Thing You Haven’t Done Before
Taking advantage of your experience and building projects based on techniques that have worked well in the past tends to become a standard practice for a lot of us — it’s quicker, easier, and efficient. But this gets stagnant pretty fast, and as part of an industry that shifts in nature very quickly, we should always encourage ourselves to try out new things and forge new talents. Is this going to work out well for you every time? You can bet your ass it won’t, but it will work at least once more than it will if you never try.
6. Pretend Like You Don’t Have to Code It
Let’s set one thing straight. In the "Should web designers know how to code?" debate, I’m of the opinion that web designers do indeed need to know how to markup and their own web design (at least in CSS and HTML).
However, web designers that know they’ll end up having to code a web design means we will have experienced-based design hesitation and restraints while producing the look for a new site (e.g., "I know this transparent PNG won’t work in IE6, and I don’t want to deal with that, so I’ll just avoid it"). The more HTML and CSS browser-rendering issues I encounter, the more it affects the way I develop the mockup of my sites in Photoshop.
Knowing how hard an element or interaction design is going to be to implement using CSS, HTML, and client-side scripting shapes the way I execute my ideas on a graphic level. This really isn’t bad at all. In fact, that’s why you should know how to code your own web designs. Knowing what the medium’s limitations are is key to crafting realistic and usable websites. And if you have deadlines to meet and know of a way to alter a design to save time and retain visual quality, you’ll be a more prolific web designer.
But, in terms of creative freedom, constantly thinking about how difficult or impossible things are to implement is a big restraint, and if we want to create something out of the box, ignorance is bliss.
For projects that need to be innovative — projects that are risk-loving — temporarily pretend that you don’t know how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript works. See what you can come up with. Is it realistic? Does it translate well on the web where people need to use your design?
7. Go Old School
Many designers today are well-versed with the idea that using tables in your web design is sloppy and a bad practice. But this isn’t the entire truth. Tables still hold an important place in our web designs, and while I wouldn’t encourage you to use them to develop a web page layout, they do still have relevant applications such as displaying tabular data.
Tables aren’t the only elements left up on the shelf in the garage these days. Using marquees or blinking elements also stirs up nightmares for a lot of designers, and their poor reputations linger from a dark time in web design.
Trying to find a classy way to use a marquee-like element (which you should do using JavaScript or CSS3 because the tag is deprecated), for example, will most likely be a challenge and a productive exercise in producing a creative solution to bring an old option back to the surface.
Revisiting some of our long lost friends in order to restore their reputation can be a fun project and can spark a lot of creativity.
8. Go New School
Browser testing and debugging sucks. It is one of the worst — yet most necessary — tasks involved in every web design project we embark on. Since web browsers (and other platforms that we have no control over) are displaying our work, it is easy to consider them the most crucial constraint on what is possible in web design.
However, competition in the browser market is ramping up, with browser vendors constantly trying to one-up each another (even Internet Explorer’s playing the game). Competition is good because browsers are less likely to accept the status quo, implementing future web standards more quickly than ever before.
Unfortunately, cross-browser compatibility tends to rain on our parade and limits the extent to which we will go when it comes to exploring how HTML5 or CSS3 can improve the form and function of a project. However, with enough understanding of the new specs, you should be able to use them without neglecting web browsers that do not/will not have support for these future standards.
9. Provide Unique Constraints
Most of what I’ve discussed so far are meant to encourage you to think outside of the box and provide your mind with limitless possibilities of what you can do with your designs. However, if you find yourself fighting a mental block or struggling to take advantage of your newfound freedom, one of the best methods for generating some unique ideas is to give yourself some restraints. Of course, we don’t want to slap on the same old limitations we always have; instead give yourself some clever limitations and see how you can bend your design in order to play by the rules you give yourself.
These constraints can come in any form. For example, what if you avoid using 5 colors that you almost always use in your web designs? What if you designed a site using nothing else but Arial font? What about keeping the page weights of your web designs under, say, 95KB? Pulling off an appealing design within limitations such as these will force you to use your skills to work your way around the walls you build yourself.
10. Collaborate with Others
Working as a member of a team can be both a wonderful and a wonderfully frustrating experience. On one hand, dedicating experts into specialized areas of a website’s production will often yield better results in less time. On the other hand, communicating your own thoughts and ideas with another person can be a challenge, along with trying to interpret their take on the problem the team faces.
However, partnering up with another designer (or a group of designers) can be both fun and inspiring. This technique can be seen at its finest in Dribbble rebound challenges. While Dribbble did not invent this idea, it has brought a lot of light to it with a large and very talented design pool to draw from. Designing based on another person’s work is a great way to force creative results based on the unpredictable efforts of a different designer with limited restrictions.
Conclusion
What will happen if we execute all of these ideas?
Well, let’s take a look:
* Your site will not have a standard layout
* Your design might not function in content management systems without a lot of work and tweaking
* You won’t be utilizing any of the experiences you have accumulated
* You won’t be taking advantage of the experiences other design professionals have willingly shared
* Your design will involve experimental ideas that may not work
* You may be using techniques that are considered old-school (like marquee or blinking elements)
* You may end up using code that not all web browsers support (e.g., CSS3 and HTML5)
Sounds like a pretty awful way to build a website to me — but it may just work.
Really, though, if these ideas produce just one good idea, a new technique, or a better gauge of your professional skills, then you have had succeeded in my book.
If you find just one new idea that is your own and that you love, then you have hit a home run in terms of getting better at web design. This will not happen all of the time; it won’t even happen most of the time. The real value in exploring your own creativity is to be able to use just one idea that no one else has done before.
What other methods do you use to spark creativity in your work? Have you tried the ideas discussed in this article before (and how did it go)?
Building Web Content vs. Traditional Advertising - How to Explain to Your Boss or Prospective Client(s)
For more information on please visit SEO NJ Computer Doctors online at: http://www.computerdoctorswebsitedesign.com/Organic_SEO.html
Many people still think advertising first- be it online through pay-per-click ads or more traditional means like direct mail, radio/TV and more.
How can online marketers effectively communicate the value of content marketing over traditional advertising?
Considering many still cling (...perhaps stubbornly) to the notion that advertising is the only way, it can be difficult to convince them otherwise.
Here are a couple of lines you can throw:
1. Discussing the value, content you create for your website has a much longer shelf life at a much lower cost. It can be re-purposed and used over and over again. More content leads to more traffic and engagement online.
2. Speaking of tone - traditional advertising shouts at prospective clients while web content pulls up a chair and chats. Web content offers a more personable tone and leads to meaningful conversations and relationships.
Other reasons/benefits you can provide include:
•· Instead of one-size fits all materials, draw customers in through relevant content
•· Easier to update, change and more dynamic
•· Easier to gauge success, see feedback
•· Costs less
•· Fewer risks
•· Reach a wider audience
•· Reach target audience easier
To further bolster your case, provide examples of websites who've implemented a good content building plan and show your boss/prospect data about traffic, conversions, bounce rate and more. Show them how over time, websites can get a steady stream of increased visitors that stay on the site longer and end up clicking buy, filling out an e-form or making a call.
Providing these reasons along with strong data to back it up will certainly go a long way toward convincing skeptics of the value of building content on their websites.
Google Pagerank Update Confirmed
For more information on please visit NJ Computer Doctors online at: http://www.computerdoctorswebsitedesign.com/
21st January 2011 - By Jim Shepherd
This morning I noticed that the usual icon that provides me with quick SEO information about certain aspects about the web page I am currently viewing was looking a bit odd. It did take me a while to realise what had happened, but the numbers had increased by one. The number I am talking about is of course the elusive Google Pagerank that people in our business keep name dropping like a celebrity.
This is quite newsworthy mainly because it has been quite some time since the last confirmed Google Pagerank update happened, if memory serves me it was April 2nd 2010 when we had the last update.
Why is Pagerank so important then?PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is referred to as the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).
The name “PageRank” is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999). However, the patent is assigned to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University. The university received 1.8 million shares of Google in exchange for use of the patent; the shares were sold in 2005 for $336 million.
In other news today!Continuing a veritable changing of the guard across Silicon Valley this week, Google announced Thursday that co-founder Larry Page will become chief executive of the online search giant, replacing Eric Schmidt in a surprise management shakeup.
The news closely follows Apple’s revelation on Monday that CEO Steve Jobs would go on an indefinite medical leave, with Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook assuming day-to-day control. Also on Thursday, Hewlett-Packard appointed five new directors, including former eBay CEO and gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, as four stepped down.
Page, 37, will move into his new role at the Mountain View technology colossus on April 4, assuming control of the business that he began developing with Sergey Brin when they were Stanford University computer science doctoral students in 1996.
He’s taking the helm at a critical juncture for the company. It continues to deliver blockbuster financial results, as underlined by its fourth-quarter numbers also released Thursday. Meanwhile, it is beefing up staff, gobbling up innovative startups and staying on top of the defining trends in technology, including the fast transition to mobile devices.
For Google this day may probably be one of their most active since they started making headlines over a decade ago. The article above continues by trying to make out that Twitter and Facebook are direct competitors to Google, when they in fact are completely separate services all together. If anything, Twitter and Facebook are competing more about the same internet services than Google ever has with both of them combined.
It looks to be an interesting day with a lot of news to monitor and new SEO strategies to develop.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)