Is Web Design Really Dead?

The age-old question of “is web design dead” is one that regularly pops up in conversation.

Let’s take a look at what could be influencing the term to be referenced more and more.

Mature design patterns, high-quality automation, templates, mobile technology, and AI, are probably showing signs for the end of web design. I personally feel that web design is dying of irrelevance. It seems that web pages are not the focus of the internet anymore, and that is the reason why web designers are moving to the next level challenges such as ecosystems and products if they wish to remain relevant. It is being heard since long that web design has no future. Being an experienced person in the Brisbane web design scene, I have researched about that, and in this article, I will be highlighting my findings regarding why the future of the web design is in risk and how an emerging blend of cultural and technological trends triggers the need of a wider approach.

Sign 1: Templates Are Leading To Commoditization

The content seen today on the web is mostly handled by some service or framework, such as Blogger, WordPress, and Drupal etc. Frameworks give shortcuts and foundations that let you spend less of your time struggling with the development of a website, and more time and efforts for developing content.

As a result of the ubiquity of such frameworks, a huge world of templates both free of cost and paid, enables you having a professional web design in a matter of minutes. Why would one go for a web designer if he can get a fairly acceptable WordPress web design at a fraction of the price, using a template? In addition, some web designers that are available at a cheaper price, just take a premade template and do some minimal branding customization.

Sign 2: Mature Web Design Pattern

What is the most recent web design innovation we can recall? Parallax? That is useless eye candy. Responsive design? That belongs to quite old digital ages. The web now has all the user interface patterns and elements you may need now. And that is the reason behind less innovation seen in web patterns. Users find this maturity a great option. They are having consistency in their casual use of the web. Shopping carts, login pages, and checkout forms all work in a similar manner. Attempting to be creative at this moment might probably harmful or pointless.

Sign 3: Artificial Intelligence (AI) And Automation Are Prevailing

There is a new form of automated web design, arguably initiated by The Grid. This is a service to develop basic websites that are able to make design decisions; semantic ones relied on artificial intelligence. It assesses the content to detect the best colors, layouts, fonts and additional imagery for the site. Using wisely selected design basics (developed by humans), it is hard to go wrong with it. The result is probably much better than an average web designer’s service.

Sign 4: Businesses Over Social Media

The practice by businesses to purchase their .com’s, costly hosting plans and hire an experienced webmaster to have their web page is greatly being replaced with free of cost and powerfully embedded Facebook pages used for business.

Analyzing these trends, I wonder if there is a higher risk for the future of web design. If some really great innovations don’t happen soon, web design is going to be an old myth.

Learn more about web design please contact us

Top Tips for Ecommerce Website Design

Ecommerce website stores are increasing every day. So how do you make your site stand out from the crowd?

Be it clothes, medicines and books or furniture, vehicles and jewelry, everything is available online. This upward trend can be seen globally and will continue for a few more years. If you have an e-commerce store, you must be aware of how tough it is to get customers since competition is not just high but just a click of a button away. Below listed are some points, which will help to make your eCommerce website attractive to your potential customers.

Easy to use Search Bar

Keeping the search bar handy and clearly defined within easy reach is very important because customers will be using it the most to search for things, they are looking for.

Using Good Pictures

Using good quality and plenty of pictures is a sure way to attract people in online shopping. Here users cannot touch anything; their buying decision relies purely on what they see.

Mobile-Friendly

Ensure that your website design is responsive and mobile-friendly as a huge percentage of people search for products and shop on their mobiles only. The importance of making a website mobile-friendly cannot be stated enough.

Shopping Cart

The shopping basket along with the search bar should be available on each page on the website so that the user can continue shopping without any hassle and know what’s there in the cart from every page he is on. Also, ensure that Add to Cart button is prominent and clearly visible on every product page.

Easy Navigation

The possibility is that there are going to be a lot of categories on your website. So, it is important to keep all the categories suitably defined under a proper menu without making them look cluttered. Using breadcrumb method makes the process of navigation an easy and smooth one.

Customer feedback and reviews

These play a key role in helping a visitor decide whether to buy a product or not. So don’t miss them.

Give Importance To SEO

As the competition is rapidly increasing in the online market, it has become very important to stay on top of search engines to ensure maximum visibility for your website. Having a good understanding of Search Engine Optimisation will help you build a website that complies with Googles best practices.

Social Media

Social media links should be placed strategically on your website design, where they are not very prominently visible yet not hidden either. People should be able to access them, as and when required. You can use Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest links.

Clean website design

This has been stated again and again that the website design should not be clumsy and product details and price must be right there. The product page should be hassle-free to use.

Fast Website Hosting

To keep your customers happy and ensure a sale, be sure your website loads fast. The best way to achieve this is by first choosing a quality web hosting company. Look for a hosting company with servers located in your country, ideally as close to your target customers as possible.

Easy and Secure Checkout

On the checkout page, no products or deals should be promoted. Prefer to use single page checkouts instead of multiple pages ones. The order, price and quantity of the items purchased should be clearly visible on the checkout page so that the customer can do amendments if needed. Also, make sure to get a trust certificate like Hacker Safe or Verisign to gain the confidence and trust of your customers.

If these points are kept in mind and put to practice, then you can be sure of having a successful e-commerce website.

If you require a e-commerce website built in Brisbane then contact m2media today. Our team of expert e-commerce website developers are ready to go!

Perfect Colour Combinations For Web Design

One of the trickiest and most challenging parts of the web design process is selecting a colour palette truly reflecting your brand and its message while having an outstanding base for the web design. In the Brisbane web design market, you will have different experiences with different designers, and since colour selection is a highly sensitive decision with even the most minor changes lead to different results. This article will hopefully be of great help for both beginners and professional web designers as it provides quality information for selecting the perfect colour combination for web design. Let me tell you that developing the perfect colour combinations is not based on simply focusing or picking two colors and going with it. There is indeed some design colour theory and science behind it.

Tip 1: Consider a Colour Wheel As A Web Design Start

If you remember that colour wheel taught to you in school, you will be surprised to know that it is still a useful tool as an adult. This wheel can give you an idea about colour and the ways different hues are related to one another. Colour wheel is a practical way to find whether chosen colours will be related to one another harmonically. The wheel consists of primary, secondary and tertiary colours and all combination therein. The mixing of colours on the wheel is important for developing harmonious hues.

Analogous: Picking three colours adjacently placed on the wheel
Complementary: Picking colours from opposite ends of the wheel
Split complementary: Picking colours and using it on any side of the opposite color
Double complementary: It is most difficult to crate. This idea uses primary colours and compliments from both sides of opposing colour on the colour wheel. It is the best technique to use for tints and tones.
Monochromatic: It is the variations of one colour
Tricia: These colours are equally spaced on wheel

Tip 2: Give Importance To Black, White And Neutrals

A palette is more than a bright colour or two. The most significant colours in the web design palette can be the ones you don’t see usually- black, white and neutrals. These colours are usually kept at the background of web design since they give either a cool or warm feel and lead to overall usability and navigation, typography and other cues.

Tip 3: Tinting & Toning

Some web designers take just a few colors from the wheel and use these straight up. That’s how tones, shades, and tints come in.

Tine: Color + white
Shade: Color + black
Tone: Color + gray, or white & black

These variations amend the color saturation’s and give variances within a palette. When you want to develop color blends, tones, shades, and tints are often applied to expand palette beyond two or three colors, so that all hues belong to the same family.

So, these are some of the basic tips to try for your web design. The color wheel lets you experiment with different colors and come up with outstanding &innovative combinations for your web design.

Need more assistance with your web design project? Talk to an expert designer at m2media. Contact us today

Top Tips For Responsive Web Design

Nowadays, almost every information is available on the fingertips, and this is also one of the reasons why people are always on their mobiles. It is hard to imagine life without mobiles these days. It is rarely that we use a desktop or laptop for surfing the Internet. Therefore, it has become very important for site owners to make their website design responsive. A responsive web design enables your website’s interface to adjust according to the mobile or tablet screen resolution thus enhancing its usability.

Here are a few tips for a good responsive website design.

1. Make it Mobile Friendly

As mentioned above, majority of the people use mobiles for internet surfing, so it is important to first build a mobile site and further progress to the desktop site. The text and logo should be easily readable on the mobile.

mobile-friendly

2. Understanding the Media Queries

There is a feature of CSS3 which enables the content to respond to different conditions on a device. Getting acquainted with Media Queries is important because these are the driving force behind a good responsive website.

understanding-media-query

3. Limiting the text on Mobiles

It is advised to use only the necessary and needed text on the mobile site and do not try to use everything same as on the desktop site. This will help the readers to know important information without getting lost in long texts.

4. Knowing the importance of Mobile

Do proper research and go by the statistics to figure out why someone is searching for your website on their phone. Research would tell you that different users have different needs. If you get to know that they need quick information on the go, then you should try on increasing the visibility of your search bar to facilitate the same.

5. Using Optimum Images

Make use of JPEG, GIF and PNG-8 file formats. Using PNG format is not recommended as it can increase the file size by almost 5-10 times which can slow down the loading time. It important to use the images with the recommended resolution and measurements which are generally 500*350 PX at 100 ppi.

6. Get Rid Of Unwanted Things

Eliminating unwanted elements is not only beneficial for the users but it also helps in increasing the performance of the website. Make sure to create a clean and chic looking responsive web design.

7. Using the Right Size Buttons

Avoid using small button sizes. For comfortable clicks, the buttons should be at least 44*44 PX. You can also use padding in place of margins as padding increase the area, which margins cannot do.

8. Get to know Google Design Standards

Here, Google recommends certain tips which can help you in loading the pages faster and thus designing a good responsive website.

If you pay attention to coding, using the right images, creating clean responsive web design and testing template components, then you can be sure of getting a super functional responsive web design, which loads fast and performs well.

m2media are the go to team for responsive web design Brisbane. Contact us today for your next web design project.

The Invisible Design

Design is not in-your-face art always. It is usable, subtle and sometimes undefinable. In simple words, I can say that good design is often “invisible”. To be clear, invisible design is not related to adding transparencies or layers or some hidden meaning to a web design project. It is about developing highly user-oriented designs that work visually and functionally. This is something I got to hear quite a number of times when I started as a young graphic and web designer in Brisbane. If you are supposed to “decorate” the canvas, you are over-designing it. The best design that really makes a site work, is invisible.

How to explain invisible design and how to achieve it? Especially when web design is a visual tool. Much of the design is about “feeling good”. Users or visitor want to interact or engage with something they value. They might necessarily not understand why. That’s an invisible design. Though the idea had been crushed in my mind before I heard Oliver Reichenstein, director of Information Architects, emphasizing the concept of invisible design. In his interview with The Verge, he stated that great design is invisible. Good screen design occurs in the subatomic micro typography level (the exact definition of a typeface), the invisible grid of macro typography (the way typeface is used), and an invisible world of design and information architecture interaction. Least input, biggest output with minimal conscious thought is what the screen designers emphasize on. And just as kind engineers and designers we don’t try to have an ideal solution but the best compromise.

Why Is Invisible Design Important To Understand?

When you develop a mobile app or webpage or even the interactions for the smartwatch, you design some kind of communication. Your design must support the message and not become a hindrance in the way of it. You will develop experience with all the design tools at your disposal. The final design is not for you, but for the wider audience that is unaware of color theory or typography or spacing. They just know your message if these things arise together in a cohesive, interesting and usable way. Hence, it is important to think of design as an invisible tool.

The Design Techniques

Invisible aesthetics are deeply rooted in the design theory basics. It is not an application or a trend of a cool latest UX feature. It’s applying color, text, icons, techniques, images, and typography to deliver a message.
After studying the concept of invisible design, I came to the conclusion to design in a simple manner and with clear purpose. Don’t embellish it with trendy components just because you want to use some fancy techniques. Design little pieces so that they work smoothly. Design the big picture to paint a complete image of what your web design is supposed to reflect.

Need help with invisible design? Contact m2media for all your web design requirements

Top Website Design Mistakes

Websites are in existence since quite a few years now. With the passage of so many years and increased awareness, one thinks that the most common mistakes made then might have been curbed. However, that’s not really the case; even today we can see the most common mistakes being committed all the time. Here at M2media we see lots of websites everday and many have major mistakes. Below mentioned are some most common website design mistakes that you need to avoid in order to get best results from your website.

1) Using a lot of images

It is true that people are attracted to the website when there are nice relevant images, but if it is overdone then it might have a negative impact on the visitors. Some web designers make the mistake of adding too many images to their website in order to attract the visitors, but in turn this slows down the response time of the website. Slow websites are a big put off for end users who tend to move on another website rather than waiting for the site to load.

2) The use of background music

You are right; it is not cool anymore. This is one of the last things that people want when visiting your website. So rather than attracting people to the website design, the addition of music only makes people go away from your website.

3) No proper navigation

Research states that more than 70% people prefer a website where they need not struggle to find the things they are looking for. However, this is a mistake that many website design professionals make; and as a result, the business loses on valuable leads. If the visitors are unable to easily navigate the products or service pages before taking an action like buying or sending a query, they will doubt the credibility of the site. Another drawback is that with so many options out there why will they waste time finding what they need. They will move away to another website to get relevant information easily.

4) No easy contact

Contact info plays a key role in establishing the credibility of a site. So, just including the contact form in the website is not enough because most people find this annoying. When people are looking for particular product information that they want to purchase immediately or have any query, they cannot wait for you to reply. They want to get immediate reply either through chat or phone. If the contact us page does not have relevant information then the visitors will get frustrated and won’t trust the website.

5) Experimenting with colors

Some people love colors and try to experiment with them, but doing this on a website design is so not cool. The color combination that you use on your website needs to be pleasing to the eye. However, some people experiment in the color combination and as a result most visitors who could be their potential leads move to another website to get relevant information.

The above-mentioned are some top website design mistakes that many designers make today, and avoiding these mistakes will help you to get the best results from your website.