Clearly design to the topic, audience and value proposition

When developing both the design and content of a blog, ensure that it is clear what the topic of the blog is, who the intended audience is, and why this blog is unique among those in that field of discussion. By keeping these three elements clearly stated, they ensure that visitors understand exactly why they are on site. It also ensures the blog has a focus and direction for all developed content, and that this is in harmony with the blog design.

Be clear over the details

These are the small things, but the types of technical irritations that can damage credibility or turn people off of the site. Simple things such as the way the front page promotes blog excerpts – if this isn’t intuitive and seamless, users might give up and leave. Internal search on the site is key if users are expected to explore previous content. Blogs are also very personal, which is how they differ from other media. By not changing the author from “Admin” to the actual name of the writer, the important warmth and personalty of the blog is diminished.

Use blog conventions to your advantage

Two things which should not be personalized are the conventions in how people subscribe to the content, and how they share it. These two features should be obvious on the blog, so users can continue to consume or actively share content. There is a question over what sharing sites should be available, and many answers to this. Certainly the key sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are important for easy sharing.

Magazine or Diary format?

Most people think of blogs to be in the diary format, however there are exceptions to this rule. If the content on the site is not generally time sensitive, it might be better to display a magazine style of design. This will help the blog stand out from others, and is particularly good at making images stand out and separating articles from one another. However, by stepping out of convention, it is important that the site design doesn’t leave visitors confused.

Image selection and placement are important considerations

There is no question over the value of images in web content to break up text, and provide useful context and visual cues to the content. In light of this, the selection and placement of these images is very important.

Images should work with the content to enforce the message of the post. Placement at the top of the content, or top right (keeping in mind the F style scanning conventions) will help the visitor understand immediately what the content is all about, then follow on from that.

There should be a general strategy behind image selection. Sometimes annotated images are great to convey a message that works with the content. Developing infographics can be a great way of getting the post to go viral, but take time to develop. Rules of thumb for general blogs is to enforce the message with an image that promotes either humor or curiosity.

These five considerations will help any blog strategically target an audience, and fuse the content with the site design. When incorporated into the operations of the blog, they will give the site focus. This is useful to both the visitor in understanding what is on offer, but also the writers in maintaining focus and direction.

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Topic: a clear idea of what the blog is about

Sometimes the topic of a blog is obvious, but other blogs suffer for not having a specific direction. Great blogs speak to a specific audience, and the design of the blog should assist in providing visitors to that site with an idea of what the topic is, even before reading the content.

This is true where generic templates are used. Often these sites don’t keep visitors as the visual arrangement doesn’t invite users to explore the content. Existing blog owners can see in the analytics of the site whether or not the site has a high bounce rate. If so, the theme and design of the site might help keep users on site for longer.

Audience: understand who the audience is, and what they want

This comes back to writing basics, but it is so important that it bears repeating. The blog should understand how the audience are interacting with the content. A blog on green technology is likely to have a broad audience, but a blog examining sustainability in buildings might have a more specific and specialist audience.

The audience is key for choice of language and how topics are filtered and approached. Blogs which explore specialist subjects can include greater jargon and more technical elements. They should also incorporate focused ways of getting new members of the audience “up to speed”, so that they can engage with the content. However, more generalist blogs should keep language open and jargon free.

The effectiveness of understanding the audience will ensure that visitors who are targeted understand they are at home on the site and want to stay. However, sites with unclear audiences will have difficulty convincing people to stick around, as they don’t understand why they are on site.

Value Proposition: why stick with this blog over others?

As with the topic and audience, the more the blogger creates an explicit value proposition, the easier it is for visitors to understand why the site is useful to them.

This is especially true of general subject blogs, where there is a competitive market for readers. These kinds of blogs should reach out to specific parts of the market proactively by enhancing their value proposition.

If the value proposition is immediately available in the design of the website, this will make the targeted reader much more comfortable and curious as to what the site has to offer them. They are more likely to explore, but also share the site with friends.

If these three considerations are incorporated into the site, the targeted visitor should intuitively understand that this is a site for them and their like-minded friends. This will keep viewers returning, the best and most sustainable way of ensuring a blog lasts. It also provides the focus to the site that makes sure that content has direction.

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Create a visually stimulating environment

The key to a well-designed website is that it keeps people on the page. Often, this is best done by creating a site which is visually engaging. Color is the key to creating that appeal. Different colors attract different types of people, so it is worth doing some research into the psychology of color before choosing the palette of the website. With the right colors, people have one less reason to move onward.

Fonts also make a big difference to web design. The choice of typeset and how it contrasts to other texts, and visual objects can play an important role in the harmony of the website. Fonts should be black and in sharp contrast to the background to ensure readability. The best font size for body content on websites is 12 or 14 points, otherwise readers might find the content, difficult or annoying to read.

Ensure loading time is short

Some websites are great to use, and include some amazing features, but people won’t really know because they got bored during the page loading time. While Internet speeds are increasing rapidly, users’ attention spans are diminishing even faster. A quickly loading webpage is more likely to attract viewers than one that takes a long time to start.

Ways to keep a page loading down is to reduce the size of images and use of graphics to the site. Flash and JavaScript are also major load time culprits, which should be kept to a minimum in order to ensure a snappy feel.

Make navigation easy

Navigation between different elements of the website is an important way of keeping people on site. Here, simplicity is really important; visitors should be able to understand the navigation tools quickly and intuitively. A good rule of thumb when mapping out the site is to ensure that all important content is within three clicks away from any other point or web page. This ensures that people feel the least resistance to browsing, and can enjoy the site without issue.

The balance between text and graphics

The use of text in websites both provides the content and the webpage SEO rank. However, graphics can also draw in users and increase page views and can create a visually balanced website. The use of graphics to space out text in web content is really important; it makes the page less boring and promotes interest. Furthermore, people often find that video also delivers content in an engaging way. However, be sure that the sizes of the graphics and videos are small, to keep the page load times low.

Creating a rich and powerful website takes some planning and good design. The tips mentioned above are good starting points to putting together a well-designed and visually attractive website.

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Context: the key is where the message is coming from

The reader needs a reason to engage with the content. A written piece should convey the strongest context possible, as it sets the stage for the rest of the writing and provides a link between the reader and the content. Sometimes the context is implied, subscribers to content have already found reason to sign up. However, this does not mean that further contextualization won’t be useful. Without context, there is a risk the reader is left cold and without any reason to engage with the writing or it’s message.

Grab the reader’s attention and keep it with desire

This is also key to great delivery. In writing, this is done through the headline. However, fonts and graphics can also be incorporated in order to grab and hold attention.

The style of writing should be such that it holds that attention and convinces the audience to want something. This is often called a “hook”, and is the promise of a benefit if the reader completes the article. The desire is the reason why they keep reading and it should interplay with the writers grab for attention.

The Gap and The Solution: aka the pain and the medicine

In sales, people are taught to find the pain to which the sale is the solution. This is the same in writing. With the context, the writer forms a relationship, the attention and desire parts are there to keep the reader interested. These are all built on the play between The Gap and The Solution.

The best way to start explaining what The Gap is, is to think about what would happen if nothing actually changed. If that happened, there would be no solution. How bad would that be? Chances are, that is the point of the article being written.

A good method of illustration of The Gap is to highlight examples of what happens without The Solution using examples. The Solution is what we are here for, presenting it is important, and should be done shortly after the implications of The Gap have been fully addressed.

Finally, a call to action is required

This is crucial for leading the audience to the next state. This answers the question: “what now”, and provides an easy start to getting on a path to The Solution. If the content is actually demanding some level of action, this request should be explicit and clear, with the first step clearly marked out.

These six points will all work together to provide compelling writing, as it will lead the reader on the quest for the solution. From providing the context on which to build trust, the journey is shaped that leads to an explicit call to arms. By that time, if the above guidelines have been followed, the reader understands why and is looking forward to taking the next step.

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Main Classifications

There are four main categories of font: serifs, sans serifs, decorative typefaces and scripts. Each has it’s own use and misuse, and it is worth understanding each.

Sans Serifs

These are quite common, especially on the Internet. Popular san serifs are Arial, Verdana, Tahoma and Helvetica. They are really easy to visually see in a range of sizes, and are particularly useful for conveying information. However, their minimalism means they lack emotion and connection with the reader.

Serifs

These are fonts with tiny finishing strokes added to the characters. These small flourishes are great for large amounts of text content as the arcs from the finishing strokes visually assist reading the text. They also feel important and have an air of professionalism, making them great for business correspondence. The most common serif font is Times New Roman, but others examples include Georgia and Garamond.

Script and Decorative Fonts

The last two categories are less important as they are not commonly used in day to day text. Script typefaces replicate handwriting or calligraphy. Common script typefaces are Monotype Corsiva and Lucinda Handwriting. They are the masters of invitation correspondence, but little else. They are not used often as they either invoke over formality, or ironic informality.

Decorative fonts are quite unusual and unique looking fonts that are used for design effect or style. They can also invoke a time, place or emotion. They are distracting, so not used for the body of content, and can easily be overused.

Common practices

For most online content, the common practice is to use a sans serif for the body content, while a sans serif is used for headings and titles. Strangely, the opposite practice is used for the printed page.

The reason for this difference is contrasting opinions over the readability of serif typefaces. Studies have shown that readability is increased through the use of serifs. However, other studies suggest that this might be due to what we are used to seeing in print, rather than the nature of the font.

Further styling can be added to the font in order to provide more information about intent and context of the written piece. This can be in the form of bolding or italicising, or adding color.

Improving the delivery of content

Understanding fonts and typefaces can have a useful impact on the delivery of your content. A report which is sent to a client written in the comic sans font is not going to get the same attention as one written in Verdana, regardless of the content.

It is therefore important to understand some of the basics and the merits of each font. That way, the delivery of the content can be re-enforced by how it is presented, right down to the letter.

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Ease of Comprehension: is the content easy to understand?

Sometimes websites are filled with jargon or acronyms which have the tendency to lock out new or less specialized users. If the language is too bland or not technical enough, the expert interest in your website will diminish. There is a fine line between the two.

Ease of comprehension also relates to the way the text is laid out. Are the sentences and paragraphs concise and sharp? Too much language in the writing of the work can lead to people losing interest or getting confused.

Legibility: how easy is it to read the website?

This is where fonts and typography have become really powerful on the website in recent years. If the fonts are too small then people might find reading difficult. Many websites have poor contrast between the background and text, making it difficult to see what is written for sustained periods of time. Legibility is an area where websites are improving dramatically, and it is often useful to do some research in this field before the website design and palette are established.

Reading Enjoyment: will users enjoy the website?

This is a balance between the quality of design and content, but this is the most important part of the website experience. Is the website a quality place to go? Is the subject matter interesting, thought provoking and well written? A great website is a combination of design and content. Ensuring these two element work together is key for a quality website.

Readability tools: to assist in ensuring a quality website

There are a handful of tools available for web designers to understand the readability of their website, and point to potential improvements.

Juicy Studio’s “Readability Test” is a free tool for understanding the readability of a website. After entering the target website’s URL, the Readability Test scores on content quality, based on some of the popular algorithms for evaluating readability. However, for this site to work, the content must already be public.

WordsCount allows for a similar readability evaluation, but can be used on content before it is made public. To run this test, copy and paste the content into the space provided and WordsCount will provide the readability statistics of the content.

Both of the above tests are for content rather than legibility. This is where “Check My Colours” can be useful. Once again, the page must be public. However, the site does a good job of checking how the foreground text contrasts to the background. It will also check the page against what is optimal for W3C color contrast algorithms. This is a great way of ensuring the site is highly legible and easy to read.

These tips and tools are important for ensuring that the content on a website gets read. Even with the best SEO and marketing, a site with poor readability will struggle to reach it’s audience. By using these tools and techniques, the web designer can ensure that the content has the best impact on the reader possible.

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Intuitiveness: how obvious are the website’s tasks?

Great websites make the complex seem simple and straightforward, and this comes from appealing to the user’s intuition about how to operate the task in the site. Sometimes, this is ensuring that the website follows web conventions that are common to other sites. Other times, the complex tasks need to feel natural to the user, with avenues for their experience to wander down.

Learnability: how easy is it to learn the website’s tasks?

If the website includes some sophisticated interactions, these features will needs some assistance. If the interactions cannot be made to be intuitive or follow common conventions, what help features are available to the user? This can be remedied by tutorials or in-line tips and tool-tips.

Efficiency: have these task been optimized?

Inefficient tasks can be annoying to the user, and make the site feel slow. Web developers should ensure that the tasks are as efficient and quick as possible, including page load times.

Memorability: can the task be repeated easily?

If the task is a common feature of the site, how easy is it to repeat it? Can there be any optimization for subsequent uses of the task after the first?

Preciseness: will the task break or cause errors?

This is obviously a poor result, but one that is too common on websites. It is important to understand the reason for the errors, any underlying causes can also affect other parts of the site. Also, think about how the user interface can be simplified to reduce errors and unnecessary user repetition.

Fault Tolerance: the speed of recovery from mistakes

Users are bound to make mistakes when performing tasks, or click to the wrong areas. How easy is it for users to recover? If recovery is difficult, the user might not bother to return.

Affordance: how relevant are the elements to the actions?

Does it make sense how the user actions result in accomplishment? Do the elements of the website create a link to this accomplishment? Does the user understand the “distance to target”?

User task evaluation can be challenging because of the subjective nature of tasks. What is easy for the designer might not be quite so simple for Auntie Wilma. So establish a clear criteria for success of each task. Also, remote user testing is a great way of bringing in a variety of users to ensure clear and successful user tasks.

As websites become more sophisticated, it is important that the users understand and are sufficiently lead to and through the tasks required on the website. Ensuring these are optimized is a great way of making user interaction on the website, clear and practical.

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So, cyber-world can be easily termed as a designers’ playground. More and more entrepreneurs are using the internet to grow their businesses. The reason for this is the great throughput of online businesses with just the right amount of “eye-candy”. Certainly though, this eye-candy must be used properly. A simple methodology has changed online business forever, “Infographics”.

Information Graphics (Infograhics) is the visual representation of data which can be used to demonstrate intricate information and data in a clear, concise and complete way. “Data viz” is another name used for this methodology is what most of the new generation call it these days. With infographics, data and information can be distinctively shown so that there’s no need to read, there’s just a need to see and visualize getting a complete understanding of what the designer wants to communicate. But, an infographic must not leave any space for self interpretation. Rather, it is needed to be designed in a way to portray a universal message so that everyone is at the same level of understanding.

Infographics can be visualized as some of the charts and graphs that most of us would have seen, and used too while using different Microsoft products like Word & PowerPoint. But, of course, as the time changes the trends change too. So, just as Web 1.0 has transformed into Web 2.0; the infographics today are much more sophisticated than the ones from yesteryear i.e. those simple pie charts and bar graphs.

These days the idea of infographics is to mesh-up many different data visualization techniques into one cohesive unit. The end result is good enough to draw the attention of the masses.

Many design trends have taken inforgraphics a long way during the past couple of years. This field has been given a much needed facelift with loads of creative mastery put in by designers. The internet today is brimming with enticing and beguiling ways of data viz.

While not many trends survive the wrath of an ever changing mindset of people, infographics is most likely here to stay. Many popular names are backing infographics as a source of efficient data visualization and its rise is eminent. It is evident this is going to become an important tool in the modern information age.

Well-established or a new-born, enterprises these days are turning their attention towards using infographics for marketing themselves over the internet. This makes them capable of reaching out to a wider audience and builds the reputation of their brand around the world. This is because a picture is worth a thousand words. Also, you don’t need to know any specific language to understand infographics. Thus, infographics can help a brand be recognized around the globe even where the people don’t speak your language.

In a nutshell, infographics is becoming one of the most popular and efficient data representation techniques used over the internet by many web designers. Thus learning how to use infographics is a must for any web/graphics designer wanting to make a mark on the market.

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Anyone get what I just did? I introduced you to the dissonance by using the approach itself. This technique can increase the productivity and quality of certain designing and writing projects.

I’ll start explaining dissonance by first introducing you to an exactly opposite concept; consonance. Consonance, according to wikipedia, is a term usually used in music to portray harmony, chord, or interval considered stable. In layman terms, consonance means you’re feeling comfortable about something. There exists a perfect harmony in the different things you feel.

Dissonance is the state of unrest that disturbs your normal state of mind. In other words, it is the feeling of losing comfort i.e. consonance. You may feel dissonance when someone tries to challenge your belief and that will certainly make you uncomfortable. Your mind doesn’t want to accept what is going around you and you start thinking what to do to get things straight.

Now I move towards a very favorite theory of mine, Cognitive Dissonance proposed by Leon Festinger. Before I give you a birds’ eye view of this theory, I should tell you why we have to discuss about dissonance and consonance and how they are related to designing and writing? There is one simple reason, which is that they are the key ingredients to the theory that Festinger put up.

The basic hypotheses of his theory are:

•    A person will be automatically motivated by being psychologically uncomfortable, i.e. having dissonance. So he’ll try to get rid of this dissonance and try to achieve a state of rest, i.e. consonance.
•    Also, while trying to reduce the dissonance, the person affected will try to make sure that he avoids certain situations that are likely to increase the dissonance.

So, let me start by focusing on the first hypothesis which will become the base of our new design and writing technique. What the first hypothesis means is that whenever you experience dissonance, you’ll always want to reach consonance. So, our goal will be to persuade dissonance and then impart consonance.

There are these 2 main pieces of an attractive website; design and content.  If you get them right, you get your clients. We try to convince people that our products are the best solutions to their problems. This is made possible by the design and content of our web pages. Using dissonance technique, challenge the beliefs of your potential clients by designing with dissonance. Then, spread the message of your services as a solution for them to achieve consonance.

The introduction to this article creates dissonance in the audience by suggesting that you are knowledgeable but you still haven’t heard about this technique. So it makes you keep on reading so that you get comfortable again after knowing that you are now aware of this concept that you didn’t know before.

So I don’t have to be Einstein here, to infer the simple fact that my using the dissonance technique worked on you just because you read my article this far. It isn’t just me; many astonishing articles out there use dissonance immaculately.

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Because you can always contact your friends on any social network that you follow, to get their thoughts on the problem. If that doesn’t work for you, you can find help on any of the hundreds of online discussion forums. But, If you ask an expert, they’d recommend that you must debug your code thoroughly yourself before reaching out for help.

So if you’re looking to debug or even thinking about experimenting with a piece of code, sandboxing tools can be prove to be your friends.

In the context of any type of software development, sandbox is a testing environment. Its main function is to isolate live code from the untested portion as to protect the system from changes that could be damaging and difficult to revert. A sandbox, tests the untested code by virtually providing an environment sufficient enough for that code snippet to be debugged and tested validly. It provides the use of same variables as well as databases that will actually be used in the system. This code is tested separately thus it doesn’t have any effect on the running system.

One thinks; why do we even need an online sandbox tool to test our web-pages while we can so easily test them on a local server using any web server stack e.g. WAMP or XAMMP? In the proceeding lines I define some of the basic reasons why sandbox tools are so important and why are they so frequently used:

•    With any web-server stack, if you want to test a small piece of code, you always have to properly save all your language files & scripts in the right directories. With a sandboxing tool, there’s no need to go through this hassle.
•    While using a testing server, you have to manually back-up all the code so that if things don’t end up the way you want them to, you can always revert back. With a sandbox tool, you’re able to remotely back-up your codes.
•    Sandboxing tools allow effortless linking of different code files at runtime.

By now many of the readers would’ve got atleast some idea about these sandbox tools. Now, I would like to list some of the widely used sandboxing tools:

•    CSSDesk
•    Jsdo.it
•    JS Bin
•    Tinkerbin
•    PractiCode
•    Google Code Playground
•    JS Fiddle
•    TryIt Editor Instant

Let us now list the most common features that are present in almost all of the above listed tools.

1.    Web-based
2.    Free
3.    Run front-end/client-side code
4.    Simple UIs custom made for code snippets
5.    Collaborating capabilities
6.    Runtime preview window
7.    Online/offline code versioning and saving

All of the above mentioned tools are top-of-the-line free products available for download. These tools can help a developer in understanding as well as experimenting with his code pretty efficiently and reliably.

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