Saturday, March 5, 2011

Web Design Trends in 2011

There is a thin line between design and development, and as we move into a new decade, this line is becoming extremely blurry. Is it enough to draw beautiful mock ups in Photoshop? Maybe 5 years ago. These days, the average internet user requires more. All beauty, with no substance, gets boring after a while…

If your only goal is to impress a community of fellow designers with your flashy designs, you’ll find yourself quickly beneath the tide. 2011 is not about beauty, it’s about function. The trends for this new year and emerging decade are responsive design, constant connection and virtual reality.

How will you stay relevant as a designer in 2011? The ultimate goal of a designer is not to dazzle but to entangle. Any designer can get ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ that are easily forgotten. The supreme designer is able to create an environment which charms and captivates the user to the point where he does not want to find the ‘Back’ button. Several elements come together to forge such a wonderland: harmonious color scheme, intuitive design, easily accessible information and fast response. Additionally, one can never under-estimate the power of simplicity. Of course, this has always been the case, but in 2011, you are no longer at the forgiving discretion of the desktop, or even laptop, computer. Now, your design must contend with smart phones, netbooks, tablets and the like. Are you ready?

Take a gander at the top 11 trends for 2011.

1. More CSS3 + HTML5

What a gratifying sigh of relief! CSS3 and HTML5 have been on the distant horizon of web design for the past couple of years, but now, in 2011, we see an explosion of it. Designers are finally starting to let go of Flash. However you may feel about Flash, you do know that it does not play well with some of the hot, new technology available to your current and potential visitors. In 2011, you will slowly step away from Flash and embrace the magic known as HTML5.
There is plenty of room for both in 2011. The problem is that designers in 2010 (and before) misused Flash. Case in point, very rarely should your entire site be made of Flash, especially these days. HTML5 alleviates some of the burden we have placed on Flash. However, HTML5 cannot (yet) replace the extraordinary design elements we can achieve through Flash.
Perhaps even more exciting is the fact that CSS3 is available to us in a real way this year. Move over Photoshop (wow, Adobe just cannot rest), because CSS3 is making short work of text shadow, border radius and image transparency. If you have not already begun, now is the time to really delve into understanding CSS3 and HTML5.
2. Simple Color Schemes
Simplicity. There’s nothing quite as impacting as an honest message on a quiet backdrop. Quiet can be interpreted several different ways. Forget black and white or shades of gray. Think of green, yellow or even red as your primary color. However, limit your palette to two or three colors. Work within the shades of each color for variety. It can be truly remarkable what a few colors can do for your message.
3. Mobile Ready
Smartphones, iPads, netbooks, oh my! There’s a dizzying amount of mobile products available to the consumer in 2011. This means your web design must be responsive to multiple viewports.

Creating a mobile ready website is not simply removing the bells and whistles from your design. This can create a vacant and impersonal design. Although not impossible, distilling the magic from your original design into a pure representation of your brand is tough! Fortunately, technology is quickly removing this burden.

With the help of CSS3, primarily media queries, mobile web design has taken a big leap forward (more on this later). One of the most important advances is that you can design a whole site and allow your coding to conform to the user’s viewing medium.

It may be tempting to just create a dedicated mobile site, but that may no longer satisfy your audience. Increasingly, mobile sites include the option to visit the original site. If you do not offer this option or if your original site is not optimized to mobile standards, you are simply not ready for 2011. Forecasters predict that smartphones will outsell personal computers this year. Bulletproof your design to meet this demand.

4. Parallax Scrolling 

Parallax scrolling: not just for old school video games. As aforementioned, the hot web design trend for 2011 is creating a sense of depth. What better way to create that than with parallax scrolling? The parallax effect uses layers to present the illusion of a 3 dimensional space. It can be accomplished with some simple CSS tricks or the help of jQuery plugins like Spritely. Parallax scrolling can be most effective as a secondary element on your design, for example, as a header, footer, or background. Making it an integral part of your navigation may prove frustrating for your site visitor.

5. Designing for Touch Screens, Not Mice

Technology has become much more tactile. Usability is shifting from abstract to tangible. This means that instead of navigating your mouse to remotely connect, your destination is literally at your fingertips. Tablets, most smartphones and some desktops use touchscreens. Does your design accommodate fingertip navigation?

How much of your design is mouse-oriented? As designers, we worship mice. Our links light up when the mouse hovers over. However, there’s no hovering in touchscreen. How will your design indicate links to your visitors? What about drop-down menus? That’s also a no-go in touchscreen design.

Similarly, how will visitors peruse your site? As controversial as it may be for standard web browsing, horizontal scrolling may be more appropriate for touchscreens. Fitting nicely into this niche is a magazine-like layout where visitors virtually flip through your site.

Lastly, consider using liquid layouts as part of your commitment toward responsive design. In 2011, you are no longer dealing with screen resolution size. Visitors can change their viewing orientation from vertical to horizontal. Your design must be flexible to meet any challenge, or you will be a relic of 2010.

6. Depth Perception in Web Design

No, we are not dealing with the aerial ‘I can see your coffee cup and keyboard on your website’ design of two years ago. Depth perception is about creating dimension in your web design, so that parts of your site looks nearer than others. It conjures a faux 3D effect when done masterfully. Remember what it felt like watching the blockbuster 3D movie, Avatar? The elements jumped off of the screen, quite literally.

Although 3D technology has no yet made it to web design, you can still replicate depth in your design. 

7. Large Photographic Backgrounds 

Large scale backdrops will surge in 2011. These images will be high resolution, and covering the entire site. Large photos are an instant way to grab your audience– they cannot help but to see it and have an opinion about it. The background photo must be content-appropriate. Simply having a pretty image in the background without any context will disrupt your user’s experience. Trends point to soft and slightly transparent imagery that does not over shadow your content, but harmonizes with it.

8. Adventurous Domain Names & Integration

Although not in the strictest sense a web design issue, look forward to seeing more creative domain names. The once-coveted .com domain has lost a lot of its appeal– primarily because you have to think up words in Na’Vi in order to find a domain that has not been thought up yet. 2011 will see a more wide-spread venture away from .com and into more whimsical domains like .me or .us. Think of the possibilities and scoop it up before it’s gone.

9. QR: Quick Response 

If you have noticed those square barcodes popping on business cards, magazines or else where, you may already know that they are a hot trend for 2011. How exactly does it translate into web design? Amazingly well, in fact.

The barcodes are called QR, short for Quick Response. Simply take a photo of the unique barcode with your camera phone. Like magic, your phone will call up the website associated with said barcode. The beautiful thing about QR is that you can use it in a myriad of ways. Feature your QR on your website, in order for site visitors to have a shortcut to your mobile site. You can also track your visitors through QR, by placing a special referral code on your URL. When you are leaving comments on sites such as this, use the QR as your avatar.

2011 is all about mobility and it will be smart to take advantage of this new medium.

10. Thumbnail Design 

The ever-enterprising folks at Google have introduced the average user to thumbnail browsing. Gone are the days of clicking through to see the content of a website. These days, you just click on the magnifying glass and hover (assuming you’re not on a touchscreen). Magically before you is a glimpse of what waits on the other side of your click.

If your design is Flash-based, that is definitely going to be a problem. The preview will not display those elements of your design.

As the average internet user becomes more surfing-savvy in 2011, expect to see more people navigating by these means. It is just too great of a temptation not to judge a site by its thumbnail.

11. Constant Connection/ Life Stream 

Last, but certainly not least, is the focus on constant connection in web design. The internet is, by nature, a sterile environment, and we make it human by sharing our lives in an open forum. Expect to see more intimacy through the form of lifestreaming. Personal blogs and portfolios in 2011 will prominently feature live Twitter feeds (not just a link to the Twitter page). People will let you know where they are at any moment of the day via Foursquare. In fact, expect to see a dedicated lifestream for all of one’s online activity. 2011 will definitely bring out our inner, creepy stalker, no doubt about it. 

Affordable Web Design & Web Development in Dubai, Abudhabi, Sharjah – Value for Your Money

Setting up a business is never easy. It is one of the toughest things to do. It takes a long time to develop your products in the first place. It takes an even longer time to get the money required. Sometimes, some businesses men get lucky…

They get funding from venture capitalists which makes their lives a bit easier. But others are not so lucky. Both these types of entrepreneurs however, have to bear similar expenses. Thus, cost cutting from any angle will feel more than welcome. At the same time, the quality of your service or product must not drop.

Need for a website

Having a cheap web site design is critical to success. These days, with so many people looking up the internet for various kinds of information, it is vital that you too must have a good website that can give your customers all the information that they need. There should also be some attractive pictures of the products so that your customers will be able to understand what you are giving them much better. If you could incorporate some useful videos, it could tremendously help in your popularity. In addition to this, a good website must also include things like discussion forums, customer complaints handling service, live chat options and so on.

Hiring professionals

This is not easy to do. If you hire professional IT personnel as part of your business and decide to develop the website in house, it could take a whole lot of time. Cheap web designers are available these days, which take care of all these requirements. They will ensure that you have the best website for your venture, and will charge a much lesser price than what it would have cost you if you had chosen to develop the website in house. This is because these designers are extremely skilled, and develop many such websites for other companies as well. Thus, you will not have to incur the costs of acquiring web designing tools as well.

For more information to create your website in Dubai, Abuddhabi, Sharjah & Ajman… Please ring 0555094300.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Download FREE Christmas Brushes for Photoshop....

If you’re working on a holiday-themed design project and need more resources to finish it up, you can download these Christmas Photoshop brushes in the below link. No need to scour the web for free brushes because we’ve got you covered in today’s post featuring 25 sets of Christmas Brushes for Photoshop.

Finally A Tool For Cross-Browser Compatibility Testing!!!

It’s about time one of the big software companies came out with a tool for testing the web design in multiple browsers all in one place without having to have a computer farm sitting there with all different browsers loaded for testing.

I’ve been struggling with this problem just like most web designers, I assume. I have two machines, an iMac and a PC lap top. The mac has Parallels Desktop on it so I have 3 Windows installations running on it, each with different version of Internet Explorer on it. It is a pain to run because Parallels is a resources hog and having it run at in the background all the time slows the machine down but having to start it up just to test a design is annoying because it takes it long to start up and I just wished there was a better solution.

On my PC I have IE6 installed as well as Firefox3 and Chrome. That is fine and works well for me but I still do not have a IE8 testing browser so that was kinda bad.

As I was reading the last month’s Web Designer magazine they talked about Adobe BrowserLab and that was great news for me! Quickly I went and logged into my Adobe account and signed up. I got a year worth of complimentary membership to Adobe Live, but I am not sure if the word “complimentary” means that they are going to charge for it after my subscription expires. Any way, I ran the test and it worked great! So not I am a happy camper and my sites should now work well in IE8.

Importance of a Good Web Design

Websites have become a very important tool in life today. Almost every organization or company worth its soul has a website since it has become the most effective means of reaching to clients, friends and any other people with ease. The art of making a website and having it ready to upload all the information you need to keep online is called website design.

There are many companies designing websites and sometimes making a choice on which one to use could be a problem. One must be able to outline the list of requirements that you need from your website designer in order to be able to determine whether he can come up with a good website design.

Before making a final ruling on whether or not you have a good web designs, it is very important to know exactly what role a god website design should play. It is important to note that almost all websites are supposed to be used as a platform to pass some information or to exchange the same. In some cases, it should also act as a shop in which persons can buy and sell services without necessarily having to meet physically.

Considering the fact that a website is a medium of interaction between the owner and any other targeted audience from a wide range of locations across the world, it is vital to ensure that the visitor can easily get whatever they are looking for. From ordinary circumstances, many people visit websites with one thing in mind and it is important for the website to be able to provide a quick and easy access to that thing.

The design of the website will influence how many positive results the website gets from the visits. For starters, the web design should be done in legible fonts so that every body reading the site can find it easy. The importance of a good web design on a website cannot be underestimated at all costs. Think of a website that is supposed to sell items but does not have an interactive platform through which any potential clients can pay for the products on sale.

Other than facilitating sales or the passing on of information, you can be able to have a forum through which you can get opinions from the visitors. If you are targeting specific clients from your website, you must be ready to understand what your clients think and a good site that has a feed back line should help you adjust your website based on the comments you get from the feed back line. This should be a good platform for maximizing your website’s potential by always keeping in touch with the clients’ needs.

What is XHTML?


The evolution of HTML has essentially stopped. Instead, HTML is being replaced by a new language, called XHTML. XHTML is in many ways similar to HTML, but is designed to work with the new eXtensible Markup Language, or XML, that will soon serve as the core language for designing all sorts of new Web applications, in which XHTML will be only one of many "languages." But, XHTML is designed to work with these other language, so that different documents, in different languages, can be easily mixed together.

For this to work, the rules for writing HTML documents had to change. These rules are simple, and are as follows:

   1. All tag and attribute names must be in lowercase. Thus, you can't write
      <A HREF="foo.html">...</A> but must instead write this in lowercase, as :
      <a href="foo.html">...</a>
   2. "Empty" tags must be written with an extra slash at the end. An empty tag is one like <br> or <img src="foo.html"> that doesn't have a </br> or <img> to end it. In XHTML, such tags must be written as: <br />, and <img src="foo.gif" />.
   3. You can never omit an end tag. With HTML, you could sometimes leave off an end tag, as in
      <p> ..... paragraph text
      <p> ..... more paragraph text
      With XHTML, you must always put in the end tag, so that the preceding must be written as:
      <p> ..... paragraph text </p>
      <p> ..... more paragraph text </p>
   4. Attributes must always have a value. In HTML you can sometimes omit atttibute values, as in
      <hr size="2" noshade>
      in XHTML, this would need to be written as:
      <hr size="2" noshade="noshade" />
   5. Attributes values must always be quoted.. In HTML you can sometimes omit the quotes,as in
      <hr size=2>
      in XHTML, this would need to be written as:
      <hr size="2" />

That's about it -- there are a few more subtle details, but essentially if you follow the above rules, then the documents you write are acceptable as XHTML. Thus it's easy to write up Web pages using the XHTML format -- they will work with today's HTML browsers, and are easily upward-compatible for the next-generation of Web browsers.

Social Media Marketing

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube are household names, and lacking a presence on these social media giants is no longer an option. Social Focus provides comprehensive account set-up and design customization options, including a broad range of marketing campaign services that will help you manage and grow your networks on these communities. Please contact us for our social media design & social media management rates. Keep your finger on the pulse of social media marketing and keep your brand consistent with the help of our expert design and marketing team.