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...