Excellent Help is Hard to Find

One of the most basic rules of user experience on the web is that developers are rarely qualified to evaluate it. As developers, we know far too much about the web in common, and intuitively grasp details that mystify people who use their days contributing to society in other ways. For this reason, it’s all too simple for us to build websites and applications that are hard to use. Good user testing during the development process can mitigate the problem, but in lots of projects, the testing budget is limited if present at all.

A person who has trouble using a website to accomplish a task will speedily grow frustrated. At best, a frustrated person will leave the site; at worst, they will complain about the knowledge to others. When our users hit a roadblock within a website or application, efficient help content is our last chance to transform a negative experience into a positive one. If content is the red headed stepchild of web progress, help content is even less popular. No one needs to create it or maintain it. When it does exist, it’s regularly hard to find, poorly written, and not terribly helpful. But done well, help content offers tremendous possible to earn customer loyalty.

Also visit : web design dubai

Stimulus web design is the top web designing company you could find for your website

Websites play a very crucial role for each business organization. Today, you have many organizations providing related services and products to millions of customers. Ever since globalization became a reality, companies have also been looking forward to develop their business across shores as well and develop it in turn by earning huge profits. The competition is quite high posing some issues and threats to many businessmen and it is very significant for them to be on the press and be very creative and innovative to stay ahead in the curve. Websites have become a very influential tool that provides great platform for promoting or marketing your services. They also tend to bring in clients for your organization from outside markets across shores. It is very significant for every company to have an appropriate high quality website to promote their business. Our whole world is shrunk into the internet today and all is available there.

Technology has revolutionize our lives in that manner as we are deeply dependent upon it for our survival. These websites on this note also represent the face of your company. They permit you to develop a very good reputation and consistency in terms of delivering allow you to expand your business. In order to create such a website, you require the right man for the task. Of course, you can attempt to create your own website for your organization, but are you an specialist to handle everything and create the perfect website that is quite fruitful for your organization? Do you have enough background technical knowledge to do the same? I am sure not. Stimulus web Design Company is a great company. They are the right men for develop your website. They have huge experience and exposure when it comes to web design and development in Saudi Arabia. They also provide services in UAE, Riyadh and other countries as well. In fact it is recognized as the best company known for web design in Saudi Arabia as well. There is no one better in the market right now to create the great website for your organizations. They are quite skilled and trained to handle website design and development. They offer high quality services in a very professional manner as well.

It is very significant for every company to have the right website for their business development. A proper website will have high excellence contents that are very informative. They will also be readable and eligible with proper fonts and designs. They will also look very beautiful as well in terms of presentation. They will be simply navigable as well and thus user friendly by nature. Stimulus Design Company creates the great website for you that are the right for the development of your business. There is no one better in the market to understand your website necessities better. They are also highly negotiable and customer satisfaction is their first and leading priority. They are also known for creating some of the top logos and graphic designs in UAE as well. For further details and communications, log onto, www.stimuluswebdesign.com.

Also visit : web design dubai

 

Twenty-five Ways to Design Your Way to Higher conversion

During the design stage of building a website all too often we find that the end result is actually nothing more than what somebody determined “looked good”. In some cases it’s a mixture of what a handful of individuals have determined to be “good enough”. What many fail to realize is that web design and visitor usability go hand in hand.

How the site is developed, along with the underlying coding structure, plays a important role on whether your site meets the usability necessities of your audience. Below are a number of individual elements that must be measured in every website design. While each plays a minor role over the total usability of a website, together they add up to be much more than the sum of their parts.

• Look and feel
• Industry best practices
• Design simplicity
• Searchability
• Link descriptions
• Links organized with lists
• Breadcrumbs
• Contact and support info
• Font size
• Font face
• Font scalability
• Short sentences
• Paragraph width
• Color usage
• Contrast
• Saturated colors
• Animated graphics
• Action objects
• Graphics, multimedia & plugins
• Link formatting
• Text coloring
• White space
• Horizontal scrolling
• Printing
• Browser functionality

When it comes to improving usability to attain higher conversions, there is no more obvious place to start than in your website design. More often than not we have seen websites undergo a complete re-design and then find their change rates jump overnight, without any extra traffic being brought to the website. Usability should not be an afterthought to the design process, but should be on the forefront driving the design from the ground up.

Also visit : web design dubai

Seven tips for designing for older users

The discussion on web design for older site visitors often drift towards accessibility and get mixed up with looking at disabilities rather ability, but this should not forever be a given. Not every person over 65 years has eyesight so poor that they have to enlarge text size or change the contrast of text colours. Not each person over the retirement age has problems with motor control or significant short term memory loss. Here is a digested list of the most significant design tips based on research with users.

1. Make understandable what's clickable and what's not

You must clearly differentiate between paragraph, heading and link styles. Underlining link text within written text helps links to contrast with copy, but underlining links in the main navigation is not essential as each and every item should be obvious. Also, don't employ underlining to recognize headings. Buttons must also be made as huge and prominent as possible so they become a clear call to action. 3-Dimensional effects for buttons can help to make them stand out. Also, create links and buttons easy to aim and hit by rising their clickable area.

2. Utilize radio buttons rather than dropdown menus

A dropdown menu can be fiddly and time intense for site visitors, and can result in people selecting the wrong item by accident. If you have less than ten items in a dropdown menu use radio buttons if possible. These have the benefit of showing the number of options at a glance without having to click. However, you should keep dropdown menus where they are recognized conventions.

3. Wait in one window

If possible, always stay in single window. If you like to provide helpful tips or explanations, consider implement it in a way that the explanation appear on the same page. If you require including a pop-up or re-directing to a new window, then inform the users by telling them. A good example of showing helpful tips on the same page is twitter's sign-up page. Here the details comes up when users click into the field “Full name”.

4. Apply the shallowest possible information hierarchy

Ensure that you completely understand your users' goals and provide them with the shortest paths to completing their task. Pull out significant and frequently visited topics and display them on the homepage. You should also maintain consistent labeling of links and page names and permit site visitors to get to the content within 2-5 clicks. The path must be kept as clear as possible of distracters such as advertising, though you can display some after the task has been finished successfully. Provide about 3 useful cross-reference links that are related to the current task goal, but not many more in order to avoid distraction. Overall, try to minimize the options on screen to be as succinct as possible.

5. Include a site map and link to it from each page

A site map gives users a good overall picture of how the sites is organized and clearly define all the resources the website has to offer. The link to the site map can generally be found near the top or the bottom of the page and regularly placed near the link to 'contact us'. Internet savvy senior surfers are aware of site maps and make use of them to gain an outline of the site. They will also likely click on a sitemap link when they get lost on the site or if they cannot get what they want while browsing. 

6. Maintain your language simple  

          

Avoid technical language at all cost. However, if you employ newer functionality such as tagging for example, don not try to rename it, but provide an easy to know explanation for it. Include information in plain English where essential and always try to reduce the number of words displayed on the page. Use simple and small sentence and include bullet points where possible. For links on the homepage or landing pages include a short description to tell site visitors what to guess when following the link.

7. Show trustworthy

Senior surfers tend to be more cautious when browsing and can get puzzled when something unexpected occur such as a new window opening or an application installing. Firstly, clearly state the use of your site on the homepage. Also, offer a brief explanation with content links, so users know what to expect when following them. Explain in 'large print' how personal information will be handle before asking user to enter it. Make use of the well-known padlock icon to specify a secure part of the site. Show terms such as 'secure', 'safe' and 'confidential' in bold. Offer a content section on security when your site recommends financial services.

Also visit : web design uae

How to generate a Color Palette for your Website

A palette is a entire set of colors one should adhere to when designing a website. This includes a color scheme plus some extra colors to work with. The goal along the design process is to stick to these colors without the need of invent and introducing new ones. Here are some tools and knowledge on how to design and generate an effective and appealing color palette for you website in just minutes:

Recognize your primary color

Many times you will be constraint by your clients require for a primary color, be it because of the logo, corporate identity (CI) or corporate design (CD) guidelines. For the other times when you have to come up with a color for yourself, think of what best represent the company's aim audience young, fashion, pop, serious, technocratic, playful. All that will resolve your ultimate choice. The best description I have found so far of what special colors actually stand for is in Jason Beaird's book 'The Principles of Beautiful Web Design'. Even though I am sure you find tons of other sources on the web be aware of easy color-meaning mappings like black=death - in web design black is also a color that convey power, think of tuxedos, limosines, Batman etc.

Generate a Color Scheme

I have found the Red-Yellow-Blue color wheel the closest to traditional color theory and that's what I am using and writing about now. I acknowledge the CMYK (Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black) color wheel but found it less helpful for my purposes. I highly suggest the WellStyled Color Scheme Generator 2. It allows you to use your primary color and your knowledge about your target audience to play around and find the most right of the five classic color schemes:

    monochromatic (your primary color in special tints or shades)

    analogous (your primary color plus two colors next to it on the wheel)

    complementary (your primary color plus the reverse color on the wheel)

    triadic (three colors evenly separated on the wheel)

    tetradic (fundamentally two complementary schemes combined)

The Color Scheme maker will calculate the correct RGB values in hexadecimal notation for you and even offer variations to further experiment. Once done, simply print or note the colors and values compute and you are ready to roll.

Ensure good Contrast

Contrast is not only a good design principle but also an Accessibility necessity for many websites. So before you make your final choice on the color scheme make sure that your main color provides sufficient contrast to background/foreground colors. Test your colors using Colour Contrast Check making sure the brightness variation is greater 124 and the color difference is not less than 500.

Finalize your Color Palette

To finalize your color palette all you require to determine is which other tints and shades of the existing color scheme you want to use black and white included. As a basic rule try not to 'overload' your page with the amount of colors used, but surely a number of 5 or 6 seems to be about right.

Also visit : web design uae

Eighteen easy SEO Items Commonly Missed in Web Development

One of the things we continually have to do as SEO experts is give recommendations to companies on how they require to change their site so that they can be better optimized. The sad thing is that a lot of the things we recommend should have been completed during the Web development phase the first time around.

No matter how much the Search engine optimization world tries to get the information out there, a lot of Web developers do not understand the basic concepts of Search engine optimization. This in turn leads to sites being developed that a Search engine optimization team will later have to tear apart and fix.

So whether you’re designing a new site in-house, using some kind of template site-building system, or hiring an outside firm, here are 18 things that you will want to make sure are in place before you launch your site. It will keep us Search engine optimization guys from giving your site an overhaul later. By following this rule you will have a much more search engine friendly web design from the beginning.

     1- Make Keyword Research before Developing the Site

     2- Put Non-www to www Redirect in Place

     3- Use a Static, Keyword Based Universal Resource Locator Structure

     4- Have Unique Universal Resource Locators for Each Product/Service

     5- Include Redirect capability

     6- Generate a Custom 404 Page

     7- Includes Keyword-Rich Alt Attributes

     8- Make Room for enough Content

     9- Setup Internal Linking Structure

    10- Decide on a reliable Title Structure

    11- Include Meta Description on Every Page

    12- Permit Inclusion for Other Meta Tags (canonical, robots, etc.)

    13- Incorporate Social Media Sharing Button

    14- Install Analytics Trackings

    15- Set up and confirm Webmaster Tools Account

    16- Follow Web standard for HTML, CSS, and Database Programming

    17- Generates an XML Sitemap

    18- Generate a Robots.txt File

Also visit : web design uae

Five Ways to make sure Your Site Is Accessible to the Visually Impaired

1. Create Allowances for Enlarged Text

Often times, simply creation text larger is all that a user require. Consider offering alternate style sheets with bigger font sizes and make sure your layout does not break when text-only zoom is enabled in the browser. Many visually impaired users will want to zoom in on the text without altering the scale of the entire site layout, which can guide to difficulties scrolling and tracking text over long lines.

2. Contrast is Key

Eye diseases like Retinitis Pigmentosa, Glaucoma, Retinopathy and cataracts all lead to a significant reduce in contrast sensitivity that is, the eye’s capability to differentiate between similar shades and levels of brightness. But today’s layouts are detailed-oriented, often utilize subtle gradients and slight shifts in value to make clean, modern, unobtrusive interfaces. For a user with normal eyesight, this makes for a very agreeable visual experience. To a user who struggle with contrast sensitivity, however, it can be a literal headache.

3. Be Mindful of Colors for Action things

Genetic colorblindness influence about 8% of all men and about 0.5% of all women to some degree. Then there’s acquire color blindness, which can effect from eye disease or injury and drives the total number of colorblind users still higher. It may not always be possible to offer these users an entirely different color scheme, and most users usually accept this. However, there is one place, where the use of color should be given the utmost attention action items. When creating buttons or notice that call the user’s attention and need their direct interaction, try to avoid using color combos that are easily confused by colorblind users and make sure these elements have clear, visible text or iconography that makes their purpose clear.

4. Let Desktop Users Browse Your Mobile Site

If you offer a mobile version of your web site, do not limit it only to mobile devices. Layouts optimized for the mobile web are classically, by nature, more visually accessible than their more grown-up counterpart. Elements are often simplify, more focus is given to text, and there is less overall visual clutter to potentially puzzle users who have blurred vision or difficulties with contrast and color. Giving anyone access to the mobile version of your site can be a quick way to enlarge accessibility without adding a lot to development costs.

5. Apply Keyboard Shortcuts to Aid Navigation

In addition to being helpful to persons with screen readers, keyboard shortcuts can make site navigation for the visually impaired user far easier. With the addition of keyboard commands, it’s likely to navigate a site with the use of arrow keys and some quick keystrokes, eliminating the need to follow a mouse cursor across a screen and the linked need to keep shifting visual focus. This can go a long way toward reducing eye strain and frustration. Many users with visual impairments surf the web on big monitors (23″ or bigger), which can lead to a lot of head and eye movement, mostly at shorter focal distances. The less time the user has to use following the cursor around the screen, the better.

Also visit: web design uae

Top 10 Good Deeds in Web Design

 

When analyzing Web design, it is easy to recognize a large number of mistakes that reduce usability. Here's a list of ten design elements that will raise the usability of virtually all sites:

    1. Place your name and logo on all pages and make the logo a link to the home page.

    2. Offer search if the site has more than 100 pages.

    3. Write straightforward and easy headlines and page titles that clearly explain what the page is about and that will create sense when read out-of-context in a search engine results listing.

    4. Structure the page to facilitate scanning and help users ignore huge chunks of the page in a single glance: for example, use grouping and subheadings to break a long list into some smaller units.

    5. Instead of cramming everything about a product or topic into a single, endless page, use hypertext to structure the content space into a starting page that provide an overview and some secondary pages that each focus on a specific topic. The goal is to permit users to avoid wasting time on those subtopics that don't concern them.

    6. Use product photos, but avoid cluttered and bloated product family pages with a lot of photos. Instead have a small photo on each of the individual product pages and link the photo to one or bigger ones that show as much detail as users need. This varies depending on kind of product. Some products may even require zoom able or rotatable photos, but reserve all such advanced features for the secondary pages. The primary product page must be quick and should be limited to a thumbnail shot.

    7. Use relevance-enhanced image decrease when preparing small photos and images: instead of simply resizing the original image to a tiny and unreadable thumbnail, zoom in on the most related detail and use a combination of cropping and resizing.

    8. Use link titles to offer users with a preview of where each link will take them, before they have clicked on it.

    9. Ensure that all essential pages are accessible for users with disabilities, especially blind users.

    10. Do the same as everybody else: if most big websites do amazing in a certain way, then follow along since users will guess things to work the same on your site. Remember Jakob's Law of the Web User Experience: users use most of their time on other sites, so that's where they form their expectations for how the Web works.

Finally, forever test your design with real users as a reality check. People do things in odd and unexpected ways, so even the most carefully planned project will study from usability testing.

Also have a visit at : Web Design uae