About Me: Web Designing

I have provided many insights into existing web sites and ways of improving their usability and design style; helping customers in maintaining their sites a less painful task.

There are tens of thousands of sites on the internet, and hundreds falling into the same category as yours. Research shows that if your site does not show up in the first 10 listing on a search engine the site might not reach the number of people to make it a sucess.You can follow these few Merchandising tips in the x*tra section to improve the traffic to your site.

Incorporating a wire frame into our Web site design process has tremendously helped us design quality sites. Our team, our clients, and our users have all benefited from this approach.

Wire Frame: is a technique is technique in which you take out all the style, like images, colors etc. You just retain the text that would go in each page, the forms etc, basically the content and the navigation menu. You can place image placeholders in place of the actual images.

What would this accomplish?
This would then force the client to focus solely on the content and the navigation flow instead of the images and the colors. In my personal experience; the first time I designed a web site and showed it to my boss for approval, he wanted me to change the colors, again, and again, he never noticed the blatant spelling mistakes right on the home page.

Now with CSS based layout designing, you can easily convert your content into final products.

Greeking: A usability testing technique, in which text on a web page is converted to pseudo latin text (usually starting with lorem ipsum) [the phrase "Its all Greek to me" comes to mind].

The reasoning behind greeking is that participants testing the interface can focus on the layout and visual design of a page instead of the content. I usually create all my layouts in Adobe Photoshop™ and then splice it up and produce the individual images. I place the pseudo latin text where the actual content is supposed to go. You can use the online auto text generator at lipsum.com.

Apperently Richard McClintock, a Latin professor turned publications director at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. Curious about what the words meant, McClintock had looked up one of the more obscure ones, consectetur, in a Latin dictionary. Going through the cites of the word in classical literature, he found one that looked familiar. Aha! Lorem ipsum was part of a passage from Cicero, specifically De finibus bonorum et malorum, a treatise on the theory of ethics written in 45 BC.

The original reads,

Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit ...
"There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain ..."