Category: Web site tips

A font’s shapes might be designed, but its personality is discovered. It’s only in its natural habitat, surrounded by other typefaces, that a font truly develops a unique voice. Designing with a font — even while it’s still being drawn — is a vital part of the creative process: seeing how a font performs, especially in the company of other typefaces, helps us better understand its personality, articulate its purpose, and perfect its voice.

Know your intentions.

Doug Firebaugh of SocialMediaBlogster.com has identified seven psychological needs we may be looking to meet when we log on: acknowledgment, attention, approval, appreciation, acclaim, assurance, and inclusion. Before you post, ask yourself: Am I looking to be seen or validated? Is there something more constructive I could do to meet that need?

Be your authentic self.

In the age of personal branding, most of us have a persona we’d like to develop or maintain. Ego-driven tweets focus on an agenda; authenticity communicates from the heart. Talk about the things that really matter to you. If you need advice or support, ask for it. It’s easier to be present when you’re being true to yourself.

If you propose to tweet, always ask yourself: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?

Sometimes we post thoughts without considering how they might impact our entire audience. It’s easy to forget how many friends are reading. Two hundred people make a crowd in person, but online that number can seem insignificant. Before you share, ask yourself: is there anyone this might harm?

Offer random tweets of kindness.

Every now and then I ask on Twitter, “Is there anything I can do to help or support you today?” It’s a simple way to use social media to give without expectations of anything in return. By reaching out to help a stranger, you create the possibility of connecting personally with followers you may have otherwise known only peripherally.

Experience now, share later.

It’s common to snap a picture with your phone and upload it to Facebook or email it to a friend. This overlaps the experience of being in a moment and sharing it. It also minimizes intimacy, since your entire audience joins your date or gathering in real time. Just as we aim to reduce our internal monologues to be present, we can do the same with our digital narration.

Be active, not reactive.

You may receive email updates whenever there is activity on one of your social media accounts, or you might have your cell phone set to give you these types of alerts. This forces you to decide many times throughout the day whether you want or need to respond. Another approach is to choose when to join the conversation, and to use your offline time to decide what value you have to offer.

Respond with your full attention.

People often share links without actually reading them, or comment on posts after only scanning them. If the greatest gift we can give someone is our attention, then social media allows us to be endlessly generous. We may not be able to reply to everyone, but responding thoughtfully when we can makes a difference.

Use mobile social media sparingly.

In 2009, Pew Research found that 43 percent of cell phone users access the Web on their devices several times a day. It’s what former Microsoft employee Linda Stone refers to as continuous partial attention—when you frequently sign on to be sure you don’t miss out anything. If you choose to limit your cell phone access, you may miss out online, but you won’t miss what’s in front of you.

Practice letting go.

It may feel unkind to disregard certain updates or tweets, but we need downtime to be kind to ourselves. Give yourself permission to let yesterday’s stream go. This way you won’t need to “catch up” on updates that have passed but instead can be part of today’s conversation.

Enjoy social media!

These are merely suggestions to feel present and purposeful when utilizing social media, but they aren’t hard-and-fast rules. Follow your own instincts and have fun with it. If you’re mindful when you’re disconnected from technology, you have all the tools you need to be mindful when you go online.

1. By 2013, more people were use mobile phones than PCs to get online

2. Smartphones and tablets owners already spend more time on their mobile devices than PCs.

3. By 2015, there will be one mobile device for every person on earth. The mobile era has arrived.

4. Mobile searches have grown by 400% since 2010

5. Most users prefer mobile sites to applications for researching prices, product reviews and shopping.

6. 71% of mobile phone users expect websites to load as quickly on their mobile phones as their desktops.

7. 43% of mobile web users are unlikely to return to a slow loading site

8. 57% would not recommend a business with a bad mobile site

9. 40% have turned to a competitor’s website after a bad mobile experience

10. 48% of users become annoyed with sites that have not been optimized for mobile devices

Fun facts:

3 times more smartphones are being activated every minute around the world than there are babies born

25 years’ worth of Angry Birds are played everyday

Design is an imprecise term. Especially when used in regular language.

For instance, someone who believes “design” is quantified solely by a product’s visual appeal might be disappointed when they get a set of gray boxes and lines — a wireframe — as a deliverable created by a talented designer.

Design is not principally measured by a product’s visual appeal; its aesthetic qualities.

It’s also measured by how it was planned and articulated, how it was built, how it functions. It’s about the design’s ability to improve upon the current reality.

The commonplace view that a “good design” is anything that is beautiful and visually appealing is wrong. It’s wrong because a good design is more than that. The visual quality of a good design is just a portion of the equation.

Steve Jobs explains this point well, once saying:

“People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Gmail has a good design because it’s able to intelligently discern between contextually-relevant emails versus ones you may not want to see right now, and because it gives you the ability to search thousands of archived emails accurately and quickly.

But you will never find Gmail being featured in any web design gallery, even though these galleries purport to have the goal of inspiring designers toward creating good designs.

Dropbox has a good design because it works flawlessly in the background without any fussing about, and because it ambitiously tackles a huge everyday problem people have.

Airbnb has a good design, not because the site is on all the popular web design galleries, but because of the company’s ability to reliably and conveniently provide a new form of accommodation for travelers.

article by sixrevisions.com