UI / UX Tips

Communicating with a web designer can be the most difficult part of the hiring process because you and the web designer don’t speak the same language when talking about the details of a website. This article explains how to get your ideas across to the web designer you want to hire. Ok, so you’ve decided to hire a professional web designer to build your website . You spent some time looking for the right person. Eventually you found the right web designer that you believe will design the most “remarkable”, “extraordinary” website the internet community has yet seen. So now what? Explaining to the web designer the layout design you have in your mind can be a very frustrating process. You will find that putting the “picture” in your mind into words can be a difficult task. Actually in most cases this is the biggest hurdle between you and the final outcome. No matter how talented the web designer is, if you can not communicate with him properly, in his own professional language, he will n...

Banners have been a major part of the World Wide Web world since its early days. Copywriters burn the midnight oil looking for new designs that will grab the visitor’s attention and compel him to click on their banner. This article discusses some of the most successful banner designs. Teasing your curiosity “Do Not Click Here”. How many of you have seen this slogan in a banner? What did you do when you first saw it? If you are like most people, when you first saw it, you clicked on it. What makes this simple sentence so powerful that it compels the visitor to click on it? The answer is curiosity !!! Copywriters and web designers are always looking for ways to arouse the website visitor’s curiosity. As banner designers their goal is to attract the visitor to the banner, usually completely ignoring the other elements on the web page that are more important to the website owner. However, because the “Do Not Click Here” slogan tells us nothing about what is on the next page, it arouses th...

Have you ever considered that your website may be annoying? When it’s comes to website design, knowing what visitors hate most is a must, unless you don’t want them to visit you again. This article describes what you should exclude from your website. If you know about an annoying website, feel free to send this article to its webmaster. A few weeks ago I received an email from a colleague asking me to check one of the website he had developed. He is a web designer and his client wanted a nice attractive flash header. The flash header was great. You can’t miss it at all. Some nice graphics elements were flying in while sound effects created just the right atmosphere. However, after starting to explore the website, the header became very annoying because every time you clicked on the website the header restarted. What was pleasant initially became very annoying very quickly, disturbing your concentration and making it difficult to read what was on the page. He is not the first to create ...

Whether you currently deal with a freelancer website , or are just looking for the best place to find a freelancer, the biggest problem you face is how to find a good reliable freelance , one that will do the job properly with good quality work and finish it on time. Many sites offer you, the webmaster, a place to post your projects to be bid on by freelancers. All of these sites let you contact offshore workers that live in countries where wages are only a fraction of what they are in the more industrialized nations. This allows you to keep your project budget low and save money by keeping your full-time staff small. So, how can you find this “diamond in the rough”? You know, that reliable individual who delivers quality work on time and within agreed upon budget? There is no simple answer. The best you can do is using the tools provided by the freelance website to try and minimize your risk. Unfortunately, most of the existing freelance websites use a very poor rating system that onl...

In Lesson 1 and Lesson 2 of our HTML 5 tutorial, we looked at some new structural tags you can use to help eliminate the “div-soup” of HTML 4.x layouts, as well as some other semantic tags to help give your pages easy-to-parse dates, metadata and captioned images. Now it’s time to take a look at what might be the most-hyped part of the HTML 5 specification — the audio and video tags. Contents Video’s a tough nut to crack Using the <video> tag Using the <audio> tag Conclusion Video’s a tough nut to crack Currently, the only way to reliably embed video on a web page so that all users can see it regardless of browser or operating system, is with Flash. This requires the Adobe Flash plugin and a combination of the <object>and <embed> tags. Most users have the Flash plugin installed already (actually, something like 95% of web-connected users have some version of it), but proponents of HTML 5 are pushing for an open video standard that doesn’t require any plugins. ...

Want to get a top ranking in search engines? No problem! All you need to do is add a few magical "meta tags" to your web pages, and you'll skyrocket to the top of the listings. If only it were so easy. Let's make it clear: * Meta tags are not a magic solution. * Meta tags are not a magic solution. * Meta tags are not a magic solution. Meta tags have never been a guaranteed way to gain a top ranking on crawler-based search engines. Today, the most valuable feature they offer the web site owner is the ability to control to some degree how their web pages are described by some search engines. They also offer the ability to prevent pages from being indexed at all. This page explores these and other meta tag-related features in more depth. Meta Tag Overview What are meta tags? They are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. Other than the title tag (explained below), information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by t...

Among the set of goodies in the HTML 5 specification is Canvas which is a way to programmatically draw using JavaScript. We’ll explore the ins and outs of Canvas in this article, demonstrating what is possible with examples and links. Why Do You Need Canvas? Canvas can be used to represent something visually in your browser. For example: » Simple diagrams » Fancy user interfaces » Animations » Charts and graphs » Embedded drawing applications » Working around CSS limitations In basic terms it’s a very simple pixel-based drawing API, but used in the right way it can be the building block for some clever stuff. What Tools Are at Your disposal? Drawing tools » Rectangles » Arcs » Paths and line drawing » Bezier and quadratic curves » Effects Fills and strokes » Shadows » Linear and radial gradients » Alpha transparency » Compositing » Transformations » Scaling » Rotation » Tran...