Tag Archive for 'designer'

Tips on Designing Effective Website Layout

Your website layout plays an important role to attract more visitors to your website. A good layout is something that addresses the customer’s needs effectively, pleases search engine crawlers and is designed in compliance with the latest trends of the business.

To design a user & search engine friendly web layout, avoid use of rustic colors, clumsy navigation, overstuffed links and heavy images. Here are a few basic guidelines that can help in coming up with a neat and clean layout.

Give Ample Room To White Space

Don’t flood your audiences with too much information or images. Skip those flashing graphics and try using lots of white space so that the website appears neat and clean. Don’t use long stories and content to convey information about your products and services. Web visitors hate reading!

Avoid Using Heavy Files/graphics

Don’t upload large files and graphics on your web pages since it would increase downloading time of the pages manifold and your potential client might get irritated. Also, it must be kept in mind that visitors will see your website in multiple screen resolutions so the images used must be eye catching as well as optimized in terms of resolution and size.

Color Combination

The color combination and images used in your website should be refreshingly new as that would make them feel intrigued to browse through the multiple pages of your site. Go for the color combination that adequately conveys your brand message and looks aesthetically pleasing.

Easy Navigation

The navigation menu should be consistent throughout all pages of your website and the links must be properly positioned to avoid ambiguity and that the users find the links easily and navigate through the pages of your website.

Readable Fonts

Choose simple fonts that can easily be deciphered by your potential customers. Be consistent with your font type and font size as it makes the content readable for the target audiences.

Follow Consistency

Be consistent with everything on the web pages ranging from font size & type to navigation menus, size of headings. Ensure that all pages of your website have the consistent look-n-feel. The primary design element must be same throughout all the web pages.

Designing / redesigning a website layout is certainly not an easy task but an extremely important one if you want to be successful on the World Wide Web. We hope that you liked our post and welcome your feedback and insights on the same.

10 Useful Free Resources for Designers

Designers are always on a look out for useful resources and applications that can give a boost to their creative potential. We bring to you a list of 10 such useful resources that can help you craft good designs and establish yourself in design business.

Web Design Library

Web Design Library offers a designer an in-depth analysis of the events related to design world. It covers all theoretical and practical aspects of visually appealing digital presentation of information. Also, this one-stop resource updates you with the latest technological innovations in design industry and sets web design standards by rewarding the best web design solutions.

Web Design Library offers all necessary web design information to you such as Web Design Basics, Photoshop, Raster & Vector Graphics, Flash & Swish, 3D Graphics, HTML and CSS, Web Programming, Website Showcase, Design Accessories, Flash Elements, Software Reviews, Web Designers’ Interviews etc.

Stock.Xchng

Stock.Xchng is a leading FREE stock photo website to download and share images. It gives a designer the freedom to browse through a huge image gallery containing over 400,000 quality stock photos by more than 30,000 photographers. You can also share your creative images with fellow designers and take feedback from them.

stock exchange

Stock.Xchng serves as a substitute for pricey stock photography for non-commercial and personal uses with the restrictions specified by the owner of the image. You can only use image in digital format on websites, multimedia presentations, magazines, newspapers, books, brochures, flyers, CD/DVD covers etc.

CSS Beauty

This online resource offers you a huge list of nicely crafted CSS based websites from renowned designers across the world. It serves as an effective platform for designer community wherein global designers show their creative abilities by submitting their CSS based websites giving budding designers lots of inspiration and creative design ideas.

Css beauty

These CSS based websites can belong to as varied categories as Business, Entertainment, Non-profit, Other, Personal, Photography, Magazine Portals, Sports etc. Besides this, CSS Beauty updates designers with the recent news and latest technological trends in CSS etc.

UrbanFonts

UrbanFonts, one of the top 50,000 sites in the world, is a well-designed and easy-to-use free font website with over 8,000 freeware fonts and dingbats (characters or spacers used in typesetting), which can be downloaded. It offers a text box where you can type in your text and change the font size, font color and background color as per your requirements. These fonts can easily be browsed in alphabetical order or by category such as “gothic” and futuristic”, both PC and MAC. You can also submit your own fonts.

urban fonts

In addition, Urban Font provides you a toggle button to change between a view of characters or text and also offers a great preview feature. The site also features a blog, forum and an article section that will increase your knowledge about fonts and typography.

Brusheezy

Brusheezy is a great creative destination for you that offers you a huge collection of the best custom Photoshop Brushes and Photoshop patterns on the Web. These can be easily downloaded and you can even upload your own patters on the website.

brusheezy

On this regularly updated website, you can easily use and manipulate your images with exquisite Photoshop brushes, which result in you coming up with professional-looking graphics. This free website also has two other related websites, Vectoreezy and Flasheezy, which enable you to download vector graphics and flash files for free.

Pixel2Life

Pixel2Life, the biggest tutorial index on the Web, has 40,000+ registered members and addresses all creative requirements of graphic designers, webmasters etc. From Photoshop to C++, this website lists over 50,000 tutorials in varied 88 categories and gives you additional resources such as code gallery, programming script, articles, hardware reviews, free images etc.

pixel2life

Also, Pixel2Life facilitates programmers, developers and webmasters to incorporate the functionality of this website on their websites with a pack of tools and is inclusive of the SearchBar API and the Auto-Submit API.

Hot Scripts

Hot Scripts, a comprehensive Web directory, entails a long list of over 44,000 web development and programming-related online resources in 1000+ categories that address the creative needs of coders, marketers, programmers, webmasters etc. across the globe. It caters to the demands of buyers wishing to build or improve their websites on the World Wide Web.

Hotscripts

Hot Scripts, the web’s largest PHP, CGI, Perl, JavaScript and ASP script collection, also entails over 16 programming languages along with other dynamic development tools, books, tutorials etc. Along with these features, Hot Scripts also gives you an open forum to discuss your design queries and share your knowledge with other designers from across the globe.

IconFinder

IconFinder is a simple software program that enables you to look for and extract icon resources in separate files. Also, this program does not need any installer since the only executable file makes use of a standard system API calls.

icon finder

IconFinder serves like a search engine for icons, which helps you to browse through 159 icon sets and even refine your search by pixel size thereby providing you with high-quality icons for your blogs, websites etc. in a quick and effective fashion. These icons can be downloaded in two formats, namely PNG and ICO, and can be used like a favicon icon. You also get the added ease of changing the background of these icons.

BgPaterrns

BgPatterns, a free web-based application for web designers & developers, enables you to screen a vast range of eye-catching background patterns, backgrounds & textures and then craft a fast design tiled pattern, backgrounds etc. It is a pattern destination where you can get access to varied patterns from ready-to-use images. You can edit, scale or rotate the images for drawing these patterns.

BGpatterns

BgPatterns also enables you to fine tune the opacity of the texture of images and designs and also rotate the background image pattern. Once you tweak the images, you get to see the preview of the design instantly. You don’t need to get registered essentially to edit, scale the patterns; however, registered users can also bookmark and manage backgrounds at one destination.

WebAppers

WebAppers provides you with comprehensive database of open source resources for web designers & developers. Here you can get some of the best free icons, stock photos, brushes, fonts and design inspirations. if you are developing a website you can find some of the best Javascript and Ajax components like modal windows, menus, galleries, tool tips, charts,calendars plugins etc.

webappers

WebAppers gives all web design related information at one place. It is easy to install any suitable resource for your project. All the open source resources are available in different licenses such as Creative Commons, BSD, GPL, LGPL, MIT and License Free etc.

Hope you’d find these resources useful and enhance your design skills to keep your best foot forward in the business world. We welcome your insights and suggestions on the same.