most inspired - blog

Bird-Malaysia.com

A great combo of strong typography and photography. The page banner images do a nice job of extending the subject matter beyond the boundaries of the box, to bring the birds to the foreground of the page design.

GreatUrbanPetEscapes.ca

Bread and Butter!

Looking for a design on a certain subject matter (pets), and certain recent submissions to the CSS galleries stand out. This recent entrée at CSSMania caught my eye. Man’s best friend looks particularly apropos on the homepage if not downright anthropomorphic, thanks to Cash Cab for improving my vocabulary on that last wordy-word.

Nkmip.com

Nk’Mip Resort, Osoyoos - British Columbia Canada

9web.co.uk

Exceptional grid layout at work in this clean and straightforeward design approach, with some script.aculo.us bits thrown in for good measure.

AdLitteram.be

Flash concept intros on many of the pages highlight this evocative red palette site.

BradFrostWeb.com/blog

A novel page concept, the content of the blog, scrolls inside the mouth, that resizes to fit the window.

MarchandDeTrucs.com

I don’t speak french, but I had a feeling before translating it that this site was a magic/novelty shop. I just love the sound of the bell going off as though people are going in and out of the shop. The illustration is quite magical… good stuff. Link for French to English translation site, hope this works.

Stampede-Design.com

A web services outfit in SouthEast Asia, Malaysia to be exact. The design is somewhat exotic in it’s dark floral grunginess.

studio7designs.com

With a 2-tier dropline menu, this site is packed full of design and graphic goodness.

IdioticAdventures.com

Enough of the serious design concepts and cultivating new ideas by exploring the latest technical genre, let’s get to some serious and much needed slacking off via animation video shorts of the headless kind (left-brain vs right-brain vs no-brain)!

Other Noteable and Fun Sites this Week:

http://ui.jquery.com

The jQuery User-Interface widgets, components and interaction scripts, just got a new site, and an updated script library v.1.5b4, as well as many new demos! The new site is hot off-the-wire, I can’t wait to check out the new demos…

http://faub.org

This ranks about a zero on the SEO and accessibility scale, but it’s a fun site concept nonetheless… with some interesting usage of drag n’ drop, transparency and a combo box navigation. Some image replacement techniques could have provided at least a minutia of content that the search engines could have indexed. As an experimental novelty site with a visual navigation, it’s really very clever.

It turns out the DOM Drag & Drop script is available from Dynamic Drive, check it out here. Please use sparingly.

The Weekly Top Standards question of the week…
How Bloggy is your Blog?

Acronym of the week:
FOSS - Free and open source software

If you’re not interested in your website’s visitors, here are 7 things you can do to make this clear to them.

1. Provide Them with No Way to Contact You

Some of your visitors may want to contact you to ask a question, make a suggestion, or just to send a comment your way. If your site offers no way for them to contact you, you’re telling them that their feedback isn’t significant. Most websites will provide a simple contact for or an email address to allow visitors to write to them, and most businesses will provide a phone number on their website. Giving your contact information will help visitors to feel that you are trustworthy and legitimate.

2. Give a Poor Description of Your Products and Services

Your website is your opportunity to provide visitors with the features and benefits of your products and services, and to let them know why they should choose you. If visitors have to search around the site to try to find complete information, or if the description of your products and services is inadequate, your website will not be effective.

3. Don’t Follow Up on Their Comments and Inquiries

When visitors leave comments on your website/blog or when they email you, a response is needed in most cases. If hey are expecting or hoping for follow up, they will feel that you don’t value their feedback if you do not respond in some way.

4. Use Pop Ups and/or Pop Unders

Pop ups and pop unders are two of the most annoying things on the internet. Fortunately, many browsers now offer options for blocking them, however, they can still be annoying to visitors. Yes, pop ups and pop unders can be effective for some people in the right circumstances, but today most internet users are going to ignore them and they will do more harm than good. If you are considering using them, be sure that you are weighing the pros and cons and be aware of the message that they can send to visitors.

5. Use Contextual Ads

Contextual ads (linked within the text of a page) are generally considered to be annoying by most visitors, including me. They typically will convert pretty poorly, which means you won’t make much money with them, and they will turn off a lot of visitors.

6. Display Excessive of Flashy Advertisements

Many websites and blogs earn money through advertisements, and it has become generally accepted by most internet users. However, if the advertisements are excessive they will change from being accepted to being annoying. By plastering ads in every conceivable location you will be sending a message to your visitors that you place more importance if making a little bit more money than you do in satisfying your visitors. If you want visitors to feel that they are your number one priority, keep ads to a reasonable limit.

In addition to the amount of advertisements that you use, the type of ads you use is also important. Many banner ads can be distracting to your visitors. Ideally, banner ads should be still, or at least involve only minimal movement. Flashy banners that quickly change colors or show a lot of moving text or objects can be extremely distracting, and visitors will wind up leaving.

7. Don’t Provide Them with an Accessible Website

Nothing shows visitors that you don’t care about them like not even allowing them to use your site. Have you ever visited a site that told you to upgrade or install something in order to be able to use the site? I think we all have. These websites present a serious negative message to visitors that don’t fit into a specific box.

What’s Your Opinion?

What would you add to this list? As a designer, what do you try to prevent sending the wrong message to visitors? As a visitor, what shows you that a website owner doesn’t value you?

Cheb.com.au

Cheb 2.0.1 was redesigned April 13th, a web design geek blog. Cheb Dagher is the blogs owner, in Sydney, Australia. The site is built using WordPress.

AuthenticStyle.co.uk

A sliding scroll page type of navigation, works pretty well, when the page slides to it’s new position, another identical menu appears in the same position as before to make it easy to use.

Fantesca.com

Fantesca: Winery and Estate, Napa Valley - St. Helena, CA, an exquisite site.

MoxieGlobal.com.au

EarlyInterventionSupport.com

A new twist on some standard design concepts, done with some freeform illustration and mixed-media visual styling.

TheNorik.com

I’m usually not a big fan of portfolio sites who place long lists of their work directly on the homepage, such that it requires huge amounts of scrolling, but this two-page site makes it work. There is a certain elegance in the simplicity. Twelve portfolio pieces are shown at TheNorik, and those pop open in a light box setup. The lightbox setup uses a certain amount of style, and not the default chrome navigation elements, so that it is completely fitting in the design. The portfolio pieces themselves are not lacking in any skills either, showing some refined talent and inspiration. Overall, everything is very tastefully done…

DesignIntellection.com

Finally, a more or less plain vanilla web standards site in the minimalist vein that strikes my fancy.

DennaJones.com

This site has a treasure trove of API usage documented here by the happy merchants. Awesome stuff gang, the phrase “happy merchant” reminds me of Leslie Camacho’s EE forum’s signature quote, more aptly an African proverb: “I hear, I forget. I see, I remember. I do, I understand… “. Although actually I could of swore the forum signature was, “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” Anyways… back to some more websites!

LarvaLabs.com

A New York based software company focused on mobile entertainment application goodies for the T-Mobile Sidekick platform.

DevKick.com

A web dev designer community site made by notable designer/developer Monc’s David Hellsing, who has been a particular friend of the open source community, developing Stylegala originally, the Tripoli CSS framework, and more goodies. DevKick is still a work in progress, but it’s really starting to shape up into a powerhouse resource for web designers.

Other notable resources and fun sites this week:

NetTuts.com

Brought to you by the same people who run PSDtuts. Here’s a link to the Launch Announcement at NetTuts.com.

There is getting to be some great tutorial sites out there for web-dev’ers, with so much out there to learn in this changing field, these make a great addition to your RSS daily feed reads.

ErguvanPlatin.com

An all flash realty development website, with a fabulous splash of colors just to brighten your day, and inspire you to create something colorful!

BestWebGallery.com

If you enjoy viewing a flash site now and then keep an eye on Best Web Gallery, they make some great gallery picks, also some CSS/Web Standards sites. This site created by Nick La of WebDesignerWall.com, another don’t miss site in itself. I’ve got a feeling most of you will be no strangers to Nick’s work.

• Way out in left field check out the Chinese Proverbs vs. the African Proverbs wiki pages for some philosophic thoughts, more great quotes, and in-depth inspiration.

• Until next time, don’t forget to kick up your boots, or would that be ReBoots?
– Don’t miss the next web standards reboot this May 1st ‘08, and be kind to your fellow designers.

As May 1st approaches I wanted to give everyone a reminder to get their sites redesigned and give them a Standards Reboot.

You don’t have to wait until May 1st to get your site rebooted, but be sure to add your pre and post thumbnails as soon as your done, so your site appears in the reboot gallery.

IntuitiveDesigns.net

From the typography choices to the fabulous illustration work, this is one classy site! A husband and wife team, namely Koldo Barroso (graphic designer) and Naomi Niles (coder), are producing some fine works from their home base of Madrid, Spain.

freshAIRapps.com

Showcase, tutorials and resources for Adobe AIR. A bit of progressive enhancement ruffles the feathers of some, if you load the design in IE6 you may see a box around the logo, and no clouds in the background. IE6 users would be better off keeping their feet firmly planted on the ground anyways. This brings up a subject for another post… did everyone see Smashing Magazine’s ”Getting Creative w/ Transparency”, post this past week? Great stuff!!

RyJennings.com

An interesting 1-page portfolio concept, with some unusual navigation choices, utilizing the Script.aculo.us js library and a lightbox scheme. Clicking the small text link, “View all Screens” (upper right) loads two panels that have links to more portfolio screenshots, and turns off the panels fading slideshow. A problem with many such slideshow elements is the height must be defined, which does not allow for resizing the text. The famous “Panic Coda - Slider Nav” seems to have found a work around for this flaw.

10voltMedia.com

The vector illustrated Cityscape on the homepage, evidently represents the Chicago skyline. A fair amount of javascript handywork, and the clean color palette make this site a fresh pick! For more real-life skylines, check Mubs’ recent MI blog post, Inspiring Cityscapes for some breath-taking photo renderings.

ChemistryRecruitment.com

A clever mix of html, flash and javascript goodness. There is more functionality here than meets the eye, the site was featured on Smashing Mag’s “Web Form Design: Modern Solutions and Creative Ideas“.

RedBlu.com

Can we as web standards professionals appreciate an all flash site? I don’t have a problem showing this site some love. It’s really a wonderful navigation within. There are times I think, when we might all like to do some flash design. The typography is also quite nice, with the fat slab serif font somewhat resembling Big Mummy by Manfred Klein.

SprintBio.com

Green earth themes are easy to like, when they are not trying to scare you into submission of changing your carbon generating ways by showing the global warming color scheme. The green earth scheme is much more pleasant, blues and greens and peaceful springtime, ahhh bliss. It’s hard to do a theme design like this and not have it look like it was inspired by another site. Take the Viget/Extend web dev blog, it looks a little reminiscent of Taproot Creative if only because the concept is very similar.

HomeDesignFind.com

Home Design Find (HDF) is a web magazine/blog for home design products and ideas.

A nice blog of modern architectural subjects and interior design products, built on WordPress with a blue theme, crinkled paper and transparent tape elements. Many of the Most Gallery sites are predominantly blue palettes this week, just luck of the draw this time around.

Grooveshark.com

A new to me music community, with a clean layout and unique set of features, that looks well worth checking out. For any entrepreneurs in the crowd this enterprise looks like a good study, as it’s a strange mix or “feeding frenzy” as it’s known at Grooveshark, of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing and revenue models, where artists do get paid. My current favorite streaming music website is Slacker, where it is very easy to build your own free personal station(s) from a mix of artists and exploring related artists.

HenryHoffman.com

Succumbing to the “Purple People Eater” this week, this overpowering light-on-dark purple design is simply too powerful to ignore any longer. Looks like a great web design blog too, nice job Henry. Mr. HH can be found kicking it over at the MODx forums.

Following on from our previous post of Inspiring CMS Showoffs I thought I’d compile a list of Web Development Framework showcases.

There are a lot of web development frameworks, but the most established ones you can count on the fingers of one hand, maybe two.

Ruby On Rails

www.rubyonrails.org
Language: Ruby

Ruby on Rails is the hugely popular framework from 37signals, that powers there many web applications, and made open source.

Also: http://www.rubyonrails.org/applications

CakePHP

www.cakephp.org
Language: PHP

CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications.

Camping

http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/camping/
Language: Ruby

Camping is a microframework for web development, by whytheluckystuff, is insanely small and incredibly powerful.

Symphony

www.symfony-project.org
Language: PHP

Symfony is a full-stack framework, a library of cohesive classes written in PHP5. It provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster.

Although I couldn’t find a dedicated showcase, the weekly blog update usually contains a few newly launched Symphony powered sites.

CodeIgniter

codeigniter.com
Language: PHP

CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications.

Prado

www.pradosoft.com
Language: PHP

PRADO is a component-based and event-driven programming framework for developing Web applications in PHP 5.

Django

www.djangoproject.com
Language: Python

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

There are a number of other frameworks (Fusebox, Spring, Turbo Gears to name a few) that I would have liked to include in the list but I was unable to find showcases for them. If you know of some, please let me know and I’ll update the list.

Pricing is a dilemma that faces all web designers (and other service professionals) at one time or another. There are a number of decisions that need to be made regarding pricing, and one of the most common involves offering fixed prices for different types of projects or providing quotes for each individual project. If you look around at various web designers you’ll see a bit of both, although you will probably see more that do quotes. In this article I would like to take a look at some of the benefits to each pricing strategy. There is no right or wrong method, but you should consider these factors before deciding on your strategy.

The Pros of Offering Set Prices

1. Less time is spent with potential customers that don’t result in any business. Quotes can take a good bit of time and if a high percentage of your quotes are not generating work, you could be wasting valuable time. It should also be said that any designer offering set prices should allow themselves the flexibility to up the price if it doesn’t fit into a specific box.

2. Potential customers like to see prices. Seeing prices can put customers at ease as they will have a much better idea what a design from you will cost. They may be hesitant to contact a bunch of potential designers for quotes, and finding a designer with set prices that they consider reasonable may encourage them to not even seek quotes from others.

Comparing the price of one designer to another is more feasible with set pricing (although a negative is that some customers tend to decide based on the lowest price rather than factoring quality into the decision). In general, I think most potential customers prefer to see set prices.

3. You may get more interest with set prices. Most people would rather contact a designer knowing at least the range of the price, as opposed to contacting a designer for a quote not having an idea what the price will be. This will not always be the case, but from my experience set prices will often generate more interest. On the down side, designers that offer low set prices will get inquiries from a lot of tire kickers that never wind up taking any action.

4. More consistency in prices. Providing a quote for each individual project can sometimes lead to a great deal of variation in prices. This can be a good thing for designers when they are able to make more money, but generally consistency and stability is more desirable. With set prices you will avoid quoting too low out of fear that the customer will go somewhere else. As a result, you won’t wind up doing work for less than you should.

The Pros of Using Price Quotes

1. More flexibility. Each project is unique and set prices really don’t account for this. Providing price quotes will help you to price jobs according to their individual requirements and demands. It should be noted that even with a strategy of offering quotes you will still find yourself dealing with surprises and you’ll still have the possibility of being in a bad situation price wise.

2. Increasing your prices is not so noticeable. Over time as you gain experience and become a better designer you will most likely want to raise your prices. With a set pricing plan these increase can be pretty obvious to customers and potential customers, but with price quotes it is not nearly so noticeable.

3. Allows you to overprice jobs that are not a good fit. From time-to-time you’ll get some potential projects that really aren’t the best fit for you. With price quotes you can simply quote a job higher than you normally would. In most cases, the customer will wind up going with another designer, but if they do choose you, at least you’ll make more off of the job than you would have otherwise.

4. You can get a foot in the door with a potential customer. When providing price quotes there is a bit more selling involved. If you website displays set prices, either a customer wants that price or they don’t. With price quotes you may get a better chance to talk to potential customers and sell them on your service.

Conclusion

Most designers prefer using price quotes rather than set prices because it allows them to treat each job individually, and since no two jobs are the same, this is important to a lot of designers. Of those who offer set pricing packages, most are lower-priced designers that tend to work on less complicated projects. As you move into bigger and more complex projects, set prices become less feasible.

What are your thoughts on pricing? Which strategy do you use, and why?

Interiors.davroc.co.uk

A luxurious and elegant site design, with lucious black-and-white fade-to-color hover treatment done in jQuery. The product photography is exquisite too - yum!

BlueFlavor.com

This redesign is a no-brainer, and will no doubt show up across all the gallery boards. If it was already Blue Flavor, maybe they should of went with Red Flavor, oh well… I don’t know much about branding. A random project loads on the homepage as a dynamic feature.

FlingMedia.com

The new startup studio of Brian Fling (previously with Seattle-based Blue Flavor), showcasing a strong background and focus on mobile design and application. With a carousel nav on the bottoms of some pages, Brian has tossed in a slew of javascript enhancements and some clever illustration work. The site also utilizes a fixed header and sticky footer, reminiscent of a frames layout with overflow scrolling for the main content div. The gridwork includes the Blueprint CSS framework and a variety of split column span layouts throughout the site.

TorontoAfterDark.com

I just love a great event website, this site just went live last week to promote the Toronto Film Festival held Oct.17-24, 2008 just before Halloween. Awesome illustration and visuals throughout this community site. The video clips are already rolling in. The festival features new horror, sci-fi, fantasy, action, animated and cult films from around the world.

WiredGamesCafe.co.uk

A community site for gamers, some great vector illustration and interesting use of background images.

SunRealtyobx.com

A sunny realty portal in vivid colors for the touristy Outer Banks region, some in-depth programming features. Vacation rental listings too, those might be affordable on a web designer income.

Medianomaly.com

This site was worth a second look for me, my initial distraction with it was it should be called “Medianonymous”, the designer’s name (Brian James Ledebur) just above the contact form isn’t easy to find. Referring to yourself in first person across the site just seems like bad practice for a portfolio site. The My Process section outline, 3D logo and overall layout and colors are the highlights.

GorillaCoffee.com

A sharp flash-based website, with most of the usability problems an all-flash site will have. Namely it can’t be indexed by the search engines, individual pages can not be bookmarked, or clicking the browsers back button will dump the whole site. This one has some nice typography, and is simple enough to navigate, they didn’t do too badly. The “Gorilla” marketing techniques of a web standards html version site, would really enhance the flash version.

MaxShaman.com

If you don’t like any of my picks this week, you are welcome to take out your frustration(s) on the voodoo doll, in this flash site, with some accessibility features. I think Max is having a little fun, the word shaman means, a priest who uses magical powers.

eddidit.com

Last but not least this week, my friend and fellow “Black Swamper” Ed Hall seems to have done a bit of a refresh on his portfolio site. Ed’s skills in the illustration dept. are just dazzling.

That’s it for this week.
Peace… Out!

Content Management Systems have become common place for website development, custom development saved for the largest and most unique websites.

Before deciding which CMS is best for your next project it is a good idea to see how others have customized the offering to their needs, as a way to evaluate how flexible the software is. Will it stifle your creativity or will it allow you to incorporate your best design and be able to provide a host of other features that would not be possible otherwise.

The popular CMSs all have strong community offerings including forums where you are encouraged to show off your latest creations, a great place to start when evaluating the software. Browse the list below to find some inspiration, some of them have RSS feeds that you can subscribe to, to stay inspired.

• ExpressionEngine

  

  Site Introductions

  RSS feed

• WordPress

  

  Your WordPress

  rss feed link

• Textpattern

  

  Let’s See Yours, Then

  rss feed link

• MODx

  

  You and Your Sites

  rss feed link

• Joomla

  

  Site Showcase

• Drupal

  

  Drupal showcase

  rss feed link

• CMS Made Simple

  

  CMS Show Off

  rss feed link

• TYPOlight webCMS

  

  Showroom

• e107 CMS

  

  Theme Announcement and Releases

• Pligg

  

  My Pligg Site

• Mambo

  

  Show off your Mambo

• Xoops

  

  Website reviews of Xoops Sites

• sNews

  

  Site Showcase

• SilverStripe

  

  Showcase

Which is your favorite CMS? Is it the one that gets out of your way and lets you design the website you want, or are certain functionalities more important? In the best of both worlds, you design your layout as you normally would, and then serve it up with all the added extra goodies a CMS can offer.

My favorite to date is ExpressionEngine purely on the enthusiasm and etiquette of the community there. I am just adding some of these others to my bloglines feeds, for future reference and design inspiration. There are some amazing sites going unnoticed, I’m sure of it.

Good luck to you in your inspiration hunting and learning/doing with your CMS of choice.

Building an effective website that accomplishes your goals involves more than simply creating an attractive design. Here are 5 things that any website owner can do to improve the effectiveness of the website.

1. Re-Evaluate Your Goals

Hopefully you have some established goals that you are aiming to accomplish with your website. However, it is natural for your goals to change from time-to-time as your site evolves and you continue to learn and develop new ideas. It’s important to be sure that you have clearly established goals and that your work still has you on track to achieve those goals. If your goals have changed you may need to develop a new strategy for getting to where you want to be.

Every website needs a specific purpose. By staying focused on what you are attempting to achieve, you can see to it that your site is more effective at what it is supposed to accomplish. A website that is focused will be a better resource for visitors and as a result it will be more successful.

When was the last time you re-evaluated your goals? If it has been a while, take some time to think through what you really want to accomplish and decide what you need to do in order to successfully achieve your goals.

2 - Re-Evaluate Your Target Audience

At the time when you started your website you probably created the site to target a specific audience. Sometimes as websites grow the audience starts to shift a little bit, and you may not really be serving the same people that you once had intended.

This can especially be the case for blogs, and I know I have experienced this in recent months on my own blog. Have you noticed that the response you are getting is not from the same types of users that you had expected? It’s a good idea to periodically evaluate who is visiting your website and how you can better meet their needs.

The success of any website hinges on the ability to appeal to its target audience, so it is crucial to properly analyze your target audience and determine how you can improve to enhance their experience on your site.

3 - Learn More About Your Audience

Not only is it important to know who your audience is, but it is also helpful to know as much about them as possible. A free tool like Google Analytics can provide with data about you visitors’ connection speeds, screen resolutions, and geographic locations. Of course you can also see how they are finding your site, how many pages they are viewing, how long they are staying on the site, etc.

This is all valuable information. Most of us check the stats on a regular basis, but many website owners don’t take the time to see what internet connections and screen resolutions visitors are using. These two factors can have a considerable impact on how you design your site, and the data that you find may change over time. More internet users now have access to high speed connections and large monitors. When was the last time you checked this information?

4 - Clean Out What Is Not Needed

Over time many websites become cluttered as more and more elements and pages are added. If your site has accumulated some things that are not helping you to improve the site for visitors, consider getting rid of them. De-cluttering your website can help to more effectively emphasize the parts of the design and content that are most important.

Blogs are notorious for becoming cluttered. Have you added a new widget to your sidebar each month? If so, have you removed the old ones that aren’t doing anything for you or your visitors?

5 - Add A Blog

If your website doesn’t already have a blog, take the necessary steps to add one. A blog will help you to drastically improve the communication with your visitors and customers. Whether you are a small, one-person operation or a large corporation, others in your position are currently using a blog to improve their visibility online.

Not only is a blog a great way to communicate and interact with visitors, but it can be one of the best methods for increasing traffic. As you continue to publish new posts your website will become home to more valuable content that will draw visitors, links, subscribers, and repeat traffic.

A blog gives you the opportunity to continually improve the effectiveness of the website as you consistently provide value to readers.