The most recent facelift has taken place on Gmail and other sign in pages of Google products.

If you don’t remember, this is how Gmail looked earlier.

The trend today for web layouts is clean and uncluttered. It makes a lot of sense when you consider the information overflow that we are seeing today across many platforms and media.

Research shows that most people scan web pages before settling on an element for further exploration. Therefore, a lot of emphasis is put on optimizing important web elements that a webmaster wants to promote. However, this is a hit or miss thing. Your audiences may like or hate your user interface (UI) elements depending on their preferences, gender, etc. This is not an easy thing to overcome and on top of that, getting UI elements right is a huge affair. Have you ever heard of the $300 million button? If not, that article should be the first thing for you to read after reading this.

One of the biggest challenges in web usability is keeping people on a web page. The balance has to be perfect on content, usability and interactive elements. At the best of times, this is a tough task. Since it is very challenging to strike a good balance, what most designers tend to do is crowd too many elements on a web page. This leads to a web page that looks very busy. A busy web page is not one of the best places for conversions.

The new way of design thinking is driven by wanting to make a website look simple. This involves a lot of things. For example, some web pages have multiple objectives to achieve. In such instances, ‘simple web process’ calls for re-evaluating and prioritizing these objectives. The design process is driven by these re-evaluated objectives.

The Gmail sign in page is a perfect example for the ‘simple web process’. When you compare the two layouts it’s perfectly clear that Google evaluated what’s important for their audiences. In fact, the number of elements on the page has increased; yet it’s hardly noticeable. A good design should be like that. People have to see it only when they want to see it. This design philosophy is something that’s going to drive our web design work in the future.

If there are any websites that you like, share those on the comments section. We’d love to see those websites you like and get your feedback.

SEO for businesses today must consist of much more than using the latest design trends. Designers should also be designing sites that take the full range of people viewing the site into consideration. The largest and most successful companies know that they have to offer different versions of their web content so as to appeal to everyone who accesses their websites.

If a company fails to present its online information in ways that are suitable for all types of cultural audiences, it is sure to miss out on potential customers who cannot relate to how the information is being presented. Take a quick look at the McDonald’s U.S. website and then at the site for Indian customers and you will notice very stark differences in how the information is presented. The Indian site is heavy on color and is much more interactive. The U.S. site on the other hand is more minimalistic and straightforward in nature. This illustrates how web design for businesses should be approached – by understanding how people from different cultures prefer to have their information presented.

It is absolutely essential to the success of your business that you focus on the website user experience for so that your visitors, no matter where they are located, have a successful visit. Studies have shown us that if a visitor to your site has a successful visit, he/she is three times more likely to recommend your site than if they find the visit unpleasant. Successful websites are often customized or localized for foreign markets, taking the local language into account, social standards and aesthetic preferences. Localizing a website is a rather complicated chore but it is necessary. Making versions of a site for different cultures shows consumers that your organization is willing to accommodate their needs. When a user sees a version of a website in his or her language, even if they are proficient in English, results in that user having a very favorable experience.

Users from around the world have special needs related to entry fields on websites for names and addresses, dates and measurements and information about regional product standards. Considering all of the issues related to international usability, it is recommended that international usability testing with users is done. This testing can be done from wherever you are located as you could make telephone calls to users to ask them to think aloud as they navigate the site, assuming of course that you can locate these foreign users who speak your language well enough to complete a telephone interview.

The internet is called the world wide web for a reason and more and more web design professionals are realizing that the emphasis today must be placed on the first two words: World Wide. If you want to truly go global and succeed with your website, resist going with those web designers that offer those too-good-to-be-true web design deals and instead work with a team of experts who understand the importance of website globalization optimization and how to implement it.

WordPress and Plugins

Of course, you will have to know how to tell when something has gone wrong so that you can then get on with fixing the situation. Perhaps you, like many beginners are using WordPress since it’s very versatile and user-friendly. Most of the technical problems that arise with WordPress are due to plugin installation issues. For example, if your theme is not working as you wish, a recently installed plugin may be to blame. Check the status of all of your installed plugins and be sure to always update to the latest available version of WP. WordPress has a good troubleshooting system in place that walks you through most problems as well as having a forum available you can access to get help from experienced users. If your data is corrupted beyond repair, the only solution is to reload your data from your backup source. For this reason you should be sure to backup your database on a regular basis to avoid losing everything.

Web Hosting

If you find that your site is unavailable for extended periods of time, get a hold of your hosting provider to see if they are having issues. If it is experiencing hardware failure for example and is having problems with just one component of the server, the entire server can be unavailable. All you can do in this case is wait for the hosting provider to fix the problem. Your site may be unavailable during peak internet usage hours or parts of the internet may simply be slow. Quite often, by the time you figure out why your site is unavailable, it will have somehow fixed itself.

Coding Issues

If you are seeing a blank space below your footers on some of your pages, the problem most likely is in your code. Some browsers will cause this to happen and may require a background color to be applied to the html. You can troubleshoot this problem by seeking the help of experts in coding forums online.

Housekeeping

You may receive a comment on your site from a visitor telling you that your site is not visible to them because they are using the Google Chrome browser. The reason for this could be that  Chrome detected code on your page that loads content from or redirects to a flagged site. To fix this, you will have to remove all links, iframes, etc to any blacklisted sites. You can also try using Google Webmaster Tools to determine whether or not malware is present.

If you are running a business online, you want to be sure that your site is available at all times so that you can always be found by those potential customers out there who are searching for your products and/or services. You can easily locate website security tips for businesses on the internet wherein you will be walked through steps necessary to solve site issues and problems you may be experiencing.

While all of this may seem overwhelming, the fact is that many things can go wrong with your site regardless of how careful and diligent you were when constructing it. A good way to avoid problems with your site is to use a website downtime program such as mon.itors.us. This service instantly reports your site outage and response time. By taking advantage of this free website, server and traffic monitoring service you are assured that your site will maintain a high up-time and optimum level of availability. You can use this service for your e-commerce sites, blogs, forums, company and personal pages.

• Where to obtain small business financing

• What a small business needs to qualify for financing

• How to easily and affordable remain connected with existing customers

• Where to find new customers and how to communicate with them regularly

During this session small businesses will receive live case studies from business owners who obtained financing and are successfully marketing their businesses through multiple-channels including email marketing, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and direct mail.

Speakers include small business marketing expert Lisa Sparks, Director of the SCORE’s South Palm Beach Chapter Hal Finkelstein and Certified Business Analyst Phil Scruton of the SBDC at Palm Beach State College.

When Friday, April 30, 2010, 8:30am – 12pm

Where Boca Raton Marriott
5150 Town Center Circle
Boca Raton, FL 33486

First Damian Montero will present “How to Make Your Website iPad Friendly,” showing how to leverage HTML5 in order to play videos and more on the portable device.

The second presentation is by Luciano Ibias, COO of Zila Networks, the company behind the successful Friends Around Me, who will talk about “iPad App in a Week: How To Port Your App From iPhone To iPad.”

Follow the April speakers on Twitter:
Damian Montero @damianmontero
Luciano Ibias @ibias

Please RSVP Via Facebook
iPad Crash Course

Date: Thursday, April 29, 2010
The Grove Spot
3324 Virginia Street
Miami, FL 33133

Time: 7.30 PM

This month’s presentation will be on remote automated testing: How to do it, what the benefits are, popular tools etc. This is going to be a great tool for anyone who works freelance or designs websites on their own. Testing can be an invaluable method for inspection into your sites usability. To do this, there will also be a demo of the Loop11 software, a great product for remote automated testing. The Loop11 competition will be launched while the meet-up and the details of the prize worth $1750 will be revealed as well!

Where

Panera Bread
1762 North Federal Hwy
Ft. Lauderdale FL 33305
954-567-5925

When

Thursday, April 29, 2010 7:00 PM

Once you have decided what type of website you wish to build, then you must choose the best resources to use. This will save you a lot of frustration when building your site and it is not even all that necessary that you understand HTML in order to build an effective site.

Web Templates

A template is a complete website layout without the text and links. Templates give you a layout and format from which you can create your web pages. Templates have many uses. They allow you to create a website without needing to know any website design as the layout is done for you. Templates also help you to launch your site quickly as you need only to add the text and then load your site to the web. You can either buy templates or get them for free and they come in a wide variety of styles and colors. Once you download the template you like, in most cases they’re ready for deployment. Your pages will load quickly and your site visitors will have a nice browser experience.

Content Pages

Providing great content will make your site a place that visitors will want to come back to again and again and a ‘sticky’ site is a successful site. The easiest way to make your site sticky is to provide helpful articles. Be sure that the articles you put on your content pages are keyword rich, informative, relevant and useful to your visitors.

HTML Editors

If you do not know how to write HTML there are many free editors available that will do the job for you. Choosing the right editor will determine how quickly your site will get online. The best HTML editors will allow you to quickly and easily add content to your pages. Depending on the editor you pick, it will make your life easy when adding graphics, icons, photos and background images to your website – in most cases it can be drag and drop.

Content Management Systems

A content management system (CMS) allows you to make changes to your content without having to hire a programmer. You can edit, delete, modify and remove any content you want even if you have no HTML knowledge or skills. A CMS offers consistency to all of your web pages. If you have a content-rich site and you need to update and edit that information on a regular basis then consider a content management system (CMS) to help ease the process of adding new content.

Blogs

[This bit is important! -->] The easiest way to publish content on the web is through a blog. Blogger and WordPress are two of the most user-friendly blogging platforms out there today that allow you to quickly input your text and then publish it. Blogs are search engine friendly, so if you want to spread your information across the web, a blog is a good way to do that. Blogs are indexed often and quickly by the search engines so if you have your website connected to your blog, you should enjoy a good deal of traffic. Be sure when blogging to make good use of keywords so the search engine crawlers or spiders will pick them up for indexing.

Using the right resources when building a website makes your site contemporary and users will benefit by receiving something of value which will help to contribute to the continuous growth of your site. Your website will become attractive when you use the correct tools and it will display as it should in the different browsers used by your visitors, resulting in them being happy to visit your site again.

Below are ten tips that can guide you in undertaking a successful redesign of your site:

1. Set Strategic Goals.

Instead of blindly jumping in to make changes your site, it is important that you think things through clearly by defining the purpose of the redesign. Jot down what your aim is. Is it to make the site more user-friendly, to better showcase your products and services, or do you want to offer visitors more informational text and/or photos?

2. Do Some Research.

You would not change the look of your home’s interior without first consulting family members or looking through design magazines for ideas. The same should hold true when you set out to change your website. Do some research to find out how your site is doing traffic-wise and how it is perceived by visitors. Consider putting up some online surveys or usability tests  before making any changes. Once you get a good picture of how your site is currently being used, you can then formulate a plan to make the proper changes to improve the user experience.

3. Take Control of the Redesign Project.

Redesigning your website may require some outside help. Therefore you will need to set a budget and see to it that it is adhered to. You should also set up a time line which clearly outlines when certain aspects of your site should be modified. You need to be on top of the entire project, so be prepared to organize people, the details and the work flow.

4. Take a Good Hard Look at Your Content.

Now that you are undertaking a website redesign, it is time to look at your content. After getting some feedback from your site visitors, you know what it is that your users expect out of your site. Write some fresh content so that your visitors are given up-to-date and useful information. New, unique content also acts as ‘link bait’ which helps build external links to your pages. Optimized content is what the search engines thrive on, so weed out any weak content and replace it with something fresh and interesting.

5. Consider Your Site’s Usability

Site usability is a buzzword that is used a lot, but do you know what it means? In short, usability refers to how easily a visitor can get around your website, in other words – how usable it is. If someone has to hunt around for information such as your contact details and your ‘home’ link, then your site has a usability issue in its design which must be addressed.

6. Check Your Site’s Speed

When it comes to web design, one of the most important aspects is the speed of your site. Your visitors will leave very quickly if they have to wait over 10 seconds for a page to load. There are various free online tools that check the speed of your site. Google recently announced something that many in the SEO community already suspected: that the search engine will now consider site speed when ranking results. If your website takes too long to load, you may find yourself slipping in the search engine result pages (SERPS). Increasing the speed of your site may involve changing hosts or it could mean that you should look at a new publishing platform. It could even mean that you have to undertake a complete overhaul of the type and format of your site’s content.

7. Check your Site’s Meaning/Message

One of the most aggravating things when surfing the web is to land on a page and not being able to figure out what the website is about. Usually, these sites are rather ‘artsy’ in nature meaning that the design may look very appealing but you have to dig in order to find out the point of the website. Be sure that your visitors know immediately what your site is about when they arrive because if you don’t, they will leave in a flash.

8. Have A Back-up of Your Old Site

Before making any drastic changes to your website, be sure that you keep a backup file of the present site. In case your new website design fails to draw more traffic, then the old site can be reloaded.

9. Create Clear Contact Us and Informational Pages

To assist with local search results, be sure that you provide detailed address and contact information. If your products can be found in local stores, be sure that you convey this on your site. This will make it easy for your targeted audience and customers to interact and do business with you.

10. Test your Redesign.

In order to be certain that the new design works, have a few people test your layout. You can post a ‘sneak preview’ on your home page a few weeks before launching the new design so that you can received feedback in order to ‘tweak’ your site so that it is designed as best as it can be.

These tips should give you a bit of guidance when you are considering a website redesign. If you think your users are used to your website content and layout, but it could do with some improvements to the overall usability, then introduce small changes gradually.