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

This time of year people begin to think about bettering themselves by making positive changes in their lives or business. There seems to be no shortage of great advice to make yourself better in just a few short days with a little focus. If you run a website the ways you can improve its overall function may be on your mind. The good news is that just like any other area of your life you can take a few days to really look at your site and make small adjustments that will lead to a big payoff.  One of the most effective ways to do this is to actually keep your visitors on your site. The bounce rate is a percentage of visitors who leave your page immediately after landing on your website without clicking onto other pages. The main aim of most site owners is to develop loyal followers, but it can be very difficult to build a following when people leave your website without looking around and understanding exactly what you have to offer. This makes reducing a high bounce rate v...

Unless you've developed the enviable skill of ignoring adverts on Twitter, you can't have failed to notice The Grid, a new service promising "AI websites that design themselves." The Grid "is not another do-it-yourself website builder," the difference according their site, is that The Grid boasts an advanced AI (artificial intelligence) that can build custom solutions for its clients in mere seconds. I've often heard WYSIWYGs, and more recently website builders, likened to robots replacing human workers on factory production lines; I've yet to hear of a robot making it into the design department. Certainly, there is scope for automation in web design: When once you spent an hour setting up basic stylesheets, now you import a framework; when once you spent a day considering design options, now you choose a design pattern; when once you spent a week coding specific functionality, now you download a plugin. We all want to think of our s...

The internet can be a worrisome place. Whether you are just browsing the web, or you go online to make purchases, people are leery about everything they do on the web. From credit card fraud to identity theft, it can be tough to gain people's trust on your website. It isn't impossible to gain the trust of your website visitors. You can implement a few visual aids that will build trust and increase conversions for your website. 1. Badges If your policy includes a money-back guarantee, or you stand by the quality of your product, you can implement a badge or emblem to promote this aspect of your business. For example, if you offer a 1 Year Warranty, you could place a silver or golden sticker with this information somewhere on your sales page. Typically, you would place it near the  "Buy Now" button to help convince visitors of the quality of your products or services. The best color to use is gold, because it speaks of the value and worth of what you...

We're not all designing our content right. There. I said it. Maybe you, personally, are doing a great job, but most of us aren't. We can, and should do better. We owe it to ourselves, our clients, and most importantly, to our users. "Content is King." That's been a mantra for so long that it's almost become a cliche. We know content matters. We know why it matters. Why then, do so many of us treat it as, if not an afterthought, a matter of lower priority? Why aren't we designing our content first, before we touch any other aspect of our content-driven sites? We should be. Before we touch any other part of the design, we should be thinking about out how our users will be interacting with the content. We should figure out how that might benefit them, and the website's owners. Users don't want to spend their time admiring your website. It's not what they're there for. They're there to find what they're looking for, and ...

Material Design is Google's new visual design language. It was introduced at the 2014 I/O Conference in June, and it's beginning to find real traction in all areas of the design community. This new visual language is fascinating because it systematically addresses a lot of issues we, as designers, face on a daily basis. At the same time, it's both surprising and refreshing to see a giant such as Google publicly announce its new design direction. The free online documentation is available for everyone and it offers so much insight into what Material Design is and how it works. More importantly, it offers plenty of design lessons for us all; it's interesting, informative and innovative. There are guidelines on what to do, and what not to do, for just about anything you can think of, from button size and placement, to animations. The 3 principles of Material Design Material Design's core values are more than just a progression of the current design ...

Words are hugely powerful. They are what mostly make up the Web. Without copy the Web would be nothing. Yet in many design projects words are seen as an afterthought when they should be the focus from the off. Jason Fired of 37 Signals fame says that "It was always you design this page and then you just pour the copy in later, and it never felt right to me." Instead, good content should be what we apply our design skills to. When you mix great copy and great design magical things can happen. Great design comes from great use of words. Calls to Action Every single site on the Web should have strong calls to action. In a e-commerce store the most likely call to action is "add that product into the shopping cart and subsequently buy it." Even sites with less apparent success metrics can use calls to action. It could be as simple as to read more content or sign up to a newsletter. Calls to action should happen on every page of the site. T...

The last century has seen a tremendous shift in the value we place on artisans. Particularly in light of the mass market style production of products, craftsmanship is still sought after for its quality and distinct style. Today, web designers are amongst the list of professionals who are working with the constant threat of being automated and replaced. Luckily for us though, despite previous technological revolutions putting thousands or millions out of work... We have no reason to fear in the short term, if we can adapt. A Brief History of a Bootstrapped Education Our industry is unique in that most, if not the majority, of us have taught ourselves to some degree. Even today, there are shockingly few options in the traditional university setting that adequately teach students a solid foundation of web technologies. This isn't their fault though, with standards constantly evolving and new practices popping up faster than most university professors earn a paycheck, ...