As a designer i was trained to look past the beauty and aesthetics of any given project but for me to believe that beauty has nothing to with the attention and respect a design gets would require the entire world to be educated to look past beauty as well. For as long as people/businesses believe beauty and aesthetics equal to quality and performance who am i to go against the tide, yet i still do it because i BELIEVE!!!

I was reading couple design magazines the other day, Communication Arts and Print Magazine, each month they select a series of project dubbed as "creative and inspiring" and showcase them in their magazines. I enjoy looking at them and depending on the type of projects i have i may even get inspired by them but i couldn't help notice that from a functional and real creativity point of view almost all of the featured projects where severely flawed. Nothing is perfect in this world and i'm the first to admit that but these magazine are the primal voice in advocating real creativity yet many of the featured projects are based on beauty.

The best type of design is when you don't notice it at all!

Our biggest problem is that we don't really know what the definition of CREATIVITY is, and we can't help but to confuse it with beauty. I follow 15 web design and CSS gallery sites among hundreds of other feeds in my RSSFeed, each day i get a list of some 50 sites that are chosen by the editors of the site based on their beauty, most of them are not functional and if you look a bit deeper into their HTML code you'll also realize that everything is disgustingly put together and there is no more room for flexibility and expansion. What these gallery sites don't realize is that they are influencers and the new designs they publish inspires many other ones. In calculation if 9 out of 10 sites showcased is beauty without creativity and functionality and those 9 inspire another 20 sites to be the same then you do the math, that's right it's no wonder why this Internet is so chaotic, nobody can organize it, nobody can categorize it, nobody can help but to make it even worse than what it is now!

To me beauty is when i look at a site and say "hmmm, that's nice but how do i find the information pages" but a creative site to is when i say "i'm glad i found this useful site, lets bookmark it!"

a creative site can be very beautiful, sometimes the simplest sites that have no graphics or images are more beautiful than the ones packed with color, texture and images. It's how you use design to help people find the right material that ultimately makes you creative. Unfortunately we are creative so that people can notice our designs first, everything else is secondary!

These are the sites that keep advocating beauty for blogs rather creativity:

http://www.problogger.net/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/
http://performancing.com/
http://www.copyblogger.com/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
http://cssmania.com/
http://cssremix.com
http://www.webcreme.com/
 

Today Internet is extremely crowded and polluted, and day by day it doesn't get any better. Many applications and blogs start and die everyday. A project you think is brilliant is already being thought and developed by several other groups and any day now they are going to beat you to the launch platform. But don't worry too much about being the second or third site arriving to the starting lineup, the road ahead is extremely bumpy and difficult. The faith of your online project is not defined by who launches first but by who gets it right!

By getting it "right" i don't mean the perfectly designed and developed site, nothing will ever be perfect, but "Right" as in what people wanted all along; "Right" as in efficient, beneficial, reliant and easy. Getting right is a guessing game because it's hard to predict who want what and if you can fit it within that need category, but is it?

Getting it "Right" requires lots of research, asking the right group of people the right type of questions, considering their well being ahead of your greedy demands. It is about understanding that if you give people what they want they will probably give you want you've been daydreaming about during all those long hardworking hours. But there are a few other ways as well...

So How can you get it "Right"?

1- Dummy proof everything!

The purpose of your site and topic of discussion MUST be visible. If you have a blog and you're constantly writing on your blog but no one can figure what you're site is about then that's a huge problem. There are millions of blogs that seem to be talking about everything, they announce news, business mergers, parenting, child care, beauty, cars and videos and podcasts, all in one little blog with a naive notion that the larger the broadness of the topic the larger audience they are going to attract to their site. CNN and BBC can do that but then again they have billions of dollars to make sure that they can, you don't!!!
Design of the layout of a site is one those areas that MUST be dummy proof. Making it clear where navigations are located, where each menu is suppose to take you, and how people can get around your site with ease. You must make registration forms something people would want to fill out rather than something you're doing because everybody else seems to be doing it as well.

Make content easy to read, whether it's the headlines, body of the content, static pages, and etc... everything must be identifiable and understandable. The easier you can read content the more engaged people will become in your site. Content is all about typography, from line spacing, size of fonts, choice of fonts to colors and what have you. Here are a few sites that talk a great deal about design and typography:  Link1  link2   link3

2- There are so many other things you probably have not considered yet!

I've read in many blogs that they didn't make the right choice when choosing a hosting company. they started with a cheap host or an unreliable one and as soon as they saw some nice traffic their  site went offline. This has happened to many blogs and it keeps happening to many more so before you jump on web business make sure to chose the right host, there are several cheap and reliable hostings out there, 1and1 or dreamhost are the two that come into my mind. if you're seeing a healthy dose of traffic you can upgrade to more performance known hosting companies like MediaTemple, Peer1, Voxel, and etc.

Load time is just as important as anything else. New visitors to your site have 5 seconds or less patience time. Meaning, your site should load under 5 seconds. Several things attribute to this cause. I don't want to become too technical, but the major factors are heavy use of graphics, a large number of database calls or queries, slow web hosts, heavy use of Java-scripts,  large home page size, large number of DNS calls, and the list goes on. You would need a technical help from a professional or freelance developer to solve many of these issues, so if you have somebody that is designing your site you can ask them to take care of the above issues as well.

If you're starting your own blog then there are a few choices you're probably considering, you can go with free blog apps like Typad, Blogger and BlogSpot or Open source CMS like Wordpress or MovableType or Drupal which sit on your own domain and server, or a CMS that costs money like another version of MovableType, and several others. Let me make it clear right here that unless you're trying to do extra stuff with your site, all of the above option basically do the same thing and if you can generate traffic then you are probably able to make money as well. Typad and BlogSpot live on some server off some where you'll never know, you don't own your domain and migration is hard not to mention that you can't customize all that much. Wordpress, MovableType and Drupal can be download, customized, and installed on your own domain and server, they are also expandable by adding plugins and other features. Though Wordpress, MT and drupal are free and open source but customizing costs money, you may need to hire a developer and design familiar with the program to be able to do everything you want the site to be. The costs are not that high but be prepared and do extra research.

You shouldn't start your online project with advertising and ad focused content and services. If you have a new blog or a web app and already you're site is bombarded with ads, it is a big turn off to the new users. Since you're site is very new and your traffic is very low your ad dollars don't kick in anyways, so save some face and remove those ads so the content and the substance of your site can breath and build you some reputation. Ads make sites really ugly, specially the google ones, not having ads at the beginning tells your users that you value and appreciate their willingness to visit your site and you're not just working on the site to make a quick buck but to help them in one way or the other. As your sites starts to grow and traffic is coming to your site in bunches (more than 1000 hits per day) then start adding ads, but still very slowly.

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Above is a brief overview of what you need to do to be prepared to launch your website. It's basically what this site is all about. I've done many project and have built many websites and the above issues keep repeating themselves over and over when working with new clients. In early meetings i spend many hours explaining why it costs them so much to build or consult them on their web project and when i explain the factors involved then they slowly start to come around. i hope this helps you guys with your own projects.

Today it was announced that once a dying a website has re launched with a new set of offerings. Excited at first i rushed to see the new site. As soon as the page loaded i told my self, is this for 6 year kids? such ugly colors, it hurts my eyes, i can't focus on any part of the page. I was about to close the site forever that an idea crossed my thought: so many other sites are making the mistakes of this site, it's my duty to inform them!

The site is ReadBurner, about a month or so ago a few blogs wrote that the site was closing and handing the torch to RSSMEME. The idea is nothing new, nor is it interesting to people like me but none the less it's an upcoming trend and something that it will probably last for another year, lets hope so.

The current look is childish to put it nicely, the primary colors are orange and blue which should remind a lot of people the kids TV channel Nickelodeon. apparently the designer is PixelTalent, to be honest he is anything but a talent, i recommend him to go to school since he has potential! anyways back to RB, the logo is ugliest thing ever, it was ugly when 3-4 years most websites were using the style and it is ugly still. The logo needs to be changed ASAP, but it's not the topic of this discussion.

The colors Blue and Orange, though complimentary colors do work together very well on this site. The rule thumb is, for a simple site 3 colors which are made up of 2 muted soft tones + 1 high tone color (for example, grey + light muted green + RED) however, ReadBurner is using high-tone blue + hight-tone orange + grey, the sharpness of the colors put side by side compete for attention, your eyes can't figure out where to look.

so enough bashing! the site has a lot of good things going for it as well. The typography is nice and clean, no supersized fonts, clear distinction between headers, links and content. the spacing between articles is wide enough which allows for better readability. However, the count box on the right side of article is distracting with the fade effect. The fade is downwards which encourages the reader to look upwards (opposite effect). The color of the fade blends right into the background blue, it needs to stand out a bit without overtaking the hierarchy.

so i decided to change the design, since all my issues were about the color choices, the change was rather simple, i downloaded the main and changed the CSS to address some of the issues i had with colors. As you can see below by changing a few colors around the site looks more elegant, easier to read and navigate through.

Next time you design a site and you want to make it as colorful as possible please think about the eyes of us, readers, harsh colors do hurt our eyes and make us leave the site much sooner than you'd like!

10 years ago i started building website, what started as a hobby and fascination turned into a healthy source of income. I put myself through design school by designing websites and the education i received allowed me to look at websites from a psychological and strategic point of view.

It is not an easy task to sell strategy with a website design pitch. Price wise is much higher and graphically it might not make much difference but of course the results are like night and day. I have a very solid track record that i'm very proud of, i have never worked on a web project that included strategy and failed!

so when i talk about web strategy in construction phase, what do i mean?

3 Strategic Elements every site should have

• Characteristics
  
• Objectives with Benefits
  
• Focus

If you research any of the successful website you will all of the above elements in them. Similarly if you'd like to know if a project is going to fail or not all you have to do is to figure out if the above elements are available or not.

Characteristics

Content and softwares are soulless. They are just a piece of information laid out on an even more soulless canvas. Content by itself is not attractive, but we can give it a zing by giving it a little bit of attention. Content represents the voice of the author, therefore to give content soul we must setup our writing guidelines to have more personal voice embedded into our content.

Some of the blogs that you read constantly and love use the personal voice to give their content soul. When you read these blogs you can imagine the writer writing them, that's very powerful.

The design of the website should also reflect you, the owner of the site. The worst thing a designer can do to his/her client is to make any project a personal and self reflective project. If you are designing a blog for another blogger try to understand who he/she is and try to deign it to reflect them simply because they are going to be the writers of that blog and if the soul of the content doesn't match the design of the site then people wouldn't be able to trust the writer right away. This is probably the biggest reason why i suggest to every client to stay away form already design templates. Worst case scenario, if they like to go with a template try to convince them to at least customize the color to reflect their personality.

Objective with Benefits

People don't buy Concepts, they buy Benefits!

If your site doesn't offer benefits to people then there isn't much reason for them to visit your site. at the same time if your site only offers one benefit that they can take at anytime then people don't have another reason to visit your site again!

Benefits are the very reason people build loyalty to any site. They are also give your site value. So you want to strategize your site to offer benefits as constantly and as frequently as possible. The more benefits you give out the more loyal people will become and the faster you will grow.

for blogs, benefits are as simple as writing "How to" Tutorial articles, for example, how to build a logo with photoshop, or How to save money, or How to fix a car. How To's are just one example, Tip, Tricks, Secrets, Special Offers, and educational articles also serve a lot of benefits people appreciate as well.

Focus

Focus is hard to achieve, and even harder to maintain. Focus is knowing what your site is about and maintaining the same Niche Market focus everyday and every year!

It is hard, i admit, how much can you write about the same topic over and over again and not just worry about running out of ideas but also worry about boring the hell out of the audience.  To avoid boring people keep revisiting the soul of your content, also revisit my Branding Article. When Choosing a Niche Topic you're actually choosing a Niche Target Market. Target market has to be big enough to make business sense but not too big and broad that it wouldn't stick. Also it is a great idea to have multiple Niche blogs to avoid boredom for yourself as well.

so before you start yet another blog, rethink why you want to start it, if it is going to be a hobby are you willing to keep it a hobby but if not

Process is so important that i'm going to dedicate this post to some of the examples of great processes GONE WRONG!

My victim is the beloved TWITTER, yes you read it right, TWITTER is a prime example of a great process gone wrong. As i mentioned earlier, to have great success we must take things step by step. Every little thing is made up of small details that working together make up the substance of that object. Now i'm not bashing Twitter here, in fact the opposite, twitter has a lot that we can learn from it. in the last post i mention that in order to fix something it's always easier to split the project into different key proccesses and analyse each process to figure out the root of the problem. here is what happened to me when i signed up for twitter, and what can be done to fix it!

I started my account on twitter on March 20th and it was a horrible experience at first. in fact i almost gave up. Now at that time i was starting a blog that would be dealing with user experience, branding and strategy. so it was kind of shameful that i couldn't figure out some simple stuff in probably the web's simplest site, according to many other geek sites. i was feeling dumbed down because i couldn't figure out how i can find interesting people on this site, i put in my email to add my friends, guess what!! none of my friends had an account on twitter, i had no connection and didn't know i could start one!!

Before i was about to tell my self "F*&# twitter, lets move on to something else" i decided to click on every button to see what they do, i clicked on 'Home' i saw another version of my own home page, which was very odd, clicked on 'find & follow' didn't know any names, so much for that promise, frustrated and about to give up, at last try i thought why don't i go to my Google RSS reader, go to some of the blogs that talk about twitter and use their names to add. Scoble from Scobalizer was the first dude i checked out, and walla after 2 hours i had my first friend. but as i added my friend #1 i discovered 'public timeline' which made life a lot easier, i had no idea what public timeline meant so i never clicked on it, i simply thought it had something to do with my account info since setting and help were right beside in the same font and color just like all the other menus!!

Where i think twitter failed for at the beginning was the fact that i signed up but after that i was kind of clueless, i learned a great example from one of my teachers, he said "always assume the people you're designing/building for are dumbest people on earth"

My solution is even better than the problem i ran into. it doesn't change the layout of the site, doesn't event change the styling all that much. to program it would probably take 30 seconds. My solution is visually shown on the image above. the change is not drastic nor is it layout altering. the new top menu is better organized and at the same time categorized. related menu items are kept together while the other ones are separated into another block.

Here is where TWITTER fails in the beginning, some times less is more is so little that we, the users, feel dumb for not finding them. People love twitter because it doesn't allow you to do many things, which is ironic since every single software, innovation, industrial, chemical and political company in the world wants to add more, do more, be more!

i think as a society we have become to used to the idea that everything must be so complex and that technology is complex by nature that when once in while we come across a really simple piece of software, for the life of us we can't figure out how to use it! isn't that funny!!
I admit i use Twitter for practice rather that anything else. i use to so i can get my points across in 140 characters or less with the same efficiency if i was writing a 1000 word essay.