Month: August 2017

Having Lawyers as Your Client? Here’s How You Will Please Them with Your Web Design for Their Law Firm

Posted on by Mario

As a web designer, we meet different kinds of people from different kinds of professions as clients, including from law firms. A law firm is a business entity made by lawyers to provide legal services and take part in the practice of law. They represent legality, liability, and dependability. If you own a law firm, this can be tough when it comes to designing the website, but don’t worry; we’ve got tips to deal with it!

Law firms, like any other business entity, have clients and potential clients visiting their website to see if they are credible or trustworthy. For that reason, we have to excel in designing the website with these following tips:

Don’t Separate User-friendliness from Esthetics
A good website is the one that can combine “user-friendliness” and “esthetics.” A website that is not only easy to access, but also good-looking at once. You have to pay attention to the balance between usability and esthetics. If your website is easily accessible, make sure the design is not too plain, even if you are designing a strict law firm website. A website is somewhat your potential clients’ first impression; therefore, create a friendly user experience if you want to turn your potential clients into the real clients.

Navigation – Make it Simple
Your website’s navigation is the crucial part that has a big impact on your website’s result. For that reason, your website’s navigation will determine whether your website is a success or a failure. Remember, the main objective here is to create a user-friendly website. First, avoid creating overwhelming multiple navigation choices, as this will cause your visitors to skip the important parts of your website due to the too many choices.

Your main menu should be limited to no more than 7 menu choices. This way, your site’s visitors will not skip the important parts. Also, place the navigational menus in places that can reach visitors’ eyes easily, such as horizontal navigation across the top or vertical navigation down the left side. Simple navigation means more visitors to come.

Content – Brief and Understandable
Most of law firms’ “bad habit” is that they provide long written texts that can ruin their website’s look and efficiency. Your website content should not present long written texts. Too much content will only make visitors skip it and leave your website immediately. We recommend using strong headlines and subheadings to define your law firm as a whole; to make a point of what your law firm does. Make sure it gives the right and strong message to the visitors. You can also use bulleted or numbered lists, as they are easier for people to read and understand the majority of what your law firm does.

Remember, be concise and clear at the same time. Also, you can use graphics and videos to entertain your visitors without making them read any more text that will tire them out.

Color – Let Your Palette Communicate
Color has an important role for your law firm’s website. Color is a powerful form of communication that can represent your website’s value. It can attract your visitors’ reaction, change their way of thinking as well as actions. Here’s the overview of the “meaning” conveyed by some colors for your inspiration.

Color Positive Meaning Negative Meaning
Red Passionate, exciting, and courageous Defiant, aggressive, and urgent
Blue Trustworthy, loyal, and logical Cold, aloof, and unfriendly.
Green Faith, peaceful, and efficient Boring, stagnate, and bland
Black Sophisticated, formal, and elegant Evil, cold, and menacing
Grey Conservative, refined, and professional Boring, pessimist, and depressing
White Pure, safe, and truthful Plain, boring, and unfriendly
Brown Timeless, dependable, and earthy Materialistic, predictable, and humorless
Purple Creative, luxurious, and wealthy Inferior, gloomy, and suppressive

 

Law firms represent truth, loyalty, courage and formality. The combination of black and grey will be suitable to present your law firm.

Typography – For a Readable Text
Typography is not always about making the text look beautiful; it is the art of making things readable but also attractive at the same time. Even though law firms don’t always rely on attractiveness, making an exception is a good step towards a great website. The best result of typography depends on how you arrange the use of words, color, and graphics.

The first thing you have to pay attention is the font; don’t over use fonts. Keep your typeface consistent to make it readable. Also, you should be consistent in applying the heading size, font, and attributes. Once you choose the typeface, size and color, keep it that way and don’t change it.

That’s all the tips you need to know to design your law firm’s website. Remember, keep it simple and understandable. Your law firm should not explain too much details on the website as it can ruin your website’s practicality. Make it conservative but concise. That way, you can create the best quality law firm website that can attract many visitors and turn them into your real clients in the future.

Why UI Changes Annoy People and How to Handle It

Posted on by Mario

When it comes to designing for good user interfaces, especially for website design interfaces, there are so many reading patterns that you can apply. Each pattern has their own knowledge of how people perceive visual information and theory of how to improve user experience while reading or observing content. Among so many theories, there are three patterns that gain the most popularity. They are the Gutenberg Diagram, the F-pattern, and the Z-pattern. If you are a web designer, we  highly recommend this article for you!

The Gutenberg Diagram
This theory reflects the western culture of reading which is top to bottom and left to right.

image 1 for UI changes

From the diagram above, we can see that there are four quadrants. For key contents like a headline and a logo, you’d better place it in the top left quadrant. Then, you can place logical conclusion in the bottom right quadrant in the bottom quadrant. Therefore, it is recommended to put a CTA (call-to-action) in this section in the form of text, a video, or a link.

The F-Pattern
In F-pattern, people start engaging with content by moving their eyes in a horizontal line. Then, they scan a vertical line trying to find the points they’re interested in. Then, they will continue what they’re looking for after scanning the content horizontally.

image 2 for UI changes

 

You can use elements like bullet, points, typography, colored buttons, and highlighted texts and so on to improve the user experience. These elements give visual weight to the interface and indicate important points.

The Z-Pattern
Many people consider Z-pattern as the king of landing pages since it covers important aspects including visual hierarchy, content structure, and CTAs. Different from F-pattern, which is more suitable for text- or content-heavy page, the Z-pattern efficiently grasps users’ attention on landing pages with minimal copy. Here is an image of Z-pattern.

image 3 for UI changes

You can follow the structure below when designing with the Z-pattern:

  1. A top horizontal line should include catchy contents and elements like the logo and navigation bar (so users can quickly access the website’s pages).
  2. Following a classic storytelling approach, a diagonal line should introduce users to the main content including the main copy, attention-grabbing images, slideshows, and so on.
  3. Finally, a lower horizontal line should feature a CTA that stimulates users to perform a certain action such as signing up, subscribing, or making a purchase.

How to Prevent User Dissatisfaction with Interface Changes

Since everyone is unique,  we cannot determine which pattern that might suit your users. To know what kind of pattern that might suit your readers; you can apply the following methods to evaluate the design and functionality of a new or an existing system with real users. Here are some of the methods:

A/B Testing
Comparing two different concepts is called as A/B testing or split testing. In A/B testing, you can compare buttons, CTAs, color schemes, and banners. The aim of A/B testing is to figure out which of various options is the most successful, for instance, which button gets the most clicks. Each case of A/B testing is unique. What elements you test depends on your business goals. However,  the following elements are generally tested:

  • Copy (product descriptions, button text, etc.)
  • Calls-to-action (for example, their placement or wording)
  • Application forms
  • Layouts
  • Images
  • Color Schemes

Bear in mind that in order to get relevant results, the A/B testing should be performed simultaneously. Besides, doing A/B tests will avoid you from audience backlash and can even help you achieve better conversion rates by making necessary tweaks to an interface.

Hallway Testing
If you are looking for an informal way, the hallway testing is the answer. It involves going to a crowded area and simply asking passers-by to test and evaluate an interface. For example, you may go to local Starbucks and do little interviews with strangers in that cozy place. You can also apply this method with your office colleagues. Therefore, to conduct testing successfully, you can plan everything in advance.

By performing this method, you can figure out what elements of an interface puzzle users and how your users conceive the system as a whole.

Five-Second Testing
The main purpose of 5-second testing is to elicit the user’s first impressions to an interface and discover whether a website or an app communicates its purpose to its visitors. In 5-seconds, they have to view an interface and try to remember as much as possible. Then, they will be given some questions regarding the sense of their reactions.

Through 5-second observing, you can generally aim at evaluating a visual UI component rather than the whole interface.

Conclusion
Even though the changes of UI will upset people,  ignoring the last trend will ruin your product. Therefore, you need to study your pattern before applying it. This trick will make the necessary tweaks without scaring off your users.

Using CDNs to Reduce Network Latency

Posted on by Mario

Using CDNs to Reduce Network Latency

There are two definitions that can be understood from network latency. In relation to overall network performance, latency is the number of milliseconds for your web content to begin rendering in a visitor’s browser.

In relation to network computing, latency is the time taken for a site visitor to make an initial connection with your webserver.

So, by minimizing latency, you will be able to correspondingly reduce page loading time and enhance your site visitor’s experience. Therefore, minimizing latency is highly recommended to any e-commerce sites. If you are a web developer this article will fit you.

How to Measure Latency

There are several methods that you can use to measure latency, such as:

Round-trip time: with Ping, you can measure a round trip time, Ping is a command line tool that bounces a request off a user’s system to any targeted server. RTT is determined by the interval it takes for the packets to be returned to the user.

Network congestion or throttling can occasionally provide a false reading, while the ping value provides a reliable assessment of latency.

Time to first byte (TTFB): After the webserver gets an initial user request, the time taken for the visitor’s browser to begin rendering a requested page is known as time to first byte (TTFB). There are two ways to measure it:

  • Actual TTFB: The amount of time taken for the first data byte from your server to reach a visitor’s browser. Network speed and connectivity affect this value.
  • Perceived TTFB: The amount of time taken for a site visitor to perceive your web content as being rendered in their browser. The time it takes for an HTML file to be parsed impacts this metric, which is critical to both SEO and the UX.

 How CDNs Reduce Your Network Latency

To reduce network latency, you can apply CDNs which work in several ways, such as:

  • Content caching: you can get this benefit through a CDN’s global network of strategically placed points of presence (PoPs); exact copies of your web pages are cached and compressed. As your site visitors are generally served content from the PoP closest to their location, this will greatly decrease RTT and latency.
  • Connection optimization: it is a session reuse and network peering that optimize connections between visitors and origin servers.
  • Progressive image rendering: For any image, a progressive series is overlaid over one another in the visitor’s browser. Each overplay is of a higher quality resolution. The visitor’s perception is that the page is being rendered more quickly in their browser than it would be otherwise.

Reducing the network latency is very important in maintaining your website in its best quality, as it determines your website’s performance and how it can attract more visitors. With these tricks, you can make an awesome website without having to worry too much about slow page loading time problems.