Web Design Review – Little Fishpool Wood Yurt Holidays

Web Design Review – Little Fishpool Wood Yurt Holidays

When small businesses are starting a new website, there is a number of several options to consider. Some small businesses do not bother about the traditional web design any more, especially website that are purely for information, the business owner just create a Facebook page and upload information there. Other small companies use free web space provided by their Internet Services Provider. There is nothing wrong with having you online presence using either of the aforementioned ways or any of the other dozens of ways to have a presence online, but there are limitations how you can present your company online.

Some small companies takes the time to create their own website the ways a small business website should be created which is by having your own domain name, web space and design your own website or have a web designer design it for you. One such small business is Herefordshire Yurts Holiday company Little Fishpool Wood.

The design of Little Fishpool Wood website shows what simplicity of design can achieve. You can reach all the important pages of the website with just one click, getting to the page you want information is well laid out with a picture that depicts the contents of the website on the top of the page. A small well designed website like Little Fishpool Wood website can do a lot more for a small business image than the cheap but rather less well presented WYIWG based free site builders or using a sub site of well known free site provider.

Besondere Grabsteine – WP Template Design Case Study

WordPress Template Design for Besondere Grabsteine Case Study

Designing website or a WordPress template for a new client can be an utterly fascinating journey; from the initial meeting, administering web design client questionnaire to find out the objective of the client to one-to-one interview with the client to flesh out the clients requirements.

The web design process is even more fascinating when the client is also a designer in a completely different industry. This was the case with a recent project called Besondere Grabsteine , where the client is a an award winning master stonemason who had designed monuments, grave stones and other stone based designs.

When working on a web design project where the client is also a designer, the potential for conflicts is great, there is also the opportunity to create creative Sparks by bouncing ideas of each other. Luckily, the conflict scenario was not the one besondere grabsteine project too.

Working on this case was simplicity itself because the client had advanced understanding or web design principles and he is quite adept at using image manipulation software, a skill he put to very good use by producing an excellent mockup design for his project. From the mockup provided by the client, coding and optimising besondere grabsteine was plain sailing.

The final website created from the client’s design concept was not identical to first mock-up the client came to us with mainly due to some limitations of WordPress template but it was remarkably similar. You can see the final concept which was then coded and ported into the genesis framework and then deployed on the client’s website.

You feedback and comments about the final template is welcomed.

Fatal mistakes in web design

The internet is full of sites of various niches – personal, business, company, entertainment, information, medical and many more. You may have often wondered as to why only some of the websites amongst the many thousands of websites in the internet space thrive, while others struggle to stay afloat.

Some of the common reasons are mentioned as under:
a) Type of Fonts and their size
People commit a common mistake of maintaining one font size for a long time without realizing that not everybody in the world possesses equal eye sight. It is necessary to keep changing the font size such that your site is legible and easy to read.
b) Lengthy Paragraphs
Human nature is such that people do not wish to read long paragraphs at one go. It is thus necessary to split content into smaller paragraphs with proper headings and sub headings so that people are encouraged to read the content on the site and they can get the information they are seeking without problems.
c) Less General Topics
It is also necessary to crowd the site with less general topics and not make people to scroll through a lot of content and many pages to find what they want. Using easy to navigate menus will help people much better.
The above three tips should help you in designing a better web site.

Website Design for SEO and Usability – The basics

One of the best ways to design a website to rank well in search engines is to bear what search engines like about websites in mind at the planning stages of your website design or redesign. When website owners award web design project to web designers, the last thing, usually added to the instructions,  usually as an after thought goes something like this “ah, yes, and make it search engine friendly”.

In reality, most of the things search engines require in a website design to rank it highly are common sense things that actually helps website users to navigate and find information on a website easily. The fact is that if you design a user friendly website, its bound to be search engine friendly as well. This article illustrates the basics of designing  search engine friendly sites that is also user friendly or is the other way round?.   Some web design companies for example web design Vancouver puts user friendliness at the heart of the site design planning stages because they know the importance of user friendly/search engine friendly websites. [Read more]

User Centred Design – Design for SE or users?

User Centred Design

It’s always a good idea to test your website out before you release it to the public, but an even better time to test it is day one of development. User Centered Design is just that, but it doesn’t stop on day one. It’s an ongoing process throughout the development of your site.

Well Worth the Time

Testing your site throughout the development does take more time, and money. Rebuilding a site, and potentially loosing a customer share will most likely cost you more though. If you plan on marketing your site, I would strongly suggest not spending dime one, until you have conducted some test. What’s the point of marketing a poorly designed site that the visitors hate?

By doing things the UCD way, many negative issues that may have occurred later on are already figured out. You may even find strong selling points about your site, that you can now give extra emphasis to bringing your site to the top faster.

Not Everyone Tests

Your advantage to the millions of other websites out there is that most webmasters don’t even bother to test their target audience on how they like their site. Having a site where you know your audience loves will only make your numbers go up, and make your marketing guys your best friends.

This article was written for Temi by Rob Campbell of Best Web Image. Rob is a usability and web design consultant. You can contact Rob via the contact page on Best Web Image. You can discuss this article and other web design related issues at UK Webmaster Forum .

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