web (7)

Web Design - Primary Guideline to note

Web design India is quick becoming along the same lines of the online cyber globe. Every company, company, business, and even individual desires to have a profiting web existence on the World Extensive Web. This is only possible through the development of a efficient website. There are several processes involved in web design. You need to concentrate on certain tips that can help you succeed in developing the best website. Let's take a look at the following factors.

• The Material of the website must be compelling

When designing a website, the submissions are very essential. Actually, that's the center factor of the entire procedure. You need to provide compelling content that can keep your guests coming returning. You must have something of value to provide through the website. If you're going to be selling items or services, you need to make commensurate content that will let individuals know what you're up to. It's always essential to engage a outstanding content company  http://www.bestwebdesignindia.net/ to provide you the right content for the website.

• Use Simple graphics, written text and other elements

In web design, simplicity is the key. There are millions of websites these days. All of them are jostling for area on the World Extensive Web. Web guests are always in a hurry to locate the details they are seeking for. If you make website too large with plenty of graphics and pictures, it's going to be very slowly to fill when someone visits. This can make guests to hit the close button and move on to the next available website. However, you'll always enjoy daily visits if your website is very easy to get around. You must prevent sleazy components, large graphics, large pictures and large texts if you truly want the best of web design. This will make your website to look cute and easy. You shouldn't distract your guests with animated GIFs, Scrolling written text, animations and other large graphics. Just keep everything simple! Your website will always fill quicker if you use lesser and easy components.

• Minimize Clicking

There's the need to minimize clicking in the website you're planning to style. There's no need to consist of several links in every line of the content. This can be very boring to guests. It's essential you add a weblink to the homepage on every web page. This allows the guests to backlink to the homepage without cracking their brain.

• Include Menu on Every Page

It's very essential to consist of "menu" on every single web page during the designing procedure. This allows the website guests to get returning to the homepage very quickly. The menu also allows guests to get around through the website quickly.

• Avoid Using Frames

When designing your website, it's outstanding you prevent using frames on any of the webpages. You should not use frames on the pictures you'll be inserting. The use of frames can actually clog your website and also make it very slowly in loading. You need to prevent it at all costs.

• Compress Image Files

Heavy picture data files can slowly down your website during the loading procedure. This can be very annoying to your web guests. To prevent this, you have to compress all the picture data files you'll be inserting on the website. You can compress them down to 20k. The creates your website very easy to fill at all periods.

In all, web design is a very elaborate procedure. If you can't handle it on your own, you need to engage an professional to help you out.

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Web designers know how important color scheme in creating websites. No matter what business you have, choosing the perfect colors can improve your website to your advantage.

Colors have meaning and power. But based on a study by Whitfield, T. W and Whiltshire, T. J., the effect of a color varies from different people. This is because people see the elements of a color, like preferences, experiences and cultural differences, differently. Regardless colors are still seen as the most interesting and important part of marketing and branding.

If you want to optimize your website and create a consistent branding for your website, you have to be careful in choosing the colors for your site. Here are the tips you should consider:

Understand Branding

The colors in your site suggests what you are as a company. It also attracts certain customers or imply your company's goals. In a less murky explanation, marketers say that colors make a brand more recognizable. So picking a color different from your competitors, and the other well-known companies, helps you create a mark to your target.

A study published in Journal of Sensory Studies, found that consumers' reaction to colors in relation to a product is more important than the known meaning of a color. So if a businessman buys a laptop for work, he won't go with the pink model instead go for black or silver.

Always match the website color to your brand to make the branding consistent and reputable.

Know The Purpose of The Website

There are companies that deviate from their brand color to establish a whole different look for their website. This is because, they find the purpose of their website as different to what their brand is.

A website is a marketing tool and each tools have different target audience. So if your website targets investors other than the usual market, you might pick a more business like hue like gray, black or white.

Write down the goals of your website so you can easily choose which color can help you achieve that purposes. You can still create a consistent branding by using the same company logo, rush essay contents, and related images.

Identify the Graphics You'll Use

The images you use should match the colors of your website because there is nothing worse than bad color combination. Bad color scheme might imply a different tone to people, especially when companies rely on color combination to set their brand different from others. Just keep the majority of your site's colors easy to be partnered with other colors. Basic tones like white and black are perfect background hues because it does not affect the written text and readability.

Think About Functionality

Think whether the colors optimize the website and does not hinder the visitors in reading your content. Are the background colors too bright? Is the text color readable? Does the color makes the layout congested?

Think functionality, not just design. If the colors are difficult on the eye, your visitors can rebound out of your website. That is one possible customer you lost.

Seek Help From Professional Tools

If you still can't decide which colors to pick, you can check a few online tools used by professional web designers.

  • Adobe Color CC

This useful tool lets you mix up colors and design palettes. You can also use the color schemes made by other users to save time.

  • Color Schemer Online V2

In intensive color scheme generator that enables artists to check perfect palette for their web design.

  • Contrast-A

Contrast-A gives you WCAG-compliant color schemes. The tool previews different contrast levels to help people with color blindness, reduced vision and clinical blindness.

  • Paletton

This tool gives you an extensive color palette you can control through a color wheel. It makes your design process convenient by providing a sample site for the tones you picked.

  • Pictaculous

This amazing tool pulls out color scheme from images you upload. Meaning, you can upload your company logo and take colors from it to keep your brand consistent.

True, deciding which color scheme to choose for your website is difficult. It is not a simple matter because the success of your business relies on how well people see your website. Follow the tips above and your web design process will be easier.

About the author:

Lace Wanders is a writer for rushessay.com, a writing company that help students with academic projects, and private companies with the contents for their websites.

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I've been published!

On the SND website. I wrote a post about my experience coding my website from scratch.

Here's a bit of it:

Don’t come to me with your questions about coding. I’m not your guy. My knowledge is limited.

But, my limited knowledge is what I hope makes this blog valuable.

Last month, I sat down and began building a website. I had never coded a website before, but in one weekend, I began abandoning the controlled design environments of Wix or SquareSpace and became exposed to the chaos and freedom of coding.

Check out the full post here.

And click here to check out my website.

Expect another update soon.

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A new website means time to analyze

The Ball State Daily News just worked with other student media organizations to relaunch BallStateDaily.com.

 

The site is now responsive and works well on mobile devices and tablets, instead of just desktops.


I'm using this new website as an opportunity to pursue my love of data and analytics.

 

Disclaimer, the relaunch just took place Oct. 16, so any trends or patterns I may think I see from these few weeks following may not be indicative of our overall successes or failures.

 

But here's what I know:

• For a month prior to to Oct. 16, mobile visits daily accounted for only 0.2 percent of the total. On Oct. 16, mobile visits jumped. They have since accounted for about 34 percent of our daily visits. This jump seems drastic to me, so I have emailed our support folks to see if any other variables may account for the increase.

UPDATE: I learned that because our former website host redirected mobile to a separate website, they had not been collecting data for mobile accurately.

 

• Between Jan. 1 and Oct. 15, 70 percent of page visits lasted 0-10 seconds. After, about 60 percent stay 0-10 seconds. Conversely, the number of visits lasting 11 seconds or longer has increased.

 

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• Twitter typically has accounted for about a third of our web traffic. With recent breaking news, however, there have been days it has contributed more than half of our overall daily visits. (Side note: We are currently working to cultivate our social media presence. Being a free service to the students, it is crucial that we continue to expand our reach and target students on services they are using most often. We do not want to become an unused app on someone's home screen – we want to actively participate in and engage with students' lives.)

 

• Not surprisingly, our tablet numbers are staying relatively stagnant. Daily visits were 8 percent from Jan. 1 to Oct. 15, and after have remained at about 5 percent. Ball State has studio that creates digital publications for tablets, and they have found that publications geared toward students have very few downloads. Furthermore, a 2013 survey by Ball State associate professor Michael Hanley shows about 68.3 percent of the student body do not even own tablets. You can't target a demographic that doesn't exist.

 

 

So those are the basics. I know I cannot use the statistics from Oct. 16 to present to inform my long-term plans. I have, though, been experimenting with this knowledge on a day-to-day basis, using trending stories and engagement numbers to generate story ideas and manage presentation.

 

I've always called The Daily News a sort of journalism playground. Analytics help me play.

 

 

Tangents

• Next semester, I'm enrolling in a class that produces a tablet publication, 72HRS. It functions as a weekend supplement to The Daily News. Because people are producing the content specifically for tablets, the content lends itself to interactivity. I am focusing my time in the class on producing this content for ballstatedaily.com, integrating audio, video, photos and interactives so they can supplement each other seamlessly. Or at least, that's the goal.

 

• As I've mentioned in prior notes about Ball State's Unified Student Media organization, the university's student media organizations have slowly but surely been working together to create a media group. As a part of this, the university is creating a massive, digital-focused newsroom that will be complete in December. They took the walls around it down this week.

 

• I met Michael Rogers, the former New York Times futurist-in-residence, when he visited Ball State last week. His lecture, Q&A and my discussion with him after were all extremely motivational. That may also become its own blog post, soon.

 

• There are not enough hours in the day.

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Racially denigrating tweets.

Confederate flags.

A new smoking ban.

It's been a fast-paced year full of change at The Ball State Daily News.

I took over as editor-in-chief in August, and since then, we have had a slough of fantastic stories.

But as important as the stories themselves, we have had the visuals team to help push the stories forward.

This year more than the past two I've been a part of the student paper, our photographers, designers and reporters have been collaborating to produce visuals that tell stories as well as the words themselves.

This could in part be because this year we have a dedicated art director, Amy Cavenaile, who works hard each day to make sure each editor is communicating and contributing to get photos, illustrations and graphics when necessary.

Undoubtedly, is is also because of the hard work of Michael Boehnlein, our design editor, and Corey Ohlenkamp, our multimedia editor.

They and their staffs have been blowing me away this year.

And trust me, I've been challenging them.

This year more than ever, we've been considering the nature of our newspaper. I tell our design staff time and time again, treat the top fold of the front page as a billboard for The Daily News.

We have a few brief seconds to capture people's attention as they walk by our stacks of newspapers. More often than not, we are competing with friends and phones for attention.

So make it sassy.

Between the increased relevance of our stories' topics and the energized way we now present them, the return rate of our paper is lower than in years past.

As we continue to reconsider the way we use our current design style, we are also moving forward with a redesign. Our top concern as we redefine ourselves is usability. We want our print product to be easy to follow, enjoyable to read and able to compete with the "lean forward" mediums while still being a "lean back" experience.

This means we are reconsidering the types of stories we include in the paper, as well as how we structure them. Even previews, for instance, rarely are treated as full stories. Instead, they are posted on our twice-weekly "Bulletin Board," to which people submit their events and we write a few sentences about them.

That allows us to devote many reporters and a lot more space to news of more consequence. For instance, we have been able to focus far more on administrative issues, policies affecting students and other changes in campus life because we have spent less time on this fundraiser or that.

Of course, it is always our priority to report on the lives of our readers. But as a print organization, a campus event that happened yesterday isn't news tomorrow. That's what the internet is for.

We want people to pick up our paper – to think and learn because of it.

That said our web focus has grown far stronger. We no longer have a photography staff. Their name is now the multimedia staff. They produce videos and photos, now, knowing that the things they cover needs for more than stills and text.

We are working with Ball State's new media organization, Unified Media, to cover spot news and daily events in a timely way for the web.

(As a little background, last year, The Daily News got rid of its website in favor of posting bsudaily.com, which aggregates all forms of student media on campus. The student media organizations now work together to cover news and produce multimedia packages. It is still a bit rocky, but it's an amazing project that has enabled our staffs to grow as multipurpose reporters.)

Because of our shifted focus on online coverage, we are also about to launch a new version of bsudaily.com.

Launching later this week, the website is responsive and has a much stronger focus on visuals and video.

It is a website meant to compete for attention, and because of that, it demands attention through strong images, sounds and headlines.

Furthermore, we are contributing to Unified Media's new tablet app, The Weekly. (I should note Amy Cavenaile had a major roll in designing the app as the new website.)

The app publishes, as you would expect, weekly, and is meant to highlight the top stories from the week prior. It is highly interactive and meant to truly engage through touch, not just look.

Every image, button, link makes you want to say, "I'd tap that." I really encourage you to download it!

In short, I and my staff recognize that media organizations cannot continue as they have in the past. We are trying to be solutions instead of victims.

If you haven't, feel free to take a look at our staff's newspagedesigner.org account. We would love your feedback. (http://newspagedesigner.org/profile/BallStateDailyNewsdesignsta)

And please, let us know what you think of bsudaily.com when it launches Oct. 18.

Thanks for your time!

Adam

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Fun. in the newsroom.

An unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.

That's what I experienced the evening of Jan. 25 when trying to report on Grammy nominated band Fun. using the Ball State Daily News's new –- and sometimes bugged-out –- website.

Instead of going to the concert on Ball State's campus, I opted to stay in the newsroom and coordinate coverage with my managing editor, Steven Williams.

(Click here to see the end-product.)

We created an action plan ahead of time. What would we want to cover? How would we cover it? Who would be where? What play would it receive on our website? Steven and I knew we would be monitoring social media, checking our phones for photos and text updates, and compiling everything for the web.

The Daily News only publishes Monday through Thursday. In the past, we would have run this story in print on Monday, effectively being three days late in our coverage. As a part of our digital-first push, though, we saw that we needed not only to publish a story over the weekend, but that we would need to publish as the concert was happening.

The content we wanted to package included:

  • Video
    • A short, video before of people excited to enter the auditorium
    • Another short video after of people reacting to the show
  • Stories
    • A play-by-play of major events
    • A column discussing the impact of the show
    • A story covering the after party at a local bar
  • Social media
    • Live-tweets & a Twitter widget
    • Collections of photos
    • A Storify
    • A live-updating Instagram widget

We decided that as the show was happening, we would banner our coverage across the top of the homepage. After it ended, we would drop the story into the homepage rotator, along with the others.

Unfortunately (but as expected), not everything worked as planned.

  • Our "before" video of the audience fell through because of an equipment issue
  • The Twitter widget and Storify (and all <script> code, for that matter) are incompatible with our website at the moment
  • The Instagram widget worked, but not as anticipated, thus we had no way of filtering photos except through the #BSUfun, and we had to remove the component when people began posting profane photos (a concern we had from the start).

Here's how we ended up playing everything on the website:

  • At the beginning of the night, we had a banner across the top of our home page linking to a story. The story simply said something along the lines of "check here for updates on the Fun. concert." We included the Instagram widget, and an outside link to our Storify.
  • As things developed, we added them to the story, rewriting as necessary. 
  • Here's what our home page and story looked like about midway through:
    • You can see the Instagram widget on the home page. The photo in the story was sent via text from one of our reporters. You can see how the integration of embedded tweets was awkward because of the unchangeable size of the side elements. I worked around this later.

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  • After the show ended, we played things differently:
    • You can see that the banner is gone, replaced by a photo in the rotator. Also, note that in the story, the photo is replaced by a better-quality photo GALLERY. Below it is a link to the Storify. Later, we added the reaction video under the gallery. We also placed it as its own component on the homepage. See also that the tweets look far less awkward here.

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The entire time I was posting updates to the website, Steven and I were checking social media for critical information, as well as sharing critical information via social media. Not only that, but we also attempted to engage our followers with conversations. Check #BSUfun -- the hashtag I started -- to see what I mean.

All in all, this was a good dry run. The concert gave us an opportunity to see the strengths and weaknesses of our new site when dealing with live, breaking news and new technologies.

I'm seeing that my interest in news design is integrating well with online journalism. I am able to consider alternative ways to tell stories, as well as how to present elements and information.

Know also that I am gaining an interest in things such as dayparting, managing the Daily News' social media and using Google Analytics to determine when to publish what content.

All in all, my goal is to get good information to the public effectively and efficiently. And I'm loving every minute.

Thanks for checking in!

Stay tuned for updates about this semester –- we have a lot of graphics planned and a talented staff to make it happen.

And, as always, I would love your feedback and advice!

Adam

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Bullet points.

So again, I've been meaning to write for a while.

Unfortunately, whenever I have the time to do so, I typically fall asleep.

But before I pass out tonight, let me share a few bullet points with you about life at the Ball State Daily News.

• The Daily News ditched its domain name (bsudailynews.com) to be a part of Ball State's College of Communication, Information and Media's new initiative, Unified Media. Unified Media consolidates all student medias, so all staff members work for The Daily (the new entity) while putting out their respective products.

• The website (bsudaily.com) has a lot of kinks to work out. I'm currently assisting in solving those problems. I'm also working as an iDesk editor with several other staffers.

• One of the website's kinks is its inability to support Flash. We're working on getting that resolved. It emphasizes, though, how badly I and my staff need to pick up coding.

• The design editor and I have planned a "The Science of ..." series, explaining how different things affect the human body. The first to run will be "The science of getting drunk." We have a "high" version for 4/20 and caffeine version for midterms. For Valentine's Day, we'll have a "falling in love" one.

• I'm presently working with my editors to devise a social media strategy that we can integrate with The Daily. I'll keep you posted on that.

All this while taking classes.

More later.

Adam

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