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

Designing in the browser used to scare me. Not because it seemed hard but because I thought I would end up with a design made up of a lot of little boxes, something that was so generic and bland I would end up redoing it in Photoshop. That fear turned out to be completely unwarranted. Not only did my designs become more focused, I also completed them faster and got clients involved earlier in the process through interaction and discussion. It's not as tough as you think Design is design. It doesn't matter if it's being done in a software program or being written in code. Designing in the browser isn't any harder than designing in Photoshop. Like any tool you need to use it to learn it and eventually master it. Design is an iterative process, one that is made more difficult by working for clients. It's hard sometimes for clients to picture exactly what you are describing; designing in the browser can get them involved throughout the process rather...

You've built your startup from the ground up. You're ready to see your sales really start to take off. There's just one challenge left to tackle: building a compelling website. You may have tons of great ideas, but unless you incorporate all the right elements and engage the right audience, your online presence will sink, not soar. Ready to build a powerful startup website? Here are 4 essential elements you won't want to forget... Focus on the function of your website Is your site meant to inform? To sell your products? To encourage visitors to try your service? If your startup involves selling products online, you'll need a software solution designed for e-commerce like Shopify, Magento, OpenCart or WooCommerce (just to name a few). If your site involves just information, consider using WordPress or a similar open-source content management system like Drupal to get your site up and running. Whatever functionality you need, make sure you buil...

Infinite scrolling has became a common design pattern in recent years. With many high profile social networks adopting the solution, it's come to be one of the most widely adopted patterns out there. Though however popular, every design pattern always has its own unique strengths and weaknesses we have to plan for. Done badly, and infinite scrolling will wreck your UX and guarantee total failure as users desert you in droves. Get it right, and you'll have an intuitive, popular and successful site. Understanding why infinite scrolling drives engagement When implementing a design pattern, it's always critical to evaluate the pros and cons for each unique scenario. What resulted in more user engagement for someone else, may actually result in less user engagement from your own users. For infinite scrolling in particular, it's all about the type of content users are interacting with. Being able to determine what type of content goals you have for...

We all know intuitively what makes a website look bad: overused bevel effects, corny clip art, overcrowded layouts. These annoyances are easily corrected by developing with design fundamentals in mind-the same principles used by professional designers and artists alike. Great websites bring together form and function. In fact, well-designed websites are seen as more credible, according to a Stanford study and are actually easier to use (as studied by researcher Don Norman). So here are five fundamentals to help you keep quality design at the forefront of your practice. Follow the rules... mostly In design school, they'll give you a list of principles to abide by that assign rules to beauty-elements like layout, order and symmetry. But as you advance, you're then told to break the rules a bit to create places for a viewer's eyes to look by employing elements like variety, tension or contrast. Use imagery and icons to communicate when possible There ar...

It could be hard to swallow sometimes but business owners need to acknowledge that their websites may not be as perfect as they believed it to be. Understandably, some of us decided to create a website one fine day with little to no experience or help whatsoever. Being overly enthusiastic, we may have overlooked issues that should be avoided, but don't let this discourage you the next time you hear someone make a statement that degrades your website. Poor Navigation What constitutes poor navigation? Having your website visitors navigate through almost a dozen navigational links that will lead them to 20 other pages, that's what. Think of your website as a nice, cozy shopping mall. A mall owner wants to keep customers shopping and buying from its tenants all day, and similarly so should you ensure visitors click and visit your pages without navigating away. However, visitors will easily get irritated if you confuse them with a messy navigational bar, for example....

When you start a sentence "wouldn't it be cool if ...," you're halfway there. Innovations and trends beget more innovations and trends. And the part that comes after that declaration - execution - has been bending the web in a new direction this year. Design morphed into minimalist, clean form. App-style interfaces scaled our designs to fit on smaller and smaller screens. Which trends will continue? Some seem set on course. Visually, the ideas of minimal style, scalable graphics and touch-based user interfaces are here to stay. For technology, retina images, cross-platform building and HTML5 will continue to drive development. But the next great ideas probably haven't even been put to paper (ok, computer screen) yet. Who knows what will change before designers worldwide unite in London for the Future of Web Design conference in April 2014? The seeds of those concepts will probably be sown in workshops about responsive design by Jason Pamental, CSS arch...

Information Architecture (IA) is not just a buzz word. Information Architecture is the art of structuring information to offer better usability in a digital landscape. It is often used in companies developing complex information systems, but lately its use in web design has been made popular as well. It is actually an important factor of a successful website and if you're not focusing on it, you're probably making lots of mistakes that you don't even realize-all of these mistakes are undermining your website and are decreasing your conversions. We all want our websites to be easy to use and today's guide will teach you how to achieve this, as we take a look at common IA mistakes that make your website less usable. Misunderstanding your audience This is key to anything you do, but it is extremely important when speaking of IA, because not knowing who visits your website can't help you create solutions for them. Understanding your audience is cruci...

Before you first meet with project stakeholders for a website design or redesign, you'll want to prepare yourself by researching the company the website represents and the nature of the audience it serves. You also need to familiarize yourself with any existing site's content and features. That first meeting will be where you set the course of the design, establishing the goals and requirements of the project. The more informed you are at this stage, the better your input, and your requests for input, will be. How do you approach the research steps for a website redesign? Do you follow a written checklist, or do you take intuitive twists and turns around the basic questions, "What is this website about?" and "How can we make it better?" Your answer probably lies somewhere along the spectrum between those two extremes. It's also likely to vary considerably from project to project. To ensure that you'll bring valuable insights to the ta...

If you're anything like me, you spend a lot of time studying other designers' work. I like to look at projects for the experience and the interactions created for the users. Obviously, as more techniques come about, the changes in web design take place and newer, better things arrive. We've experienced the life of the splash page, the introduction header, parallax scrolling and so many other things that have affected the web experience. However, those things were mainly aesthetic and didn't really change the way we create websites. Lately, I've been thumbing through some websites and have seen a new change. One I think I like, but am not sure. A change that I could see really reinventing the way we even think about designing websites. It would cause us to be smarter and think more intuitively about our audience. And that couldn't be a bad thing. This technique is something that's not unique to the world of responsive and mobile design. However, f...

It's the time of year when every blogger on the Web pulls out a crystal ball, dusts off the tarot cards and spends hours staring pointedly into tea cups in an effort to predict the trends for the coming year. The resulting lists usually range in plausibility from the absolutely certain (Apple will release a new device) to the utterly implausible (it will be a TV). The truth is that it is extremely rare for any trend to arrive out of the blue. If you look carefully you'll see the roots of every major trend in the coming year start to develop in 2013 (or earlier). Whilst it's possible that a genuinely revolutionary concept will be popularized, it's far more likely that 2014 will be a year of small incremental gains, inspired by, or in response to, steady technological development. The future of web design is already evident, we just need to look behind us to see it. Here are 7 predictions for 2014 that are already proving true, and how you can survive them...

I'm sure you've heard of personas and scenarios, but let's start with a quick explanation of how they are useful in the design process: A persona is an elementary tool of usability and user experience design and describes a typical member of your target audience. Although a persona is a fictional representation of a user, it is based on real data; the persona should be as close to a real potential user as possible. A scenario is a 'story' based on the persona's experience of, journey with, and actions taken while interacting with your app or site. It explains the process a user might follow, their capabilities, reasons, goals, and motivations in relation to the site. Scenarios explain everyday situations; how the app or site fits in the persona's daily life, what got them to use it, how they use it, why they keep on using it, and so on. Together they describe the various contexts in which someone could be using your site. This, in turn, flush...