On 1stWebDesigner.com, I found the first in a video series on building a freelance business with WordPress. Spence, the “Evil Genius” from LabZip, explains how he got into WordPress and why he thinks it is a great tool for freelancers to use to build their own businesses. He doesn’t focus on web designers or developers. He believes that anyone can use and modify WordPress to suit their business.
Category: Web Development Page 23 of 31
Notes from the UX Experience meetup:
“Think strategic about UX before designing.”
Perception, Interaction, Emotion/Habit
- UI is a tool for influencing all 3 (listed above).
- Perception is the reality of how people perceive you.
- Things fail when you force people to change their behaviors.
- UX is business goals, brand strategy and user research
- It is the design of user emotion, interaction and perception.
- Through the strategic understanding of what happens before, during and after each interaction.
- You create. Created about you. Created around you.
- To be really good at it, there’s a lot to learn. And learning happens in real time.
- Ask: “if this, then what” or “if this, then why”
Before building
- What do we need to learn?
- What does it really mean?
- How do we deliver?
- What does it look like?
Questions to ask when designing
- Who?
- What? [Customers’ needs, Business Goals]
- Where? [Location]
- When? [Time, Frequency]
- Content, Customization, and Context
- Why? Is this going to be useful to the customer?
Solving the Why
- Personas are important *you’re not designing for you.
- content is relevant
- focus on behaviors
- drives the content/messaging/information architecture
- models the experience
- keeps the team focused
- You might make something useful for your customers
Inspiration
- collect different items for inspiration
- reverse engineer how a design or brand was created.
What do UXer’s do?
- expand the realm of what you are designing.
- Get a client involved by asking questions about what they need not what they want.
UX has niches that you concentrate on: UI, Interaction and UX Strategist
Check out: Adaptive Path, Ideo, onwardsearch.com, UX Magazine
Does your website have light content and no photos? What is light content? A site that doesn’t have much to say. Your pages may have less than 300 words on them. According to Yoast’s SEO Plugin for WordPress, 300 words is a good number to have on a web page.
What can you do to improve the site?
You need to jazz up the site. One way is to add more photos. Be creative. Photos can help to convey what your company’s products or services are about. With products, you can show them out of the box and being used by a person. If you are selling services, you can demonstrate your services by using photos of your staff or stock photos. For example a client does property maintenance for local homeowners and rental properties, I took a few photos of painting supplies, measuring tape and a toolbox with tools. These photos were adding to help demonstrate a few services that the company provides.
You can also add social media, videos and a way to schedule appointments. In Creating more purpose for content-light websites, Kendra Gaines explains how to make your website more interesting so people will return or suggest your site to friends. This can be a challenge when your site isn’t a blog or magazine.
Responsive web design allows you to make your websites easy to read at different device sizes. This short collection of 5 articles helps you to keep your responsive designs from being boring, let visitors opt-out of “mobile” sites and apply tricks and templates to achieve responsive design.
- Is Responsive web design boring? Jonathan Longnecker of FortySeven Media believes that responsive design can lead to boring web sites.
He explains his argument and provides tips on how to make sure that these sites aren’t boring. - What if your visitors want to Opt-out of your Responsive Design? For some sites, responsive design lets them read the site quickly and easily. If they need to do something quickly, a responsive design may get in the way. CSS-Tricks.com shows you how to let your visitor choose to go to a “full site” version of your site.
- Responsive Design Changes Your Workflow. It forces you to change how you approach building web sites. You have to think about designing for various sizes and how your design fits together like puzzle pieces inside of one whole piece. Luke W. shares his notes from An Event Apart on Responsive Design.
- Web Designer Wall’s 5 Useful CSS Tricks for Responsive Design shows you 5 commonly used CSS tricks for coding responsive design. Tricks that include Responsive Video, Min and Max widths, relative values and more.
- Looking for some inspiration on designing Responsive web sites? Speckboy has 20 Free Responsive Web Design HTML & CSS Templates. This templates can be use on static websites or with a CMS. They can also be used be designers to learn how to create responsive designs.
As a developer, I look for tips that can help with problem-solving to picking a language for my next project. Here are 5 development tips to help you be a better developer:
- The “Just look at it” hack to problem solving When you have difficult problems, sometime you want to just sleep on it. Dave Lee suggests that you “Just look at it”. Don’t try to solve it. Stare at it for a while and see what ideas you come up with. He lists the steps that you can use to try this type of problem-solving.
- Productive Procrastination When you just can’t focus and need a break, you can either force yourself to finish a demanding task or take a break. Productive Procrastination shows you how to switch to less demanding tasks like checking out what people are saying about your company on Twitter or reading a blog related to your industry.
- 10 things web developers must know to become truly amazing To be a great developer, you need to know more than code. Here’s Dan Frost’s list of things you need to know.
- How to pick the right programming language A programming language is like a tool. Not every tool is suited to complete the project or problem that you want to solve. Mashable lists which languages are better suited to a particular industry.
- Don’t be afraid of imperfection Perfection can be stifling. It can cause you to procrastinate or never complete a project. When you create an app, users don’t care if the code is perfect. They just want it to work. Amber shares why you shouldn’t be afraid of weird looking code in your next project.