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

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...