THE ART OF NAVIGATION MENU

EXPLORING THE MAIN SECRETS OF WEBSITE DESIGN

Nowadays you can see various different types of navigation menus with interesting, creative and unusual web designs. The navigation menu on a website is like a road sign on a street or a level directory in a shopping mall. You cannot reach your destination without first knowing where you are. Like in real life, navigation in web design is very important and plays a major role in a website’s usability as well as in user experience. Design navigation menu is the primary hint for the user to know about your site. After all, once the user gets lost, the cool dynamic effect and interesting content will be meaningless. Even if our site has a search function, the search box cannot be the only tool for the user to navigate. The navigation menu is one of the main factors to determine the usability of a site, and if visitors can easily find the content they are looking for without effort, they will be more likely to stay on your site instead of closing the page to leave. Effective website navigation menu design can help your site to increase page views, improve user experience, and even increase sales and profits (Mockplus.com). Let’s have a look at the principles the web designer should keep in mind! It is time to start!

INDICATE WHERE YOU ARE

It is crucial to let the user know where he is at all times. You can do this by changing the link’s background, color of the page name or turn the text bold in the navigation menu to make it different from others. Austin Eastciders uses a different color and background to indicate the page the user is on. This indicator can also work as a subtle design change, for example by using a different web navigation background which creates the feeling that other menu items are in depth.  
 

Another example, Media Surgery uses a darker color as an indicator for an opened subpage. Simple, but effective.

 
 

COMMUNICATE THE CONTEXT

To be consistent with your content and navigation provide some context for website users to find things they need quickly. You can place small icons related to the content you link to or short descriptions to give an overview of what the page is about. Sarah Parmenter uses short and nice captions under main navigation to provide some information about the subpages the main navigation is linking to.  
 

TRY VERTICAL SLIDING NAVIGATION

According to CreativeBloq.com, Increasing numbers of websites are adopting the vertical navigation trend, and when it works it really works well. It's particularly popular on portfolios or creative web agencies that push the boundaries of traditional web design.  
  The example above from AWARD is a fantastic case of using the vertical navigation while keeping it visible at all times. Icons link from the side so you can click an icon instead of the hamburger icon. It’s an experimental approach to navigation design but it can work on creative-oriented websites.

Why use this?

Only try this technique if you’re going for a full-screen layout that moves away from a traditional grid design. A working vertical navigation isn’t easy to create from scratch, and it's tricky to get it working in responsive designs. However if you’re curious to experiment and willing to try new ideas then vertical navigations can be a refreshing twist.

WHY A GOOD NAVIGATION MENU MATTERS

Google likes consistent navigation. It is good to have consistent navigation not only for users to understand and get the idea of how to navigate through your website but also for search engines to index your website. Search engine robots will crawl through your website in order to index your website and put the links in the search engine results page. If you want to be visible, pay attention to good navigation design and get more website traffic. Often overlooked, your website’s navigation menu plays a key role in your web visitor’s experience, how well your website traffic converts into potential customers, and your website’s search engine rankings. A recent survey by Web.com notes a glaring disparity between consumers’ and small business owners’ perception of how well small businesses are executing their marketing on their websites and social media platforms. Of the small business “decision-makers” who were surveyed, 61% rated their websites positively, while only 46% of consumers shared the same view. The navigation menu should be descriptively labeled to minimize the amount of work your visitors have to do to find information most relevant to them on your website. Use keywords that your target market is using to search for businesses in your industry. Don’t label your pages “What We Do” or “Who We Are”. Users are looking for concise and specific terms that look familiar. Think about what your users are looking for, and what words would resonate with them. Have a look at ThriveHive’s navigation menu. Instead of using a generic label like “Our Services” we used “Marketing Solutions”. Instead of using a generic label like “About Us”, we used “What is ThriveHive”.  

  WHAT ELSE IS IMPORTANT TO KNOW?

One last area of the main navigation you should consider is adding a call-to-action. CTAs can be placed in either the main menu or up higher in the courtesy links. Using a CTA can help call out a very specific menu item that you want your visitors select, such as signing up for your service or requesting a consultation. A well laid out menu will help your website visitors understand what you do quickly and bring them to where they want to go easily. For example, Mildren Events have a call-to-action added to their header menu. Consider it for your website too! The call to action is a way to direct focus and give the visitor a clear route to accomplishing a goal. When developing call to action buttons, consider what you want the visitor to do: what your primary aim is, and how this fits in with their objectives. It might be to log them in, sign them up, complete a sale, ask them to contact you or join a mailing list. Whatever it is, you will probably want to drive a sale in some way. Keep in mind: a call-to-action is not only essential for big web companies. The same holds true for any website. The color of your call-to-action button really matters; it’s rooted in color psychology. Testing has revealed that green and orange buttons work well, but on some sites, purple outperforms both. Many corporate websites are blue, and orange is the opposite color, which may explain why orange works so well. Green is the color of good luck and generosity, making it the ideal color choice if you’re trying to get someone to make a positive step. As well as choosing the color for your call-to-action, make sure that the colors are consistent across the board. Consistency helps to anchor the visitor’s eye and establish a meaning for your call to action. It’s OK to use the call to action more than once on a page providing they are the same color. (You may want to repeat your call to action above and below the fold, for example, so the user always sees one on-screen) (WebsitetoolTester.com).

CONCLUSION

Would you want Blueninja.io help you with Web design and Website Development? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing (SMM) are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article!  

With creativity in heart, with an idea in mind!

ART OF LOGO DESIGN

The importance of great logo design

Introduction

Logos can be considered as a brand’s name card and the visual representation of their marketing efforts, and they resonate with consumers on a variety of fronts. The design process must be aimed at making the logo immediately recognizable, inspiring trust, admiration, loyalty and an implied superiority. The logo is one aspect of a company’s commercial brand or economic entity, and its shapes, colours, fonts, and images usually are different from other logos in the same market niche.

Logos are used to identify.

Tailorbrands states that a logo is a company’s first introduction to consumers. While this is not the only factor consumers consider when shopping, a logo can be an appealing invitation to learn more. Well-designed logos tell customers about a company with colours, shapes, and different fonts. Moreover, a visually striking image can intrigue customers, leaving them curious about the company behind a bold design. Creating a logo design is a vital part of your company’s marketing efforts. Ignoring the design aspect to cut corners, save money, and shorten the design time frame can have more expensive consequences down the line. A company with poor design and branding can become associated with their worst efforts, making it hard to shake the negative image. On the other hand, a memorable logo can serve as a springboard for a new brand strategy and can redefine a company’s image to consumers.

Effective Logo Design

One of the vital steps in building a successful brand for your business is the company logo as this often forms the first impression of your company. After spending quality time researching and choosing a business name, the logo will be the piece that carves out a memorable part of your business in the customers mind once they start associating your company with the logo. Great logo design is more than just displaying your name in an appealing font. They say people form an opinion of a company within the first few seconds. Powerful logo design should be strong and balanced without clutter to distract from its message. The following are solid guidelines for inspiring logo design and your branding.

• It should be distinctive and easy to spot at a glance.
• The visuals and imagery should be appropriate for your company.
• It should work in harmony with your company name.
• Your logo should always be created in a legible font.
• And finally, the logo should look great in black and white as well as colour.

These are the basics. During the logo design process, every single part of the process should be carefully thought about and experimented with. For example, did you know that even the font that you choose can help customers form an opinion of the service they may receive at your company? Colour should also be a major decision regarding your logo. There are many colour theories that prove that colour can seriously affect the viewers desire, trust and willingness to use a particular business. For example law and financial companies tend to favour strong powerful colours to project trust and stability. Natural health companies favour green to show the vibrant, earthy nature connection. Choose a logo created by a professional designer that understands the important factors of logo design to fit you with a logo that works for your company and brand. You will be more likely to be remembered and recognised by your existing and potential customers and build confidence in buyers that they are choosing the business that is right for them.

 Memorable

One of the most important aspects of a good logo design is that it is as memorable as possible. And the trick here is to keep it simple. Surprisingly, a simple logo can still adequately reflect the values of your business. According to American Marketing Association (AMA), this year the global brand strategy, design and experience firm Siegel + Gale released “Logos Now,” a study that measures how logo styles evoke distinct brand perceptions and personalities—in other words, what makes logos memorable. The study found that the most memorable logos in the U.S. and U.K.—Nike, Apple, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s—have several common characteristics: namely, they are simple and deliver positive brand benefits. The study also found that consumers are more likely to attach positive attributes to familiar logos, and find brands with familiar logos to be trustworthy, respectable and reliable.  
  A great logo is not only instantly recognizable; it should also elicit an immediate emotional reaction. When the logo is simple in design, the mind is able to process it more quickly and efficiently so that your emotional side is able to take over. Yet when a logo has a complicated design, it requires too much cognitive processing for it to have much of an emotional impact.

Simple

A good logo is distinctive, appropriate, practical, graphic and simple in form, and it conveys the owner’s intended message. A concept or “meaning” is usually behind an effective logo, and it communicates the intended message. A logo should be able to be printed at any size and, in most cases, be effective without colour. A great logo essentially boils down to two things: great concept and great execution. Simplicity makes a logo design easily recognizable, versatile and memorable. Good logos feature something unexpected or unique, without being "overdrawn."  
  Simple designs are typically the most attractive. Besides, the beauty of a simple logo design is that it requires less cognitive processing. Your logo should say it all. The instant people see your logo, they should have all the information they need to have a complete emotional reaction. This is the moment they make a decision about you, good or bad, according to the source. For Audi, the iconic four interlaced rings, which are now symbolic of Audi, did not come into existence until 1932, when Audi merges with DKW, Horch, and Wanderer to cut costs in reaction to the depression. The rings were meant to symbolize the unity of the companies, which also comprised the new Auto Union AG.

Versatile

Color is very subjective and emotional. This can distract from the overall design - say if you saw your logo in all red, that color may be the first thing that you respond to and not the composition of the design elements. I will not even consider submitting color suggestions to a client for review until they have signed off on a final black and white logo.

— Patrick Winfield

Black and white logos have always been popular for their versatility, ease of reproduction, and beauty. Even in the modern world of instant colour prints and neon flashing at every corner, a basic black and white design can be a huge success. The suggestion might not be applicable for particular industry or type of business, while the practice is becoming more and more popular in recent years. Many luxury brands have picked up on this fact, and choose to represent themselves in black and white.  
  According to the source, an effective logo works across a variety of media and applications. For this reason, logos should be designed in vector format, to ensure that they scale to any size. Ask yourself, is your logo still effective if it is printed...

• In one color?
• In a reverse color?
• The size of a postage stamp?
• As large as a billboard?

One way to create a versatile logo is to begin designing in black and white. This allows you to focus on the concept and shape, rather than color, which is subjective in nature.  
 

Conclusion

Would you want Blueninja.io help you with Web design and Website Development? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing (SMM) are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article!

ANIMATION IN WEB DESIGN

ANIMATIONS ADVANTAGES, DISADVANTAGES & TIPS IN WEB DESIGN

Introduction

In a today’s competitive world, the web design undoubtedly matters, because it can reflect how your brand is doing their business, and ultimately how your clients and potential customers see and feel about you. Making a great impression is crucial, as you can potentially gain and keep a customer for life. If you ask professional website designers to define what can be considered as a good web design, there are high chances that they will all give you a wide variety of different answers. However, the most well-designed things are based on a number of specific web design principles that result in useful, beautiful products that ultimately give consumers a deep level of satisfaction and enjoyment when used. One of those principles that we are going to discuss today is simplicity and the use of animation.  
  Auxesisinfotech explains that, according to web credibility research from Stanford, 75% of people admit judging the credibility of a business based on their web design. So for sure, credibility has a straight relation to how likely people are to make a purchase. That clearly means one is losing his clients if their site has a poor web design. One needs to ensure that his website conveys that they are in a genuine and trustworthy business, which is often decided by the caliber of the web design.

Animation | Do I need to use it?

Animation is one of the most impressive and effective tools that you have to use on your website design and development. The thought-out use of animation on your webpage can help you increase your targeted traffic in a way that ordinary text-based content cannot do for you. There are plenty of advantages of including animation in your web design plan. For instance, it keeps your visitors on your website significantly longer, reducing your bounce rate. As a result, it leads to the higher level of interest in your site and encourages relatively higher number of shares and revisits. However, it is crucial to always keep in mind that, even with animation, your website design has to be as simple and clean as possible. Below are the thoughts of famous SEO (search engine optimization) specialist, Neil Patel, on this matter: “One of the biggest problems with websites is that they become outdated quickly. It seems like, as soon as you’re about to finish with one update, it’s time for another. But it doesn’t need to be that way. Busy website designs lose their allure and become dated quickly.” For instance, “while most news sites are cluttered and distracting, the Los Angeles Times leaves its site clean. It draws focus to a small selection of headings and uses white space for the rest:  
    Despite the fact, designing with motion is a great way to draw user’s interest to a particular part of your website, as well as to lead the user’s eye to important areas of a web design, and make a website memorable, it can also cause some drawbacks, that have to be taken into account as well. Avatar New York states that, before you add a set of animations to your website design, there are potential drawbacks to consider, especially if animations are not implemented properly and negatively impact UX.  Getting overloaded with animations clutter the interface, which leads to a worsened user experience and a negative impact on the loading speed of your website. Slow loading is considered as one of the biggest causes of users abandoning websites, and animations can slow speeds down significantly if not executed with attention to the factors, such as quality, scaling, and minimal coding. Besides, un-optimized animations can also result in rendering issues. It is crucial to take into account that users do not want to wait for pages or animations to render, so make sure that rendering and loading take less than two (2) to three (3) seconds. One of the types of animation effects that will make your website design more eye-catchy, without making it too ‘heavy’ is a parallax effect. Parallax scrolling design refers to the use of visual effects combined with 2D scrolling to create the illusion of depth and layers in a user’s experience.  
  IQ Computing states that, there are the following benefits of using parallax scrolling, which are:

• Stimulate users with different levels of depth and a sense of animation Encourages longer page visit time as user curiosity leads to scrolling through the entire design (including the highlighted call to actions)
• Emphasizes professionalism and higher level of creativity of your company/organization (this can vary depending on the industry and size of the website involved)

The practical approach of using parallax effect is explained by WPVortex, which specifies that from the customer perspective, one of the best things about parallax web design involves function – it helps users overcome the barriers presented by being a new user, for instance, and consolidates information in a visually pleasing way. When a new visitor enters the website, they need to get a sense of what the site offers but clicking around a dozen different pages cannot be considered a great way to do that. Parallax websites allow designers to set up content so that all of the key information is in one place – on the homepage – and that information has a narrative structure, i.e. one-page websites. The long scrolling format also allows readers to move through it at their own pace. Finally, parallax is relatively popular compared to other animation effects, as it offers extraordinary web marketing appeal, largely through the experience of dynamic motion. Rather than a flat website design, where readers are faced with big blocks of text and static images, parallax sites offer a high level of interactivity that can make it seem as though the user has climbed inside the webpage. As a conclusion, animation does not need to be overwhelming in your website design, as there is a high chance that the user might just ‘get tired’ browsing throughout the website. Customfitonline states that animations need to be used in the following cases:

• to add visual interest (i.e. web page slides in from the side of the screen),
• act as a response (i.e. hovering your mouse over an item and something happens),
• act as a notification (i.e. a bouncing icon might mean attention is required).

Conclusion

The web design is a tool that should be wisely developed and implemented, taking into consideration the characteristics and preferences of your client base. Who are they? What do they like? How can their attention be attracted? Consider your website design as a part of a big mechanism: every detail matters, and if something does not work, the entire business will be affected. Despite of many opinions, it is not compulsory for the web design to be complex. If your graphic designer is capable of implementing amazing 3D graphics and animation on your website, yes, it is good. However, it is not the most important factor. As in any marketing effort, the ability to understand and address the needs and preferences of your customer is what makes your business a market leader! Would you want Blueninja.io help you with Web design and Website Development? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing (SMM) are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article! With creativity in heart, with an idea in mind!