Month: October 2017

How to Create a Big Impact with Minimalism Design

Posted on by Mario

web design

Today, minimalism has become popular among web designers as it is known as one of powerful techniques in modern web design, especially when many designs become more complex.  Besides, many studies have revealed that a clean design may result in lower bounce rate since it produces more benefits to websites, such as faster-loading times and better compatibility between screen sizes. One of the most well-known sites that utilize minimalist web design is Google search.

Visual Characteristics

You can assume that a page is a minimalist when they leave these significant details:

  • Flat Texture

Minimalist interfaces often have flat textures, icons and graphic elements. Flat interfaces don’t make use of any of the obvious highlights, shadows, gradients or other textures that would make UI elements look glossy or 3D.

  • Vivid Photography and Illustration

Image is one of the most important elements in minimalist design. Through images, your user can experience emotional connection and set an atmosphere. However, not all photos are considered good for minimalism design. In fact, many photos negate the benefits of the surrounding minimalist interface and ruin the integrity of the layout. Therefore, you need to learn how to select or capture a photo that follows the principles of minimalism.

  • Limited Color Scheme

Color also plays a very important role in minimalism design; it is good to set both informative and emotional connections between the product and the user. Besides, a color can add a visual interest or a direct attention without needing any additional design elements or actual graphics. If the designers understand how to aim for minimalism, they will tend to squeeze the maximum from just a few selected colors, and it’s not that rare to use just a single color.

  • Dramatic Typography

Another important element that has a big impact to your design is typography, if you wish to have an immediate focus to the words and contents, while helping to craft a much larger intriguing visual.

  • Contrast

Not many elements you can use in minimalism design, that’s why applying high-contrast copy or graphic elements can be a good choice. With high contrast, you can direct the user’s attention to the important elements and make the text more readable.

Best Practices

Minimalism focuses on clarity and functionality; therefore, for some designers, minimalism design is truly a challenge since with fewer elements, you have to be able to explain more. If you are wondering  how to put minimalism design into practice, you can learn from the following points.

  • Have a single focal point per screen

In a minimalist design, content is king and the visual layout salutes the king. The aim is to put away distractions from the message and keep focusing on what’s important. This is why a strong focal area is important as minimalism involves stripping away elements that are unnecessary.

  • Set great expectations with the top area of the screen

To encourage users to explore the website, make sure that you provide contents that keep them interested. You can place high-level contents with ample negative space at the top of the screen, and then increase the content density as the scroll deepens.

  • Make Crisp Copy

Since you are working to create a minimalism design; therefore, you have to omit needless words in your copy to include only the bare minimum needed words. This technique will help you explain your message adequately.

  • Simplify but don’t hide the navigation

Minimalism design should make users easily accomplish tasks without distraction. Therefore, you need to have intuitive navigation as the biggest contributing factor to this kind of simplicity. However, navigation in a minimalist interface brings a significant challenge. Many designers even choose to hide some or all of the navigation to remove all the unnecessary elements and streamline the content which can result in lower discoverability of navigation items. Therefore, the best way is to design minimalist websites that ensure visitors to find what they need easily.

  • Incorporate Functional Animation

Don’t forget your animation; it should also follow the principles of minimalism. It should be meaningful and functional. For example, you could use animation to save screen space. Aside from its functionality, animation also makes your site look a bit more fun.

  • Use minimalism for landing pages and portfolios

Remember that not every page is suitable with a minimalist aesthetic. Generally, minimalism is appropriate for portfolio websites and landing pages which usually have fairly simple goals and relatively little content. Furthermore, you may also find difficulties when applying minimalism effectively to a content-rich website.

The bottom line is, if you choose minimalism design as your choice, you have to consider many things before applying it on your design. At the end, what makes a good website is always the good combination of usability and great aesthetics.

Designer’s Ego: Benefits and Dangers

Posted on by Mario

The Benefits and Dangers of a Designer’s Ego-ywf

Most of us certainly have an ego, some  like to be praised, and some  think that their choice is absolutely right. As a web designer, it is not a sin to have ego, for it is a human nature. However, how far an ego should take you? You can discover the good side and the bad side of an ego that may affect a designer’s work by reading the points below.

The Good Side

  • Confidence

Having a good amount of ego will produce you a good confidence, because you know that you have talents; it gives you a good start to set a level of expectation. With a good amount of confidence, you can stay focused and work hard, this is all for the sake of living up to expectations.

  • Moving Forward

Another benefit of having a healthy ego is that it can lead you to make decisions. On the other hand, getting overconfident may lead to biting off more than you can chew. However, a balance of confidence and awareness will help you decide which projects to jump on and which to let go.  Besides, you will know when to wait for the right one.

  • How to Get There

For some people, they might have a good ego naturally. Therefore, it is not difficult for them to have a balanced view of themselves and their abilities. However, some may have to work a bit harder to achieve the balance. If you find yourself in difficulties in handling your ego, you can start balancing it by realizing that you are human and that you’re going to make mistakes. However, once you make mistakes, do everything you can to correct it. You can take your mistake as a lesson to learn from and then move on.

When your confidence is low, you can remember things that can elevate your sense of pride. For example, you can recall your thoughts of the first websites you created or other good memories that can make you feel good.

The Dark Side

  • Stop Listening

One of the biggest disadvantages when you have a bad case of ego is to stop listening. Your client wants a result to be like what they expected, sometimes they demand something that are fraught with problems or make little sense which surely will make designers confuse, lose their patience, and start tuning people out. However, we suggest you to be patient.

This is because when you reach the point where you simply know better and refuse to take other people’s opinions seriously, you start creating things only to please yourself while your client is the one that you should please. Therefore, listening to others and working to understand their point of view is critical to a successful project, even though it is okay to gently argue and compromise for what you believe is best.

  •  Stop Learning

It is common to stop learning, especially when you get to a high level of proficiency with a skill (HTML, CSS, graphics, etc.). You might think that somehow you don’t need to keep up with the times as you know everything. However, soon you will realize that your skill isn’t sufficient, especially when you are working with WordPress and the old static HTML sites.

  • You Operate on Instinct Alone

Gut feelings can mean so much, but without proper research, your gut feelings will only lead to a wrong choice. Therefore, put in the required effort to ensure it’s the right one. That doesn’t mean you have to toil for hours just for doing research, but use research as a media that can facilitate our gut feeling whether it is right or not.

The overall point is that an ego should be managed very well as it can creep up and hurt any one of us. However, we believe that most of us can conquer the dark side of our ego and play it very well for the success of our project.

How Google Considers Webpages as ‘Low Quality’

Posted on by Mario

How Google Classifies Webpages as 'Low Quality'-ywf

When talking about producing best websites with best value, one cannot deny that they have to pass Google quality assessment. To classify sites, Google usually issues their quality update monthly and as a web developer, you surely wish your site will be qualified as a high quality, right? Therefore, you have to know how Google classifies Webpages as ‘Low Quality’. Knowing what makes webpage  considered as low quality is as important as knowing what makes it considered as high quality, so to prevent your sites from getting low rank, you can read the following information.

Excessive & Unnatural Internal Structural Links

Since early of 2012, Google has been talking about its low-quality criteria list when they filed a patent that directly targets websites repeating internal links across sidebars and footers. This was actually a part of SEO technique, but now it has become an unnatural form of SERP manipulation.

You can see some obvious signs when a website is untrustworthy, like it’s been hacked or it’s full of spam comments and spam pages. There are some less obvious factors that Google considers it as low quality signals.

Phantom 2

As Google keeps updating its algorithm, we began to see a change in Google’s algorithm in the end of April 2015 where in May 2015 was dubbed the Phantom 2 update. Many webmasters speculate that Phantom 2 is made to examine the newly patented low-quality criteria list, a lot of websites with poor quality content saw upwards of a 10 percent decrease in organic search traffic.

Over-Monetization of Content

Google considers most websites to be designed to trick users, search engines, or both. If Google determine your web as a part of this kind of websites, then they will record your web as the lowest quality. In fact, Google has taken greater steps to cater for high volume search queries that don’t have a single dominant interpretation.

Ads & Affiliate Links

Regarding to ads and affiliate links, you should make sure that the main focus of the page is its main content, so users shouldn’t have to scroll past affiliate links and ads or interact with intrusive overlays. For example, Taboola and Outbrand which blend in with the page, this design makes them look like they belong to the page and increase’s users trust. However, the bad side is, it will affect your quality ranking.

E-commerce Trust Factors

Another issue that you have put to underline is the lack of attention to detail e-commerce hygiene pages and hygiene content. Below are some pages that you should consider the most.

Financial Transaction Pages

Good transaction pages do not only have to contain cart/checkout and subsequent stages on the website, but these pages should also contain prominent links to standard e-commerce hygiene pages or any page that allows a user to “purchase’ or add a product to their cart/basket. Furthermore, as this page can be considered as the most important user pages, you should develop it with the best effort possible.

Financial Information Pages

Don’t forget to create a high quality content for your finance content, financing product purchases on your own site, or content and information that can insure products or services. High quality content should contain keywords and understand the relationship between keywords and content.

The bottom line of this article is, in order to get your SEO basics right, make sure that your pages and internal linking structures serve users very well, so that it doesn’t pass link equity to the money pages, especially for e-commerce and brochure service websites.