The Benefits of Reading Good Design Articles
Good creative web design articles can provide a lot of things, depending what the topic is concerning. Most importantly they help website creators bridge the gap between conceptual ideas of how a website should work, with the reality of what gets readers to look at, use, and repeatedly visit a site (i.e., traffic). After all, what’s the point of building a website if there’s no one available to read and utilize what it offers?
Teaching the End Goal
The first significant benefit is that design articles repeatedly inform a reader about the principle of how website users think. It’s not enough to create a site; the designer has to create a site that is useful for a visitor. And to do that, the designer has to get into the mind of the user and determine what he or she needs or wants. Design articles discuss and frequently cover multiple ways to find out how visitors think, what makes them tick, what offends them and what attracts based on past practices. These can save a designer a tremendous amount of energy and work doing their research just to find out the same thing.
Identifying Pitfalls Ahead of Time
The second significant benefit is the identification of pitfalls and traps that can otherwise waste a lot of money, time and energy as well, where pre-knowledge would allow focusing work in the right direction. For example, understanding what sort of things in a creative web design that makes a reader has to work to find what he or she is after is a poor idea. They get people frustrated, they then get annoyed, and then traffic drops or dies off. Finding this out the hard way after doing a ton of work to see it produce next to nothing is a painful lesson to sit through.
Developing Strategy
Learning how to manage attention with various media is an essential skill in creative web design. Building a website is not simply about putting a bunch of content together with photos and calling it a day. There needs to be a strategy about how things are put together, where a reader will be taken when he or she arrives, where the information flow should bring them to for a call to action and so on. Every piece of a website should be contributing to the overall goal of having someone read it in the first place. Design articles can be immensely helpful showing tips and methods on how to make this concept a reality.
Creative web design today can serve the same function as magazine ads and display, but there is a definite science to it. And a lot of the work starts before the website is even complete.
Identification of market strategy, market goals, target consumers, sales goals, action expectations, and support are all part of the building up before the website coding even happens. Fortunately, one doesn’t need to take a series of classes to learn all the above. Instead, articles can provide a lot of the basics with full explanations, how-to’s, steps, background, and reasoning for each component. With a bit of time and research, one can easily get the equivalent of a full semester of marketing via dedicated reading.
Learning to Simplify
Part of the problem with misguided websites is that they tend to be cluttered and stuffed with too much, making the site unwieldy and hard to visit. Excellent sites are amazingly simple in approach, design, and function. People can navigate and find what they want right away, connecting the need for the solution in record time. Design articles are a great source for this approach put into practice with case examples and real-life success stories. There is no better way to learn to create successful designs than to see it in action.
Practical Sources
95Visual is a regularly updated source for creative web design work and discussion, featuring a good library of articles for reference and use. And that's half the battle of creating a good website: finding the knowledge to use and apply to create a superb site to visit. In addition to supplying a reference for use, we look to external resources for inspiration as well. http://www.creativebloq.com/, https://muz.li/, http://www.redlemonclub.com/ are all websites that have great articles on website design, or you can always Google “best [enter relevant adjective] website designs of [current year].”
