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7 More Useful Tips To Help Your Site Convert

By Smashing Editorial, April 13th, 2009 in How-To | 56 Comments

Last week we presented 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert – we discussed various rules and guidelines from marketing, such as subliminal suggestion, prevention of choice paralysis, AIDA-principle, attention guide and the Gutenberg rule. The main idea was to help designers and developers create a design that would help the site to grow and become a success the financial point of view.

This article presents further principles and rules that will help your site convert. Among other things, we cover A/B testing, footnotes, testimonials, feature lists, the sign-up process and typography. You may be interesting in the following related posts:
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Clear And Effective Communication In Web Design

By Steven Snell, February 3rd, 2009 in How-To | 105 Comments

Communication is one of the foundational elements of a good website. It is essential for a positive user experience and for a successful website that truly benefits its owners. All types of websites are affected by the need for good communication in one way or another. Regardless of whether the website in question is an e-commerce website, a blog, a portfolio website, an information website for a service company, a government website or any other type of website, there is a significant need to communicate effectively with visitors.

Because of the significance of communication with visitors, it is an essential consideration for every designer and website owner and the responsibility of both. Unfortunately, communication is sometimes overlooked and takes a backseat to the visual attractiveness of a website. Ideally, the design and other elements that do the communicating work together to create a clear, unified message to visitors.

In this article, we'll take a broad look at the subject of clear communication in Web design. We'll start with a discussion of the primary methods of communication for websites and typical challenges that designers face. From there, we'll move on to look at what specifically should be communicated to visitors and tips for implementing this in your own work. At the end, we'll look at some of the goals that should be established in terms of communication when developing websites, as well as some of the results of having a website that communicates effectively.

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7 Essential Guidelines For Functional Design

By Smashing Editorial, August 5th, 2008 in How-To | 83 Comments

Look at what you've made. Beautiful, isn't it? But does it work? For whom does it work? Of course you can use it, but can anyone else? In short, is it functional?

At the heart of every piece of practical design, whether it be a website, product package, office building, manufacturing system, piece of furniture, software interface, book cover, tool, or anything else, there is a function, a task the item is expected to perform. Most functions can be achieved in a variety of ways, but there are some basic elements a designer needs to take into account to create a product that best fulfills its intended function.

These are the elements of functional design, the process of responding to the needs or desires of the people who will use an item in a way that allows their needs or desires to be met. Functional design is both an outcome and a process. As an outcome, it describes products that work well to perform their assigned tasks; as a process, functional design is a set of practices guided by the principles that produce that positive outcome. (Functional design is also a computer modeling technique, but that's not what we're discussing here.)

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How To Communicate Design Decisions To Clients?

By Smashing Editorial, July 22nd, 2008 in How-To | 124 Comments

You may have noticed that in certain business and marketing circles there exists a "backlash" against the design community. Despite the rise of attractive, user-friendly solutions, in such cirlces unattractive designs have somehow managed to remain at the verge of acceptance. You'll hear ideas being thrown around like "design is a waste of time — we have a really ugly site which outsells our competitors 3 to 1" or "we are not worried about the design, we'll outsource it or use a free Wordpress theme, let us focus more on the product".

You can almost sense a little bit of pride in how ugly their web-site is, or that they are treating design like a commodity. However off base these types of thoughts might be, there is clearly a lack of respect for designers in the business community at times. I'd like to address how you can shatter this barrier and talk to business folk in a language they understand.

This article provides you with 5 guidelines you can use as a designer to "speak business" — even if it's just to get your foot in the door or land a big project.

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10 Principles Of Effective Web Design

By Smashing Editorial, January 31st, 2008 in How-To | 486 Comments

Usability and the utility, not the visual design, determine the success or failure of a web-site. Since the visitor of the page is the only person who clicks the mouse and therefore decides everything, user-centric design has established as a standard approach for successful and profit-oriented web design. After all, if users can't use a feature, it might as well not exist.

We aren't going to discuss the implementation details (e.g. where the search box should be placed) as it has already been done in a number of articles; instead we focus on the main principles, heuristics and approaches for effective web design — approaches which, used properly, can lead to more sophisticated design decisions and simplify the process of perceiving presented information.

Please notice that
- you might be interested in the usability-related articles about 10 Usability Nightmares and 30 Usability Issues we've published before,
- we'll cover more principles of effective design in our following posts. Therefore you might want to subscribe to our RSS-feed.
In order to use the principles properly we first need to understand how users interact with web-sites, how they think and what are the basic patterns of users' behavior.

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How To Choose A Logo Designer

By David Airey, November 9th, 2007 in Graphics | 73 Comments

A well-designed logo is probably one of the most important issues when it comes to design of corporate identity. The logo has to be describable, memorable, scalable and effective without color.

To fulfill these criterias is a quite hard task to accomplish which is why you need a professional logo designer to save your time and achieve best results up front. However, the choice of really good designers is quite time-consuming. What should you keep in mind in making your choice?

In this article David Airey, a logo designer himself, offers his personal perspective on the selection of logo designers, provides some insights in his workflow and explains why you should think twice before choosing logo designers from the Google's Results front page.

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Corporate Identity Manuals & Guides

By Smashing Editorial, August 28th, 2007 in Tutorials | 5 Comments

The protection of visual identity is probably one of the most important issues when it comes to developing concepts in which corporate identity (CI) is used. Both in web design and in print - corporate identity manuals are supposed to give designers precise guidelines on how logotypes, colors and typography should be used. Basically for one simple reason: to promote the visual identity in the most convenient, consistent and efficient way and make sure no mistakes are done. E.g. the logotype remains readable and the whitespace around the logo gives it the space it needs to breathe and be effective - throughout various projects.
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Printing the Web: Solutions and Techniques

By Smashing Editorial, February 21st, 2007 in CSS | 74 Comments

Users don't read, they scan. In fact, after many years, reading online still didn't manage to assert itself against reading offline. Therefore long articles are usually printed out and read on paper. However, not every page will be printed out correctly by default - sometimes layout doesn't fit, sometimes font size isn't chosen properly or leading simply isn't big enough. It is also important to include some further references to the printed version of the page, so users can get back to you, once they've read the printed version of your article. Good news: web-developers can control the way web-site looks on the paper.To make sure that no data will lost and the legibility of content remains optimal after the printing, you can, of course, use CSS. There are many options and techniques you can use developing print layouts. Here is a quick overview of some interesting solutions you can use to generate print layouts "on the fly".
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