Material design is a visual language which is driven by a framework engineered to create native apps for android. However, many of its concepts can be applied to web applications.

• Material is metaphor
• motion provides meaning
• Bold, graphic, intentional

Here are some of our favourite techniques outlined by material design which we have already started to apply to our newer website

Elevation

One of the key concepts of material design is using the screen as a 3D space. When applied intelligently we can draw attention to an action button or a fallout by making it appear closer to the user.

Elements can appear to move through the Y-axis by correctly manipulating shadows. Imagine making a button move towards your eye when you hover over it.

You can also draw attention to titles and callouts by making them appear a little raised from the rest of the page.

this technique may sound a little old hat but the way Google has specified shadows should be used makes the experience feel much more realistic, making the user feel as though they are looking at more than just a screen.

Responsive Interaction

this is one of our favourites. The spec for material design suggests a lovely ripple effect  so that the user knows instantly where they have touched the button. This is a really cool technique which enhances the user experience and makes the UI feel pristine.

Meaningful transitions

This concept is drilled around making screen transitions and animations mean something to the user. By keeping transitions uniformed and consistent, we can maintain a relationship between elements where necessary.

For example if we have a button which opens a drop down menu, by having the menu appear to grow from the location of the button, that relationship is maintained.

Material design for websites

Material design currently exists as a visual language for building apps but there is a lot we can learn from it as web designers.

As usual we try to stay at the forefront of technology and you can rest assured we will will apply material design to our websites wherever necessary.

The post Material Design- for websites? appeared first on Web Design Bradford | Distynct.

The site is clean, crisp and integrates with their membership management software. Further features include light-box images, custom post types and carousels.

The owners at core are delighted with their new mobile friendly website and have already experienced some success since the launch.

Head on over to http://www.core-gym.com to check it out.

The post New Website: Gym in Greengates appeared first on Web Design Bradford | Distynct.

Your Customers Don’t Understand Your Jargon

So many times do we see websites which list a boat load of jargon but offer no explanation for what it means. These are not necessarily keywords which your customers will search for.

When it comes to jargon, consider speaking to someone who fits the demographic of what you would think to be your customer. Speak to them, drop in jargon and gauge their reaction. Help Icons next to key words or even links to their own pages can help improve your websites user experience. This way you won’t alienate your audience by throwing overwhelming words at them.

Use relevant pictures, not just what you think looks pretty

Pictures can paint a thousand words. We’ve heard it a thousand times before simply because it is true. Allow designers to be creative with the images they place on your site. Think about the story they tell or the image they create.

Choosing generic stock images can be a lengthy process. It is often well worth hiring a talented photographer. I have often said to my clients, I could create you the best website in the world… without good images it is worth nothing. You may as well wear a nice tailored suit and walk around in a straight jacket.

The purpose of your website user experience

Who visits your website? What are they expecting to find when they visit your site? What age are they? Where are they? All simple questions but often overlooked.

Unless you understand your clients and prospective clients you will never be able to produce a site that generates business for you.

The Website User Experience Test Of 5

Once you’ve got some designs to look at- before you look at them, take this test…

• Write down 5 things you expect to be able to find
• (This is the tricky part) open up your designs, then close your eyes for 5 seconds before you see it
• Remembering the 5 things you’ve written down, look at the design

If you can find all 5 the things you wrote down within 5 seconds, you’re onto a winner.

Make sure buttons do what you think they do

A click is a key event in website user experience. Especially the first one in a visit, I see it as a test of faith. Make sure every link, button, nav item, image or anything else that a user can click on does exactly what you expect it to do. If a link goes off to another site, you might consider placing an icon next to it. If you’re popping up lightboxes or even (shock horror) ads, make sure your user expects it.

The internet is a fickle place, it is so easy for people to turn away. Provide your users with the information they are expecting, no more, no less.

The post Website User Experience: Think of your users, not yourself appeared first on Web Design Bradford | Distynct.

The care home will specialise in Contented Dementia residents. With its prime location and fantastic team of staff, The Gateway is set to be Bradfords leading elderly care village.

The first phase of their website is designed to gather interest in time for the projects completion which is expected to be some time in 2015. It features a broad and airy layout, lots of pictures and informative copy. The site collates user submitted details in a database. Prospective employees can submit their CV with a hope to becoming part of a strong team of professionals.

Look out on our site for some close ups of our magic and in the meantime, go ahead and check out the site at http://www.allsaintscare.co.uk

The post New Website Launched For Care Villlage In Bradford appeared first on Web Design Bradford | Distynct.

Here are a few friendly pointers to consider next time you visit your Google Analytics dashboard.

Bounce Rate

By sorting your pages content drill down by bounce rate, you can see the pages which are performing badly on your website. If you have pages with a high bounce rate, consider improving the layout or content on that page to engage your user.

Exit Rate

Pages with high exit rates are also regular offenders. This might mean that your users are engaged on that page but aren’t being encouraged to visit another page. You should think about adding a ‘You may also like…’ or a ‘Related’ section to pages which Google Analytics highlight as high exit rate.

If you’re an e-commerce company, consider adding ‘related products’ to the bottom of your products page template. ‘Recently viewed’ is another potential cure for a high exit rate.

The problem here may be that you have an external link on that page which you encourage your users to click. Consider using target=”_blank” to open that link in a new window so the user comes back to your site when they’re done.

Entrances

By sorting your content drill down by entrances, you can see which of your pages are most important to your users. These pages may be a users’ first impression of your business and should not only reflect your business accurately, but also take your users through to other parts of the site which may interest them.

Demographics on Google Analytics

Demographics is a huge word which all businesses should address. Who buys your product or service, what is their typical age and gender? You can get an overview of demographics through your Google analytics dashboard. If you sell stair lifts and you’ve got alot of 20-25yr olds visiting your site, you should reconsider your ad placements and put them somewhere more relevant to your target market.

New vs Returning

Getting a host of returning visitors to your website is not a bad thing. It means you are engaging your users who feel compelled to revisit. But of course, it’s not your existing customers who’ll win you new business, is it? If you’re website is engaging and popular among the right demographic, consider upping your monthly spend on driving traffic to your site.

Measure your success

How can you tell if a campaign is successful if you’re not measuring it’s success. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve heard people say “my website is not performing”. I ask them where their existing business comes from and they “don’t know”

Set up conversions to target checkout success pages or contact form confirmation pages to get a gauge of how successful you campaigns actually are.

I hope that’s helpful, and that you’re going to wing yourself off to your analytics page right now with an enlightened approach.

Because I’m good, here’s a link to Google Analytics

The post The importance of Google Analytics appeared first on Web Design Bradford | Distynct.

Take a look at this scrolling plugin here

With all new design an development techniques, they can easily spoil a website by being over used. But when used creatively, websites can benefit hugely from plugins like this and create stunning user experiences.

I came across this awesome scrolling plugin while surfing websites looking for various parallax techniques and found this little gem. Parallax scrolling is another technique which has been over-deployed and almost spoilt in the industry by those who think it looks cool without holding to think whether it is actually relevant.

We are going to bare this plugin in mind but only use it when we feel we have an application for it which will be just awesome.

The post Awesome Scrolling Plugin appeared first on Web Design Bradford | Distynct.

That’s not to say that they weren’t aware of that shopping baskets were capable of such functionality, they just didn’t know that some of this stuff was readily available to smaller businesses.

That’s why I’ve put this quick fire article together to help educate the smaller businesses of Leeds, the last one is by far the most powerful:

Mobile Friendly eCommerce Websites

Yes, ecommerce websites can be responsive. Without spending thousands on developing a standalone app for your store, you can make it respond to fit all types of screen sizes including iPhones and iPads.

Customised Layouts

So a lot of people think that to set up a web store within a reasonable budget means they’ve got to settle for a theme bought from theme forest or something of the sort.

This is folly I say!

Any web developer worth their meat will have starter themes which allow them to create fully customised layouts with a lot of the work done, out of the box.

Seamless Shipping

Some couriers support the facility to create shipments directly from certain shopping carts. This saves you time entering the details. Just choose a service, click, and the shipment is created.

Integrated blogging

It’s a shopping cart, you can’t run a blog on a shopping cart!? Can you?

Yes you can!

WordPress blogs can be fully integrated with some eCommerce websites which means you can run the two, seamlessly without updating both sides every time you make a change.

Multiple Channels, One Installation

Want to sell on eBay, Amazon, Google or other shopping channels? This is one of the most powerful facilities I’ve come across as a designer. If you have a store with thousands of products, you can integrate to several shopping channels, whilst managing your catalogue, orders and fulfilment in one place.

Here at Distynct we believe that rich and seamless functionality should not cost the earth. We can provide fully customised eCommerce websites at very reasonable rates. With such feature packed installations available, if you are not already selling on the internet, you should be asking yourself, “why not”.

The post Things you didn’t know about eCommerce Websites appeared first on Web Design Bradford | Distynct.

What that effectively means is that “I” is now “we” and to celebrate this, our first project was our own website.

We’ve simplified the site structure to make it even more attractive to the eye, we’ve included a fully fledged blog and some cool new features.

There are a few more pages to be added over the next week or so but we just couldn’t wait to launch, so here it is, our new website, our new blog and some additions to the portfolio coming soon!

The post New Website, New Structure appeared first on Web Design Bradford | Distynct.

I once went in for a job to do a website for a reputable company in Leeds and I didn’t get the job because “we don’t like using freelancers” and “we don’t think you’re going to be around in two years time to support us”. 6 weeks later that same company called me back having placed a deposit with a web design firm, had their designs done and the firm had gone bust.
“I’ll gladly help you” I said with a wry grin on one side of my face. (The client doesn’t mind me writing this, in fact we’ve had a bit of a laugh about it.)

This was three years ago and I still work on a monthly retainer for this company and have developed several solutions for them over this time. Happy days!

When I’m breaking my neck to ensure I provide my customers with a superior service, our reputation is being marred by the misgivings of others. To this I say “no fair”.

The post Are all freelancers unreliable? appeared first on Web Design Bradford | Distynct.

One of my latest developments has been to learn the LESS language, a server side preprocessing tool for CSS.

LESS allows me to develop websites much faster by using custom variables for things like colours, font faces and much more.

Whilst LESS is not particularly new in the industry, I never used it in the past because of a bug which meant that your pages would flash with no styling for a split second. But more recently I have come across Grunt.

Grunt allows us to use preprocessors like SASS and LESS to develop websites but processes and minifies the code so that it loads much faster in your browser.

Nifty stuff!

The post Introduction of grunt to our websites appeared first on Web Design Bradford | Distynct.