So, you have decided to check out BaseKit and want to create your website directly from your Photoshop design. But first of all you need to get that Photoshop design ready for BaseKit. As cool as it would be to just upload any old PSD and have it work in straight away in BaseKit – you need to follow a few steps to get it ready to go in. Nothing too difficult – just a few little tweaks and checks so it works perfectly!
Just watch the above video from BaseKit usability guru Gordon as he takes you through five easy steps to getting your PSDs BaseKit ready.
We have many more tutorial videos over on our YouTube and FaceBook accounts, so if you’re stuck – take a look – we may have the solution for you!
Having trouble feeling inspired? Just can’t seem to find anything online or through multiple various design blogs that catches your attention? Inspiration can be found all around you at anytime, you just have to go looking for it. Dare to venture away from your computer and search around your environment for that inspirational “Ah ha!” moment.
Outside of the availability of the “world at your fingertips” through the use of the web, many artists, authors and the like often search for inspiration around their local surroundings. For instance an author from Portland writing a book about coming of age on the west coast wouldn’t normally set the story in Boston, he writes about what is familiar to him or to his surroundings. Going to a museum or stepping outside of your normal routine can often be inspirational, but let’s face it, you can’t go to the museum everyday and you aren’t likely to break your daily habits or routine. Most of the time we usually have to stay in step with our daily grind and don’t have time to do such things. What I hope to provide to you with this article are several ways to break away from your computer and find the inspiration around you.
One way to start is by reading a lot, something to help you get the cogs in your mind moving maybe get you starting to think differently. Architectural, design, and even fashion magazines are a good place to start.
“Seriously, print has a lot more variation than the web, as they know a lot better what they’re designing for. Webdesigners/front-end developers need to make sure the website works on different screen sizes, for different devices, different operating systems… Print is more like designing for the iPhone: You can predict the outcome a lot more, giving you more freedom to go crazy, or try something that wont scale/bend. Product design is just lovely to look at. I’m a big fan of clean designs, designs that cut out all the unnecessary crap and focus solely on their purpose.”
- Tim Van Damme of Made by Elephant
Take the time to get away for your ‘normal work’ and read or learn something new and interesting. It doesn’t even have to be design related, taking a break may do you some good. You may find yourself inspired by some typography, a layout, or an article.
Another fantastic form of inspiration is fresh air and maybe a good look around you from nature or your surroundings. Go outside and see what catches your attention. Maybe you’ll notice a beehive or a pattern in the way the grass is laid, break your routine just a bit. Go on a stroll before starting your work or try something you might not normally do in your day, eat something new, explore the world around you. Doing this keeps your thought processes from becoming stagnant because your mind is always on its toes.
A good example of nature inspired design is BlueBeetle.com. The first thing that I noticed when coming across this site was it’s use of macro focusing on the subject and the movements in the background, but these are small things to engage the users senses in the design.
Take the time to get away for your ‘normal work’ and read or learn something new and interesting. It doesn’t even have to be design related, taking a break may do you some good. You may find yourself inspired by some typography, a layout, or an article.
hecking out vendors at flea markets can also come in handy. You are able to find vintage photography most of the time. But you have to look at the design and craftsmanship of handmade things. And this would also include looking at Packaging design. Go to a local store, since they seem to be the most obvious place to find examples. Board games are always a good for ideas, because they provide a variety of inspiration.
Keeping an Inspiration Notebook
When it’s not easy to use a variety of sources it can do you good to keep an inspiration notebook full of images, print, magazines, fliers, ads, album covers stickers, etc. This way you have inspiration at hand if need be.
By keeping a journal you will find yourself become less reliant on online resources, it will encourage you to be more open to a wide variety of disciplines, and you likely see more originality come out in your designs. Categorize it, because adding to it over time can get a little messy and may make it difficult for you to find something specific. And always add to it consistently, make it a habit to find things around you and add them to your notebook. In my experience post-it notes tend to work wonders for me.
Struck with a moment of “ah” inspiring creation or found something on the fly? Do like I often find myself doing, most mobile phones come with cameras now. Snap a quick photo of it and create a mobile photo library of inspiration. then you can do with it what you will. Sort of bringing your notebook into a digital format.
There are multiple places for you to share your inspirations online, for example ember, flickr, or even create a list on twitter.
In conclusion I hope you can take what you’ve read here and start exploring your environment. You would be amazed how much you will be able to find.
Have any other sources of inspiration? Why not let others no about it throught the comments in the entry.
After our last plunge into five of the internet’s biggest time-traps, it’s time to strap up those waders and fix your snorkel in place. We’re heading back down the sinkhole to investigate another ten distracting, absorbing and procrastinator-friendly websites, all of which seem designed solely to whip you into their time-sucking whirlpool.
Yes, we’re all aware that miniclip.com has some of the best gaming on the internet – but there are alternatives. With it’s agreeable, old fi, lo fi background and interface, Mindjolt is not such a conspicuous pleasure as the anim-heavy daddy of flash game sites – and the games aren’t bad either. Focusing mainly on old fashioned puzzle games, mucking about on the site is a solid reminder that games don’t have to look amazing and feature an armoury steadily increasing in firepower to make them eligible for total brain-distraction.
If you’ve ever just missed the best shot of your life because your trigger-finger fell too slowly on your shutter, then this is the site for you. Though it’s a very niche product they’re offering, the amazing aspect of this collection of photographs, all taken with perfect timing, is the impressive backlog laid on for your to browse. Whether it’s an old lady licking a 99 at the precise moment a seagull steals it from her grasp or a chuckling boy a split second before snowball-facial-impact, some of these are guaranteed to induce intense guffaws.
Try a sample:
Great Tit In Flight – you can’t beat the expression on this fluttering bird’s face.
It’s oh-so-wrong, but that’s why it’s oh so much fun. Using the complete apparent freedom of circulation when it comes to US mugshots, the creators of this site have crafted a brilliant multiple-choice style quiz based on real life felonies. ‘Who was charged with grand theft?’ they’ll ask, confronting you with a line-up of very different individuals. Make your choice based on appearance alone, and see just how wrong you can be when judging a book by its cover.
Gruelling it may be, but browsing Crimelibrary is like falling into a bracing black-hole of fascinating nastiness. Every serial killer, mass-murderer and false-imprisoner is here, so after initially landing you might well find yourself locked in a macabre loop of death and destruction. What’s more, it’s all written in a winningly sensational style, the way all over-the-top American crime reportage should be. You may find yourself starting off with the big-hitters – your Dahmers, Gacys and Nilssens, but soon you’ll be examining a huge variety of murderous psychopaths, all of whom you’d never heard of before. A charming way to spend the afternoon.
Have you ever wondered what goes on in the mind of people less intelligent than yourself? Then take a trip to the forums of one of the UK’s biggest entertainment and celebrity sites. What’s amazing about DigitalSpy users is their intricate knowledge of the most pointless facts regarding British TV. This useless genius is then compounded by an ability to find an argument in the least offensive debate – and it all makes for satisfyingly smug reading. Just don’t be tempted to join in.
This post was written by Liam Tucker of the excellent Watch With Mothers. Which is another great way to waste your day. – Want to write for the BaseKit Blog? – Drop us an email.
The first step of giving your business website a good health check is – quite logically – the home page.
Have a good hard look at the first page your customers see when they visit the site. When inspecting your home page, you need to think about what information it presents. Within the first three seconds, a customer will decide if they want to find out more, or go somewhere else. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes – does your home page present your business in an attractive way? Is it easy for the customer to get to the information they need? The average customer will want to either find out more about you, find out how to contact you, or browse the products or services you provide. If your eye isn’t instantly drawn to these three options, then it’s likely that the homepage has too much on it and needs to be simplified.
So content is key to how well a homepage works. There isn’t a definitive answer to the debate about how much information to put on your homepage. There is always a ‘too little’ and definitely always a ‘too much’, but finding the right balance is rarely a simple process. A good way to work out your business’s own ideal balance is to look at the business itself – does it provide one simple thing, or many different things? If it’s the former, then your answer is most probably that you’ll want to keep the home page nice and simple. If you have multiple services, then you might want to categorise them, to give options for navigation from your homepage a bit more simplicity.
Writing the text for the homepage is much akin to answering the question ‘So, what do you do?’ when chatting in the pub. Go into too much detail, and your audience loses interest. Go into too little detail, and the audience is just as clueless as before they asked, and they’re unlikely to ask again. The main paragraph shouldn’t normally be more than a sentence. Some businesses go for their business tagline, while others expand a little on the info. Of course, if you’re only expecting traffic from visitors who already know what your business provides, then you might want to launch straight into the latest product or service news.
Check out Dabs or Firefox for examples – once you’re on the homepage, they don’t really need to explain their business to you. At the other end of the scale, check out Twitter – it has a minimal homepage with a short description of what it does and a neat cluster of navigation options – Sign Up, Sign In, Search, the Trending Topics and the usual footer information at the bottom. The home page doesn’t really need to say more, although many people are still at a loss as to the whole point of Twitter, so perhaps their web designers should be reading this blog as well!
Something else to learn from the Twitter homepage is the weighting that is given to the different navigation options. The ‘Sign In’ button is located in what has become a traditional location for user sign in areas, in the upper right hand of the page. While it’s prominently designed, it doesn’t distract from the rest of the page. This is because members know where to log in, and can ignore the rest of the home page as they click through to access their profile. The aspect of the home page with the most prominence (besides the logo, of course) is the Sign Up button, because logically Twitter wants to encourage first time visitors to the site to become members, and logically the majority of new visitors to the site will be there to do exactly that.
Apply this way of thinking to your own home page. What will most visitors of the site want to do when they visit it? What do you most want them to do? Does your current site encourage this activity in its design? The answers will pretty much dictate the way you lay your site out, before you’ve even started about thinking how pretty you want to make it.
Finally, look at the appearance of your home page – are the graphics sharp? Do all the colours on the page match each other? Is there any text which is too big, or too small – or spilling out of the frame? If you can see any of this, then your customer can too, and untidiness will cast your business in a poor light – no matter how superior your products are, if your competitor has a nicer looking site, the customer will be inclined to go there instead.
A website has to be as technically tidy as it is content-wise. You can have the perfect text and ideal images, but if they’re not aligned properly, then the site will look disjointed and it won’t reflect well on your business.
So that’s your home page. You should now have a very good idea of what needs improvement on your site, or what you need to think about when starting the next version of the site from the ground up. Next up, we’ll take a look at updateable content, like the News Page. Keep your pencils sharp!
"It differs from other similar services by allowing users to implement functional, interactive and dynamic elements without coding. It doesn't simply build a static site like the web site builders of a decade past.
