Smack Happy Design

One of my clients recently launched their new web site, Brain Fitness Australia. They needed a site that allowed them to edit content, so we built it using WordPress. They won’t be using it as a blog per say, but they can in the future if need be. As a content management system (CMS), WordPress can be an elegant, simple and easy to use option. With all the plugins there aren’t a whole lot of things you CAN’T do.

As for Brain Fitness Austalia, we wish you the best in your endeavors!

Visit the site: brainfitnessaustralia.org.au
Take a look in our portfolio.

I recently completed a few projects and added the artwork to my portfolio in the areas of graphic design (ads and a splash screen), flash animation (an intro) and illustration (some icons). Here’s the run down:

• Alexa Ads – Designed several ads to promote downloading the Alexa Toolbar.
• Layaco Intro – Created a simple and elegant intro for Layaco Promotional Media. Also helped clean up the site a little, you can check it out here.
• Splash Screen – Made a splash screen for Composite Software’s product suite.
• Sfbaytunes Icons – Illustrated several icons for a web site about promoting media in an online gallery setting.

Should your web site design have a fixed width or should it be liquid and expand across the entire browser? I know this question has been asked and answered many times on the web, but I need to throw in my own two cents.

There are certain cases where a liquid layout may be appropriate. One example would be Google Analytics with their large, scalable graphs. When you have something that scales that well and can take up the whole page, you may as well do it.

However, most sites do not need all that space. Here are a few arguments against the liquid layout.

• Readability Its difficult to read text any wider than 40-60 characters. It becomes very hard to follow the lines and wrap around to continue reading.
• Awkwardness Another negative effect of the liquid layout is the unnecessary sparseness it creates. On very large screens the page elements end up miles apart. As a designer, I don’t think that looks very pretty and it can feel very awkward.
• Creativity A fixed width allows designers more freedom to get creative without worrying about stretching their design. This can sometimes result in less coding and more interesting layouts.

The only argument I can come up with for a liquid design is that it fills the whole screen. But like I mentioned above, if you don’t have enough content filling the space, that might not look so great.

There are cases where a liquid layout is appropriate, but in general I vote for a fixed width.

In the design business the occasion often arises where you have to send a very large file. I consider anything over 14MB or so to be a large file. When I need to send a file of this size I look to DropSend. Its extremely easy to use and the free account offers pretty decent options. They also allow you to store your files.

There are a few other sites for sending large files as well. Some of them are YouSendIt, SendThisFile, and Megaupload. But I’ve found that DropSend has the best to offer.

Smashing Magazine offers desktop wallpapers every month and for March, you will find one that I made! Its called Computer Head. Click here for March desktops.

If you’re offering a service online there is a particular formula most sites use these days. The top half of the page (above the fold) has a colored rectangle area, often with rounded corners. One half of this rectangle spouts the companies tagline followed by a bullet list of features and/or benefits. Below this list is a big shiny button enticing you to click and sign up – an important call-to-action. On the other half you’ll find an image, or more often a screen shot of the product.

Below the colored rectangle is usually a three-column area. In each column you’ll find more information about the product; product highlights, how it works, testimonials, or something of the like explaining the product even more.

One example of a site that uses this formula is Credit Karma. They do a great job of explaining exactly what they do in the 2-3 seconds they have when a user visits their home page. The shiny yellow button is large with a very clear call-to-action, giving the user focus and direction. They also do a great job in the three columns telling the user how their product will be helpful.

Credit Karma has a great home page for an online service that I would gladly use as inspiration. It has several of the important components that Jakob Nielsen claims a great home page needs:

• Logo
• Navigation
• Tagline
• Short paragraph stating what you do (the bullets in this case)
• Focus and direction (the sign up button)

Yesterday Birthday Alarm made our first ecard live on their site. Its an anniversary greeting card for a couple. They begin their day by a lake, then have a romantic dinner followed by dancing. If you use Birthday Alarm, send our card, or at least check it out.

In just a few days it will be Valentine’s Day. To celebrate I made a nice e-card and sent it to my clients, family and friends. Sending out a custom card on the “off” holidays is a great way to get attention, remind your clients that you’re thinking of them and hopefully spread the word about your services. Sometimes it can even generate some new business.

View the animated card

When I begin a project for a client I like to build up a lot of imagery that relates to the task at hand. One great resource for gathering images is iStockphoto.com. I browse through the photos using keywords and save them to a lightbox specifically for the project. The best feature of lightboxes is that I can then share them with the client, and they can let me know which images they want me to use. Here’s an example of my “monkey book” lightbox.

A friend recently asked me to take a look at his site and give him some suggestions on how to improve his searchability or search engine exposure. Here are a few of things I recommended:

• Search engines don’t like meta tag redirects. If you set up a page to attract search engines and it redirects to some other page 4 seconds later, the search engine will not be fooled. It will disregard the original page.
• Listing all of your keywords at the bottom of the page is a big no-no. You need to write a few paragraphs of text and mix your keywords in. The people who make search engines know about those word blobs and so they make the engines avoid pages that have them.
• A blog is good if you can fill one up. Blogs give you a reason to update your site, and the fresher the content the more often a search engine will crawl your site.

These little things aren’t much, but they will definitely make an improvement.