Category: Design

Blueprint To Deal With Your Blog Design

Its often tempting to make things perfect. In making things perfect, we start the lazy habit of procrastination.

In psychology, procrastination refers to the act of replacing high priority work or actions or tasks with low-priority actions, and thus putting off important tasks to a later time.

Small Case Study!
I had a client who was so tied up in making her blog look exactly the way she wanted it to look, that she didn’t have 3 articles up on her blog for a month or two. And after having 8 articles and spending day and night(with lot of excitement) tweaking the theme she felt like, blogging isn’t for her! She had great expectations. She had read a lot of success stories for years. After a long procrastination she had finally taken action and had registered a domain and bought a hosting account, and had published 8 articles on her blog. Owff…that’s a lot of work, isn’t it 🙂

It can happen to anyone
Procrastination isn’t anyones asset. It can happen to anyone. Many times we advice a lot, and we ourselves procrastinate. The best way to deal with all these is to plan before hand. Now planning and procrastinating doesn’t help!

Plan And Take Action
Make design changes along the way..along with blogging. Don’t think you will finish the design aspects of the blog once for all and after that start with blogging. If you think so, then you may never start blogging; the actual content generation process. Because, no design can be perfect. You will comeup with some design changes once in a while, more often in the beginning days of your blog. Its so overwhelming and distractive to keep making the changes, tweaks, optimization.

design-blog-mess

After a long period of procrastination, we somehow manage to sit down and start writing something for the blog. Suddenly a design issue starts interrupting our mind. Immediately we leave writing and start to fix the design issue. After we finish with that, we start browsing some blogs and immediately fall in love with some design elements – like a social media button. Now we want it on our blog too. Start with figuring that out. At the end of the day, you will still be procrastinating!

It seems like you have been working all day long, but at the end of the day it’s about results or the outcomes of your action that matters. My advice would be to reserve certain period of time for the most important activity for your blog or business. Do it with full focus. If you choose to work 3hrs or 2hrs a day? Make sure you only work on one big thing, the most important thing, with full attention.

“Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all of our resources on mastering a single area of our lives.” —- Tony Robbins

So, am I suggesting to forget all other things and only concentrate on content generation? No, not exactly!

First of all, people subscribe/read your blog and they are here for content. If the content is good enough, they will stick around. But what if the design is too good, but there is no content for a long time.

So my advice would be to, start blogging immediately and make design changes once in a while.

Here is my blueprint:
You can’t fix a day in the week or month to think of design changes, tweaks, optimization etc. Because, on that day you may not be able to come up with creative design ideas.

So, what I do is, keep a note book or a file on my computer wherein I write down the design changes, tweaks, optimization ideas that strikes my mind every now and then. I also make sure to prioritize the listed items. I put the most important and urgent task at the top of the list. This file is dedicated to the look and feel of the blog. For new blogs, you can choose a day in 2 weeks or a day in a month and start working on the design, tweak/optimization works one at a time from the list. Make sure to implement as many changes as you can from the list.
If you could do only 10 out of 25 items that day, then postpone the other works for the next schedule. This way, you will make sure that the most important changes has been accomplished.

If some design tweak requires help from others, then mail them or post on any online forum and keep it pending and carry on with the rest of the things in the list according to the priority.

This way, you will be spending most of your time on the major aspect of your blog, that is “CONTENT” and you will not be neglecting the rest of the things that make up a good user experience on your blog.

Even if your blog is established and has a good looking design and usability factor, make sure to take a day in a month and do some improvements on it. Often times we get lazy to edit the theme and put on some code, affiliate link or help link etc. Make sure you don’t procrastinate any more with your blog/business. Don’t take it granted, make sure you work for it. Don’t forget, the subscriber count you see in your feedburner account are real people watching/reading your blog!

PS: So, should I say this: “Content Is STILL King!“

Web design careers for freelancers: How to get more work than you can handle

This is a guest post by Paul Wallis. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

If you’re a freelancer, you’ll have noticed the market for web design comes in a large range of shapes and sizes, particularly on the contract sites like Elance. This is also an evolving market, and if getting business is the natural first priority, staying in touch with what the market wants is the natural development. Things like SEO, in its various ramifications for clients, need to be studied.

This is a business exercise. It’s worth getting yourself well prepared to provide a range of services so you can target your freelance work efficiently. You’ll find that you can generate more business, and more repeat business, with some pretty basic concepts and capabilities.

How to get more business without even trying- The support role
If you’ve been in the business for a while, you will have noticed that you’re supposed to be all things to all people. All glitches, bugs, hopelessly inappropriate software and other invaluable users of time mysteriously turn out to be your babies. This, believe it or not, is a real business asset, if you know how to exploit it. The Mr. Fixit role is actually extremely valuable to clients.

More importantly, you’ll find that good clients will stick with you as a support service. This work may not be glamorous, but it will pay all the bills by itself. You can double your receipts and you’ll also get referrals from customers without asking for them. You may find the entire local Chamber of Commerce is suddenly on your client list.

Targeting your web design work
Targeting uses your skills to their best advantage. Don’t bother going for any work that happens to be there, unless absolutely unavoidable. Target the things you do best, where you can really perform brilliantly.

Ask yourself:

1. What are your strongest design areas? Which facets of web design can you do day in, day out, and do well, almost reflexively? These are areas where your business can go into high production mode with no problems.

2. In what fields of web design do you really excel? This is quality control for business- You don’t even feel like you’re working in these areas. This is your quality zone, where you’re not only better, you’re ultra-competitive, and quite likely to win a battle for contracts.

3. What extra services can you provide? This is a business issue. If you can show added value and services, you’ve got the contract before you even go for it. If you’ve got search engine optimization” as part of your credentials, you’ve just ticked a box on the client’s list.

4. How good are your client relationship skills? If you answered anything other than “Excellent, Dazzling, or Brilliant”, you need to put in some work. All business is as much about relationships as anything else. If you want customers, excel in this area. Take courses if necessary but get it covered.

You’ll never look back, targeting your work on this basis. Keep your relationships strong and healthy, and you’ll literally have more work than you can handle.

About the author: Paul Wallis is an award winning professional freelance writer, specializing in creative writing, SEO and journalism, working in the US, Canada, Australia and Belgium.

Top 10 Sure Principles for Effective Web Designing

This is a guest post by Buytemplates. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

1. Clear, easy web-pages:
The first step to make a website effective and striking at the first glance by the user is to make the webpages clear. The Krug’s Law of usability focuses on this very aspect—that it becomes very obvious to the user on how to utilize the website, and achieve his objective.

2. Catch the User’s attention:
It is important for the website, if used for advertising, to use techniques like emboldened fonts, moving texts, marquees, graphics, and Flash videos, images to grab the attention of the user and concentrate it on the key topics. However, it must be kept in mind that user is not confounded with too bright and confusing meshes of objects on the screen. Use this technique moderately to gain success.


what-to-do-with-design

3. Impressive Content:
The content of the website is actually what the user ends up reading ultimately, and hence, is one of the most influential factors for effective websites. The content should be to-the-point, easygoing, impressive in readability, and clearly understandable. Use of objective language, plain and clear statement which are at the same well written enhances the appeal of the website.

4. Concentrate on Functionality:
Users like to know clearly what functions the website offers. Displaying One-Two-Three step procedures for the users, by breaking up a task, has proved to be very effective to guide the user in a simple friendly way towards his goal. Clearly establish what the user’s next step would achieve.

5. Respect the User’s Time:
Websites which take the users to long time-consuming procedures for their own purposes, or play with the user’s patience generally tend to annoy the user. Requiring the user to fill out long details and make accounts before allowing him to do general tasks is an unnecessary task and negatively impacts the website.

6. Simplicity is still the golden rule:
Keeping the website simple is strongly recommended. This is because users enjoy navigating through simple websites in which they don’t have to comprehend much. From the color scheme to the boxes to the page structure, don’t overdo or overcomplicate things.

7. Special Effects:
Keeping it simple and using special effects at the same time is an art. Most websites incorporate special effects like Watercolors and Transparency into their web-design.

8. TETO:
This is a popular technique to keep checking and properly maintaining the website. TETO, or Test Early Test Often, which recommends regular testing and debugging of the website, so as to keep a check on problems which usually tend to occur. Testing is considered as very imperative to website design, since it can solve problems which the designer might not have predicted.

9. Communicate:
A good website talks to the user, providing him with clear concepts and ideas. Use of a clear structure and organization helps a great deal.

10. Optimize Load Time:
Users are annoyed when made to wait. Figure out and rectify if the website takes longer than usual to load. Load time should be optimized for effective websites.

Author Bio:
Buytemplates.net is a web products hub offering scores of inexpensive web templates and brochures. The site presents readymade website templates like SharePoint templates, Joomla templates, marketing brochures, and many more along with an affordable template customization service.

Alignment of Ads, Two Horizontal And Rest Vertical – BuySellAds

BuySellAds [BSA] is an advertising marketplace for small to medium sized website owners/publishers. Publisher like the flexibility in charging the advertisers and the easiness with which one can implement the ad codes into their website.
And advertisers like the quality publisher websites, ad rotation feature for equal exposure, stats features and the recently added A/B split testing between multiple ad banners etc.

But A Problem..
If you are using 125 x 125 ad format of BuySellAds and you have many advertisers, then you might have come across the problem of aligning them.

Example:
If you want to have 6 ad spots, as shown in below image.

Advertise-Here

[ 2 x 3 – Two Horizontal and rest Vertical ad spots ]

There is no built-in user friendly option to get this to work. One simple solution for this is, you can generate 2 separate javascript ad codes and paste it inbetween 2 separate div or p tags to somehow align it.

But the Problem
1. Using more ad codes means increase in the load time of the website as a whole.
2. All the ads does not get equal exposure. As we can only rotate the ads present in a single block of code and can not rotate between two separate code blocks.
3. Some time we may forget to change the price of advertising on one block, which will some time become unfair for advertisers.

Better Solution
Generate a single ad code with 6(or whatever you prefer) ad spots and add “float:left;” to the A element of the styles array in the ad code.

Before


BannerStyles1240548 = new Array(
    "a{display:block;font-size:11px;color:#888;font-
family:verdana,sans-serif;margin:0 4px 10px 0;text-align:center;text-
decoration:none;overflow:hidden;}",

After


BannerStyles1240548 = new Array(
    "a{float:left;display:block;font-size:11px;color:#888;font-
family:verdana,sans-serif;margin:0 4px 10px 0;text-
align:center;text-decoration:none;overflow:hidden;}",

Caution
Do not copy and paste the above code, as the quotation marks appearing on a webpage will not work properly in the source code. So just manually add float:left; to the A element of the styles array, as shown above.

Finally
1. You have nice looking source code! with less clutter.
2. Less number of javascript code, so faster loading of your webpage.
3. All the ads rotate and thus equal exposure to advertisers.
4. Single change in the settings of your ad code will be applied to all the ads.

Related: CSS Code To align 125X125 Ad Banner On WordPress Sidebar

Image Rollover Effect – using Simple HTML

When visitor roll mouse pointer over a image, s/he will see a different image, when s/he moves mouse pointer out of the image focus, s/he will see the previous image. This is called RollOver Effect. This method is mostly done using JaveScript. It is used mainly on images, while building menu etc.

Yesterday I had written an article about OnlineProfits re-lauch and I had used rollover effect to one of the images there, and some people asked me how I did it(Simple Ans: See the source code 😉 ).
So here is the simple code to achieve this design effect:

<a href="Destination Address" 
ONMOUSEOVER='thinkwithsatish.src="ImageURL-when-mouseover" ' 
ONMOUSEOUT='thinkwithsatish.src="ImageURL-when-mouseout" 
'><center><img src="ImageURL-to-be-shown-by-default" 
NAME="thinkwithsatish"/></center></a>

Explaination:
ONMOUSEOVER and ONMOUSEOUT are valid JS effects. Since all most all browsers support JS, this works fine.

Give a name to the actual image to be displayed:
<img src="URL-of-default-image" NAME="thinkwithsatish"/>
I have named above tag src as thinkwithsatish. Now Refer to this name by using ONMOUSEOVER and ONMOUSEOUT commands.

ONMOUSEOVER='thinkwithsatish.src="ImageURL-when-mouseover" '

ONMOUSEOUT='thinkwithsatish.src="ImageURL-when-mouseout" '

Hope the rest of the code is self explanatory.

Code in action!:

Now you can test it by taking your mouse pointer in and out of image area. If you don’t see any changes, place the mouse pointer over the image for some time – because in some cases, it takes some time to load.

I see that, it works perfectly in Mozilla FireFox, Internet Explorer and Chrome. I haven’t tested it in other browsers. And interestingly, I saw it working even in RSS feed!

Many people use content management system software like WordPress, to publish their content. So in order to include a RollOver effect using JavaScript means – editing the header part or installing a plugin which does the job etc. So instead we can incorporate this simple coding to get the design effect.

Design Tip: This is just the coding/programming part. To get the effect on the design, you must choose such images which will have good effect on users mind. So choose the images wisely.

I am not sure, how helpful it is to you. But it surly helps me sometime to get some minimal design effects on my WordPress blog posts.

Are You Puzzling Your Visitors/Readers? Check List

It was completely different, if you were already a big brand or a celebrity. People will be mentally connected to you and will bare the inconvenience and do the things which you want them to do! But if you are like most of us, then you will have to think from users perspective.

This is exactly what comes to my mind when I visit a website/blog which is filled with many “call to action!” – Are You Trying To Puzzle ?

For example, there are many News websites and entertainment websites which are so confusing that, we bloggers can observe them and take advantage of it, by not doing such things on our blog.

Some of the puzzling things
1. Display half a page or so – ads!, and some dozens of sponsored links above the fold.
Displaying a lot of coupon codes/discount coupons of various products(which may be invalid), to gain search engine visitors to those keywords.

what-to-do

2. Some 15 to 20 social media widgets – for you, to inform your friends, family and their dog about the website.
And some more widgets to join their fan clubs – 1 fan club is a good idea. 2 is ok. Anything above 3 or 4 is a bad idea.

3. Some flash ads and animated .gif banners.

4. Few pop ups and pop under and not to forget text link ads(like kontera – which you may see on our blog too! , Infolinks etc).

5. And its quite common that, they will be having many CPM ads on their site, and so they need us to refresh the pages and visit various pages on their site – and its easy, break the single article into two(or even more) and link to it at the bottom of the first article, and link back to the 1st page from the 2nd page, so on.

6. Having a pop up, asking you to signup for a news letter – and the popup having no exit option!

7. Some audio/video(some time, sponsored audio/video), auto-playing! and the visitor searching all the open tabs for the possible culprit(to shut-it-down).

8. One or the other contest going on, and you participating in it with half a mind, because the prize is so valuable but you haven’t seen them announcing a winner. When announced, there will be no clue about the winners existence.

9. And a funny thing – I saw a Twitter widget integrated on one of the famous entertainment site, which shows the recent tweets of some one at their office. I thought, they want to give some real time entertainment news to their visitors. But when I observed it closely, all the previous tweets from almost months were tweeted by some bot(automatic tweets!), and most tweets were out of topic. Ex:- I increased my Twitter followers by using this service, check them out. bla bla bla.

10. And what else or what not ? ha…they also have some syndicated contents!

Innocent mistake:
Even though they have all these puzzling things around, not all News/Entertainment sites are useless. There are sites, which have good quality content. But the thing is, they forget their main product. The basic element that they wanted to sell you. That is their content or any of their own product, say a DVD or CD or their magazine.

But when the ad revenue or the other benefits get bigger then their main product they may get distracted and may start puzzling their readers with more of what makes them profitable, for the time being.

Smart Planning and Execution:
I have seen some people not displaying any ads or banners on their site for many years, and finally they release their own product – they take time to bring up a exclusive, quality product, while building a group of target audience. Once the product is launched, some people will surly talk about it on their websites, forums etc.
Similarly when a already messy site adds one more mess to its sidebar, who cares about it? And so the site owner will continue with the puzzling act of make money, instead of concentrating on their product.

Are You A Big Brand or a Celebrity?
It was completely different, if you were already a big brand or a celebrity. People will be mentally connected to you and will bare the inconvenience and do the things which you want them to do! But if you are like most of us, then you will have to think from users perspective.

But then, Some Facts..
Also know the fact that, many of these news/entertainment sites have got premium publisher accounts. That means they earn a major share in the total earnings they generate, unlike the usual 50 – 50 or 30 – 50 or 60 – 50 ratios. Some ad networks even pay 80% to their premium publishers. Because if they can retain some key players, they are sure to retain their loyal followers too. But such sites will have multiple posters and many many many posts in their archive.
Blogs with single author or 2 or 3 authors will have a hard time building such a site. Instead, you can concentrate on building a community around the blog, who can stick around longer. So, you may have to stop puzzling your readers and build the community, authority, trust around your blog/brand.

The final take from this post is:
1. If you have any widgets/banner on your sidebar, then take some time now itself and remove them.
2. I believe, you have some call to action to your visitors. Like news letter signup, buy this button for your product etc. Focus on the main thing(s), rather than wanting your visitors to do all the things which you expect them to do.
3. Avoid forcing your visitors to take certain actions. Let them choose what they want to do and what they don’t.
4. Teach your visitors whats on your blog. Ex:- Twitter had a video explaining what Twitter is all about. Similarly, some people write and educate their readers about things like – What is RSS. What are the bubble links that they are seeing when they hover over certain words – intext ads etc.
5. Label the things properly: Label the things like, subscription form, Search form, News letter form, recent links, popular links, Sponsored link, advertisements etc.
6. choose a good niche and try to be on topic as far as possible. Think, what if your favorite politics blog suddenly started writing only about entertainment and traveling!
7. Let the design of your blog be simple and well structured. And load before your visitor forgets, what he was looking for!
8. Do some testing and know which widgets your visitors use frequently to share the content on your blog. Retain such things and remove the rest.
9.
10.

You may earn a dollar more today by puzzling/confusing/misleading your visitor, but remember, with that intention, you might have already missed a big opportunity. Better late then not, you can take action now and never miss an opportunity in the future.

What do you think of sites which try to puzzle visitors/readers. I have left point, 9, 10 empty. Would love to know your experience, in the comment section.