9th
August 2010
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We spend the majority of our time designing for other people; we take a design brief and we design with our clients and their users in mind. We use their company logo, their brand’s colours, their content and quite often their ideas. Sure, there’ll always be aspects of the design that we are not 100% happy with, but so long as the paying customer is happy then we have done our job and done it well.
Designing your own portfolio site is quite unlike any other site you’ll design, there is no client, no specific set of requirements and nobody’s ideas but your own. When you say these things out loud, it sounds like any designer’s dream: no limitations and full creative freedom. It’s only when you finish your third or fourth redesign that you realise that you are far fussier than any client you have ever worked with and that creating a design that you are 100% happy with seems almost impossible.
I must have come up with at least eight or nine different designs (I think I coded at least three of them before changing my mind) before I was finally content with my own portfolio site. I say content, because I don’t think I’ll ever be “happy” with it because I’m too close to it and far too fussy.
However, the multiple redesigns taught me a few things about designing a portfolio site.
Keep it Simple
Keeping it simple was the biggest problem I faced when designing my portfolio site. I had all these crazy ideas about what would look great, bizarre colour combinations, slightly off the hook layout ideas – all in the pursuit of being slightly different and to standout. In end I just drove myself insane – I was over-thinking it completely.
In end I came to the conclusion that I’m a web designer and developer – I am by no stretch of the imagination a graphic designer. I am no-where near that creative, but I am capable of creating highly usable and visually appealing websites, so I decided I should just focus on that. Everything else seemed to fall into place after that.
A Blog is a Good Idea
Not only is including a blog on your site great for SEO and bringing more traffic to your site, it’s also an opportunity for you to show that you know what you are talking about. If you are passionate and knowledgeable about what you do, a blog is the perfect way to show this to potential clients and a good way to potentially start a discussion with other designers, which may in itself lead to other opportunities.
Never Use a Template
This really should go without saying but never ever use a web template for your portfolio site. I’ll be honest I was really tempted to at one point. I wanted to build my portfolio site on WordPress but didn’t have a clue about creating my own theme or where to start, I considered using one of the many available WordPress themes. That being said, I realised that I’m a designer so my portfolio should be designed by me for me – so I learned how to develop for WordPress. My point here is, don’t use someone else’s design for your portfolio site, no matter what.
Don’t Waffle
Don’t use 12 twelve words when 7 will do. This is especially true of your homepage, don’t try to squeeze in as much content as possible – try to include a short introduction that sells yourself and what you do to potential clients. If you get their attention they’ll look deeper into your site.
An Effective About Page
This is your opportunity to really sell yourself and stand out from the competition. Tell your users about your background, how did you end up in the industry, what parts of your job do enjoy the most? These are all aspects of you as a designer that make you different from every other designer out there. You can even mention your hobbies, especially if they are a bit different from the norm – for example you might love surfing, and so might the guy who’s currently reading your story. This makes you unique to that potential client and since he can already relate to you on your shared love of surfing, he may well get in touch for his next project.
Showcase only your Best Work
Don’t include every site you have ever designed, your users are probably not interested in that website you designed whilst still at design school. Your best work will also more than likely be your most recent work and therefore probably still online.
Another good idea is to only showcase the types of projects that you are keen to work on again. For example if you enjoy working on E-Commerce sites and want another E-Commerce project it might be a good idea to focus on this when showcasing your work.
A screenshot of your last piece on your homepage with a nice call to action button linking to your portfolio page is always a nice touch too. Show people what you can offer from the offset and invite them to explore further.
Multiple Contact Options
Not everyone has the time to give you a call or to write you a long email. Provide as many contact options as possible. A nice short contact form always goes down well, maybe also instant messaging options like MSN / Yahoo Messenger or Skype.
If you’re anything like me then you probably struggled with your own portfolio site, you tend to be your own worst critic and over-think it completely. The best piece of advice I can pass on is to keep it simple, once you have come up with a design, don’t look at it or think about it for a week. Then come back to it and see how you feel about it then, you’ll be surprised how your opinion that design can change once you have taken a step back.
This post was written by Lee Harding of Lee Harding Web Design – creating modern beautiful and usable websites. Want to write for the BaseKit Blog – get in touch!
Photo from Flikr creative commons
5th
August 2010
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You can always focus on your proper execution of the design principles, but what about creating a rich user experience through the use of psychology? Understanding more about your viewer as an individual and meeting their needs is the core foundations in Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ as pertaining to design.
What I’d like to do is go through each level of the hierarchy to help you better understand what exactly your client needs or wants whether you are providing them a site, game, or application. Creating the base of our hierarchy ‘pyramid’ is functionality. What good is your product if it doesn’t work? Having the basic functions of your website in place such as ‘Back’ and ‘Forward’ and you links hyperlinking to their correct destination. Because since the internet’s public induction, these are the core elements that are expected out of any website.
Reliability is the second tier of our hierarchy structure. Making sure that your site’s performance isn’t only stable, but it remains consistent, time and time again. People look for reliability in the products they use. If it worked fine yesterday, why not today? With little to no reliability you can also expect little to no people wanting to return to your site. It’s easier to get frustrated with unreliability and just walk away.
Is your site or design over complicated? You don’t want to complicate things and confuse your user. In addition to being easy to use, is your design forgiving? If the user messes up a portion of their sign-up form and it erases all of their previous entries or crashes the site, let’s face it, I would think it would be considered a usability failure. A usable website has a navigation system that is easy to understand and use, an organization that makes content easy to browse, readable text, and a layout in which orienting oneself is straightforward.
Designs regarded as proficient are perceived to function at a high level. A design that allows people to do things not previously possible and to expand on basic functionality is considered to be great. A proficient website might include advanced search options, the ability to combine data from different sources into more sophisticated levels of information and Web-based tools.
After all of the base needs have been met you can start to explore your creativity, which is the top of the hierarchy. Try to provide your user with a rich experience, give them options if need be. Think of fun ways to incorporate them and let them have a bit of fun themselves. You can add certain changes to your design to accomplish this. A creative website might include AJAX effects, aesthetic appeal and interaction through voice commands. Do we really have to get everything right at one level before committing resources to higher levels? Will a market tolerate a product that fails for no reason 10% of the time if it does everything beyond expectations the other 90%? Again, while the hierarchy intuitively makes sense, the needs and desires of the market will likely determine what is most critical to improve in the hierarchy.
Less is more – the simplest designs are often the best. You don’t want to over-populate any one of your web pages with too much of anything (images, content, etc) and you certainly do not want to make your readers scroll down a page for 30 seconds to find what they are looking for. Have a good balance, make sure everything is easy to access, and make sure your site looks neat. When things have been laid out in a way that has some order to it, and is not just clustered together, it is more professional and is much easier to look at, both initially and for extended periods of time.
Do you think this process is a waste of time? Or does following these core design principles based out of psychology help you succeed online?
This post was written by Joshua Rapp of Rappsody Studios creating modern beautiful and usable websites. Want to write for the BaseKit Blog – get in touch!
21st
July 2010
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Don't be like this guy...
Imagine going to a restaurant and enjoying one of the best meals that you have ever eaten, but the service was lousy, I mean really lousy. You had to wait over an hour for your food; the waiter was inattentive and he even got part of your order wrong. Would you go back to the restaurant again or recommend it to a friend? If you’re anything like me, you’ll remember the entire experience rather than just the end product.
If you want to stay ahead of the competition as a freelancer and ensure a steady stream of work you need to offer more than just awesome design skills to your clients. Your customers won’t just remember the final product, they’ll look at the experience as a whole – make sure it’s a positive one!
If You Say You’ll Do Something, Do It
If you make a commitment to a project, whether it’s a particular deadline or a piece of functionality, ensure you follow through. If you promised the client a website with a full content management system within two weeks, you better make sure you deliver on time. Failing to do so could have a massive knock on effect on your client’s business – say for example your client is expecting the final bug free version of a site in two weeks time and has planned an extensive marketing campaign on this basis and you miss the deadline. You have caused your client both valuable time and money. Somehow I don’t think they’ll be too happy and I doubt they’ll want to work with you again.
When it comes to dealing with a new client you are only as good as your word and not living up to your word will more than likely earn you a bad reputation and lose you repeat business.
Be Honest
Your client wants a full e-commerce website that they can update themselves and they are willing to pay big bucks for it. You’ve never designed, let alone built an e-commerce site before; do you take on the project even though you are unsure whether you will be able to do a great job in the time available?
I’m a huge advocate of taking on challenging projects and using them as an opportunity to learn new skills as well being paid for doing it. However there is a big difference between taking on challenging project and being well out of your depth. Taking on a job that introduces a big learning curve will pretty much guarantee that the end product won’t be as good as it should be.
If you can’t do a particular job, be upfront and honest with the client. Maybe you know somebody else in the industry who has the experience that you don’t. You can outsource the parts of the project that you can’t do well, whilst you focus on the areas that you know you can deliver.
Stay in Touch
Every client is different; some will expect regular updates whilst others will be a lot more relaxed and leave you to it. I like to provide my clients with regular updates, whether it’s just a short email to let them know that we are still on track and things are going well or screenshots or the URL on my test server where I will give them access to areas of the site that are almost ready.
I find that by providing my clients with regular updates that it helps to put their mind at ease that the project is in safe hands and all is going to plan. If the client has seen the work in progress and is pleased what they’ve seen, it also gives me peace of mind that they won’t be asking for massive changes towards the end of the project.
If a client sends you an email or leaves you a message, you should always try to get back to them within 24 hours at the most, especially during the working week. Whilst it’s important for the client to understand that you do have other projects and they shouldn’t expect your world to revolve around them; it’s equally important that you be contactable during working hours. If you prove impossible to get a hold of, you will more than likely be perceived by your client as unreliable.
Don’t Just Design – Advise
There are times when you can give the client exactly what they want and times when you need to advise them that what they want isn’t the best idea. A lot of clients, particularly those who have entrusted you to build their first website, don’t always know what is best for them. For example they insist you use a certain set of colours or layout style, you know that it just isn’t going to work; although they seem convinced it’s a brilliant idea. Do you just do what they ask or do you advise them against it and explain the reasons why? I like to think of that a large part of my job as a designer is to advise and if necessary educate my clients. Not only will they appreciate your honesty, but they’ll also be happy to know that you care about their website just as much as they do.
Get And Understand The Facts
It sounds like an obvious point, but do you fully understand exactly what your client’s needs are? Do you know who your clients competitors are, who their target audience is, what they want their website to achieve, are there specific functionality requirements? You’d be surprised how many designers don’t fully understand their client’s needs before starting work on a project. The result is an unhappy client who hasn’t got what they asked for and a designer who won’t be walking away with a glowing reference.
Go the Extra Mile
The freelance design industry is fierce with competition; there are countless design agencies and designers who offer quick and very low cost design services. Competing as a freelance designer and making a good living can be extremely difficult unless you stand out from the crowd. Offering outstanding customer service to your clients is just one of the ways you can make sure you do stand out, earn repeat business and receive glowing recommendations from your clients.
This post was written by Lee Harding of Lee Harding Web Design – creating modern beautiful and usable websites. Want to write for the BaseKit Blog – get in touch!
29th
June 2010
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By now you should have a good, if not considerable, handle on designing a site. Now you need to worry about your target audience, so let’s talk about building your User Interfaces (UI) and your User Experiences (UX) with the appropriate age groups in mind and how you tackle certain hurdles that tend to pop up from time to time.
Designing for the elderly and children may be different than designing your everyday site. Older users enjoy a less cluttered and simple-to-use design. You have to remember that most previous generations did not grow up with computers, like most of us have, or are just starting to use one. My father still asks me how to forward his emails, and just now realized that you can listen to music on the computer. However, with networks like Facebook, more of his generation are using the internet and learning how to explore or even create their own sites. It’s often mentioned of me by my parents, relatives, and friends, ‘ask Josh, he’ll know the answer’, but how do I exactly know? By a process of trial and error and how my own mind has been trained to process information that is given to me. And if I don’t know the answer? Information is only a search engine away.
Older users want to be shown step-by-step how to use something, keeping in mind here that repetition is key to success. No one really ever gets something on their first try, so make any process or special feature plain and simple to understand. If your are providing a service, then think about providing tutorials, either written detailed instructions or video. You can never go wrong with an instructional video. It’s sort of like show and tell 2.0. This would also be a great time to suggest tips and tricks or maybe more offers that branch out from the original one. Always include a link back to the tutorial or help, but don’t make this process mandatory.
You often hear people complaining about not being able to talk to an actual person. While, for most of my generation, the ease and use of email suits us fine, other users may need or want that person to person support over the phone. Don’t over complicate it by adding chat support, most of the time your user will just wind up confused, but do make yourself available in both an online form and phone format to bridge that gap.
A picture is worth a thousand words and, in this case maybe a thousand future headaches. Using pictures along with you details or instructions can help save both you and your user countless hours of frustration. Usually, when setting something up, we look for the fastest route there is to accomplishing our goal. Your use of color also goes a long way, and I cannot stress that fact enough. When my father sits down at his computer, he always turns the background to a soft blue color. For him, having all of his icons on his desktop over top of an image is too confusing and he has a hard time deciphering the icons. Simplicity will carry your design a long way. Include ‘alt’ tags to your links, most of your users will not click something at random unless they know what it is or what it is going to do first.
When your target audience tends to be younger, like children, as I said previously, your use of color is critical. Soft and bright, but not overpowering colors, create a fun, enjoyable experience. Most of the children’s site are made with the interactivity in mind first. It’s a primal urge to touch and interact with items and this is especially strong in children. For instance, you may include a small game with a rewards system in place; this gives the user a sense of accomplishment and encourages them to explore more of the site at the same time.
How are you planning on designing with your target audience in mind?
This post was written by Joshua Rapp of Rappsody Studios – designing with beauty and function. Want to write a guest post for BaseKit? Get in touch!
Photo from Flickr user Spigoo used under CC Attribution License
