Posts Tagged ‘website design’

On February 22nd, the Wall Street Journal wrote an article about websites – more to the point – how expensive websites can and can’t be and what the benefit is for the business. The article discussed two female business owners, what they spent for their websites and how the sites were doing for them. Both were running successful businesses, and both had active websites. That’s about all they had in common.

Business owner 1: According to the article, “Katrina Garnett, 48, is an Australian-born Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose Crossworlds Software sold to IBM in 2001. Garnett has invested $2 million of her money to create My Little Swans, an adventure-travel business catering to wealthy families”. The portion of that she used on her website? An astounding $250,000. Her site, My Little Swans, sells luxury travel. (not really sure what swans and luxury travel have in common, but hey, she really wanted those swans!) Take a look through the site.What did you think?

If you’re anything like me, my first response was “you have GOT to be kidding me?!?!” Okay, so I will give the woman some credit, at first glance, I thought the site was pretty, and well put together. It was easy to use and captured what she does. There are a lot of cool features, and it is easy to connect with her on social channels. Overall, I would have given the site two thumbs up. But then…I remember that she spent $250,000 on it. More than I spent to buy my condo! And my thumbs drop. A lot. The site is good – but she easily spent $230,000 more than she should have. The site is nothing that special, in fact I have seen hundreds of sites that are much better than hers, and I can guarantee cost less than a tenth of what she spent. Seriously, that design team saw her coming a mile away. I hope they have trouble sleeping at night for the highway robbery they made out of her site.

Business owner 2: The WSJ says “Joan Bradford is a former schoolteacher and a theatrical costume–shop owner who bought and renovated an 1840s house 15 years ago in New Windsor, Md., and turned it into a bed-and-breakfast. She named it the Yellow Turtle Inn after she had a dream about such creatures and learned that they’re the only turtles that guard their nests.” And her site? She spent almost zero on her site, Yellow Turtle Inn. She used a program that came with her hosting and set it up in a few weeks. She says she has made tons of tweaks, but that she has never paid someone to work on her site. So take a look at this one. What you you think?

My first response, “Okay, it’s time to cough up a little money, because this needs a face lift”. The site is boring, simple, and obviously home-made, right? It has all the content that is needed, but it just doesn’t make you feel all warm and cozy like an inn should. I don’t really have any desire to call them because with a site that rudimentary, I worry that the service won’t be great and that they won’t deliver a good experience. A little goes a long way, and even a $5,000 investment would really help her to turn her website, and her image around. But, she does get a little more respect from me than Miss Swan because while the site is poor, at least she didn’t get hog-tied and taken for all she was worth!

A website is one of the first things that a customer is going to see – it needs to represent who you are and how they can expect you to deal with them. Clean, simple and concise websites make people feel like the person will be easy to understand. Glamor, elegance and extravagance will make them feel special and important. There are hundreds of other emotions websites can bring out  and what matters is that yours brings out the right ones from your visitors. But, you shouldn’t have to break the bank to get this to happen.

What do you think about the sites?

First, just because I offer site designs that can run into the 4 and 5 digits does not mean that I don’t want to help clients who can’t afford a large makeover – I love design, and if I can make someone’s site better with small fixes, I will.

Second, these tips are not for those who need a fully branded marketing strategy. These are for people who blog for fun, or as a secondary job. If you need a site that is branded, and used for business, you need something custom and completely yours.

With that said, here is the easiest way to make your blog look like a million bucks without spending a ton:

1. Download a theme from Wordpress.org. Pick one that is clean, simple and that you like as is.
2. Hire someone to create 5 pieces for you: A header, a rss button, a social media connect button (twitter/facebook/etc), a button people can grab from your site to promote theirs and one other button (depends on your site needs).
3. Have the designer add the custom buttons that have been created for you, change out the header and add some widgets on the sidebar.

Most designers (including myself) will do work like this for under $500, and the difference that it makes will astound you…

What other ways can you think to make some simple changes to your site?

A year ago, I started this blog simply as an outlet for my creative ideas for business. I hoped that I might help my readers to improve their writing, business and life through the tips and advice that I offered. A year ago, I never imagined to be here – owning my own business, on the adage top blog list and closing the gap towards 1000 subscribers.

To celebrate my 1 year anniversary – I am making a few changes to the blog. The first, was to separate out my writing advice, blog management, website/blog design tips, and social media posts, so that they are easier to find.

The second change and on? Well, that’s up to you! I asking for your input:

1. What would you like to see from me over the next year?
2. Which posts have been your favorite and you’d like to see more of?
3. Any thoughts in general for me or my business?

Thanks for being here at the 1 year annive

*For those of you who saw “palate” when it first went out… apparently spell check doesn’t cover “lack of caffeine”. I completely forgot that there is “palate: roof of mouth” and “palette: color”

Thanks to @ksablan and @ShelleyDelayne
for helping find my error!

Life is about color, from what you wear to your website design. Many of us hear ‘color palette’ and assume we are talking graphic design. But what about the color palette of your office and work clothes? Shouldn’t you give them  just as much attention as the space your website lives on?

I find that when working in an environment that is filled with color and a well created color palate, that I am more creative and enjoy working for longer. Dingy, dreary atmospheres are horrible for me to work in. Same thing for my apparel. If I don’t like the outfit that I am in, it affects my mood.If I am in bright, fun colors, I have a bright, fun mood. Soft fabrics mellow me out, and flowy skirts make me more visually driven.

What is my color palette today?

My attire:

My work atmosphere (Corner Bakery):

What’s your color palette today? Does it make you want to be more creative?

1. Twouble with Twitterers: yeah, ok, so I may be this bad sometimes…

2. Redesigning the Stop sign – if a marketing team was in charge of designing a stop sign…definitely true for some of the large agencies.

3. Font Fight – for the Web Geek in all of us (first shown to me by Creative Whirlwind)

4. Hulu and Dennis Leary – bliggity blogs, facey spacey’s, tweety pages…yeah, I couldn’t help but laugh

5. Your printer is a brat – for all of us who have dealt with the evilness of a printer…

Although a bit tongue in cheek, this list (Pointed out to me via Twitter, can be found at nheerdesign, and originally put together by someone on facebook) is the ultimate list of ‘ways to know you are a graphic designer. Although my career is not 100% a graphic designer, I definitely had to shake my head at a few of these. Oh, and I added a little surprise at the end (no fair scrolling to the bottom first!).

• You have bags under your eyes so big you’d have to check them in at Heathrow Airport
• You watch the Superbowl just for the commercials
• You can spot bad typography from 100 yds away
• You are pro-facebook because 95% of the myspace accounts burn your retinas
• You can name more than 200 fonts in under five minutes
• You are completely immune to subliminal advertising
• You look upon a well-designed project with either: sympathy OR extreme jealousy
• Your hand is permanently stuck in the shape of a mouse
• You tell stories of exacto-knife inflicted wounds with grizzled sort of pride
• You practically take caffeine intravenously
• You have an appreciation for everything unique
• You’ve been spending three days non-stop on a project and it still looks like shit. You find yourself overcome by Deathlust.
• “You find your pulse increase at the sight of a lovely ligature, glasses steam up when an unusually elegant arm, leg, or tail comes in view, and a well-kerned paragraph is apt to make you break into a sweat with excitement.”
• “You know you’re a Graphic Designer when… you buy a CD or DVD for the artwork, even if you have no idea what the actual music or film is like”. (even worse, you don’t actually watch or listen to it, just stare at it for hours and hug it in adoration)
• “You know you’re a Graphic Designer when… you look at the clock and see it’s about midnight and think ‘I’ll go to bed now’… and you actually go to bed about 2-3am”.
• “You know you’re a Graphic Designer when… you need someone else to point out that you’re sitting in a room in front of the computer with all the lights off, and haven’t noticed”
• “…when you know what “kerning” is and you really, really like it.”
• “… when you wear two [ke] [rn] pins on your bag, and only you know what they mean. To others its probably a band of sorts..”
• Forget the boy-wonder and the man of steel; your heroes have names like ‘Tibor Kalman’, ‘Stefan Sagmeister’, ‘Paul Rand’, and ‘Paula Scher’.
• You don’t wear black to look cool, you wear it to hide the gauche.
• You have a thing for chairs. You don’t know why.
• You giggle whenever you use the colors F0CCED, EFF0FF and 44DDDD
• You’re in the sun and you look around for a Drop Shadow to sit under.
• You give your relatives a lecture about color spaces and profiles when you email them your vacation photos.
• Seeing someone use Lens Flare or Comic Sans adversely affects your blood-pressure
• You maintain a grid system for your refrigerator magnets.
• You organize your CD collection according to the Pantone chart.
• You sit at work for eight hours straight just looking at your monitor, waiting for a spark of inspiration that doesn’t come.
• You’re up ’til 5am because you came up with the best idea ever while brushing your teeth.
• The hottest dream you ever had was “Trace contour… Find Edges… Pinch… Extrude… Smudge Stick… Motion Blur…. Sprayed Strokes…”
• You know Lorem Ipsum by heart.
• Your kid knows Lorem Ipsum by heart.
• The preschool teacher complains your child won’t color inside or outside the lines – only indicate colors on a separate sheet.
• Activating your entire font collection makes your computer crash
• You deliberately butcher your perfectly cross browser compatible site in IE by placing a “Too Cool for IE” banner on it.
• You prefer a Layer Style of 50% Opacity (or less) on your wife’s Satin.
• You spend $200 on a font for your personal website because “it’s the only one where the lower-case g is just right…”
• Looking at a menu make you go “hmmm, ITC Baskerville italic” rather than “mmmm, lunch!”
• And when you finally order, you go for Layer Based Slices with Grain Texture…
• You use words about fonts you dislike that other normal people reserve for fascist dictators and serial killers.
• cntrl+Z is the first thing that goes through your mind if you drop and break something.
• You refer to colleagues as Strict, Transitional, Loose and the Future Unemployed.
• You refer to your privates as “the Magic Wand”.
• You know that rivers are more than just water.
• Your best friends are all employees at the local print shop
• The only people who seem to know what you do for a living are other Graphic Designers (ex: Graphic Design? What’s that? You’ll never be able to make a living being an artist!)
• Kerning and leading on your shopping list actually matters to you, and you don’t see a problem with that.
• Several South American economies suffer noticeably any time you try to give up coffee, or even cut your consumption of it by half.
• You know that “bleeding” doesn’t hurt.
• when your significant other/ friends have threatened to never speak to you again if you point out one more font to them.
• when you know the difference between fuchsia, magenta, and maroon.
• If you could go back in time you wouldn’t go back to see the rise and fall of civilizations, you’d go back in time to destroy comic sans and papyrus.
• ….You can understand everything on this list.

Ahh the lovely world of creativity and graphic design.

Now, to make it even worse, here are 5 great graphic design sites you must check out!

1. Amazing seamlesss patterns for the backgrounds of whatever it is that you want to design.
2. Photoshop actions for really cool images (or more professional ones).
3. Photoshop disasters (because we have all had one…)
4. Increbible textures to use on any surface (ohhh, imagination is starting!)
5. Ahh fonts, fonts and more fonts (maybe someday we can get a petition to remove comic sans from existence!)

Did I miss one? how many of the “you know you’re’s” did you agree with? What is your favorite graphics site?

I love color. I love creating unique color schemes. And I love finding them in random places. I often use adboe’s Kuler when I am stuck on a scheme for a design, but I get bored with it fairly easily. A lot of times, I wish I could take a picture and just pull some true colors out of it…now I can! Using stumbleupon and the tag ‘web development’ I came across a great new tool: Colr.org. You can upload any picture you want, let it choose a random flickr image, or have it pull colors from a website. You can click on spots on the picture, and it will pull the true color out to help you create a theme. For example, I pulled in the background image from my website so that I could grab some colors. Once I did that, I can either click ‘pull scheme from website’ or I can mouse over the image and click any of the color boxes for a true color. Here is what mine looked like while working on it:

Try it out, upload a picture and have fun, you never know what color schemes will come out! (and if you create something amazing, please share it!)

There are hundreds of great graphic design posts – and endless lists of tips and tricks. But, most of those lists are for graphic designers that design for a living, or for people who need advanced tips and ideas. I have found that while helpful, we often forget some of the basic design rules that everyone should know. Regardless if you design for pay or just for fun, these rules will help everything you do look more precise, professional and powerful.

1. White space is your friend. Step away from the color, the boxes and the images. Leaving white space on the page will cause the eye to draw to the important factors in the page – allowing the reader to understand the key points. If a page is too cluttered, the reader doesn’t know what to look at, and you run the risk of your message getting lost.
2. Don’t let your font’s overpower the message Whether creating a piece, whether it is for a website or a magazine the font you choose is important. You’re not going to use BOopee (or a goofy font like it) when talking about a funeral home, nor would you want to use Edwardian Script (or a formal font) when talking about what your 10 year old thinks of his snack food. With that said, you also want to make sure not to pick too many fonts. The best rule is to choose 3 fonts: a font that is for the main writing, a font for the headers, and a ‘fun’ font for highlighting specific words. This will allow your message to get across cleanly, and still allow you a little fun.
3. Pick colors that compliment, not detract I talk a lot about color, how it affects you, and places to find it. I talk about it so much because it is so important. How many times have you seen something and your first thought was ‘the color is wrong’. If this is what you are thinking about, then the message can’t get through! There is no such thing as the right color – mixing things up is a good thing. But, trying to mix too many colors can be overwhelming. Remember, color may surprise you, you just need to know where to look.
4. If people have to hunt for it, they won’t find it Want people to call you? Give them your number. Want people to email you? Give them your email. Simple huh? It seems that this is not common sense. Many times, we get so carried away with making a design ‘look pretty’ that we forget to make it useful too. Unless you are entering your piece in a contest, more than likely the goal is to get a response, so make sure that the people can respond easily.
5. Spell check. Grammar check. No matter how beautiful the site or the design is, if there are spelling or grammar errors, it will be ruined. Do not trust your computer to check the grammar, it won’t. This also includes double checking that your contact information is right, and all the links work. A non-working design fails, no matter the beauty of it.
6. It’s okay to break the ‘rules’. See? I just did, and the sky didn’t fall. Sometimes it is okay to step outside what is expected, to get that surprised response from your audience. Just remember, do it too often, and like anything else, it gets old and boring.

What do you think? Do you have a design trick that everyone should know and use to share? Disagree with any of the above, or have a great example to share?

The last few months have been tough for us all (and I don’t even want to think about tomorrow…) but so far, I am surviving. It may be just barely, and it may not be the most fun, but it is still surviving.

Although it isn’t exactly the first of the month, it is the first Monday and therefor the first day of this month that I am thinking about work and how to keep it going for the next few months. One of the best ways for me to start a month off right is by learning something new that I can spend the rest of the month trying to improve. For example, last month was my time to focus on learning to use photoshop better than I already can. This month, I have decided to take a step back and review some of the basic web design tricks. Often we are so focused on moving forward that we forget to go back to basics, but with how crazy everything is around me right now, it feels good to go through and simplify a few things – plus, there are always new tricks I can pick up…because unfortunately, as much as I wish I did – I don’t know everything .

What new tricks can you pick up? Is there a great tutorial site you turn to for help?

First and foremost – you! You are the only tool that you really need to be creative. Creativity is there, inside all of us and all it takes is pulling it out and putting it to use. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other tools that can help! I have millions of little creative tidbits bouncing around inside my head, but even I need tools to help me put them into action. And, after spending all day in a creative whirlwind and putting together about 8 different color themes for a new social media site I am working on I decided to put together a list of the best free creative tools that I use on a daily basis, as well as a couple that I pay for, that are well worth it:

1. Kuler - (FREE) color themes for anything, free to browse and download

2. iStockphoto – free to look, a couple bucks per picture, and they have millions!

3. Adobe Creative Suite – full thing will run you about $1500, but it is well worth it. I am counting down the days, and saving my pennies, until CS4 is available…. *hint*hint* Adobe!

4. Twitter – (FREE) If I get stuck on a creative idea, or need some help, I know my network of people will always help

5. Flickr- (FREE) sometimes I need visual stimulation, and the photography on flickr is great. I am always amazed at what I can find

6. Mindjet- Do you remember those charts you made in elementary school? The ones that helped you to map a story line or an essay? Add a computer and Word to it and you have mindjet mind mapper. It is definitely a bit pricey ($350 per license) but if you do a lot of project planning, it is worth it.

7. Roboform- Remebers all your passwords so you can save your brain functions for the more creative endeavors. (ok, it isn’t a creative tool per-say, but at $40, it is impossible to pass up.)

8. Wordpress- (FREE) Blogging is one of the best ways to keep your writing sharp. Even if all you use it for is to bitch about life, try writing a few times a week and you will be amazed at how much easier writing in general becomes. Who knows, you may become the next Perez Hilton or Seth Godin!

*Just a side note, I am NOT an affiliate of any of these programs and don’t make anything on it if you choose to buy them, I just think they are worth looking into…

What am I missing? What are your favorite creative tools?