The growth in information architecture has urged many IT technologies to adopt cloud services and grow over time. Microservices have been the frontrunner in this regard and have grown exponentially in their popularity for designing diverse applications to be independently deployable services.
Trivia: In a survey by O’Reilly, over 50% of respondents said that more than 50% of new development in their organisation utilise microservices.
A key part of designing successful websites for clients is making sure that as many end-users as possible can access and enjoy that site.
So, what if you discovered that around 1 billion people couldn’t enjoy your designs? Even if those people manage to click on a link and visit the website that you create, they might not be able to understand what’s being sold or navigate to the checkout page.
According to statistics from the World Bank, there are 1 billion people with disabilities worldwide. That’s 15% of the total population of the globe.
Despite this, many designers fail to consider customers with differing abilities when creating an engaging app or website. Unless your client explicitly tells you that they’re supporting customers with disabilities, you might even not think about those users at all.
Learning how to embrace the concept of inclusive web design means that you deliver better results to your clients; the more customers your clients can reach, the more praise and positive reviews your designs will get.
So, how do you introduce accessibility in your design choices?
In broad terms, inclusivity refers to activities or behaviors that empower marginalized people in society. Designing for inclusivity means making your content more accessible to anyone dealing with a mental or physical issue that may make it harder for them to use a traditional site.
Ultimately, accessibility is one of the main goals of an inclusive design strategy. When you make websites or applications more accessible, you tweak aspects of your UI and code to make the site as approachable and usable as possible to people with certain limitations.
According to the Web Accessibility Initiative, many modern sites and web tools are designed without the needs of those with disabilities in mind. This creates accessibility barriers that make websites almost impossible for some people to use.
Here are just some of the different types of disability that can affect the way end-users interact with a website or app:
Web accessibility can also be about making life easier for people who encounter problems in particular situations. For instance, those with muscular problems might have a harder time using buttons and links on a small screen.
So, how do you make your designs more accessible?
There’s more to inclusive web design than making your fonts a little bigger and hoping for the best. To deliver a truly accessible experience, you need to know the people and groups that your client is targeting. Spending some time going through your customer’s user personas and asking them questions about those with a disability can help you make informed decisions.
For instance, the Microsoft Inclusive Design toolkit asks designers to recognize exclusion, examining the parts of their website that might be inaccessible, and learn from diversity.
Before designing anything, ask yourself whether you can:
Any website design should be focused on clarity first.
Whether you’re designing for inclusivity or not, the aim should be to deliver as much of a simple and straightforward experience as possible, avoiding any web design sins along the way.
For instance, no-one likes a messy design full of unreasonable navigational signs. You need a site full of understandable links, buttons that are easy to click on any screen, and large fonts that are easy to read.
Whenever you’re creating a new element for a website or app, ask yourself how you can make life easier for customers from all backgrounds. For instance, Parramatta park uses excellent contrast, clear fonts, and ideal element sizing to ensure that its website feels as easy to use as possible for customers.
Notice how the buttons are clear and easy to press. The colors are bright and engaging on any screen, and the navigation is simple to follow too. Remember, when you’re designing an inclusive prototype:
The visual elements on an inclusive website need to be as simple and easy to understand as possible. However, it’s important not to forget about the way that you handle the written word too.
Using simple terms instead of complex industry jargon can make a massive difference to those with reading issues. There’s also typography to think about, from the color and contrast of your words against your chosen background to the font’s clarity.
Remember, suboptimal design with both imagery and language affects those without disabilities too. Following basic rules for simplicity delivers a better experience for anyone that visits your site.
Make sure you:
Look at the design choices for text on the Nomensa website, for instance. Plenty of white space makes content easier to read. Simple words are understandable and engaging. Even the font choice mimics the logo while offering readability.
Inclusive web design trends will come and go. However, color and contrast will always be essential to your decisions.
By making sure that your design elements meet the minimum color contrast ratios defined by the WCAG means that you’re supporting readability for visually-impaired users and improving experiences for customers that aren’t visually impaired as well.
For designers who need extra help in this area, tools like Stark help measure color contrast. This tool also offers a range of other tools intended to support accessibility too.
Remember, the minimum ratio you need to access will depend on the element that you’re designing. The WCAG recommends the following guidelines:
While you’re working on your color contrast strategies with apps like Stark, make sure that you consider the needs of users with color blindness too. 4.5% of the world doesn’t see color the same way as everyone else. If you’re finding it difficult to achieve the right contrast while sticking to your customer’s brand guidelines, try underlining and bolding elements too.
Finally, these days, more companies are opting to embed video and audio content into their sites. These visual and auditory tools can offer useful information about a brand and what it does. However, you could struggle to deliver vital information to some customers through video and audio alone.
Captions for video content could be essential for those with hearing loss. You may need to think about adding transcripts to pre-recorded videos that people with hearing impairments can access. These transcripts and captions are also helpful for anyone who doesn’t have access to audio on smartphones or computers.
Transcripts can also help those with visual impairments by giving a text-to-speech tool something to describe to your user. That way, everyone gains useful information. Look at this captioned video from the University of Washington, for instance. It ensures that everyone can understand what’s going on in the content. If you add transcripts to your website pages for clients, you could also help them benefit from improved SEO too. Transcripts deliver more keyword-ranking opportunities than videos and podcasts on their own.
For designers to excel at delivering truly inclusive UI environments, they need to become as good at creating websites for people with disabilities as they are at creating interfaces for people like themselves. As designers, we try to be as inclusive as possible, but it’s easy to get caught up thinking about making a website easier to use for us.
If you can step into the shoes of someone that isn’t like you, and think about uncommon needs first, then you may find that you deliver a stronger, more engaging experience for every user.
For instance, rather than designing a website for someone with the same visual needs as you, then thinking about making tweaks for those with color blindness or vision issues, think about the needs of those with disabilities first.
You can learn more about putting uncommon needs first by checking out Vasilis Van Gemert’s blog post on the “Method of Crisis.”
Inclusive web design, or designing for accessibility, is all about maximizing the potential audience that your clients can earn. Whatever situation end-users find themselves in, you should ensure that you’re taking advantage of inclusive design.
If you can prove to your clients that you can deliver for all customers’ needs, you can unlock a much larger audience and many more opportunities.
The post Getting Started With Inclusive Web Design first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
People are trading convenience for privacy in today’s digital world – which means they share more and more information about themselves. While one-click checkouts and saved passwords can all be appreciated, that mental « autopilot » can sometimes steer us wrong. While we were all once wary of anyone asking for information about ourselves, we now assume that it’s just the cost of participation —you’re asking for my favorite book, I’m giving it to you; you’re sending me an email from my boss, and you’re getting my attention and reaction. But this autopilot is what cybercriminals and hackers from people like you and me around the world effortlessly turn into hundreds of millions of dollars every year. In this article, we will discuss the definition and types of cybercrime and available cybersecurity courses.
Cybercrime is a crime that either attacks or exploits a computer, a computer network, or a networked system. Cybercrime is mainly, but not always, committed by cybercriminals or hackers who want to make money — people or organizations are carrying out cybercrime. Any cybercriminals that are coordinated are extremely technically trained and use sophisticated techniques. Others are hacking novices. In extreme cases, for reasons other than personal gain, cybercrime attempts to hurt computers. This may be political or personal.
A domain name is an essential element of every project, product, and company. It’s central to a brand and has a disproportionately large impact on user experience. Not only that, but it also impacts SEO and ultimately revenue.
Domain names are also one of the most commonly retailed elements in web technology, with most designers hoarding a small empire’s worth of domain names “just in case” the right side-project comes along.
Because so much of the information and advice on domain names is provided by companies selling domain names and is therefore not impartial, we wanted to bust some of the myths you’ll encounter.
In fact, almost no one can own a domain name. As demonstrated by the (probably) annual renewal notices you receive, you are merely renting a domain name.
You pay a registrar, who registers the domain with ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) — or an entity to whom ICANN has delegated the responsibility for a particular TLD.
Even when renting a domain, you do not have the right to use it; thousands of UK-based businesses have had .eu domains stripped from them as a result of being removed from the EU.
Domains do not have inherent value; they acquire value over time.
25 years ago, if you were building a search engine, the ‘perfect’ domain might have been search.com, find.com, or perhaps look.com — the particularly cynical might have opted for webads.com. You almost certainly wouldn’t have registered google.com because it says nothing about search.
Any domain name can acquire value through longevity, SEO, and branding
google.com acquired its value through a simple, relentless branding strategy and a generous dollop of luck.
Any domain name can acquire value through longevity, SEO, and branding.
If you’re at the point of registering a domain name, either your business is new, or your digital strategy is. In either case, you have hopefully carried out keyword research, but without a live site, your keyword research hasn’t been validated. In other words, you don’t know what your keywords are.
Even if you’re confident that you know exactly what your keywords should be at this time, your keywords may change. The pandemic has required most businesses to pivot to some degree. eatoutny.com isn’t much use if legal restrictions have forced you to switch to a delivery business — unless you’ve also registered eatinny.com.
Furthermore, in the area of ecommerce, customers tend to view keyword-heavy domain names as budget options because they are like generic-brand goods. It may be that your business will only ever be a budget option, but it’s not a wise business decision to restrict your options.
There is an SEO benefit to keywords in a domain, but it is minimal and will almost certainly vanish in the next few years — even for EMD (Exact Match Domains) — because it is too close to gaming the system.
As frustrating as it may be to seek out a .com you’re happy with, nothing says “late to the party” like a .biz domain.
A .co extension is slightly better in some regions because the .co.** format is commonly used; .co.jp for example. However, .co tends to be typed as .com by users accustomed to the more common format.
nothing says “late to the party” like a .biz domain
It’s possible to opt for pun-based names using regionally specific TLDs like buy.it, or join.in. This kind of strategy will play havoc with your local search strategy because computers don’t understand puns; you’ll potentially do quite well in Italy or India, though.
If you’re registering a domain for a non-profit, then .org is perfectly acceptable. However, carefully consider whether a domain is worth the lost traffic if you can’t also register the .com (because people will type .com).
The one exception is industry-specific TLDs that communicate something about the domain’s contents to a target demographic. For example, .design is a great extension for designers, and .io is fine for an app if it targets developers (i.e., people who understand the joke). You should also register the .com if you can, and if you can’t, carefully consider whom you’re likely to be competing with for SERPs.
This is not to say that anything other than a .com is worthless, just worth less than the .com.
Trademark registration and domain registration are two entirely different processes, and one does not entitle you to the other. This has been legally challenged a few times and fails far more often than it succeeds.
Trademarks are rarely blanket registrations, which means the trademark owner needs to declare the industry in which it will operate; there was no enmity between Apple Inc. and Apple Corp Ltd. until the former moved into music publishing and no one could download the White Album onto their iPod.
There is, however, a limited value in registering a domain that has been trademarked elsewhere. Not least because you will be competing against their SEO, and if they’re big enough to trademark a name, they’ve probably grabbed the .com.
Premium domains are domains that have been speculatively registered in the hope of attracting a huge resale fee. The process is commonly referred to as ‘domain squatting.’
Domain squatters bulk-register domains in the hope that one of them will be valuable to someone. As a result, they are forced to charge exorbitant fees to cover their losses; a premium domain will cost anything from 1000–100,000% of the actual registration cost.
Setting aside the cost — which would be better spent on marketing — premium domains often come with legacy issues, such as a troubled search engine history, that you do not want to inherit.
The business value of a social media account varies from company to company and from platform to platform. Even if it is valuable to you, numerous marketing strategies will accommodate a domain name: prepending with ‘use,’ or ‘get,’ or appending with ‘hq,’ for example.
More importantly, it’s unwise to allow a third-party to define your long-term brand identity; sure, Facebook is huge now, but then so was the T-Rex.
A domain name is an alias, nothing more. You don’t actually need a domain name — what you need is an IP address, which a domain name makes human-friendly.
Think of domain names as an accessibility issue; humans are less able to read IP addresses than computers, and domains bridge the gap. (See how helpful accessibility is?)
While a domain name is beneficial, question whether a sub-domain or even an IP address would do. Registering a domain is an exciting stage of a project that many people never get past, leaving themselves with a huge collection of domains that they pay an annual fee for, and never actually develop.
Now we’ve dispelled some of the myths surrounding domain names, let’s look at the key characteristics shared by good domain names:
A brandable domain is non-generic. It’s the difference between a sticky-plaster and a band-aid. Unique is good, rare is acceptable, generic is a waste of money.
Keep it flexible. Don’t tie yourself to one market or one demographic. Your domain name needs to work now and fifty years in the future.
Six to 12 characters and two to three syllables is the sweet spot. Names in that range have a musical rhythm our brains find it easier to retain and recall.
There are 44 word sounds in the English language. Other languages have similar totals. If you use a domain name that is pronounced phonetically, it will be easy to communicate.
The post 8 Domain Name Myths Every Web Designer Should Know first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Looking for something new to get you excited about design work? This list is packed with all kinds of goodies to help you feel inspired and ready to work.
Here’s what new for designers this month.
Same Energy, in beta, is a visual search engine. You can search with a minimum number of words or an image. The website is designed to help you find art, photography, decoration ideas, and practically anything. It uses deep learning and algorithms to create images on the home page, and you can create feeds in the same manner. The coolest part of this tool is that it tries to match the visual and artistic style you ask for with image mood and objects.
SVG Repo is a collection of more than 300,000 SVG vectors and icons that you can download and use in projects for free (even commercial use). The site has a powerful search tool to help you find the right image, and the platform is designed so that you can contribute.
Penpot is an open-source design and prototyping platform for cross-domain teams. It is a web-based tool that isn’t dependent on any operating system and works with open web standards. It’s designed to be zippy and interactive so your team can work fast.
Directual is a no-code platform for building scalable apps using a visual interface. (Perfect for designers with less development experience.) It includes integrations with other popular tools and is free to use while figuring out how the app works and how you can make it fit your business goals.
HTML Boilerplates helps you start web projects by generating a custom HTML boilerplate that you can download. Just choose the elements you want to include and then copy and paste the code into your editor.
Rows is a spreadsheet tool with built-in web integrations that’s made for team collaboration. It works with other tools you already use, such as Google Analytics, Twitter, LinkedIn, Mailchimp, and so many others. Without scripts, you can use it to automate workflows, analyze data, share dashboards, and build forms and tools that make work simpler.
Form.taxi is a premium web-based form tool. You can create web forms without code or programming and connect them to your website. The tool then stores information, filters for spam, and notifies you of form submissions.
Verbz is a voice productivity app that allows you to create notes, assign tasks, make announcements, run standups, or chat. Talk or type, listen or read. It works as your own voice assistant for teams. It’s available in Beta from the App Store, and there’s a waitlist for Android users.
Flameshot is a tool for grabbing screenshots. It has a customizable appearance, is easy to use, and lets you draw and edit screenshots as you work.
Kitemaker is a collaboration tool for development processes. It can help you keep track of everything from tools such as Slack, Discord, Figma, and Github in one place. It helps you structure projects and keep discussions about work moving forward in one place.
This Code Works is a place to save code snippets that work for when you need them again. You can group and organize snippets and share with others. You might think of it as the “Pinterest of code.”
Sensa Emoji is a collection of common emoji icons that you can use in your materials. Every element is fully vector and free to use.
Google Fonts now supports icons, starting with Material Icons. Choose between outlined, filled, rounded, sharp, or two-tone options in the open-source library.
Toolbox Neumorphism Generator is a design tool that helps developers to generate CSS in the soft UI /neomorphism style for the elements with real-time output.
An Interactive Guide to CSS Transitions explains everything you need to know about this great animation tool for website designers. This tutorial digs in with code and examples to help you create more polished animations and is designed for anyone from beginners to experienced designers with some pro tips throughout.
The About Us Pop-Out Effect adds a special element to any team or contact page with a nifty pop animation. Each person seems to lift out of the circle frame in this pen by Mikael Ainalem.
Interactive Particles Text Create with Three.js is a web element you could play with all day. Text shifts into particles and follows mouse movement in a fluid motion in the pen by Ricardo Sanprieto.
Bitmap Fonts is a collection of various bitmap typefaces all pulled and stored in a single location. This is the perfect solution if you are looking for a bitmap option.
Uniwidth Typefaces for Interface Design is another collection of fonts for a specific purpose – here universal widths for interface design. Uniwidth fonts are proportionally-spaced typefaces where every character occupies the same space across different cuts or weights. This is both a tutorial on the type style as well as font collection.
Bubble Lemon is a typeface for projects with a childlike feel. With an outline and regular style, the thick bubble letters look like some of the sketches you may have done in grade school.
Core Font is an open-source project with a funky and modern style. It has a full upper- and lower-case character set, numerals, and a few punctuation marks.
GHEA Aram is a superfamily with a Central European flair, according to the type designer. The premium typeface includes everything from light to black italic and even some Armenian ligatures.
Make Wonderful Moments Duo is a script and sans serif font pair with a lighthearted feel and highly readable character set. The regular (sans serif) only has uppercase characters.
Ribheud is a slab-style display font with a heavy look and strong presence. What makes it interesting is the left-outline/shadow on each character.
Rose Knight has an old-style feel that can take on multiple moods, depending on supporting design elements. All of the characters are uppercase with alternates. It could make a fun branding option.
The Glester is a beautiful premium typeface in a calligraphic style. The most interesting element of this typeface is all of the extra decorations that allow you to change individual characters (380 glyph alternates).
Velatus is a vintage-style typeface with plenty of swashes and flourishes that make it unique. It comes with 157 characters and 96 glyphs.
The post 27 Exciting New Tools For Designers, March 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
March is that time of year where the feeling of newness starts, from the first Spring days to fresh design projects. These trends are no exception, with fun new takes on some classic concepts.
Circles are always popular, but the top trend is an animated take on the traditional element; plus, fun pink and purple color palettes and a few faux split screen designs round out trending styles.
Here’s what’s trending in design this month.
Circles are one of those shapes that never leave the design sphere. They have a lot of classical meaning and are flexible in terms of design options.
Designers are having a lot of fun with this shape right now. From animations to text circles to image frames, they seem to be all over the place.
More recently trending is more circle-shaped animations. This trend maintains a circle’s properties as a unified and harmonious element with movement to create more engagement and make you look at the design just a little bit more.
Each of these examples uses circles in a different but equally interesting – and animated – way.
Universal Favourite uses a circular blob. It’s almost like a giant bubble. It wiggles and flows, and stretches within the space without any help from the user. It has a smoothly quality that makes you want to stare at it. The color here helps, with the circle and background not having an immense amount of contrast. Also, note the cute little circle button in the bottom corner.
Kenta Toshikura put most of the subtle animation for this design inside the circle. With a hover state, the entire circle moves on the screen with a second layer of animation, and the cursor is also a circle that hops around the black background.
Kffein takes a totally different approach with a circle made from the primary test elements. Identifying website information rotates in a circle around another geo shape on the main plane. Not only is there a circular animation, but an almost three-dimensional effect that happens due to the way elements are layered here.
The prevalent pink and purple color combination isn’t for everyone – although you wouldn’t know it from the number of designs using similar colors.
This bright combination almost screams “spring” and has a lightness to it that almost seems to lift the mood of any project. (Maybe color selection is a reflection of how we all want to feel.)
What’s nice about these colors is that they flow into one another nicely. They can also be expanded to fall into neighboring hues on the color wheel, such as red from pink and blue from purple.
Maybe the most popular use of this color pair is as a gradient. You can find pink to purple everywhere, from background gradients to image overlays to buttons and user interface elements. There’s no lack of use here.
Each of these examples shows opportunities with this color combination.
SMU uses bright pink, blue, and purple to create a giant “road sign” in the design that jumps out from the rest of the project. The sign almost seems out of place and doesn’t fit as part of the normal color palette. This is what draw you right to it.
USA Volleyball uses the popular gradient option and extends the pink to the purple palette to hints of blue and red. What’s great about this design is that it uses a super trend element and color option and makes it work with their current color palette. You can almost imagine the design conversation when someone wanted to use a pink to purple gradient for a brand that features red, white, and blue. The gamble paid off, and it works beautifully without being off-brand.
Blobmixer uses purple, pink, and a few other bright colors – note the animated circles, too – to draw users into the design. The entire project is a fun, customizable experience that you can play with, and the color choices are what make you interested enough to try. This design also offers a great example of tactile animation and elements that feel real even when you interact with them using a mouse on the screen.
Split-screen designs were a huge trend for about two years. The aesthetic was also functional for content that required a this or that choice on the part of users.
Now, we see the design elements but without the function. (Maybe because it just looks nice and creates a sense of balance without a symmetrical design.)
These projects look like they might offer multiple gateways to content, but there is only one call to action on the dual-screen aside from navigation elements.
What this design option does is help draw the eyes across the screen. One side will immediately appeal to you, and when done well, you’ll feel a subtle push of pull from the color, text, and images to look at the other side as well.
Renaissance TV does it with heavy animation with “dancing dots” from an old TV that doesn’t work. But then you need to look at the green text to understand what is happening.
Yacht uses text weight and space to push the eyes across the screen. Almost everyone will go to the heavier areas first and then gaze across the screen through blocks of space to the final small text on the right side. And it all happens in a fraction of seconds.
Bonjour Paris pairs bold color with black and white images. You may look at either side first, depending on personal preference, but the other half of the screen is necessary for a complete understanding of the website.
While all of these design trends are evident in new and recent projects, the use of pink and purple color palettes – particularly with a gradient – seems to be everywhere you look. These color choices are popular and come in a lot of forms.
Maybe the most obvious is with brighter pink and purple gradients, but other variations are also trending. It’s definitely one to watch in the longer term.
The post 3 Essential Design Trends, March 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
There are many reasons you might be wanting to improve your design skills this year. Perhaps you have extra time on your hands and want to put it to good use. Or maybe you’re new to web design and finding that there’s a lot you still don’t know how to do. It could also be that you recognize that the web is changing, and your skills could use some refreshing to keep up.
Whatever the reason, there are many ways to level up your web design skills in 2021. Here are 12 ideas to get you started:
Jack-of-all-trades designers might be able to say “yes” to everyone. However, they’re going to be stretched very thin as they attempt to strengthen every skill needed to keep up with demand.
It’s much easier to become a trusted designer and to improve your skills if you have a smaller and more specific skill set to develop.
Just keep in mind that niching down doesn’t necessarily mean focusing on a particular industry. For instance, you might choose to be a UX designer instead of a web designer. Or you might specialize in designing ecommerce websites instead of monetized blogs. Just find something that you’re passionate about and will be good at doing, and zero-in on the skills needed for it.
Local development environments are useful for staging websites, doing redesigns, and testing updates safely away from live sites. But you can also use them for experimenting with new design techniques, trends, templates, plugins, and more.
Local by Flywheel is the one I prefer to use:
Here’s a good exercise to start with:
Take a website you like — something you’ve looked at in awe and couldn’t imagine ever building on your own. Then, put yourself to the test. See if you can recreate it in your sandbox.
Don’t be hard on yourself if you don’t figure it out right away. Consult your resources and give yourself time to make sense of what’s going on and implement it with the available skills and tools.
There’s always a clear evolution in a designer’s skill set, from the day they begin designing to the present day. And that’s a good thing. If your work doesn’t improve or change with time, then you’re going to have a lot of catching up to do when the stagnation begins to hurt your business.
Want to see how much progress you’ve made so far? Revisit one of your first projects and look at it with fresh eyes. I bet you’ll see a big change in how you design today from how you designed that site then.
Now, ask yourself what you would do differently. And then, go to your sandbox and do the redesign.
A friend of mine is taking a UX design course and needed some users to run through a prototype he created for the class. He could create anything he wanted, so he designed an app related to his other love: Music.
While he could’ve easily thrown together some carbon copy of Spotify or SoundCloud, he came up with a completely new concept. And it was really impressive, to the point where I urged him to put it into production and see if he could list it in the app stores.
I think it’s when we’re really passionate about something that we’re willing to push past our limits. So, carve out some time to tackle that passion project you’ve been toying around with and see where it takes you.
One of the reasons UX designers do user testing is how valuable users’ raw input is. While it would be nice to think that design is a completely subjective matter, that isn’t really the case when usability becomes compromised due to design choices.
Understanding what users like and dislike is an important part of taking your design skills to the next level. And a good way to do that is to share your designs on Dribbble.
Here’s an example of UI8 asking for feedback:
I’m a huge fan of automation and shortcuts powering things behind the scenes in business.
After all, one of the reasons you become a web designer is so you can design, right? When you’re bogged down with administrative and logistical tasks, that’s time spent away from doing what you enjoy.
One way in which you can streamline your backend processes is by putting together a design toolbox. Your preferred CMS. Flexible templates or apps you use from project to project. Website testing tools. And so on.
As you do this, it’ll force you to examine how you build websites. Are you really working as efficiently as possible? Are there newer apps or systems that’ll help you design better sites? And as you improve your design toolbox, you’ll improve your design skills.
I have a hard time recommending this one, only because I’m reluctant to sign up for yet another newsletter. That said, I do see the value in subscribing to some blog newsletters as I don’t always remember to revisit their websites and check out the latest content.
What I’d suggest you do is pick one or two design blogs that have a good variety of content and publish regularly. And then pick one small business or freelance blog.
WebdesignerDepot, of course, is a good one to start with as it comes at a good frequency, recommends great reads from all around the web, and is fluff-free:
I’d also recommend signing up for one that’s focused on your niche as well as one for business.
As a freelancer, I’d vote for the Freelancers’ Union newsletter. There’s always something timely and useful in there.
I just adopted a second dog, so I’ve spent a lot more time on walks while house-training her. At first, I was stressed about it because it was time spent away from work. However, I started to fill that time with podcasts and found that it helped me work better for the rest of the day.
One reason is that I’ve been listening to work-related podcasts, which are always chock full of helpful tips. Another reason is that it gives my eyes a rest from looking at the screen so that when I come back 15 or so minutes later, I feel refreshed and ready to go.
Rebekah Carter has a good set of web design podcast recommendations to get you started.
There’s an overabundance of information online. If you want to brush up on CSS, there are hundreds of YouTube courses that cover it. If you want to learn how to use a new WordPress plugin, you’ll find dozens of great tutorials across various online course platforms, YouTube channels, and even people’s blogs.
There’s no need to go back to school to become a better designer. Here are five places where you’re bound to find free courses for web designers.
It’s easy to lose sight of design principles when your clients are clamoring for a website that will make them a lot of money, get them a lot of readers, and so on. Sure, you can design a UI and UX that works, but do you remember why the design choices you made are effective?
Choose a book — just one to start — that’ll help you reconnect with the roots of good web design. Not only will you get a good refresher on web design principles or design theory, but you might learn something brand new.
Here are some of my favorite books for web designers:
Now more than ever, finding a community of like-minded web designers, developers, or freelancers is important. It’s not just about having a group of people to vent to when clients drive you nuts (though that’s great, too).
It’s about finding a group that brings something new to the table and enriches your understanding of web design and what it means to be a web designer.
If you’re on Facebook or LinkedIn, start there. There are tons of web design and freelance groups that have productive discussions every day. If you prefer to meet up with local designers and developers, check out Meetup.
You may be surprised by how many groups there are and the kinds of meetups they have planned.
Did any of you attend a design conference last year? I did. I virtually attended Adobe MAX — from the comfort of my home, in my pajamas, for three days.
I scheduled my assignments around the sessions I wanted to attend and didn’t have to pick one over the other (i.e., “Do I make money or do I learn something new?”).
Some of the sessions showed us how to do more with Adobe’s tools, while some of them featured design and business leaders who shared personal insights on how to work more effectively. It was a great way to shake up my normal routine and to get a ton of information about the future of web design in a short period of time.
Like I said before, there’s a lot you can do to improve your design skills. Just be careful not to overdo it.
Pick one or two things on this list to start with. If you have more time in your schedule and you’re excited about what you’ve learned so far, add a couple more.
Just take it slowly. Your brain will only be able to absorb so much at once. Plus, the last thing you want is to burn yourself out on skills training and not have the energy to complete your work.
Featured image via Unsplash.
The post 12 Tips to Improve Your Web Design Skills in 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
It’s February, and the spring sun is finally starting to peep through the winter clouds. While many of us are still largely restricted to our homes, the web has kept on growing.
We see a shift in attitude towards natural health, wellbeing, and sustainability, and these are now being branded less often as outliers and increasingly mainstream. We’re also seeing more and more color all the time, ranging from an emotional signifier in the background to being a functional element in its own right.
Gorgeous color in the background image and the scrolling narrative pull the user in on this site for lab ‘grown’ meat.
This page celebrating 100 years of outdoor footwear company Hanweg uses a mix of illustrations and photographs to create a timeline marking the company’s highlights alongside what else was happening at the time. Any excuse to get Yoda in.
Gaffer describes itself as bridging the gap between football, music, fashion, and culture. The site has a glossy feel, with strong art direction and an easily navigable architecture.
This rather beautifully made tribute to Martin Luther King uses some great typographic effects, and the variations, in contrast, create a layering of the different content elements.
The home page for design agency Bonjour Paris uses sideways scrolling to give an overview of the whole site. There is a lot of content, but it doesn’t feel like waffle, and exploring the site is a pleasant experience in itself.
Wild Souls is a Greek company that principally makes nut butters, tahini, and halva. The site is very colorful but warm, and the display type — Canela — has a slight softness to it that is appealing.
This is a strong portfolio site for interactive and graphic designer Nicolas Loureiro. The work is front and center, and the navigation is pleasing.
Studio Nanna Lagermann is a small interior design studio that works on private homes, public spaces, and set design. The site creates a feeling of space and calm. Colors are soft and neutral, and the type, although massive in places, is clean and sophisticated.
Illustrator Aurelia Durand created her own typeface that she uses in her work, and it is used as the main display font here too. This site has a sense of joy about it that is hard to resist.
This site documents the life and work of 20th-century Italian artist Mario Russo. The layout is thoughtful, and the text, while informative, doesn’t detract from the work being shown.
Gigantic Candy makes vegan chocolate candy bars. The site is big, bold and lo-fi, and has a sense of fun to it.
dBodhi sells handcrafted furniture from Java, made from reclaimed teak and locally grown plant materials. The clean layout combined with a slight sepia tone on all the photography creates a feeling of quietness and nature.
Menu Durable is a guide to creating healthier, sustainable food menus in Canadian healthcare facilities. There is a lot of information here, and it is well written and attractively presented with clear color coding.
This is a lovely, simple portfolio site for photographer Virgile Guinard. By using blocks of color pulled from each photograph’s predominant color and only revealing each photograph on rollover, each image is allowed to stand out.
This site for The Bold Type Hotel in Patra, Greece, is a boutique hotel website archetype, but it is done well. The pinky sand background color is a good choice, and the photographs are excellent.
Nor Norm provide an office furniture subscription service. The site is clean with a feeling of light and space. There is a good balance between an overview of the process and details of the individual items available.
At first glance, Ask Us For Ideas looks like a creative agency, but it is actually a creative broker, matching clients with agencies.
Prinoth has been making snow groomers since the 1960s, and this microsite is to mark the launch of their new hydrogen and electric versions. It is as slick and glossy as any luxury car website. And now I know what a snow groomer is.
Design agency Pschhh has embraced the use of circles, reflecting the sound of bubbles their name suggests.
CōLab is a design and marketing firm. There is a great use of color and movement here, and you don’t really notice initially that there is no actual work on show.
The post 20 Best New Websites, February 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
MUNICH – SAP SE (NYSE : SAP) a annoncé aujourd’hui que le FC Bayern Munich, le club de football le plus titré d’Allemagne, a mis en œuvre avec succès la solution SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central pour standardiser et optimiser ses principaux processus de ressources humaines (RH) et améliorer l’expérience de ses plus de 1 000 employés.
En s’appuyant sur le service SAP Model Company pour accélérer le déploiement de la solution, le FC Bayern a bénéficié de processus préconfigurés et de best practices prêts à l’emploi.
Intégré à la suite SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management Suite, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central est un système d’information RH basé sur le cloud, que les entreprises utilisent pour gérer leur personnel grâce à toutes les fonctions RH essentielles.
Avec la mise en œuvre de SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, le FC Bayern est passé de feuilles de calcul et processus manuels à une plate-forme entièrement intégrée. Cela permet de mettre en place des processus RH cohérents et numériques et, à l’avenir, d’unifier les données relatives au recrutement, à l’intégration et à la gestion des performances. En outre, des rapports peuvent être générés facilement et efficacement pour optimiser la planification et l’analyse des effectifs.
« La solution SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central permet à l’équipe RH du FC Bayern de faire ce qu’elle fait le mieux – se concentrer sur les ressources humaines stratégiques et à valeur ajoutée plutôt que sur les processus transactionnels », a déclaré Jan-Christian Dreesen, vice-président exécutif du FC Bayern. « Avant de mettre en œuvre la solution, nous travaillions avec des processus lourds et fastidieux. L’intégration nous a permis non seulement de numériser nos processus, de les retravailler et d’innover. En créant un environnement plus efficace, notre équipe RH peut se focaliser sur nos employés et leur offrir la meilleure expérience possible. »
SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central comprend des options en libre-service pour favoriser l’engagement des employés du FC Bayern. L’application SAP SuccessFactors Mobile offre à tous les employés – y compris les joueurs, les entraîneurs, les managers et les employés de bureau – une expérience mobile moderne et intuitive. Ils peuvent accéder à leurs données personnelles et mettre à jour leur profil employé, ainsi que saisir, approuver et enregistrer les absences telles que les vacances – autant de tâches qui nécessitaient auparavant de faire appel aux RH pour obtenir leur accord.
« Avec la mise en œuvre de SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, c’est avec enthousiasme que nous ouvrons un nouveau chapitre dans le partenariat de longue date entre le FC Bayern et SAP », a déclaré Andreas Jung, membre du conseil d’administration du FC Bayern.
« Depuis 2014, SAP est un partenaire platine officiel du FC Bayern. Nous travaillons ensemble à des solutions innovantes qui aident le club à atteindre ses objectifs sportifs et commerciaux », a déclaré Thomas Saueressig, member of the SAP Executive Board, Product Engineering. « La mise en service de SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central étend ce partenariat à la gestion de l’expérience humaine, permettant au club sportif d’accélérer encore sa croissance et de rester compétitif à tout moment, tant sur le terrain qu’en dehors. »
Pour plus d’informations, visitez la section « SIRH & Gestion RH » de SAP.com et le SAP News Center. Suivez SAP sur Twitter @SAPNews.
The post Le FC Bayern Munich adopte SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central pour améliorer la gestion numérique des ressources humaines appeared first on SAP France News.
When you think of installing analytics, you probably reach for Google Analytics. And you wouldn’t be alone. The platform’s tight integration with SEO and the implication that using Google products is beneficial to ranking means that Google Analytics is the most commonly installed analytics solution globally.
Google Analytics isn’t a bad choice: it’s free, it’s fairly comprehensive, and it does indeed tie most SEO efforts up with a nice bow.
But Google Analytics is also slow, extremely bad for privacy — both yours and your users’ — and for many people, it’s too unwieldy, having grown organically over the years into a relatively complex UI.
Some alternatives are fast, privacy-friendly, and geared towards different specialisms. Today we’re rounding up the best…
Heap is an event-based analytics platform. That means you can tell not just how many people visited your site but what actions they took when they were there. This isn’t a unique proposition, but Heap is one of the best implementations.
Heap offers an auto-track tool, which is ideal for new installations because you can get up and running immediately and fine-tune the details later. That makes it great for startups, although it’s also the choice of major corporations like Microsoft.
Heap’s free plan includes 60k sessions per year and 12 months of data history, but when you outgrow that, the business plans start at $12,000/year.
ChartMogul is geared towards SaaS that offer subscription plans, staking a claim as the world’s first subscription data platform.
Services like Buffer and Webflow use ChartMogul to monitor their revenue and analyze the ROI of changes to their features, design, and user experience.
Ideally suited for startups, ChartMogul pricing is based on monthly recurring revenue; it has a free plan for up to $10,000 MMR; after that, pricing starts at $100/month.
Fathom is an awesome, privacy-first analytics solution. It offers a simple dashboard and is ideal for anyone looking for simple analytics information to verify business decisions.
Fathom is ideally suited to freelancers, or entrepreneurs with multiple projects, as it allows you to run multiple domains from a single account. Fathom is entirely cookieless, meaning you can ditch that annoying cookie notice. It’s GDPR, ePrivacy, PECR, CCPA, and COPPA compliant.
There’s a seven-day free trial; after that, Fathom starts at $14/month.
FullStory is designed to help you develop engaging online products with an emphasis on user experience.
FullStory is a set of tools, making it ideal for large in-house teams or in-house teams working with outside agencies or freelancers. It pitches itself as a single source of truth from which everyone from the marketing department to the database engineers can draw their insights, helping digital teams rapidly iterate by keeping everyone in the same loop.
FullStory uses AI to track and interpret unexpected events, from rage clicks to traffic spikes, and breaks those events down to a dollar-cost, so you can instantly see where your interventions will have the most impact.
There’s a free plan for up to 1k sessions per month; once you outgrow that, you need to talk to the sales team for a quote.
Amplitude has one of the most user-friendly dashboards on this list, with tons of power behind it. For project managers trying to make science-based decisions about future development, it’s a godsend.
The downside with Amplitude is that to make the most of its powerful data connections, you need to pump a lot of data in. For that reason, Amplitude is best suited to sites that already have a substantial volume of traffic — among those customers are Cisco and PayPal.
Amplitude provides a free plan, with its core analytics and up to 10m tracked actions per month. For premium plans, you have to contact their sales team for a quote.
Mixpanel is a little bit more than an analytics program, aiming to be a whole suite of web tools it has ventured into split testing and notifications.
Mixpanel is laser-focused on maximizing your sales funnel. One look at the dashboard, and you can see that Mixpanel, while very well designed, has too many features to present them simply; Mixpanel is ideally suited to agencies and in-house development teams with time to invest — you probably want to keep the CEO away from this one.
Mixpanel has a generous free plan for up to 100k monthly users, with its business plans starting at $25/month.
Mode is a serious enterprise-level solution for product intelligence and decision making.
Ideally suited to in-house teams, Mode allows you to monitor financial flow and output the results in investor-friendly reports. You can monitor your entire tech stack and, of course, understand how users are interacting with your product. Wondering who handles the analytics for Shopify? That would be Mode.
Mode has a free plan aimed at individuals, but this tool’s scope is really beyond freelancers, and the free plan’s only likely to appeal to high-price consultants and tech trouble-shooters. For the full business plan, you need to contact Mode’s sales team for a quote.
Microanalytics is a relatively new analytics program with a lightweight, privacy-focused approach.
Microanalytics provides a simple dashboard with acquisitions, user location, technology, and the all-important event tracking to monitor user behavior. Microanalytics is compliant with the web’s most stringent privacy laws, including GDPR, PECR, and CCPA. The tracking code is just 1kb in size, meaning that you’ll hardly notice its footprint in your stats.
Microanalytics is free for up to 10k pageviews/month; after that, the monthly plan starts at $9.
GoSquared is another suite of tools, this time aimed at SaaS. Its primary product is its analytics, but it also includes live chat, marketing tools, and a team inbox.
If you’re tired of comparing multiple tools to help make the most of your startup, GoSquared kills several birds with one stone. Perhaps most importantly, if you’re beginning to build a team and don’t have any engineers onboard yet, GoSquared has an award-winning support team and an idiot-proof setup process.
GoSquared has a free plan that’s fine for evaluating the suite and integrating data from day one. As you begin to grow, paid plans start at $40/month.
Segment is a little different from the other analytics tools on this list; Segment is a layer that sits between your site and your analytics. It integrates with many of the tools on this list.
There are several benefits to this approach. The main one is that different teams within your enterprise can access analytics data in a form that suits them — designers can access complex data, and management can stick to revenue flow. It also means that you can switch analytics programs with a single setting in Segment and even migrate historical data into new apps. If you’re an enterprise that wants to future-proof its customer intelligence gathering, Segment is worth considering.
Segment is trusted by some of the web’s best-known names, from IBM to Levis, and…ahem…Google.
Segment is free for up to 1k visitors per month, and after that, the team plan starts at $120/month.
The post 10 Best Alternatives to Google Analytics in 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
