Navneet Panchariya - Web Designer | UI Designer | Front End Developer

One of the most common complaints that I hear from bloggers is the fact that no matter how hard they try, they can’t grow their blogs past 100 or so daily page vies. Those early days are indeed the hardest, because you need to put hard work in without the certainty of achieving results. If you are in that same situation, here is a simple strategy that will certainly increase your blog traffic and make you break the 1,000 daily page views mark. In fact, the strategy could be used even if your are already over that number but have reached a traffic plateau lately. Just make sure to execute the 4 steps as planned and to spend the two hours and a half every day (obviously if you have more time available you can expand the time spent on each of the four steps proportionally). First Step: Killer Articles (1 hour per day) Spend one hour brainstorming, researching and writing killer articles (also called linkbaits, pillar articles and so on). Notice that your goal is to ...

There are several lists of web design mistakes around the Internet. Most of them, however, are the “Most common” or “Top 10” mistakes. Every time I crossed one of those lists I would think to myself: “Come on, there must be more than 10 mistakes…”. Then I decided to write down all the web design mistakes that would come into my head; within half an hour I had over thirty of them listed. Afterwards I did some research around the web and the list grew to 43 points. The next step was to write a short description for each one, and the result is the collection of mistakes that you will find below. Some of the points are common sense, others are quite polemic. Most of them apply to any website though, whether we talk about a business entity or a blog. Enjoy! 1. The user must know what the site is about in seconds: attention is one the most valuable currencies on the Internet. If a visitor can not figure what your site is about in a couple of seconds, he will probably just go some...

Choosing the right colors for your website is just as important as selecting graphics and content. This article discusses what factors to consider when selecting your website colors.  Colors have many effects on people. Certain colors can invoke specific emotions in people. Emotional reactions can affect the image of your company in the visitors mind and can have a major effect or your company’s “brand”.  If you doubt color evokes emotion, consider the phrases, “green eyed monster” “seeing red” or “in a black mood”. The green-eyed monster is a reference to jealousy, seeing red means a person is angry and a black mood refers to depression. People do associate colors with specific moods. Scientific texts have proven that different colors can make people happy, sad, relaxed, excited, angry or afraid.  Anything that can evoke those responses in people needs to be looked at carefully when designing your website. Colors tend to be classified as “neutral, “warm” o...

A lot of web designers are mainly concerned with creating beautiful websites for their clients. They want the websites they create to be picture-perfect, impressive, and works of art. They don’t put much thought into a website after they hand it over to the client. If this is your mindset, you’re leaving money on the table. Also, my experience training web designers for over 8 years tells me results (not design) make the biggest difference between the web designers who earn a lot and those who don’t. In other words, you should be making websites that make your clients more money. By thinking like a business owner you’ll be able to charge a much higher hourly rate. This mindset starts by viewing your websites as more than just a pretty face. Business owners care more about the statistics of their website. How many visitors did they get this month? Is that more than last month? How many people purchased something? How many people left without buying? Why? To a business...

Building a CSS stylesheet is not often the most difficult task when constructing a website. However putting together readable styles which still make sense months down the road may be a challenge. Web developers often get lazy and struggle to keep their documents organized. Thankfully there are some easy steps you can take to build your stylesheets with a very clean codebase. In this article I would like to introduce some ideas for writing clean CSS comments in your code. Commenting is a useful practice not just when coming back to your own files in the future, but also for other developers who are picking up your work. Play around with just a couple of these techniques and you will certainly notice a difference in the readability of your stylesheets. Basic Organization Techniques I like to usually split up my CSS documents by using comment blocks as headers. I place these between large segments of style selectors which each pertain to a different area on the page. For e...

Responsive design is quite popular these days. It is a new and revolutionary way of planning to develop websites which will be compatible for both PC, and laptop users as well as for the latest generation of tablet and mobile users. Right now it is recommended either to develop separate sites dedicated to the mobiles or tablets with separate web addresses or use a device that will detect the target devices and redirect the users to the device specific site. But there are two unique issues related to these suggestions. The device identification script that will be used to identify the mobile devices can face problem in tracking the huge number of mobile devices are continuously hitting the market every other day. Developing and maintaining so many numbers tablet and mobile specific sites may take lots of time and can be lot more expensive than the normal. Responsive design facilitates with a comparatively better solution for the disintegration of the web devices. The most i...

When was the last time you held a pencil and paper? Can you still recall? Well, technology has certainly ruled the world even in designing. People use computers and other gadgets to come up with designs for various projects. We cannot blame them because there are really certain advantages that they get in using it like having outputs faster and easier. But does this mean that we can merely forget the existence of our old pals in designing - the pencil, pen and paper? Not really because even with the advancement of technology, these old pals are still there for us. They are even vital parts of a design process. Designing starts with sketching. It is a good way to come up with better outputs. It allows you to express your ideas There could be so many ideas that you can think of for a design but how does it look like? You might even be unsure of what to work on. You can put these ideas on paper through sketching. Sketch as many as you can. Do not worry about using lots of p...

Understanding your customer and his needs is the primary key to creating customer-oriented websites. The main role of a web designer is to create useful and efficient websites, with high levels of communication, however designers fail to fulfill this function simply because they don’t listen to their clients or because they know best. This is a huge mistake when a web designer creates a custom design according to his own taste, which usually contradicts to the taste of the client and doesn’t accomplish the intended purpose of the website. It is clear that communication of the content to visitors should be the primary objective of the layout, but very often designers forget about this aspect or sacrifice it believing that aesthetics is the most important factor, influencing visitor’s experience with the website. However, it happens that users have lousy experience because the website they are visiting is image - or sales-oriented and not intended for the customers. Another re...

Freelance work gives specialists a lot of opportunities starting from individual growth in terms of experience and professionalism, and ending with great working environment, independent schedule and the lifestyle you like. But there is a serious drawback - all freelancers have to look for clients themselves and this task requires some knowledge and skills. A lot of experienced and professional designers start freelance careers having talent and abilities in web design but not knowing thing about marketing, and this is one of the most serious problems, because absence of marketing strategy will definitely result in lack of clients, lack of work and, consequently, lack of profits. What you need to understand now is that you’re selling yourself and your web design services, you are a brand and your activity has a lot to do with branding. This is why whether you are an experienced freelance web designer or just starting your career, it’s time for you to work out a marketing pla...

Web design accessibility is about making your website accessible to the maximum number of people with different kinds of disabilities and deficiencies, as well as to people using small-display devices to surf the web. A lot of countries have legislation which requires certain types of websites to comply with minimum accessibility standards in order to be open to the largest possible audience. Building accessible websites is a relatively new technique, but it can be very advantageous in terms of visitors, search engine optimization and website maintenance costs. According to the stats, millions of people are considered someway disabled and are not able to use websites in traditional way, creating accessible websites you may increase your audience significantly. Taking into consideration all the users browsing websites from their cell phones, Web TV and PDAs, by making an accessible website you can increase the number of visitors at least by 1/3. As for the SEO, search eng...

There are dozens of reasons that will justify your website redesign; however, if you’re not an IT person, you may even not realize that your website needs one. How to check whether it’s time to change the layout of your web resource? First of all, browse other websites and try to notice whether their web page design looks more stylish than yours. Aesthetics is a very important aspect of the web design, so if you understand that your website looks outdated and unattractive to the target audience, you need to take some measures, because chances are you’re losing customers every day. Remember, that in order to gain a competitive advantage over your rivals, you need to look for a high quality custom web design that will create a positive and modern image of your company, help to build brand awareness, increase customer loyalty and convey the message of your company the way you want it. Another important reason why you should consider redesigning your website is the increase of u...

I have been working as a freelance web designer for more than five years and have developed my own system of how to increase productivity when working from home, which I would like to share with you. The first thing that influences positively the overall productivity of a freelance web designer is a quiet and comfortable workplace. Ideally this should be a separate room, designated only for work. Try to eliminate all distractions that can keep you from working and take much time. Switch off all internet messengers and email notifications, your cell phone and the TV. Keep your desktop clean and orderly. Find the most productive part of the day and try to optimize your schedule to fit into this part, this way you’ll have better chances to achieve desired results. Remember you shouldn’t jump to work right away after waking up. Except for doing all the usual stuff like taking shower and having breakfast, you need to think about the ways how to manage doing more things during...

In this message I’ve decided to collect some of my thoughts on how to get rid of bad freelance designer habits, having to do more with psychology than professionalism, as well as how to break bad design habits in order to develop creativity and bring some fresh air into your work. First, let’s talk about some ways I’ve worked out to teach myself how to look out of the box that might be useful for other designers. The thing is, a lot of professional web designers, especially those having a lot of years of experience, have developed their design handwriting - they’re constantly using the same design elements they are used to, like gradients or permanent sets of icons, or web 2.0-style mirroring images and so on. After you use these things so much it’s hard to switch to another thinking and bring some creativity into the process, however, I’ll give you some tips on how to transform your traditional web design into a creative web design. Your task now is to start thinking differ...

Web design is the most complicated method supporting a communication process all over the world. Hence, content, usability, appearance and visibility are the most important aspects to consider while designing a website. That means that all materials and information placed on the website should be relevant and targeted the website’s concerned audience. Also, there should be a user-friendly interface with a reliable and simple navigation structure. A single style for graphics and text should be used when designing an interface to provide maximum comfort for the website user. A relevant, appealing and professional manner is required. Moreover, Search Engine Optimization measures should be taken to increase the search visibility and key words relevancy of the website. Considering this, once going to hire a designer you are expecting him to possess at least basic web designing and programming skills. But the quality of your website is depending not only on a web designer. Notice that...

It has been known that working as a freelance web designers is very different compared to any ordinary daily jobs. Sure they are no super agents like CIA or SWAT, but freelancers are people who have 100% freedom in accomplishing their work. For example, working from bed, toilets, cafes, Disneyland and feel free to name any locations you want. Point is, being a freelancer can be more challenging because given its freedom, it comes with a price. Price we are talking about is distractions and other unique challenges that normal working people may not encounter and these challenges can put a freelancer to grave for it will definitely affect a freelancer’s deadline. What is worse is that, being on time before due or deadline is the only requirement imposed on freelancers. Therefore again, if it freelancers failed to deliver their work on time, fullstop is the outcome. Else than the obstacles that a freelance web designers must deal with, the other issue is the ability to get as many ...