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Web Design & Development
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In our day, when the rush after profit is so big, most of the times we don't observe all the mistakes made over and over again. In this article I identified the top five web mistakes that can reduce a website's effectiveness as well as its long-term growth prospects, and provides useful hints how to avoid them.
- Not mention what is your domain!
The most obvious problem I usually see in a home page is the absence of description exactly what the site deals with. This usually means just saying What You Do. One of the essential factors here is what I call “precision”. How easily someone visiting your site/page for the first time can understand what the deal is, and if they're in the right place.
First impression is the most critically valuable. If someone has enjoyed it, s/he recommends it to 3 people, but if not, s/he will say 10 people still in. Don't ever bother welcoming anyone to your web site. That goes without saying.
Whenever we visit a new web page, we always have this question in our mind: “Am I in the right place? For avoiding an unacceptable situation you must use the most basic design techniques. First is a good position, secondly use a visible size of the most important and at last, don't forget about the strong contrast of what they need to know.
Web site's first job is to answer that question, whether positively or negatively.
How to Say What You Do
It is really simple to explain what you deal with. You just mention 3 important moments:
- What your company/service is
- What you do
- For whom
So a good intro might be: “RT Design Studio is a professional and a really great team that creates web designs, and provides its clients with products of the highest quality standards, in the shortest deadlines.”
- Incredible Graphics
We've all been to web sites that rely on a big splash of stock photography or graphics trying to make an incredible first impression, but the effect doesn't quite happen. This is what I mean by “Incredible Graphics”.
I think that using the graphics correctly, you can catch the eyes and convey your messages in the best way. Don't exaggerate with the text, it has to communicate information very quickly and accurately. Imagery, too, can import a rich combination of “soft” info, or a high-level of complex info in the form of a graph, chart, or diagram.
The selection of imagery has to be credible. For example, don't use pictures that are not representative for your business, the information given by images have to correspond to reality, or at least to your domain of work.
- Bad Production
I have to say that shoddy production technique is one of the biggest factors that can impact your home page's success rate. So a home page should have a high content-to-markup ratio, have well-written title and meta-description tags, and feature the most relevant content high up in the source.
Use of inline styling, tables for layout, lack of separation of style and code from markup, and heavy non-semantic HTML can all be detrimental to the probability that a visitor will proceed further into the site.
A poorly-produced page will also:
- be slower to load
- translate less successfully to other media (like mobile devices)
- be less accessible to people with disabilities such as screen readers or magnifiers
- be more costly to edit and re-design over time
- Give them what they want!
Remember that a home page should focus on what the visitor is interested in, not what you're interested in.
When someone visits your site, he is trying to find out if he is going to get what he needs. Of course, all web sites have their own goals, but the best way to achieve those is by helping its visitors achieve theirs. The better you do that, the more people will come back to your site, and recommend your site to others.
The most successful web sites find win solutions, keeping people on the site by giving them what they want long enough for the site to get what it wants.
- The Dead Space.
“The Dead Space” is what you build for your visitors that have nothing in them!
Usually it goes like: “Under Construction” or “Coming Soon” placeholder. Whenever you see one of these you think “This site isn't finished, so I'm unlikely to get what I want here!” OK, so it only took a few years for web designers and owners to realize this was dumb and pointless.
No News is Not Necessarily Good News. My favorite modern Dead Pit trap is the Empty News Section variant. If you don't have a lot of News to give, it's far better to show just a few items on your home page than to create a section with not a lot in. |
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Marketing
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Many people ask themselves how to become highly successful freelance web designers. They search information from all the possible resources, but indeed there are some simple steps that can make your business one of the most profitable.
- Choose your own products or affiliate
Choose what to sell. What you like to do? Choose the product that fits better to you and your web site. At the moment you may be thinking at a product that will bring you a lot of money. Yes, I agree with you, and it sounds really good. But when you are going to work days and nights on this, you will quickly get tired and bored, if you aren’t personally excited about the product you are marketing.
- Love what you do and do what you love
Being a successful freelancer means to have desire for what you do. A desire, plus some coffee must keep you awake into the long night when all you friends are down the pub or fast asleep. Equally passion will focus, motivate why you choose to go freelance.
As somebody who is able to demonstrate your love for the industry is much more important than your experience or technical ability. After all you can teach somebody to enjoy their work or to contaminate them with your passion.
- Manage your time
As a freelancer you may expect to have less work than if you were in full time employment. But in reality is further from the truth. First of all you must keep on top all the task you need to fulfill, manage your projects, do your accounts and everything else that’s involved in running a small business.
To be a freelancer is being your own boss, with your own rules, but make sure you’re both strict and fair. Don’t be afraid to be flexible with your working schedule and structure the work in an efficient manner. Also, organize even small work related thing, for example; checking and shorting out emails, making calls to clients, feedback, paperwork, etc. but. If you find your attention fading, take a walk or go down the gym for an hour. When you come back you’ll be refreshed and much more productive.
- Never stop learning
Web design is a domain where you never stop learning. Every day new ideas or techniques are discovered and there’s always plenty to learn. It doesn’t matter the source from where you get the information, it may be from other designers, from books or just asking questions, it’s important to keep always abreast of the latest trends and technologies.
Simply put, successful freelance web designers love what they do and are constantly learning how they can do it better.
- Get a killer portfolio
As a freelancer, what you need is a killer portfolio. If you don’t have your own portfolio the best way to do this is to create your personal project or sandbox where you can demonstrate your ideas.
But if you’ve been working on the web for a while, don’t post up every project you’ve ever done. Put your best foot forward and showcase your most recent work. After all, nobody wants to see a website you created back in 2000, no matter how good it was. People are very visual, so portfolios are a much easier prospect for designers. Above all, be honest. If you didn’t do the design, or worked in partnership with another agency, let people know.
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Marketing
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 Being a successful web designer or creating a great design is more than just having a name and a
product. The key to running a profitable business is to know that your job is actually to satisfy your client.
To succeed you must understand the needs and wants of your customers and prospects. You do this by integrating your brand strategies through your company at every point of public contact.
One of the key elements that propel successful brands and successful people, is having a defined focus. It means that the most important words in diferentianting your brand are:
focus, focus... and once again focus.
After all, that's what a brand name does: differentiate you from others, because our brains act as filters to protect us from too much information and chooses what is more uncommon!
For example:
RT Design Studio is a web design company. Like thousands of web designers, we promote ourselves through our web site and other online avenues. To keep from being prosaic in the over-saturated cyberspace marketplace, we set apart by focusing on different activities, one of them being the banners design - getbannerdesign.com
This site serves as a good example of how we can effectively focus on a specialty area and exploit it. When you enter this web site, at first sign you can observe who we are, what do we do and why does it matter! If you can see, here we focused just on offering banner design, just as in the "real world", where your brand needs to have a unique look and feel about it, so does our website.
So google.com works, one of the most simple and efficient internet search engines and what is simple - is brilliant. Imagine that you suddenly develop an interest in webdesign. Not knowing where to turn for more information, you head to your favorite search engine and type in the keywords "web design". That means focusing on something, like google does, focuses on searc or just like getbannerdesign, focuses on offering a great, quick and affordable banner design!
For understanding better this concept, take a look at www.rtdesignstudio.com, that has a large spectrum of services: web design, graphic design, banner design, web hosting and more. Not that it isn’t efficient , but is just the fact that it has more products being in this way a little out of focus. If you are interested in just one option then you will have to click on the link towards the proper category and then be taken on a new page, while on getbannerdesign.com everything you need is just right before your eyes.
Regardless of what your general area of expertise is, you must focus on a particular slice of the pie and make certain your name is a synonime to it. Think of this concept as a combination of your name and your speciality. Either ingredient alone is powerless. Put them together and you have an explosive combination.
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General
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This confrontation is also known, by many people, as a fight of Nature vs. Nurture, the difference between one's innate ability vs. ability affected by personal experiences. It is a topic that has been debated by people of all professions, nations, colours, throughout history. The words "gifted" or "talented" can be more often heard in artistic field, where the achievements of artists in fine art and performing art are more visible and obvious. Yet, I have to find the reason why people have the need for such debate or self-awareness. Perhaps some people need it in order to gain self assurance, while others find it hopeful.
So Natural Talent versus Work. It should be pretty obvious what they mean but just to make sure - Natural Talent being the attributes that you have genetically inherited; like intelligence, physique, or big vocal range. Work being the ability to concentrate, work hard, and be persistent at what you do. The point is if we take the percentage of talent and percentage of work, and mix together we can get one big mix known as "performance". Performance is of course the results, the end product, how well you do at something.
Of course there exist natural talent, it's not a myth. Let's have a look at such people like: Mozart, Michelangelo, Einstein, Michael Jordan, etc. – whom we can call natural talents. I'm sure that some people have more natural aptitude than others in certain areas.But, if we look deeply, in reality, talent can only carry you far, the rest is hard work. The two are not mutually exclusive.
However, the verdict of someone being naturally talented is often skewed. For example, when we see a fine piece of art or music, we often conclude that the artist must be really gifted. We come to this conclusion because we're judging the end result - the art work itself. But, most of the times we forget about the process and the journey of getting there. The artist may have been practicing for many years to get to that point. In this case, hard work plays a significant role, regardless of whether he/she is naturally gifted or not.
Another factor that's often ignored in such discussions is Passion. Passion makes us strive for excellence. Talent + hard work + passion is a winning formula for success.Personally I'd much rather see a hard working person with less natural talents succeed over someone with natural talents. There's just something so oddly honourable and satisfying about it. Being able to work hard towards a goal, consistently, despite hardship, is a gift. It's easy to judge talent by a painting, photo, music score or fan base because they're more conceivable.
What type of student were you when you were at high school? Have you switched types since you started going to university? So many questions, answers to which I don't really care about. The main idea is that you must find your own opinion….and decide what is more important …to rely on your talent or to work hard to get what you really want and need!
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