How Professional Web Designers are better than Free Templates

There are many people especially from business community ask…why hire a professional web design company especially when we are having many free resources providing us hosting, web templates/blogs and everything we need to develop our websites. Or these services are also available on a fraction of the cost that is why many cannot understand why they should pay a lot.

What we need to develop a good website?

We all know that making a great website is much more than just coding HTML. You need to be having certain elements to present your ideas successfully and also should have knowledge about the idea and how to implement it. Ignorance can be bliss for the one who may write the web content, but not for the one who visits it. Which means if your website design looks unprofessional, so will your reputation.

Why a professional design?

A good website design can change your flexibility – it’s about relinquishing pixel perfect control of a design’s appearance & concentrating instead in functionality. So it is really important for the person who is designing and developing the website to focus on its design as well as on its functionality.

How the user gets around the site, how they find the thing they are looking for and also how they can share their feedback.

Custom Content Development:

It is true that many people have access to free website designing and development sources and they are using them to create website for Abu Dhabi market, but do you know that they are lacking in quality, why?

Because every website is a different representation of different business or ideas that is it is really vital that website content must be developed according to the idea. While in case of free websites it is not possible, professionalism lacks and they fail in attracting the visitor. Use of generic templates forms obviously not work for your specific needs as every company has their own goals, products, identity, size and service.

In contrast to that design philosophy at leading software companies is to work with each client focusing on their end goals, services and products. For that purpose they create a unique design and efficient website that offers its customer unique experience, the one we expect from the internet.

WHAT NEXT if you have a professional website?

So, what you actually want from your business website, “lots of sales”, and what if your free template could not work in that way, “how it will be a good investment”. In any case, a free template cannot serve you better, but a professional web design company can. Web Design Company working for Abu Dhabi business market understands that a professional design is directly proportional to the success of a business.

A unique and fully dedicated web design can offer a complete solution to a business or enterprise.

Tips To Design A Great Website

What must be there in a good website? How to identify important web development elements? These are very common question here is your answer.

Must load fast:

The first thing now a visitor can check about your website is “its speed of loading”, so if you cannot do anything about a web page make them load as fast as possible. However, we understand that Internet connections are becoming more and more sophisticated, but no matter how fast the average connection is, there is always more content, more images available for download.

A good web developer must understand that people only notice when it is not there, so be prepared for this. The best web development company Dubai operating in UAE must understand the need of fast web pages.

Must be up-to-date:

A good development team must understand that a web page is completely different from writing for print. People become very choosy when they surf online, especially when they first land on a web page. So, make sure that what your reader wants to read you must provide them. Go in detail and be unique should be your motto to attract the customer attention.  Provide some details too about the topic so that visitors who want to read in detail to keep the loyalty of your customer.

Must have a great navigation:

A great navigation is your way of success, a web page with great, great navigation is something can help your visitor stay on the page. So assign this task to your web development team to design and develop clear, direct and easy to use navigation. In a case your web page is quite long; add anchor links to help your user to get back to the desired place.

Must have sprites and small images:

Use small images, as they can easily be downloaded. However, early web designers were interested in creating as much as possible big images, but honestly it is not a good idea to upload a photograph without resizing and optimizing it. However, very small images should be avoided as they usually fail in attracting the customer’s attention.

There is another way to speed up site images and that is use of CSS sprites. In case you have several images across several images on your website (such as navigation icons or logos), sprites can be used to cache the images so that there won’t be any need to re-download on each page your customer visits. Moreover, if the image stored as a larger image, there will be limited HTTP requests for your page which will surely increase speed tremendously.

Must have right colors:

One of the important factors of a good website design is color. Colors are one critical element of a website, but a web developer must understand that colors have specific meaning and using a wrong color combination can ruin the whole investment. On the whole development team must understand that web pages are for everyone even if they are designed for a specific locality, they can be viewed by other people.

When planning for color scheme keep in mind color symbolization and choose colors which can be accepted by everyone.

Top Four Handy Tools For Web Developers

Web developers who actually develop for a living thing mostly use some handy tools such as Firebug and Browser-shots or comment.in, plus many fonts embedding services, etc. So in this article I am going to share with you some handy, but underrated tools that are a breeze of ease for web developers – as these tools can reduce time usually taken in web development.  Especially if they are developing website for Dubai market they will surely need some great web development handy tools.

I am writing this with the best of my intention and hoping that my list will surely help you in developing some very outstanding websites. It is also important to share that most of my selection is based on online tools because they can be abducted in few seconds, let’s start the discussion.

Patternizer:

Patternizer is an online tool based on CSS3 functionality, offering complete customization facility to create an awesome product. Now you can easily check gap between CSS3 strips/checks, browse the existing library of patterns available and also check the color or angle of appearance.

Basecamp:

This tool is more beneficial for designers; basecamp is an online application for project management. It is a great tool for smaller project as providing a handy tool to create to-do-lists. It is for designers who are collaborating with other design houses. Google Chrome Dev tools:

A really nice tool for web developers more interested in increasing their productivity without compromising their creativity. This tool can help in inspecting, analyzing and debugging the pages straight from your mobile devices. For instance, if you are busy in multiple web development projects for Dubai market you will surely need some handy tools to keep track of almost every project.

Google web designer:

No web developer can forget WYSIWYG and to implement in their product, they usually look for some handy tool. Google web designer is a great tool as it offers them flexibility and access to see their designs and content on all screen sizes (desktop, tablet and mobile).

This is also a great tool for building animated ads; in fact, I am hoping that Google has big plans to create better-animated ads. So for every designer looking for a quick and reliable tool they can specifically use Google web designer.

Tiff:

Another very important tool, but less familiar among web designers¬ – they usually use their instinctsand create fonts. In fact, there are many who can distinguish between Arial and Helvetica, but I am not talking about them. There are unique, premium quality fonts that are available on many e-stores. This tool will help you in identifying a difference between typefaces. Tiff is a handy tool with support for Google Web Font library and regular system fonts, but hoping that in the future it will have a lot to offer. However, I am quite satisfied with its present functionality.

Apiary.io:

This is an easy way to design and document your API, yes, there is no need to worry as this is a very reliable tool. It offers collaborative design, generates a document, integrated code samples, automated testing and mock API, in fact, all pack in one great tool.

The Evolution Of Dubai Web Design

Web design trends are like photos in fashion magazines, they change in days and especially If we are discussing Dubai market. The competent Dubai web design agency is flexible enough to adapt fast changing web design trends, thus it is vital for designers to have appropriate knowledge of current design trends. 

 

Trends we would like to see LESS of:

1.    UNNECCESSARY SCROLLING

Most of the time we like to scroll around to see “what is inside” and mostly we like scrolling. But sometimes web developers overwhelmed and use unbelievable scrolling effects, so the process loses its practical sense or slow down the user. And this is just not acceptable, especially when everything is so focused around quick content consumption that is why it is advised to avoid unnecessary scrolling.

 

2.    ALWAYS RESPONSIVE

Responsive Design is taking over the web design industry, simply it is a general tendency to have a website responsive across all mobiles, tablets and desktop devices. However, I am not trying to convince you that responsive design is a dreck, in fact, it is a must have for almost every website. But this one reality is not true for many successful websites; in fact, they are not responsive at all and still are very productive. The reason behind such ignorance of trend is that they just do not need a responsive design. 

Does your websites are loaded with heavy background images, or flash animation or dynamic content? Then it is better to divert them to the mobile version of a website or if your website is less complex you can stay away from responsive design. 

 

3.    BROWSER COMPATIBILITY

Unlike a common believe your website doesn’t need to work in all browser versions (Safar, Firefox, Android and so on). It is better to check on Google analytics, which browser is most liked by your client and you can simply develop for such browser only. It will give you more time to focus on your website development and help you in saving some dollars.

 

4.    CAPTCHA FORMS:

“Re-enter the Code”, I hope that 2014 will become the last year of verifications of us through Captcha process ¬– we all know that we are not bots and it should be understood by leading websites too. We want some other plugins to spot spammers, but guys say no to Captcha verifications. Another thing most of us do not want to see is the boxes outside the forms, especially when there is enough space need to be filled. So, it is better to not interrupt the conversation and put superfluous barriers between people and their goals.

 

5.    FLASH WEBSITES AND INTROS:

Flash animations, a good old way to ruin your website, we all understand that their era is ending now. We hope that 2014 will let them RIP at last.

However, there are many other trends we would like to see less of includes content overdose, overly hero image installation, auto-play videos, popups, advertising sidebars and “hello world” blog post.

Common Design Mistakes Web Designers Make

Designing is mostly taken as a confused term and most designers mix print and web design as a same thing which is absolutely different. Traditional design is what it takes with a design that is transferred to paper and it has nothing to do with interactive design. Most of the time print design is an idea that is transferred on paper to represent the brand identity or to achieve some marketing goals. However, web design company Abu Dhabi is absolutely different and is mostly using professional creativity rather than just emotional imagination. Interactive design is what that is the biggest concern when someone starts designing for its website. Interactive design is far more than just emotions that are why it needs someone that has hands-on experience of designing tools as well as can think out of the box to reach the targeted audience. However, web design and interactive design has a close connection, but mostly designers do not bother much about such thing. The purpose of this write-up is to share some major mistakes which must be avoided by a web design company.

Avoid large block of content

Have you ever visited a website and get a creepy feeling because of the ‘big blocks of content’ becomes ‘a big chunk of distraction’? Adding big blocks of content is a very common mistake usually committed by first-time web designers. The reason is they forget the pattern of reading internet readers usually follow (they tend to scan the important information and does not read every single word) and in case they could not find relevant information they instantly leave the place. Large content blocks are a big distraction as they usually are not easy in reading resulting customer loss.

Solution:

To fix the issue, it is really important to share your message effectively so that your visitor will easily get the main theme of your website (may be reading just a few lines). According to experts, it is just a matter of few seconds (not more than five) and if your content is engaging them for long without giving them a clear picture of your business they will leave quickly. So, it is a must to write your content in a clear and concise manner, and always in small chunks.

Avoid Contrasting Color Combinations

Color scheming plays very important role in designing an eye-catching website, but what most web designers forgets is contrasting colors are not eye-catching. Contrasting bright colors may look good in clothing store, but they cannot be eye-catching on a web portal.

Solution:

Use soothing colors that make website content easy to read, one of the most famous color scheme is using a blue palette on a white background.

Never Use Fancy Fonts

There are Fonts that are swirly and are dotted, but wait a minute if you are using them on your website; websites with such Fonts are hard to retain the attention of a customer. Avoid using fancy fonts instead design readable yet elegant fonts that are attractive enough to grab the attention of a customer.

Why should you prefer local web development company?

When you need an online platform for your business, you either choose a local web development company or look for an offshore service provider. However, offshore companies offer several advantages specially reduced cost, many businesses are still preferring the services of local developers over them. There are a number of reasons for this preference and we are covering in this article.

Trust:

There are several benefits a local web development company can offer you and the best thing is trust. It is really easy to trust someone that you can physically meet and talk for several hours about your project than the one who is sitting at a remote location and interacting with you using the internet. Honestly, on the internet, there are many cowboys, and in case you want to verify the legitimacy of a company you need to see them physically which is not possible in case of an offshore company.

Same time zone: Another benefit working with a local web development company is that they also work in the same time zone – this will help you in sharing your concerns timely and you do not need to wait hours for them to come back to the job. Your emails will be replied quickly and you can easily call them during their working hours. However, many offshore companies work in a different time zone that will make them difficult to approach, for instance, for a design concept they usually call and make discussions which is obviously not a beneficial approach.

Understand the market:

If you are a business owner who wants to target the local audience then it is important to select a local web development companies in Dubai. The reason is that they understand your traditions better and know how to respond to the current market trends. The local company will tailor your websites according to your needs to make your customers feel familiar with the product or services. For example, a local web design company can provide local downtown street photos, such as downtown photos (an expression of your local market), it will engage your customers in a better way. While, in the case of offshore companies it is a rare case as they follow a standard pattern and are unable to provide such customized skill.

Targeted traffic:

For a successful business website, a huge amount of traffic is vital. People use different expressions to search on the internet which is obviously different in each region and only local development company can understand this. They understand the market trend and work accordingly to get your websites at the top ranks. Another benefit a local company can give to its clients is that they are available anytime. Their designers are ready to listen to you anytime, thus, you will expect your desired results always. Language can become a big barrier, especially for offshore companies while local companies understand the local trends and language.

Top 5 Characteristics Of A Good Design Agency

Website design and development agency are someone who will give you a strong shoulder when you need to conquer the digital world.  They will deliver you a perfect website solution on time and with all the features you want in your business website. Also, they take care of your budget concerns and deliver you timely.
 

However, it must be kept in mind that web design takes time as it is a complex process and mostly require extensive client involvement. The client is taken as a serious entity and most of the time is considered part of the development team.In order to find a great solution that can satisfy your customer five must follow characteristics are listed below;
 

Friendly:

To develop a complete web solution a website development agency may need several months, which means many interactive sessions with the client and too many questions that need to be answered by the client. In order to complete the target, a friendly attitude with the client can help you in a lot of ways, for instance, make you more productive.
 

Listen:

A good web design agency may need several sessions with a client and to get the most from your client, you need to become a really good listener. You need to listen to your client even if they do not have any clear idea about what they actually want, show them some samples and hear what they say about. This will eventually build a strong client-company relationship.
 

Use Proactive approach:

Most of the time, customers who consult to a web development agency comes with no clue what they actually want. You need to be proactive; you need to ask them different questions about their business, their business objectives and why they want to have a website. It will help you in determining what you can actually deliver them, ask them about their budget thresholds and proceed with some visionary website samples. This will help you in identifying all objectives that your developed web development project must deliver. The most important thing you must ask to your client is their future business objectives too. It will surely help in determining the right technology and other development tools and objectives.
 

Plan for deadlines:

Time is money, and for a business it is more precious than diamonds. Setting achievable deadlines is something very important. These deadlines must be met in order to retain the customers and earn their trust. It is also very important that the deadlines of deliverables must be shared with the customer. They must know when they will be able to see their website.

How To Find A Perfect Branding Agency For Your Business?

Branding is a very important term in the business world and it is equally important for small to mid-size companies. To build a brand identity, it is really important to hire a professional company that will help you in achieving your business objectives. However, it is really important to hire a company that can help you build your brand integrity in the business world but how to find a perfect branding agency in Dubai?

 

Set a budget

Setting a budget for your business is very important as it will help you in determining how your business branding will be done. Planning is very important for business branding and in case you have hired a branding agency it is better to discuss with them about the budget and cost. Moreover, it is really important to share what you have in your mind about business branding and where you want to see your business after one year. It will help you determine the cost of your business. Moreover, it is really important to understand the actual size of your business as it will help you setting your financial goals. Goals and objectives are really important before trying to brand your business as they will help in selecting your path to success. For instance, set number of traffic that your website will receive with branding and also predict figures in sales as a target.  Also write it down how you want to see your brand’s progress in coming few months and what it must achieve in the time period.

 

Do some research

Finding a good branding agency in Dubai could have been a tricky job as there are plenty of companies that are offering their services. It is better to do some research on the internet or you can ask your friends about a good company. Shortlist at least three companies and then check their packages and then crosscheck their services with your branding objectives. After doing thorough research call them and ask about their services (this will help you in finding not only a perfect branding agency but a good strategy as well).

Now you have made your initial selection, check them on the social media and see how their customers respond to their services. This will help you in figuring out who they are and how they can help you. Moreover, their social media presence will also tell you how they are handling their own branding strategy. You can easily check, do they check their website properly? Are the owners coming online and check for customers’ feedback? Do they progress on social media with time or stick to few number of likes?

After determining all these facts go and check out their portfolio examples. If they have a dedicated page for successful case studies look at it and then make your selection. Although, this may look like a very difficult job, but eventually it brings very positive results.