E-commerce is a tough endeavor for web designers working for online businesses. There’s a lot to consider when you develop an online store. Firstly, everything must be easy to use and the process of getting products into your shopping cart and then checking out must be quick and painless. A lot of hand-holding needs to occur during this process. Great web design goes a long way to ensuring customers don’t encounter any issues getting their items.
Western Digital, the makers of some of the best PC/Mac accessories like the My Book external hard drive, have crafted an online store that is of the highest caliber. The CSS hover and drop down navigation is smooth and easy to use to pick your category. Photos and truncated details are shown for every product without having to go into the product detail page, making it easy to pick which one you’re looking for. Then there’s the exorbitant amount of details put into the shopping cart section that allows you to fully customize the orders with ease. It’s a very well thought out website that gets the job done. It sets a pretty high standard for e-commerce too.
Posted on April 16th, 2009 by Jordan Blanco
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Personal portfolios are a great source of inspiration, particularly graphic designers. If you haven’t already checked mine out, head over to Xploited Media. Now that you’ve looked at mine or ignored my random plugging, check out DesignForFun.com, the portfolio for Ben Barry. Ben is a graduate from the University of North Texas and is currently one of the designers for social networking website, Facebook.
Ben has a very clean looking portfolio, as you would expect from one of the guys running the very polished Facebook website. It’s accented by colorful icons and sharp contrasting pages. He’s got his portfolio organized by year and using the icons above the table you can sort based on type and other features. Each page has a detailed analysis of Ben’s role with the client’s project and several screenshots/photos. It’s all well handled with a straight forward navigation of previous and next buttons on the top right. Ben’s portfolio is very solid and a great recommendation for beginner graphic designers seeking help in creating their own.
Posted on April 9th, 2009 by Jordan Blanco
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Popular websites become popular not because of flashy designs or animated characters, but because they can get you to want to come back for more. They generally contain content that is always changing and many of the better ones contain social networking features these days. One of the strongest ones in my opinion is Threadless.com. Threadless is an online t-shirt company that uses design submissions for their clothing line. Designers and the rest of the community decide which shirts stay in print.
This social networking clothing website is a sort of avenue for designers looking to make some extra income and a great place for customers to shop for awesome tees. It’s got a wealth of skilled community members that submit their designs, no two shirts look the same. It makes for a great place to hone one’s craft. Not to mention, it’s also one of the best designed e-commerce ventures on the net. Check it out if you haven’t already.
Posted on April 2nd, 2009 by Jordan Blanco
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Interactive websites are difficult to make, many of them rely on Adobe Flash to get creative. One such web design firm that goes to great lengths to engage its visitors is the Red Interactive Agency. Amusingly, their website url is ff0000.com, which is the color code for red on the web.
Once you enter their website, you are greeted with a character on the bottom of the website trying to introduce you to their “red universe”. Visitors can choose from 10 different personalities and customize them with their name before venturing around the website’s interactive environment. You have the ability to chat with other visitors through this method and even use the characters to do gestures and fly around the background. It’s an interesting way to engage potential customers and definitely shows Red Interactive Agency’s prowess over content like this.
Posted on March 26th, 2009 by Jordan Blanco
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Often government websites tend to be convoluted and poorly designed, especially from a user interface perspective. It’s kind of ironic that they need to be equipped to handle even the least computer-friendly folks, yet they’re the most complex websites around. But do they need to be? No. With some extra effort in making their sites user friendly they can ease stress from those going to pay fines, ordering tags and registration, seeking unemployment, and more.
One of the better government websites I’ve found in my research was for the State of Indiana. The first thing you’ll notice upon entering their portal is that the website is very clean and professional. They utilize a great set of colors - white, blue, and gold/yellow. These colors empower the person with a yearning for education, enlightenment, and warmth/comfort. Everything is laid out in easy to read chunks. They have their most viewed area and sections to direct you based on your interests. Other government websites need to take note of how easy this one is to use.
Posted on March 19th, 2009 by Jordan Blanco
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When it comes to selling products online, the design, functionality, and ease of use all come into play as to how well the business does. For, Simplepureclean.com, the website for Simple. Pure. Clean. cleaning supplies, they must not be doing too well in the e-commerce marketplace.
The first observation that can be made is how unorganized the homepage is. Scrolling down you’ll noticed the site is littered with random testimonials and product facts and help. Each bit of content is placed in a different colored box without any attempt to develop a strong color scheme. This occurs on a variety of subpages along with constant font size changes and randomly placed photos. By clicking into the Buy products section, you’re taken to an online store that completely changes the look of the website. A concise color scheme and layout across the homepage and store would help ensure customers think the site was legit and professional.
Perhaps this website was built for Search Engine Optimization? A text heavy website connected to another one is often used to improve rankings in search engines. Even so, Simplepureclean.com is ranked highly on Google and is likely to be the first thing customers see. Time to get serious about that doorway page.
Posted on March 11th, 2009 by Jordan Blanco
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TheMovieBox.net is a movie trailer showcase website. They receive a ton of traffic and downloads, so really whatever I say doesn’t matter, because it works. Despite that, the site could use a little bit of spring cleaning to be a little more presentable to its viewers.
For starters, the site is extremely text heavy. When dealing with movie trailers, viewers want to see flashy things. To film studios, they want customers to find their trailers based off of the images, as the text is not going to sell them on watching the video alone. So it may help to use screenshots or posters from the movies to display them at the top. Additionally, the header is lackluster. The Movie Box does not try to distinguish themselves with any sort of identity. The “logo” is a rather generic font and navigation is just plain text. Spruce these elements up with some art. Changes like these go a long way.
Posted on February 25th, 2009 by Jordan Blanco
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The portfolio of a photographer is generally ripe for designing a beautiful website. They’ve already got a collection of exquisite images to work with. However, not all realize how much a well designed website can do for their business. One photographer that delivers in spades with a strong portfolio website is Phillip Toledano.
Mr. Toledano’s website has a unique charm. It’s simple and yet oddly refreshing. The only colors that appear on there exist within the photographs within the grid. The grid is maintained through the sections of the website. You navigate to the different areas by clicking one of the available images in the grid. Once in a specific section, a visible custom scrollbar is located at the bottom of the content area. In the projects area (his portfolio) this design is elegant and easy to use. The scrolling is smooth and showcases his photography without the need for navigating to new pages or popups.
Photographers need to take note of Mr. Toledano’s website. This is how you do it correctly. There’s no need to develop and design a complex website as a photographer, something simple and elegant works far better.
Posted on February 18th, 2009 by Jordan Blanco
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Sitting in your car on I-95, stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, you must have at one point tuned the radio to Buzz 103.1. Now while they may have a thriving broadcast station in South Florida, one thing they’re missing is a strong complement with a website. In short, their current website, Buzz103.com, is one of the worst broadcast station websites from what I’ve noticed. Point your browser to the site and let’s take a look at why this website is not doing any favors for the radio station.
The header of the Buzz website is an extremely tacky gradient that does not fully connect on major browsers (on various operating systems), Firefox on Mac being a prime example. The navigation, with its distorted font, has a vertical javascript menu that drops down away from the actual buttons in a clumsily made menu. Below the header is a confusing barrage of poorly designed animated images that take you to various websites and sections within the Buzz website. As for the subpages, they’re a collection of random font sizes and odd images. Those are just a few issues, but they’re a strong indicator of a poorly designed website. There’s no quick fix for Buzz’s site, they just need to hire a professional for once.
Posted on February 11th, 2009 by Jordan Blanco
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There are many excellent advertising agency websites around the internet, but there’s one that is absolutely amazing. Leo Burnett Worldwide, Inc. has one of the most interactive websites. The website is built using entirely Adobe Flash. From the homepage you can see all the sections featured by floating text surrounded by apples and a cursive Leo Burnett logo in 3D. Using Flash they were able to allow the mouse to rotate the website in 3D by adjusting the axis. Additionally, it moves a pencil (which is a part of the agency’s marketing tag) that draws all over the canvas. It’s clean, professional, and very creative.
The subpages can be selected by clicking the floating text or using the menu at the bottom of the page. What is interesting is their decision to make all of the subpages unique. The brands page works much like the first page but as if their brands were part of a solar system. The heritage also has a clever use of interactivity, as you can play with the company’s timeline with clients. Websites like these are immediately compelling to people as they can express the company’s vision and purpose. This one in particular shows that Leo Burnett can offer fresh marketing ideas to potential clients. Clearly a success.
Posted on February 5th, 2009 by Jordan Blanco
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