Web Design

While you're cleaning out all the mystery items you’ve been stuffing in the drawer all winter, why not add a reassessment of your website to your spring clean up list? Here are five quick tests you can do kickstart the spring website cleaning season.

I know there are still many believers out there who advocate for everything to be above the fold. I’m not saying that the fold should be ignored. However, before you sit down with your designer and tell him/her to make sure everything fits above the fold, I recommend that you understand a little more about it.

The greatest gift you can give your clients and potential clients is a website that they love. Not just because it is beautiful, but because it flows and works as expected. But how do you do it? As we often discover, just because a site works for us doesn’t mean it works for everyone else.

As a UI (user interface) website developer, I’d be lying if I said I don’t yearn for the days when websites were created with one medium in mind: the desktop computer. Back in the good old days, testing meant checking on just a handful of browsers - not multiple smartphones, tablets and desktops. But times have changed, and the web has changed along with them.

As your competitors freshen up their web experiences, you may be thinking of doing the same. To help you understand what’s happening and why, I've created a list of the top 3 trends that will dominate in 2014.

UXCamp Ottawa gave the Envision team a chance to take a deep dive into the heart of user-centred design. This past weekend (November 9 - 10), over 400 people from around the world came together at the Museum of Civilization to learn, share and connect.

From your latest Twitter or LinkedIn review to your most recent Facebook update, many of us are striving to be noticed. After all, according to a new study, you only have a small amount of time to be relevant (80 minutes to be exact); so more is more, right? Not exactly. While you may only have a limited time to be relevant in the social media world, in the search engine world, you can technically be visible forever.

Not too long ago, typography choices were limited to web safe fonts. If you wanted to use an alternate font, these were usually encapsulated in graphics, or employed elaborate Flash (SiFR) or JavasScript (Cufón) techniques to make such rendering possible; this is not the case anymore!

From the polish of your shoes to the make of your phone, we are constantly being judged by our peers based on outward appearances; and a professional website is no exception. In an online world, your website is more than just your storefront, it’s your brand identity.

In the website context, the “Jabberwocky” is a collection of code on your website that is collectively “smelly”– that is code which, while it may not actually be broken (the website does what its supposed to) but is riddled with design flaws. So, how will this affect your website?

A frequent question I’ve had from many clients over the years has been “what is a good conversion rate?”. This is a difficult question to answer for many reasons. Before I dig into why that is exactly, lets talk about what a conversion rate is.

In our quest to make everything ‘better,’ we sometimes manage to muddle up a perfectly good design or overcomplicate an easy-to-grasp concept.