Good design is functional, it’s key function being to create a visual splash.  When your viewer lands on your site, your design should be eye catching, but how long does the visual impact of a website last for.  The answer is no more than 5 seconds, after 5 seconds your viewer needs something else to focus on.  So many website suffer from this ‘big splash’ syndrome, so much effort has gone into the visual impact that in terms of content and features to hold the viewer there is nothing really to speak of.  Not only will visitors quickly leave your site, they probably won’t return.

So what do you need to do to keep viewers on your site?

Well, they need a ‘call to action’ your website needs then to prompt the viewer into doing something that hopefully will draw them deeper into the site and hopefully a stage closer to becoming a new client of yours.  Many sites employ features such as a prompt to sign up for a newsletter, or an option to download a PDF brochure.

Most importantly though your site needs to deliver it’s message quickly and clearly, a good way to do this is to have a web based offer of somekind in the top/center section of your site.  Make your viewer feel privileged that they are being offered a product or service at a discounted rate as a reward for finding your site.  This really helps to make the whole experience feel worthwhile, remember, that if your viewer has taken the time to find your site then they do half at least some interest in your products or services.

Really try to think – if I were viewing this site, what would I want to see? – often when designing a site you can become blinded by the design, your are so happy with the look of your sparkly new site that the content and client offering becomes secondary.

White Space!!!!

Don’t be afraid of white spaces on your site.  Use of white space can really add depth and interest to your site.  How many websites have you seen that are a complete assault on the senses, there are just so many things competing for space on the page that nothing really stands out.  The common mistake is just to keep adding and adding to the website and in the end your original message is completely lost amongst the mire.  So….embrace white space, it really helps the user to feel comfortable when browsing your site.

Don’t be afraid of simplicity

It is far too easy to feel the temptation to make your website a technological wonder – it must be able to do a million and one fancy things and have wondrous fancy moving graphics.  Ok – in it’s place these things are fine, but often a simple approach is always a winner. Your viewer is not necessarily looking to be wowed be technical wizardry, your site must achieve it’s goal of delivering your message in the quickest and most effective manner to your viewer.  Often wizz-bangs really detract from doing this.  Fancy self indulgent intro sequences quickly become irritating and obstructive.

Don’t dictate to your viewer

Your site has one purpose; to hold the interest of your viewer, it is their experience that really counts.  Therefore a big no-no is building features into your site that force the viewer to use a certain screen resolution or to have a certain media player installed.  Some designers often forget that a website is written for the viewer, not to indulge their creative fantasies.

Often when revamping your website, it’s all to easy to dive headlong into flashy new design ideas without really considering what it is that you want from it.

So with this in mind, we’ve put together a little list of things to consider when looking at new website ideas:

Make a list of what you don’t like:
Look at your current website and those of your competitors and make a list of what is wrong with it, everything from how it looks, how it is arranged and how it works. Often this is a great way of arriving a definitive list of features that really work for your particular industry.

Facelift:
Do you need to make any changes to the functionality of the site, often the temptation when re-designing is to throw everything away and start from scratch.  Often in this process many tried and tested features on your current site are consigned to the bin.  So, maybe all that is needed is a fresh cost of paint and some new bling.  Don’t be afraid to keep aspects of the current site – and just give them a lick of paint.

Draw a tree:
The first thing to do is to draw a flow chart or a tree of how viewers will navigate your site.  Often it is easy to dive into fancy re-designs and be wowed by sparkly new artwork without really giving much thought to how easy it is for viewers to navigate your site and quickly navigate to their desired page.  Drawing a tree or flow diagram will really help you to plan a navigational system that is quick and easy to use, after-all your viewer will have a very short attention span and if they can’t find what they want quickly then they are back to Google.

Allow for growth:
Always make sure that your redesign leaves plenty of scope for additions in the future.  How many times have you seen sites that clearly look like they have had additional content squeezed into strange areas.  Some sites can end up looking like strange houses that have had ill conceived extensions bolted on to them over the years.  The golden rule is always create a design that has plenty of space for future growth, none of us really know for sure what is just over the horizon.

Before launch > revisit your original brief:
Often the road to launching your new site can be a long one with plenty of twists and turns along the way.  It is very easy to unconsciously move away from your original brief or intentions, taking you away from the original vision.  Always, when signing of your new site prior to launch go back and review your original intentions and double check that your site is true to it’s original vision.

Get plenty of feedback:
Prior to considering a re-design it is always worth asking for some honest and frank feedback from anyone outside of the business.  It is all to easy to be very blinkered when looking at our own website.  A fresh set of eyes will always bring out often vital areas that you have overlooked

and lastly…..

Have a plan and stick to it!

Finally Microsoft have chosen to join the rest of the civilized world and release a browser using the same coding as Firefox and Safari. It is such a nice change to design a site that displays perfectly with Safari and Firefox – and now I.E!!.

Historically when ever we design a site that works as it should in all mainstream browsers, we would then do the dreaded I.E check, having to check the site in I.E 6 & 7. Usually our work would require a bit of design tweaking in order to function with I.E 7 and I.E 6 would be all over the place.

The reason is that for some reason Microsoft saw fit to make a pixel size different for each of their browser releases and totally different from everybody else. This means that every website would need to have a separate style sheet for practically every version of Internet Explorer, meaning practically a complete recode for every version.

Hopefully now Microsoft have joined the rest of the world then over time we will only need to code sights once. Often though it takes people years to upgrade their browser, sometimes we bump into people that are still using I.E 5.5.

For years and years I have avoided using ‘cooper black’ and looked down on it as being very dated. I remember those old ads shown in the local cinemas in the seventies, advertising the local dodgy curry house. They we always really badly shot and grainy and generally always used cooper black as the font of choice.

After years of skipping past it in our ever growing library of fonts, today I thought I would try it for a piece f Flash that I was working on that needed a bit of a quirky/corny look to it.

What a shining light of inspiration it proved to be, it gave the project the perfect look, with it’s dated seventies-ness really adding to the look and feel of the artwork.

And the moral of the story is……..I guess it doesn’t hurt to take of the blinkers every so often!

Is Twitter really worth it? – or is it one of those passing fads that everybody does for a while just because they feel they ought to.

I guess we probably fall into the latter, we’ve been religiously using Twitter for about 12 months now, we make regular tweets on a variety of subjects and have a decent number of followers.

Looking at our web stats I can’t see that it really has any impact on our monthly performance, we get the odd referral but nothing really that is on parr with other marketing that we employ.

We always try to mix informative tweets with more ‘sales’ related offers to our subscribers, we’ve tried lots of different things. We’ve used other offers that works well in other areas, but with Twitter…not a dicky bird (pun intended).

So I guess we’ll keep punting away until the next big ‘you must do this’ sensation comes along.

If anyone has any feedback on their experiences with Twitter I’d be keen to find out.

As a designer, every few months you learn a new technique or style you then set about using on everything that you do. Looking back over past work you can almost book mark your development by the work that you produce. The difficult thing is when you learn a new technique is not to use it on absolutely everything!!!

I once heard the blues guitarist BB King say that the most important notes are the ones that you don’t play – i.e the use of space in music is more important than the notes that you do play. I think the same thing can be related to design, as a designer sometimes its hard to know when to put then paint brush down and call it finished, there is always the temptation to add a little bit here and a little bit there.

As I look back through the work that we have produced I can chart our growth as designers, the best work is often the most minimalist. Good design really works in a clear context, simple statements are often the most bold.

At JC Peters we are a fairly small company, so it is always hard for us to make the time to market our own business. The question is always should we prioritize marketing our own business as high up the ladder as working on existing projects for our clients.  If we don’t market ourselves we find we get too many peaks and troughs, we go through periods of being very busy and when those periods are over we have periods were we are then marketing ourselves.

The obvious answer is probably to expand our marketing side to ensure consistent activity but over the past 18 months, like all businesses we have tried to run ourselves as leanly as possible in order to weather the storm.

Currently the cold market seems to be thawing slightly and clients are wanting to spend again, so we have been very busy with organic work from existing clients.  I think we will probably take the plunge and employ a marketing person to work full time on marketing our web & graphic design services, we will probably look to do this in the new year.

We’ve recently built and set up a number of p.c’s to fulfill an I.T contract for a client of ours.  As part of the software install we have supplied the brand new shiny Windows 7, this was our first experience of Microsoft’s brand new flagship OS.

So…..whats it like?
As hardened Mac users we’re always keen to avoid anything Microsoft.  Our first thoughts were that it is very ‘Mac like’ when it boots, it doesn’t show a load of DOS code as its predecessors always did so well done for that Microsoft!.

It also now has a dock area at the bottom of the screen, which is very useful for quickly opening your fav programs (mmm, where have I seen that before?).  It’s media integration is also really good, it looks very slick.  Page animate nicely into one another it all felt very well balanced and put together.

Its fairly clear to see that Microsoft have been closely watching Apple and their great OS (Snow) Leopard > upon fist glance the new Windows 7 appears to be really good, it looks great, isn’t to processor hungry (unlike the Lead Balloon that was Vista).

So is it really as good as Leopard?
Of course it isn’t!!! – the main problem is that it is still made by Microsoft > and that means badly thought out, not tested properly, impossible to actually do anything other than write a word doc with.  As soon as we try setting up a simple Network then that’s when you see behind the curtain, it is still just like all of it’s predecessors and is unnecessarily long winded in order to perform the simplest of tasks.  It is clunky and worst of all it won’t Network to a Linux based server.

And the moral of the story is………..get a Mac, they work.

Email newsletters, as a web design agency we get a fair few requests for email newsletter design.  As email marketing is much cheaper than traditional print advertising, the recent economic climate has drawn many businesses into looking at more cost effective forms of marketing.

At Jc Peters we have designed and managed quite a few email campaigns on behalf of our clients, they seem to be an excellent way of keeping in touch with regular clients and reaching new ones.

The consensus is that they not only a more cost effective method of marketing (versus Print) but they also are able to provide access to extremely accurate statistics & data on open rates and bounce rates.