Room for improvement - a guide to design

Advertise on Facebook

2012-02-04T00:41:00.001-08:00

Is Facebook Advertising for You? http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/222712

7 tips for improving pay-per-click

2012-02-04T00:37:00.001-08:00

Seven Tips for Improving Pay-Per-Click Campaigns http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/222436

Great examples of design

2011-06-13T09:14:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite long established design agencies - The Designers Republic™

The usual practice of building a website that has Search Engine Optimisation and accessible navigation has no place with some major design/advertising agencies - it almost doesn't make sense. Highly creative high profile agencies should know better, right? Surely they want to set the standard for highly ranked highly usable websites - after all these agencies are looked up to, listened to and followed by many in the industry. The fact is that a lot of these design agencies use Flash to build their websites, giving them creative freedom to display what they want, and no boundaries to how it will look in different browsers. In my opinion agencies like 'The Designers Republic' are more or less saying to their audience
"Look at our work, look at our clients, we don't need to be found on the web, if you can't view our website - so what, our profile is massive, everyone knows who we are, clients know what to expect from us, our website is designed for visual impact not content".
This is a typical example of a business making such an impact that the name alone has become a brand and with that comes reassurance, popularity and a following of clients that come to them, and I bet most of the time The Designers Republic don't really need to look far for new business.

Still I know who they are, and I know what to expect, and I like that. Why Not Associates design agency are also a well established favorite of mine since my College/Uni days - http://www.whynotassociates.com/ - this is another example of an influential creative business where the quality of work and profile speak for themselves.

Take a look at some digital design and marketing companies in recent years. They combine visual impact and impressive portfolios of work within well built and well optimised websites that have well written and creative content. They prefer not to restrict some users and usually leave 'Flash' out of the design and instead make clever use of standard programming languages and Cascading Style Sheets. Better Brand agency know who they are, know who their audience is and I rate their work highly. Brilliant clean and clear website, a prime example of a professional creative and web development company - http://www.betterbrandagency.com/.

Keep posted.

Are you a designer?

2011-05-26T16:52:00.000-07:00

Where do you draw the line between web developers and web designers? There are some pretty bad examples of web design out there, but amateur designers are saturating the website design market and too many unqualified, inexperienced web designers are competing for the same business as the professionals. Unfortunately some clients are spending their marketing budgets on amateur website design, then realising they’ve made a mistake when the website doesn’t perform or simply is unfinished.

On the other hand, in some cases clients have learnt their lesson from being burnt in the past, and possibly clients these days are wiser to the crap out there. And some ‘professional’ web designers have gained work from picking up the pieces from badly designed websites – could amateurs be also creating work for the experts?

It’s time to ‘Name and Shame’ the amateur developers and designers. Even though most of these websites function correctly and aren’t that bad with navigation, we are picking on visually ‘unpleasant’ designs and branding. Here are some with terrible logo/branding, and even worse portfolios: web-designuk.co.uk, inventivecreations.co.uk, rochdalewebdesign.com, freshwebdesign.com – there are so many more out there, these four websites were picked up in organic Google searches for keywords such as ‘Web Design Experts UK’ and ‘Web Design

’ ranking higher than the professional design businesses.

I’m a designer and with over 10 years experience in both designing for the web and for print I’d like to think I’m speaking for fellow accomplished designers out there by recognising the GOOD design from the BAD.

Keep posted for my next instalment.