WebSpeek Blog

A user-friendly interface is a must for any websites, unless you intend to drive your visitors up the wall!

Take a look at the user interface of Flickr below:

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Icons are really essential in web designing.

Whatever functions that you provide to your users, icons make them clearer to users.

However, there are many companies who are charging us, web designers, for purchasing their icons.
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Testing your websites is an integral stage in web development.

This ensures that your end users will be able to view your designs just the way you want them to perceive, no matter what browser they are using.

The 2 most important tests that must be performed is the screen size test and browser compatibility test.
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It takes a great deal of initial planning and creativity to redesign an existing site.
I am currently redesigning WebSpeek.com. Heheh, personally, I hate to plan when I’m doing something creative. It kills my creativity. I’m not trying to say that I’m good in arts though. I’m a little “robotic” and I’m trying to break this habit by doing more digital arts.

Designing without a plan in mind is a recipe for a design fiasco! I hate to plan, but I will picture what I want in my mind.

If you don’t like to sketch out the basic layout of your site, you can always picture it in your mind. Ask yourself the number of columns you need, your intended height of the header, position of the navigation bar, and so on. At this point of time, you are not advisable to think of the programming aspects yet, just focus on the crucial layout aspects. For example, try to imagine the skeleton of your website as follows:

Next, think of your colour scheme, logo and main areas of your site. My initial design was horrible:

As you can see, based on the skeleton, a presentable (but not satisfying) template is built. After that, I had this claustrophobic feeling. The page was too cramped. I cannot imagine how much more cramped it will be when real information is displayed on the page! Therefore, I decided to remove 1 column from the layout:

Now it looks much more spacious :)

But then, something occured to me: The colours are too dark and heavy! The navigation bar on the right doesn’t look right (pardon the pun) for a forum. So I moved the navigation bar to the left and overhauled the colour scheme:

Hmmm…. something is still wrong. Although the colours are much lighter now, they do not match each other. The font styles and sizes are also not uniform. I made a complete colour scheme change again, and a new logo is also created. I may not be fully satisfied with this design yet, but it is the most current and final version of WebSpeek.com’s new design:

This final design is still subject to more tweaks.

I hope that gave you an overview of how a web designer thinks! (at least, how I think lol)