Website first impressions: New site for Breeze Law Firm

You have one chance to make that all important first impression, are you achieving that with your web site?

The updated site we've created for Breeze Law Firm delivers a great first impression with a rich look/feel, easy to navigate interface and direct copy allowing visitors a thorough overview of the practices areas.

Visit the site a www.breezelaw.com

Custom 404 error pages.

Does your web site have custom error pages? If a visitor types in the address of a page that has been moved or no longer exists are they greeted with this?



Does this screen engage your users? No and you are missing an opportunity to direct your users to the information they are looking for.

Take this "error" opportunity to present your visitors with custom 404 error pages, ours has full site navigation and a site map.

Web Design Updates for Indigo Image

Back in February I mentioned our web site was undergoing a freshen up. Client work always comes first so it has taken until the middle of April to roll out the changes. But today is the day!

While the overall design has not dramatically changed we have focused on usability issues. Our home page now features our RSS feed and a dynamic portfolio navigator. The entire portfolio section has been reworked and all logo and graphic design pieces are presented as a slide show format for easy viewing.

The portfolio has been split into the following sections

• Web Design - with 3 galleries of web site, email templates, landing page, banner ads etc
• Logo Design
• Graphic Design -with 3 galleries of business cards, letterheads, flyers, trifolds, menus etc
• Complete Branding - with six galleries of branding projects
  

We have also taken the opportunity to update our blog template and create a custom background for the STLwebdesign Twitter page

New web site for Saint Louis Associates in OBGYN

Launched this afternoon is a brand new web site for Saint Louis Associates in OBGYN.

Presented with a clean and fresh look/feel, the site information is organized in well structured categories, from "Practice Areas" to "Woman's Health by Life Stage". The user is able quickly to hone in on their information of interest.

Home Page



Woman's Health by Life Stage


Visit the site at www.snowdenmd.com

Google Launches a new Web Browser: Chrome

I am a huge fan of Google and was delighted today to see they are launching a completely new web broswer, built from the ground up.
They have produced a comic which describes in layman terms the features of their new system. The browser is due for launch today and I will be keeping an eye on the official Google blog for that magic download link.

The new browser includes:-

• Tabbed browsing where each tab gets its own process, leading to faster and more stable browsing. If one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t go down with it.
  
• A distinct user interface that places tabs on top of the browser window instead of right below the address bar
  
• An “incognito” mode that lets you browse the web in complete privacy because it doesn’t record any of your activity
  
• A new JavaScript engine built from the ground up for speed
  
• Malware and phishing lists that automatically update themselves and warn you of bad websites
  
• A default homepage that displays your most commonly used sites and other personalized information
  

Website Design: First Impressions count.

What kind of impression does your web site make, especially in those critical first few seconds? Are you engaging your users to explore further or sending them away? Recent studies show that if a web site has not captivated a user within 4 seconds then they will abandon your site.



Here are a few things to consider.

• How quickly does your main page load?
  What pops up first? How quickly can you begin to read any text? It's critical for the most eye-catching elements to load first and near the top of the page. The page can then continue and finish loading while the visitor is checking out what's loaded first.



• Is it clear what your web site is about and generally what's offered from a quick scan of the page?



• Is the navigation clear and obvious so your visitors can quickly see where to find your products or services or are you forcing your user to think to much?

So is your web site meeting these simple criteria or failing and sending your traffic away.?
It doesn't matter how much effort you put into search engine optimization, pay per click programs, internet marketing etc. If the first impression or your site is lacking your visitors will go else where.

A web site makeover: Tiger Tables

Last week saw the launch of a new web site for tigertables.com.


Tiger Tables is in the business of selling actuarial software and offers a demo version for evaluation. Delivering an easy "don't make me think" approach was our focus during the design phase, and we utilized bold navigation on the home page to attract users to try the demo or buy the product.

The overall site design was targeted for a more upscale, professional look compared to the original site.

Business owner Larry Katzenstein had this to say:

"Thanks again for all your help. I love the way my new site looks."

Pixel Perfect Coding

Two of my projects last week moved out of the design phase and into the coding phase.
It is during this phase that the non functional design created are sliced up and reconstructed into into fully functional web pages albeit void of content. Content population comes next.


During this intial coding phase our pages are tested, tested and tested again to ensure they perform well across all user platforms and browsers. In a perfect world all browsers would render a coded page exactly the same way ...but this is not the case. Browsers can introduce gaps and spaces into a design. A web design which displays seemlessley when viewed with internet Explorer can have gaps and spaces when view with Firefox.

We employ a standard of pixel perfect coding ...a design will display seemlessly whatever browser it is viewed on. We achieve this though the slicing logic used in cutting up our designs and careful coding with hacks where necessary.

Your web site...is it time to re design?

Re-design is a natural cycle of having a web site. What worked well ...say eight years ago, may not be performing up the mark for you today. While many changes can be made by a little web maintenace here and there, there comes a time when only a full scale redesign is going help you accomplish your objective.

But how do you know when that time has come? Here are four tell-tale signs that the time has come to re-design.

1. Your Business has grown or changed
   While any good web site will be designed so it can accomodate moderate business growth, if your business is booming and you have extended your service offering it is likely that your original web site is not doing you justice. The same goes if you have changed the direction of your business.



2. Outdated Design
   You only get one chance to make a first impression and if the overall look/feel of your site is radically "behind the times" you can lose credibility. If your site features animated clipart, is coded as frames or looks like a "Front Page template you are the victim of an outdated design!



3. Your information lacks organization
   If you have been adding to your site over the years it is likely that your navigation has become a little confused. Making your visitors "think" when navigating will not engage them to the same extend as a well thought out navigation and information structure.



4. Poor Performace in the Search engines
   Poor rankings in the Search Engines can be a result of not optimizing your site well. Poor search engine ranking can also be a result of bad design choices or coding on your site. Make sure that your site isn't designed using frames and that the text is coded in HTML. Flash sites are also more difficult to optimize for Search Engines.

If any of these senarios describe your web site contact us at info@indigoimage.com to see how we can help bring you up to date in the web world.

Blog widget: The web poll.

Blogs are becoming an increasingly popular marketing tool for companies, both big and small. They allow you to update your readers with company news, offer tips, tricks, promote products. The list is endless.

Blogs can now also be enhanced with widgets.Widget are small applications which have a specific function to perform on a blog or web site.For example some widgets allow you to show videos play music, and while this might not be relevant to a business blog there are plently of widgets out there that are.

For example a web poll widget.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Widgets like increase the interactivity with your readers just that one step further. They require little technological know how to add...cut and paste some code and your are ready to go.
What's more most of them are free.

Image Optimization: Improve the load time of your web site or blog

For the average web site or blog most of the load time is a result of the images on the page, the bigger the image files, the longer it takes for the page to completely download.

To improve download time, professional web designers will go though an image optimization process where the images on a site are fine tuned via a balance of file size vs image quality.

The following picture of some nice juicy fall apples illustrate the process. The settings used to save the image were adjusted but it is not until you look at image 4 that a noticable degredation appears. In this case Image 3 would be selected having the best combination of low file size and image quality.

Although we use professional graphics software to optimize there are plently of free ulitilies available to do the hard work for you. My favorite is Net Mechanic ..here you can upload your image and it is presented in varous optimized forms. Pick the image that best suits your need, right click and "save picture as".

Image 1 : file size=14.1 Kb	Image 2 : file size=8.66 Kb
Image 3 : file size=4.58 Kb	Image4 : file size=3.02Kb

Graphic Design Portfolio Updated

I recently had a call from a lady who had visited my site. She was looking to create a new web site but told me she had spent many hours trying to find a company to work with but had not liked any of the sites she had visited ...until she visited indigoimage.com and hence the call.

This one phone call alone speaks volumes about having a good online presence and standing out from the crowd.

I have been working on the organisation of the portfolio aspect of the site recently and today launched a reconfigured version of the graphic design portfolio. The portfolio is now spit into logos (five galleries) Business Cards & Lettersheads, Brochures and Newsletters and 2 galleries of corporate design.

The portfolio has been updated with some new projects and the new configuration should make it easier to visitors to home into their intrest area faster.

Our blog gets a shake up

This blog is nearly two years old ...and 176 posts later I thought it was about time it had a little more order.

Having reviewed it's common themes it has been categoried into the following:-

• Design Snippets
  Various information relating to graphic and web design


• Eye of St Louis Web Designer
  Photographs from our collection taken out and about in St Louis and beyond.
  
• Free!
  Who likes free stuff ..we all do!


• Graphic Design Projects
  Completed graphic design projects: letterheads, packaging, binders, brochures etc.


• Indigo Tips
  Technology tips to improve your online experience


• Internet Marketing
  What is internet marketing ..learn more here


• Logos
  some of our logo projects


• Projects in Progress
  New projects we a reworking on


• Random Thoughts
  Bit of everything in here!


• STL Marketing Executive
  Post from our guest writer St Louis marketing executive


• Web Design Projects
  Completed web design projects


• Web Site Usability
  What makes a good web site?

All posts from now on will also be open for comments

Designing web sites for cross browser compatibility

Although most people will stick with a favorite browser to view web sites there are a multitude to chose from ... Safari, Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla Firefox .... and all of these have many versions

Consider browser choice with operating systems( e.g Linux Fedora Core 4, Macintosh OSX 10.4, Windows 98, Windows XP) and the different combinations grows horribly large.

As a web designer an important consideration in designing and coding a web site is how well it is going to perform across the gamut of browser and operation systems. In an ideal world all browsers would display any given web site in exactly the same way. Alas this is not the case. What may perform fabulously on Internet Explorer 6.0 may be full of flaws when viewed using Netscape 7.2.

During the development of our web sites we constantly test our code to see how it performs... testing them on a total of 53 browser/operating system combinations. This enables us to tweak our code so our web sites look good and perform as designed no matter what operating system or browser you or your site visitors are using.

Web Site Usability

How usable is your web site? This is a term you may have heard but what does it actually mean? The bottom line is web site usability is all about engaging your site visitors and can encompass a large number of issues.

For Example

• A slow loading web site can cause visitors to "give up" before: Engagement rating a big fat zero




• Poorly designed navigation can lean to frustration




• Long streams of text. Reasearch from Usability expert Jakob Nielsen has shown that people read 25% slower from a computer screen that reading from paper.

For a free uability evaluation of your web site give us a call at 636 273 6746 or E-mail: IndigoImage

Readability

The usability of a web site is one of my pet subjects ..the navigation has to be intuative, the content has to be delivered in a logical user friendly way and a site has to load quickly ...just a few of the issues thyat affect the usability of a site.

Another is the readabilty of the content. Compare the following 2 paragraphs ...which is the more readable?

Indigo Image is a St Louis based graphic design company offering web site design and traditional graphic arts.

Indigo Image is a St Louis based graphic design company offering web site design and traditional graphic arts.

Using a dark background with light text can be an effective way of drawing the users attention to an area and in the example above this is the case. However defining a whole web site to have a dark background and light text can be very tiring on the eyes and make the content difficult to read.

It is also important to have adequate contrast between the the text and background.

Web Site Usability

I am a real advocate of web usability and not giving the surfer a mental workout as they experience a site.

Our own site www.indigoimage.com is currently going through a slight overhaul to improve usability ..our portfolio of web and graphic design projects has grown to such an extent that we need a better interface to present them.

Look for the updates early next week!

Web Design...don't make me think

Here is a senario:-

Shopping online, you have found the perfect designer wallpaper in a St Louis based store, time to checkout..but where is the checkout button..on the top, on the side where? This is a site where the checkout button is not intuatively postioned.

Don't make me think!

As a site visitor you are being asked to do too much visual processsing to complete your order.

Good web design is all about producing an interface which interacts with the site visitor in an intuative way. In an e-commerce site excellent and easy to use navigation is crucial. The bad positioning of a checkout button can mean a shopping cart is abandoned and a sale is lost.

Website usability

How many times have you visited a website with a "funky, cool" flash animation only to sit there rapidly trying to find a "skip intro" button or waiting for the animation to work itself through?

What purpose is that animation serving and how is it contributing to the usability of the website?

We create websites that focus on usability ..sites that are simple to use, easy to navigate and deliver information without making the visitor think. We combine good function with compelling design and focus on design elements which will support the message of the website not overwhelm it.

There are occasions when e.g small animation or sound byte, enhance a site and used sparingly they can be very effective, but we always ask ourselves...in using this element is it contributing to the usabilty and message of the website?

The horizontal scroll no no.

Did you know that about 30% of internet users have their monitors set at a resolution of 800 x 600 px, the majority now have their monitors set at 1024 x 768 px.

But what happens if your web site is designed at a width suitable for the majority? 30% of your visitors will have to scroll horizontally to fully view your site.ARGHH!! Horrizontal scrolling is not an intuative action of any surfer and there is no telling what important information or message they may be missing.

Until the 800 x 600 viewer statistics drastically drop we will always be designing so our web sites with optimal usability for the lowest common denominator.