Web Design News

Do you still have the excitement burning within you when you’re facing some new challenges?

I certainly do and I’ve got that excitement burning inside me right now because we’re facing one crazy week. Not only are we moving to new premises this week but at the same time we set to launch two new sites for clients, test a couple of low-key marketing methods and have a very interesting meeting with a client.

In November we’ll be starting work on a brand-new website for this client and when it’s finished he wants to launch it nationally and we’re the people he has asked to make that all happen. Now don’t think that this client is only talking about launching the site on the web because he isn’t … he wants to get his URL in front of a lot of eyes in a variety of places.

He’s talking print, billboards, buses, trains, radio, television and anywhere else he can get people to hear or read about his business. On Tuesday we meet with him to begin planning our strategy because he wants it to start happening as soon as his site goes live.

Yep … it’s definitely going to be an interesting week.

Usability in web design is all about designing and producing websites that are easy for people to use and understand.

These are sites where the navigation is simple and you don’t need a map to find your way back to the start – sites where the colors are a help in getting the message of the website across to the people using the site rather than a hinderance – sites where the text is easy to read and easy to understand too.

At least that’s my understanding of usability.

But I could be wrong … and I am beginning to doubt my understanding of usability … especially after coming across a website run for usability experts where the text throughout the site was in a colour that tended to blend in with the background colour.

If you or your client has something to say on a website then make sure that people can read the text. There’s nothing quite like black text on a plain white background to get your message across.

Yes we definitely are moving to new premises. Sometime around the end of October or the beginning of November we’ll be moving up to Luizzi Street in Pialba. It was so good to see this go up on the door of the new premises this week:

That means that this month and next month are going to be crazy as we start preparing for the move and then settle in at the new site. And just to make it even more crazy the work keeps on rolling in. We’ve already been booked up for over $11k worth of work in November and here it is, only the beginning of October.

To help cope with that work we’ve taken on some new staff. From today there are two graphic artists working with us, a new programmer and an e-commerce consultant who has plenty of hands-on experience. We’ll also be taking on several web designers as well just to keep up with the work.

It’s definitely an exciting time ahead and definitely one that Toni and I are looking forward to.

A few days ago I wrote about what was working for our small web design business in a town where there is plenty of competition. You can find that piece here at Beating the Competition.

Since then I came across this interesting thread on on a major Webmaster board that was started by a small designer who was looking for advice on how to pick up more work.

If you run a small web design business it’s definitely worth reading.

Over the years the tourist town where we live and work has had a fairly stable group of web designers and developers. The industry here has been made up of perhaps three ‘big’ design houses and a few low-key home based businesses.

Copy Text has tended to stay out of the local competition because we’ve been fully occupied with overseas clients but in the last year or so we’ve been slowly moving into the local market and so have one or two other web design businesses. Because of our overseas work we’ve been able to make the move into the local market slowly and we’ve been able to depend on the best form of marketing of all … word of mouth.

While the other new and established businesses have been spending money on advertising in various forms of local media we’ve been able to quietly working away at producing a quality product at a reasonable price for our clients and now it’s really beginning to work for us. In the last seven days we’ve taken on three new clients and they have all become interested in dealing with us because of what our satisfied clients have told them.  Two of those jobs landed in our laps in two hours yesterday – and the orders are worth many thousands of dollars.

In some ways that boost has come at a rather interesting time because we’ve noticed that there has been a sudden increase in other small web design businesses starting up around town. While those new guys aren’t doing much media advertising they are driving around town with their marketing message splashed across their vehicles and perhaps that’s what’s working for them.

But what’s working for us is word of mouth marketing done by very satisfied clients and following up on fresh leads that our clients tell us about. We spend time talking to our old clients and we spend time talking to the new prospects too and that’s working for us.

Of course, getting out and selling yourself face to face may not be something that your comfortable with doing. It’s safer to sit in your car or call the local paper and organise an ad in the next edition but if you want to beat the competition you have to move out of your comfort zone and get serious about succeeding in business.

QR code … if you haven’t heard about it yet then you soon will. It’s been big in Japan for some time (think 2003)  and now it’s breaking out into the United Kingdom and it will have an impact on web designers.

QR code is what enables camera phones to read what could best be described by likening it to what we know as a bar code. In Japan businesses display the code on their store fronts, it appears on billboards and just about anywhere else that a someone can point their camera phone at.

When someone does point their phone at one of those pieces of QR code they’re then taken to a website where they can obtain further information about whatever it was they were looking at.

You can read more about QR code here and here

Over on Small Business Trends there’s an interesting post – New Business Ideas: Targeting Nostalgic Consumers - that suggests that there’s a the market for nostalgic items is booming.

That’s something that we, as web designers, should be keeping in mind too.

Sooner or later you’re going to be confronted with a client who may want to show different things to different site visitors depending on where they’re coming from. That’s when you start getting involved in geotargeting or geo-location.

If you haven’t encountered geotargeting or geolocation yet you’ll find an excellent article about it here. You’ll also find that it’s not something you set and forget; to be effective geotargeting is something that needs some attention every month.

I swear on a stack of bibles that in all my 10 years of web designing I have never … ever … embedded sound in a website and after completing the client’s website I am currently working on I will never … ever … embed sound ever again.

The reason why I will never use sound again is because I’ve just been psychologically damaged for the rest of my life. I wanted to brush up on the EMBED command and so I went to a site that Google recommended and there was subjected to the most hideous aural torture you could possibly imagine.

I was stuck listening to the most soul-destroying rendition of the 1812 Overture I have ever heard. It sounded as though the musicians were playing tin whistles and a garbage can lid and the cannon … was a cap gun.

I am now a shattered man.

It’s sometimes interesting to look at the print advertising used by web design businesses. Some of them make the same mistakes in both forms of advertising.