Tag: user interface design
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Mobile-first design
Have you checked what your website looks like on a smart phone? Or a tablet?
More than 60% of visitors to your website will be viewing it on a mobile phone, so it is important to make sure that it looks great on a mobile device.
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Why Font Choices Matter
The fonts you choose for your website are a key aspect of branding. The font styles you choose make your website distinctive, and subtly communicate your values. The Google Fonts directory even has keywords for the feelings and seasons evoked by a font.
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Alternative Text for Images
One of the key components of accessibility is providing alt text for images, especially if the images contain text.
This is because, when people with visual impairments use your website, they rely on a screen-reader to read the text out to them. This only works with images if they are described using alternative text (usually referred to as “alt text”).
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Microformats
Microformats are a way of marking up standardized data so that search engines, AI tools, and calendar tools can process it. Adding them to your site helps AI tools and search engines to rank your website higher in search results.
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Favicons and Logos
Your logo tells a story about your business in a single graphic. The colours, fonts, and symbols that you choose express your values in a concise way.
If your logo is truly distinctive and your brand is very well-known, it may be recognizable on its own without your company name.
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Holding out for a Hero
A hero is a content block that has a big bold image, a headline, a short explanation, and a call-to-action (either a button or a really short sign-up form).
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Does Your Website Reflect Your Values?
Your values are how you show up in the world as a human, so it would be strange if your website did not reflect your values.
Values are not the same as politics, although they do affect how you vote and what you campaign for.
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Design and Development
What’s the difference between a designer and a developer? A lot of people assume that these terms are synonymous, but they are increasingly found on different teams in large organizations. There are other roles in the software development space that are also needed to ensure that the finished product is reliable and usable.
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Responsive Websites
A responsive website is one that you can view equally well on a mobile or desktop device. The font size and layout should be readable without zooming, panning, or scrolling horizontally.
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Styling your Website
Since the invention of the web, styling on websites has improved in leaps and bounds. You can have gradients, rounded corners, overlapping elements, drop-shadow, scalable and responsive content, and much more. This is all made possible by CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
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Organizing your Content
When you are building or updating your website, you need to think about what your target audience will expect to see.
There are various ways to find out what they will expect; you can ask a group of people who are likely to use your site what they would expect to see; you can look at other websites offering a similar product or service; or you can experiment with different ways of presenting your information and see which is the most effective.
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Accessibility
Making websites accessible is a very important aspect of user experience. Accessibility benefits everyone, because it makes websites easier for everyone to use. It is also a legal requirement in most countries, including Canada.
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User Experience
User experience is an important aspect of website design. Remember the bad old days of the 1990s, with marquees, animated graphics everywhere, an excess of links that were just labelled “click here”, and garish background colours?
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