There are so many things that come into play in effective web design that for an aspiring web designer, but if there’s one skill that a web designer must really develop, and fast, is how to deal with customers, especially those that are notoriously difficult to work with. In this infographic from the online publication Top Web Design Schools, the business of dealing with difficult customers is given a tongue-in-cheek, but very informative treatment. Reading through the infographic will give you the necessary information that will help you deal with clients more effectively in the future. As they say, forewarned is forearmed. You can now go to a client meeting with the necessary tools that will help make these meetings more fruitful and definitely a lot painless.

From: Top Web Design Schools

The WordPress Phenomenon

In 2005, default blog templates were fairly “simple,” to put it nicely, until Blogger went through a design refresh with spankin’ new designs to boot. The free theme craze took on a larger scale when WordPress introduced a flexible theme system less than a year after, allowing web designers to apply XHTML/CSS–based designs in a more manageable way. This opened an opportunity for designers to showcase their skills to attract more work, but inadvertently opened a can of worms as the theme distribution system was compromised and used for unethical link building by spam sites masquerading as “sponsors.”

Yet still, the availability of free self–publishing solutions and the growth of the problogging industry resulted in an increasing rate at which new weblogs are launched, a good number of which can be considered “commercial problogs” and a good percentage also run by prominent individuals discussing specific expertise and topics. However, a good majority make do with a free WordPress theme, sometimes even a sponsored one, not knowing how it affects their branding and identity. This goes for company weblogs and well–known individuals, as well as all sorts of self–published “problogs.”

Content is King

It has been a web design adage — content is king — and it continues to hold true up to now. Your weblog and the rest of your site will only be as good as your content. But with today’s crowded blogosphere discussing the same topics, no matter how good a writer you are, there will always be blogs that are just as good (or even better) in your field.

Readers are struggling hard coping with various sources, and some will simply discard feed subscriptions based on design and presentation. Assuming that you write just as well as your peers, or competitors if you look at them that way, what will differentiate you will be your presentation of content and overall design style.

Your Identity, Your Design

Don’t expect your new blog to be taken seriously if you don’t have good content, but don’t expect it to stand out with only good content without a decent design. Everyone these days have the basic SEO, online marketing, and social networking skills to push our sites to various channels. Basically, it doesn’t take as much as it used to for a newcomer to get some web 2.0 mileage. But when you get that attention, make sure you make a good impression, not only with your content but also with your kickass design. Make users remember your site describing both content and design.

It doesn’t cost much to get a good designer to work on a personalized design and online identity, the benefits will be worth every dollar spent anyway. Just make sure you hire someone who groks web design 2.0 and doesn’t fall into these common pitfalls.

Written by Markku Seguerra, rebelpixel.com.

(click for full size image)

The London Tube Map is a design classic and worldwide recognized as a symbol for London. When Harry Beck designed the map in it’s new format, he changed the until then standard geographical concept and decided only to implement the railway topology and not the geographical situation of London. Geographically correct the map would look like this. At the same time every non-underground clutter was removed and London had become a symmetrical pattern of straight and 45 degrees lines.
Although there are minor geographical distortions in the official London Tube Map, it’s beauty lays in the symmetry, the usage of equally spaced out distance between stations, the 45 degree angles and the usage of adequate whitespace. Even though the map features many subway stations (275) it is perfectly readable, even at smaller pocket sizes.

Becks’s style has often been imitated, been adapted by many other companies/towns, but never has anyone reached the same level of popularity with a tube map as Becks has with his London map. Both Amsterdam (NL), who even credit the London Transprt Museum on their map, and Tokyo have the same concept and perfectly manage it to ruin a great principle with clutter. Other towns, such as Paris, make their map unreadable with too much of text and too little contrast or add visual noise to an otherwise outstanding map such as Moscow.

Maybe I’ve lived too long in the UK, but the London Tube Map is one of the most brilliant designs I’ve ever seen and used.

This is one of the most horrifying comment areas out there:

Now that’s a long scroll. This isn’t from a product landing page or a shopping site with pages upon pages of “special” offers. This is a blog, for crying out loud!

Let’s assume for a second that only the top box (which is the actual comment form) exists and focus on that. It’s just too busy! My eyes were all over the place with the sprawling combination of boxes and text.

I know it takes effort to align form elements. (Or not, since this particular site uses tables to do that.) But it would be much easier on the eye if all the input fields appeared in a linear fashion, one after the other, to minimize the confusion.

Linear is not always necessary, but always keep forms as simple as possible, if you can help it. Take a cue from Smileycat’s comment form design showcase and note how functional and uncluttered those forms are.

Okay, so you get through the ordeal of leaving a comment, but this blog says you’re not done yet! It continues to nag you with the “Blog this at your site” and the “Tell a friend” sections. It doesn’t help that the lack of comments subconsciously discourages the reader from actually commenting. Even if there are any comments, those two extra panels have already separated the reader from the “leave a comment zone” since the comment box is now too far away.

The Share This button is certainly more desirable, both in form and function, than these bulky boxes. If you don’t think a button will cut it, what about collapsible panels with JavaScript?

Since the comment form above belongs to a blog in a blog network, many more readers will be turned off and confused by this comment form on several different blogs. It’s not too difficult to elminate this usability problem: Don’t complicate the process. Don’t ask too many questions. Don’t look desperate. Just let them comment.

The Question

It’s not really a bad thing, which Zeldman also stresses. The question is, now that you’ve scattered yourself all over the place, how are you going to put yourself back together?

Not that you need to; I’m sure not everyone would be interested in painstakingly picking up the pieces one by one and gluing them together. That’s why FriendFeed became an instant hit. But if you ask me, using another social network to put them all together does not feel good. Not one bit. I’d consider it another convenient (even organic) way to spread my own content. But that’s it. I still dream of the day I manage to tastefully put my stuff together in one place. Like these websites:

Jeff Croft and Denna Jones

Truth is, Jeff Croft‘s recent site redesign is more than an exercise in consolidating “stuff”. It also experiments with CSS3 (view it in Safari) and prides itself with fancy Tufte-style bar graphs on the sidebar. Lots of API-wrangling here, from Flickr (with photo-cropping to boot) to Google Maps to Upcoming to Authentic Jobs.

Denna Jones’s website behaves like a portfolio up front, but as Jon Tan relates, practically everything on the site is extracted from elsewhere. The header is made up of the basic blurb placed on top of a photo from Denna’s Flickr account. This gives a dynamic, interactive, and personal feel all at the same time.

Coming Together

Although an out of the box solution like FriendFeed seems like a godsend, those who care about a great user experience will find a better way to present content from several external sources. Will doing so become an easier task? Let’s hope so, at least by some degree.

The layout editor offers complete flexibility in building a great website by allowing modules (content areas with and without sidebars, navigation, images, a footer, HTML areas and widget bars) to be inserted without the need to know a thing about codes.

The included – free – child themes create a solid basis for site designs by providing typography, structure and various colour palettes; there is an option for any imaginable project and it is even possible to create one’s own.

The Style Manager quickly and easily makes tweaking the CSS, changing backgrounds, matching colours to individual preferences or trying different fonts possible without any knowledge of codes.

Builder also incorporates two very useful SEO options – users control how they want to be located by choosing either the basic or advanced options. For those already using plug-ins (such as SEO All-In-One), the Builder will keep existing settings.

This incredible package consists of the Builder, a multiple use license – the theme package may be used on as many sites (both client and personal) as required, the Style manager for codeless tweaking, a continually increasing collection of extra (bonus) child themes and a whole year of updates and support.

Start using Builder now!

Configuration

As well as being quick and easy to install – upload, activate, done – Builder has several configuration options that make life simple!

The navigational menu is configured by simply checking a box by the page names to be included – ready. A second, yes/ no option determines whether default text widgets will carry default text for ease of identification. “Yes” keeps things easy throughout.

Then there are various options for the tracking code, usually placed on the footer of a theme.

SEO options include using post tags (meta keywords) for single posts or category archives for indexing by search engines.

The most exciting part is the layout builder. There are four ready made layouts, but creating a personalised layout is much more fun.

This is done in a few simple steps: first, the new layout has to be named; then the width is selected (600px narrow, 780px medium or 960px wide). Step three is to select an extension – doing this allows the layout to make changes to the style.css and, if required, disable the style.css file of the theme. Hiding widget areas – for ease of working on the theme – is another option.

The best part of the process is creating a design without the use of codes. Builder currently provides a choice of six self-explanatory modules – content, HTML, footer, widget bar, image and navigation – to be inserted .

A page template builder allows views to be configured to a total of eleven different options.

Purchase a copy of Builder

The first step for starting the business will be having your own site. Remember, your site needs to look flawless. It is a direct indication to your future clients of what you are capable of doing. While setting up the establishment for your business, you can use wireless internet routers for connecting several computers in a single network. Learn the things involved in successful web designing by researching. Try to offer additional services like SEO, IM, traffic promotion and search engine submission. You will find that most clients will pay extra for this.

You might also want to learn some fundamental coding technologies necessary for web designing. Be comfortable with HTML, XHTML, PHP and CSS along with Flash, Perl and MySQL. Decide the focus of your business and research the charges your competitors are offering. Always have a business plan and set your financial goals.

Gradually build your portfolio. You may start by designing the site of a friend. Try to work for no-profit organizations such as local clinics and churches that will look nice on your resume and you will be doing something good. Try to establish a partnership with other freelancers such as copywriters, search engine specialists etc. This working together in a group assures jobs landed through indirect associations.

Nowadays it is possible to use templates for web design as it is a tremendous time saver. Try to become a businessperson rather than being happy with freelancing and join the local chamber of commerce to promote your name.

Welcome to hell.

Still on the subject of the dark side of the web: I found a contest for the ugliest website held last June. The winner, which turned out to be mytastynuts.com, won a free redesign package worth $1800. Now this could have been a little more buzzworthy if the contest and company site itself looked like there had been thought put into the design. Heck, if you ask me, the current mytastynuts.com looks better, and don’t really have the right to be doing redesigns.

Of course, there’s really no harm in entering a contest where a free redesign is up for grabs—even if it ends up being not much of an upgrade at all—but that’s the problem with web design: the threshold’s too easy to cross.

The ugliest website contest would also have gone viral if the site were designed in the ugliest manner possible. Something that looks like this (without looking like they’re ripping you off). But that’s the other problem with web design: not everybody “gets” good design.

1. Many have high tolerance for badly designed sites and bad design in general. Put bluntly, they wouldn’t know if something looks ugly even if it hit them in the face. Sometimes design can depend on a person’s instinct and taste, but it can also suck
2. Combine that with “it’s just a lowly website”, not something cooler like architecture, fashion, or an ad campaign, and it’s a steep, uphill battle.
3. And to top it all off, there’s the thin line between design and decoration, which is the absence of purpose and real content. A website, more than any other designed entity, is nothing without content and function.

Don’t be such a downer

Okay enough with the pessimism. How do we get rid of said problems? Eliminate ignorance, for starters. Buckets of inspiration from CSS galleries and image bookmarking sites are always good to have, but it’s also important to know exactly what we should avoid.

I recommend grabbing some eyedrops before clicking any of the links below:

• Webpages that Suck
• CSS Hell
• CommandShift3′s Worst Ever Websites
• World’s Worst Website Designs
• The Worlds Ugliest Websites!!!

The next step is figuring out why said sites are on the list. But that’s for another (ugly) day.

So I was reading Elliot Jay Stocks’s post on the Apple tablet and noticed all the fancy gravatars his commenters had (maybe because they were not as small as the ones in the blogs I frequent). One in particularl that caught my eye was Jeremy Swinnen‘s and made me wonder if, like Sam Wilson‘s, it was a condensed version of his website and/or brand. I visited his site and turns out I was wrong.

Avatars are usually faces (photographs, caricatures, etc.) or logos, because that’s the most straightforward way to advertise yourself. But why not try something that remind people of your own website? Chances are that’s the first thing they do after reading your comment: check out who you are via your homepage.

If the logo in your avatar is featured prominently, which is probably the case anyway, then great. But I feel a disconnect when visiting a site that has no visual ties to the avatar associated with it. And putting a spin in your branding by using more than your logo in an avatar is a worthy challenge.

Sure, we also associate people with their respective URLs, but aren’t avatars the proverbial peacock’s feathers, the smoke and mirrors, the flashing neon sign—to lure people in, establish a connection, and possibly seal the deal on whatever it is you’re “selling”?

If you’re not choosing the most effective way to bring people over from Mr. Stocks’s site, then you could be missing out.

After a long and stressful day at work, nothing beats a long warm shower for getting rid of the tension in one’s body. In fact, it has been proven to work much better than alcohol when it comes to ensuring a peaceful night’s sleep. Warm showers are also great for beating the cold weather. Spring may be here, but the sun isn’t always as cooperative as we want it to be, and a bit of extra warmth and pressure may be just the thing for getting the chills out of one’s bones.

However, Gessi, a renowned company for its beautiful and innovative bathroom fixtures and designs, has gone the extra mile. One of the offerings from its Private Wellness Luxury Shower line, aptly called Colour, combines the undeniable comfort one gets from a warm shower massage with the benefits of chromotherapy.

The Different Shades of Well-Being

Chromotherapy, more often known as color therapy, involves the use of both light and color to regulate the body’s energy. However, it is different from light therapy, which involves the use of light of specified wavelengths in order to alleviate depression and other physiological conditions. Chromotherapy works under the premise that different colors correspond with specific chakras in the body and as such, have different effects. Red, for instance, is associated with passion and the need to survive, thus giving energy. Blue, on the other hand, is often connected with relaxation. This is also the color used for treating patients with severe jet lag.

However, whether one is interested in the benefits of chromotherapy or not, it doesn’t really matter. Just stepping into an illuminated shower which can change colors if you so desire is already an experience in itself.

The Gessi Experience

Gessi takes the idea of private wellness to the next level as it combines the luxury of adjustable shower settings – from a strong hydromassage to a gentle drizzle or a fine mist – and a completely customizable aesthetic experience. One can choose to freshen up with a single color or move through the entire spectrum during the course of one shower session. It is also possible to turn off the colored lights for those rushed mornings. In any case, the clean and elegant lines of the shower unit allow it to stand alone as a beautiful bathroom centrepiece.

With this, Gessi has elevated the shower routine into something much more luxurious and aesthetically-pleasing. While the price may be somewhat steep, it is worth knowing that coming home every night means being rewarded with a warm and relaxing shower that soothes practically all of one’s senses.

Photo via trendhunter.com