Skateboard Company Websites That Shred!
February 26th, 2010
Once upon a time, I fancied myself a skateboarder. I wasn’t very good, but I dedicated over a decade of my life to it and had a blast along the way. With the busyness of work, family, and life in general, I haven’t been able to skate very much. But I like to reminise on the old days and see what’s going on in the world of skateboarding from time to time.
Today was one of those days. I started looking up company websites to see what they were up to. As a designer, I was also looking at the design of the company sites. The design of the different company’s sites varied. Some were pretty lame, with no attention to the design at all, and some were really impressive!
Here’s what I found on my little online journey.
C1RCA
Tags: skateboarding, Web Design
Posted in Graphic Design, Web Design ·
A web design start to finish: Tanglebank Gardens – Part 1
January 18th, 2010
Designing and building great website involves more that just coming up with interesting color combinations and putting in pretty pictures. The process includes many different tasks that help the designer get inside the head of the client, so to speak, and come up with a solution that will be the most effective in meeting the client’s goals.
This series of articles will walk through the design process for the Tanglebank Gardens (a local gardening ’boutique’ in Abbotsford, BC) website. Hopefully this will give you a good idea of what goes into creating better websites.
Step 1. The brief
Getting information from the client about the project seems like a no brainer, but being thorough is the key. Asking a lot of questions is essential to finding out what the problem is and what the client really needs. Often times the client says “We want a website”, and that’s it. It’s the designer’s job to draw out the details and get the client thinking about their goals, target audience, and desired look of their site.
Fortunately the kind people at Tanglebank had lots of ideas and great examples from around the web of what they were looking for. They knew their target audience and what they wanted the site to do: Get people to the store. They also wanted to have a place where their many regular customers could go to find out what was going on and get involved online. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Process, Web Design
Posted in Best Practices, Graphic Design, Navigation, Process, Web Design ·
6 practical ways to promote your site
January 14th, 2010
So you have a brand spankin’ new website. You’re pumped. You think to yourself, “Wow, now I’m feeling really good about people visiting my site. I’m so glad I had it re-designed!”.
Now how to get people to visit the site?
This is a key question. A website is no good if people don’t go see it. I’m not going to go into deep SEO techniques or anything, so don’t worry. These are just a few practical things that anyone should do to get people to go to your website. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Promotion, Website
Posted in Adveritising, Business, Promotion, Social Networking, Tips, Web Design ·
Great examples of vertical navigation
January 10th, 2010
These days it’s quite normal to find the navigation of a website located across the top of the page horizontally. But, sometimes an additional vertical navigation is needed to draw attention to specific areas of the site. Other times a vertical navigational system may be the best solution for a given design.
In researching vertical navigation for a particular project, I ran across some amazing examples. Listed below are some of the best that I found.
Worship Leader Insights
Tags: Design, Navigation, Vertical Navigation, Web Design
Posted in Best Practices, Navigation, Web Design ·
Getting crunk about web design.
January 9th, 2010
Found this little gem while searching “web design” on YouTube. This guy is literally rapping about best practices in web design for maximum conversions and high search engine ranking! I wonder if he gets teased by his homies on the streets for having such a well of geeky knowledge? The funny thing is that everything he’s saying you can take to the bank. So listen up!
Check it out:
Tags: Rapper, SEO, Web Design
Posted in SEO, Uncategorized, Videos, Web Design, Weird Stuff ·
