Tips on website design

22 Replies Rob Boirun

A notepad and a pencilWeb redesigns can be a huge undertaking. There are many things to keep in mind as you approach redesigning your or another website. Here are some of the basics of good web design to help keep your focus where it belongs.

User Experience

At the forefront of any web redesign should be the overall user experience desired. How do you want people to interact with your website? What do you want them to take away from your website? These are just a few starter questions to ask yourself as you go about planning the redesign. The easiest thing to do in order to answer these questions is to think about what you like about your favourite websites and what you dislike.

Design Aesthetics

The best designs are often the simplest designs, and keeping things clean is more inviting than a cluttered page. Cohesiveness in design throughout the site is key here. The content delineates one page from the next; not a whole new pallet of colours. Clean, modern designs are also easier for the user, making them more likely to interact with information you have posted, whether through a blog post or messaging forums.

Ditch the Gimmicks

This is not the time to go overboard and incorporate everything you have learned in your experience with web design and cram it all into one page. Ditch the shadow boxes and the splash pages, and make your page more inviting by making it easy for users to use and interact with the site.

SEO Friendliness

Incorporating aspects of SEO into your site’s design and content is very easy to do, but it has to be done right. Everyone wants their web page to ping higher on search engine results, which is easily achievable. Just make sure you are not taking away from the site content at the same time.

Check the Coding

Finally launching the web page after a redesign can be both an exciting and nerve-racking experience. After all the work that was put in to choosing the colours and overall aesthetic look, as well as the content, you want the launch to go off without a hitch. Nothing dashes the excitement of a site launch than to spend most of launch day fixing broken codes. Before you make it public, check your coding. Then double check it just to be sure.

User experience, above all, is the most important element. Having a website that users can easily use will keep users visiting your site regularly and will keep new traffic flowing in regularly. Keep the user experience in mind, and all the other necessary elements for good web design will fall easily into place.

Looking for a professional company for effective yet affordable Web Design? Please check out Snap’s website design.  Also don’t forget to advertise your offline business with advertising flags.

Situation SHUFFLE – iPhone App Review

11 Replies RonF

Today, I am going to introduce you all to a gaming app thats both fun to play and needs brains! Yup, I recently came across this app, Situation SHUFFLE, in the iTunes store while strolling around as usual and to be honest the puzzles in this game will make you scratch your heads but won’t bore you.

Situation SHUFFLE iPhone app

The Situation SHUFFLE app comes with a big collection of mind-challenging puzzles that focus on reasoning and strategy representing real life situations. To pass these puzzles, you need a keen sense of problem solving skills and a little bit of attention to detail which makes sure your brain gets a complete workout. To start with, the puzzles seem like child’s play, but they need your complete attention and concentration to crack them.

The app has 30 IQ puzzles, 30 extra quizzes and 6 hidden SHUFFLE quizzes. As and when you complete an IQ puzzle you can take up the corresponding extra quiz. Each IQ puzzle consists of 6 slides representing common events and occurrences like a trip to an amusement park, a busy day at work, a birthday celebration, a scene in an elevator etc. The slides have to be arranged in the right sequence and have striking graphics and you get 4 hints for each puzzle. You can zoom into the slides to compare them and make a mental note of minute details. The details may be really subtle at times, but that could make all the difference.
Situation SHUFFLE iPhone app
Once you have arranged the slides in order, you can submit your puzzle by pressing on the Check option. Your scores are calculated based on factors such as the number of hints you’ve used, the number of times you check whether your answer is right etc.
The extra bonus puzzles that come with the app are also of the same type but are a tidbit easier to solve.

The 30 SHUFFLE puzzles get unlocked based on conditions like, the number of IQ & extra puzzles you’ve cleared and your score. These puzzles are quite challenging and your IQ points are determined by the number of combos you score.

The UI of the app is pretty cool and the graphics are pleasant. Moreover, the app is simple to use and you can get started immediately playing the puzzles. But it would have been good if the tutorial had a better video like demonstration for users to easily grasp how the app works. Though there is one present, its just too slow and lacks details.

Also, there is no information as to if additional puzzles will be added. I was hooked on to this game for about a full day and managed to complete almost 75 percent of the puzzles. I think its just wait and see. But if new puzzles are added for additional cots or even if the developers could offer in-app purchases, I will be buying them for sure.

Go try this app and share your feedback in the comments below. The Situation SHUFFLE app is available in the iTunes store for 99 cents.

Daily Deal Market Ripe For Consolidation

2 Replies Angeline

According to Yipit, there are 384 daily deal websites operating in North America that it knows about. This number is almost certainly far higher once you consider all the smaller sites that are not able to run deals each and every day.

So is the market too saturated? Is the industry doomed to fail because there are too many competitors competing for an ever shrinking supply of customers?

In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the telephone and one of the biggest communications companies of the time immediately dismissed it with the famous quote:

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”

That company was Western Union and the lack of foresight for this new technology meant they were never able to compete in the profitable telecommunications industry – an industry which they had previously dominated with their telegram service.

Between 1894 and 1904 over six thousand telephone companies went in to business and from there mergers, acquisitions and closures happened to consolidate the industry to just a handful of companies today.

In 1939 there were 132 railroads in America, today that number is just seven as mergers, acquisitions and closures meant huge consolidation in that industry.

An early 1900's American train

The sort of train that powered America in the early 1900’s

In 2005 there were a huge number of social networks available, Myspace, Orkut, Bebo, Friendster and Classmates to name but a few. Today? We have one site, Facebook as the market consolidated.

In 2007 there was just one daily deal website worth mentioning which was Woot, a hugely popular and profitable website that continues to grow and increase its revenues. After the launch of Groupon it spawned off thousands of clones around the world, over 400 of them in American alone.

Since 2009 there have been 72 acquisitions in the daily deal industry, 44 coming in the last 6 months alone. Groupon have gone for an expansion by acquisition business model with at least 8 buys under its belt, Google too is eyeing up the industry with several acquisitions in the daily deal market to expand its Google Offers programme.

There are plenty of other acquisitions too, LivingSocial have bought at least seven daily deal sites and BuyWithMe have purchased 6 daily deal sites before they too have been purchased.

So just like other new inventions and markets spawned hundreds of clones, it might look like the daily deal market is in decline as the number of sites decreases but there is still a very healthy merger and acquisition process taking place as the deal market looks to consolidate and become profitable.