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Miscellaneous

Pretty Does Not Equal Design

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On May 13, 2013

In Design, Miscellaneous

Art PencilsNotes from the Milwaukee WordPress Meetup “Stop Making Things Pretty and Start Designing”.

Design is more than themes, graphics, fonts or the look and feel of a website. The most beautiful sites aren’t the most successful. People come to your website to solve a problem, get a task done or to learn something new.

Things don’t need to be attractive to solve a problem. Michelle Schulp

Websites like Google and Craigslist have very simple designs. Most people wouldn’t call them beautiful. These sites focus on helping you get a task done instead of looking pretty.

Design is a technique that you can use to solve problems. It can help you to build a website or an app that your visitors will want to use.

Start Designing

Design is fundamental. It helps you to focus your attention on the details and see how everything fits into the final product.

Be deliberate! Everything on a website or web application should have a purpose. The most important question to ask when designing is Why. When you ask why, you can get to the reason for a font, color or photo on a website. You can then determine whether or not it really helps your visitors or just makes the site pretty. Design adds value.

Design is a process. Your job is to help your client and yourself remember that the design is not for you; it is for your customers. To help you do this, use tools like a mood board, style tiles and style guides. They help you to focus on choosing the colors, patterns, fonts and logos before you create a prototype. Gray screen prototypes can help to focus on how the site works before adding colors and fonts.

Related Article

Build a Better Website

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On April 23, 2013

In Design, Miscellaneous, Web Development

Computer CodingYou’ve built your website. The site gets enough traffic, but you want it to do better. What things can you do to build a better website? Speed, images, navigation and forms can help or hinder how your audience works with your website.

Does your site load fast?

Check your site for speed issues. A slow loading website with make people leave your site if it takes too long. Two of the simplest checks are image sizes and the location of JavaScript in your web page.

Images with large file sizes take longer to download than smaller sized files. You can use PhotoShop or another photo editor to shrink down the size. If that doesn’t work, consider using Smush.it to remove unnecessary bytes from image files.

JavaScript’s location in your web page has an impact on the speed of the site. You need to determine if a specific script need to be in the head tag or placed before the end body tag. When a web page loads, it stops loading the page when it sees a JavaScript. It processes the JavaScript before continuing to load the rest of the page. If you have several JavaScripts, it has to process each one. To improve speed, you need to move the scripts that don’t impact the page immediately to the bottom of your page.

Do you have images that work?

Too many, not enough or even the wrong type of images can turn off visitors. You want the images that you use to help your visitors to decide to stay on your site and to do something. Whether that is sharing your article, buying a product or signing up for your newsletter. To help use images to make your site more usable, 1st Web Designer has some tips on how to use images effectively.

Can your visitors find what they want?

Your navigation menu is an important tool to help your users find what they are looking for. If your visitors have to use two or three clicks to find anything, you need to reconsider how you have organized your site. To create effective navigation, you need to use words that your visitors will understand. Standards like About Us, Home, Contact Us, Products and Services help people to navigate your site. You may want to add features like a sitemap or additional navigation at the bottom of each page. Your design can help visitors too. By being consistent with colors, word choices and images, these design choices can help your visitors interact with your site.

Are your forms easy to use?

Forms that look like a tax form is going to make your visitors leave. You want to build forms that are easy to use, guide the visitor and quick to fill out. If you need ideas on how to build a better form, get inspiration from these 5 Web Form Designs.

By looking at speed, navigation, images and more, you can improve the overall experience for your visitors.

10 Web Fonts for Websites

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On April 10, 2013

In CSS, Design, Miscellaneous, Web Development

Fonts are a great way to add personality to your websites. Before CSS3, you couldn’t easily add fonts that weren’t supported by the browser. In CSS3, let you add the fonts that you want to use. This means you no longer are limited to fonts using web-safe fonts. By using the @font-face rule, you can add more style to your website. I have complied a list of 10 free web fonts for you to experiment with. All of these fonts can be downloaded from FontSquirrel. You can also download the @fontface kit, so you can easily add the fonts and CSS to your website.

10 Web Fonts for Websites

Links to Web Fonts

Caviar Dreams, Sans Serif
Colaborate, Sans Serif
Comfortaa, Sans Serif
EB-Garmond, Serif
Libre Baskerville, Serif
Lobster 1.3, Script
Riesling, Retro
SciFly, Sans Serif
Limelight, Retro Style
Tangerine, Calligraphic

How to Style Your Code Snippets

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On March 24, 2013

In CSS, Miscellaneous, Programming

When you write a blog post and need to add code snippets, they should stand out. You have two choices: use a Syntax Highlighter or style the code yourself.

Syntax Highlighter

A Syntax Highlighter is a tool styles the code snippet for you. You can use one of the following tools to style the syntax.

  • Prettify, a Javascript solution the highlights source code syntax.
  • Snippet, a jQuery Syntax Highlighter.
  • SyntaxHighlighter another Javascript Syntax Highlighter tool.
  • Prism, lightweight syntax highlighter that works with HTML5.

Style Your Code Snippets Yourself

If you want to handle the styling yourself, you’ll need to use HTML and CSS. You need to use  HTML tags like <pre> and <code>. For extra styling, you can place your code inside a div tag.

Write the HTML

  1. Wrap the code snippet in a div tag like <div id=”codeSnippet”>
  2. Add your code snippet between the <pre> and <code> tags. The pre tag displays the text exactly as type preserving spaces and tabs.

<div id="codeSnippet">
<pre><code><script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
$('.slideshow').cycle({
fx: 'fade' // choose your transition type, ex: fade, scrollUp, shuffle, etc...
});
});
</script>
</code>
</pre>
</div>

Write the CSS

In your CSS, add styles for pre, code, div and anything else that you need. In the following example, I created a style that mimics an old DOS computer screen. I used pre, code, a div and a class to achieve that look. Here is the simple CSS:


/* Code Styles */
pre {
white-space: pre-wrap;
white-space: -moz-pre-wrap;
white-space: -o-pre-wrap;
word-wrap: break-word;}

code {
font-family: Courier, 'New Courier', monospace;
font-size: 12px;}

#codeStyler {
border-radius: 5px;
-moz-border-radius: 5px;
-webkit-border-radius: 5px;
margin: 1em 0;}

.computerGreen {
background-color: #000000;
color: green;}

When you view at your results in a browser, you get a code snippet that looks like this:CSS Code SnippetLine numbers can help to make the snippet more readable. If you want to add additional style to your numbers, try Styling ordered list numbers.

First Day of Winter 2012

By

On December 22, 2012

In Miscellaneous, Photography

The first real snowfall arrived just in time for the First Day of Winter. It certainly looks like winter here.

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