Parallax Design
The term parallax first came into being from the visual effects of 2D side-scrolling video games which used different speeds for background image movement to create an illusion of depth during gameplay. It was generally achieved by making the background move slower as compared to the foreground so that it seems further away. The same concept applies to the parallax website design whereby the background of the website is made to move at a different speed as compared to the rest of the page to create an impressive visual effect. It is especially suitable for online storytelling.

Parallax design gives websites an opportunity to surprise viewers with page depth and animation. The feature encourages users to scroll through the complete webpage making the site visits last longer. It provokes curiosity and direct users to call to action. Also, it reinforces website credibility with creative and interactive viewing.

Snags of Parallax Web Design
Given all the above mentioned benefits of parallax site designing, there are many downsides to this trend as well. Majority of these drawbacks come from the fact that most of the parallax websites have a single long webpage that is extremely harmful to the website’s SEO as well as page loading speed. Here are few of the negatives points to using parallax scrolling:

• Websites having a single webpage can implement one set of Meta information, one h1 tag, and URL. Hence, problematic from the SEO point of view.

• Lot of images and other content on a single page can cause slow loading, leading to frustrated visitors leaving the page before even viewing it.

• Not compatible with responsive web design

Tips for developing a great parallax website
Here are a few tips to design a successful parallax website:

• Use it reasonably and don’t overdo. It can make your site complicated.

• Use it to create an amazing storytelling experience.

• Create a fun and engaging UX with depth using layering

• Highlight calls to action

As such, the parallax scrolling effect is taking the internet world by storm as one of the most popular web design trends of 2014. We can see it popping up on almost every type of website across the web. Whether it’s Business to Business or Business to Consumer, this design trend provides a great platform to websites to tell stories and keep their visitors engaged.

Parallax web design can be used by your brand in a variety of different ways. So, if you want to update your website, or do a complete website redesigning, this trend definitely needs considering.

Knowing how groups influence people can help you enhance the design process and influence the target audience quite easily. By incorporating social influence in their work, designers can take the user experience to a whole new level.

Theory of Social Identity
Understanding concepts related to the social identity theory can really help the UX professionals to effectively incorporate social influence in their work.

According to the theory of social identity, when an individual identifies himself/herself with a group, he/she feels more associated to that particular group (in-group) and their behavior gets more uniformed. At the same time, they regard members of other groups (out-group) as being cut from the same cloth and associate negative attributes to them.

Example: PC vs. Mac

Let’s take an example of the Apple commercials. It’s not so long ago that Apple launched an advertisement that regarded Mac products as cool, edgy and hip. As such, the members of this group would identify themselves as having those traits and at the same time, regard the Windows-based PC users as uptight, stuffy and boring. Thus, individuals would like to purchase Mac products to associate to a cool group. Apple used social identity theory to develop an attitude towards its product so that the customer would purchase it.

Let’s see how social identity theory plays out for web.

Understanding Social Identity Theory through Facebook
Facebook is the king of social networking basically because it has successfully incorporated social influence and social identity theory in its network. Let’s go through a few points to understand this.

Self-Categorization through Facebook: Going In-Group

Creating your profile on Facebook is the first step to join this huge group —Facebook. People want to connect to Facebook as they want to be a part of social groups that reside on Facebook already (an eg. of self-categorization). Also, they want to see what others are doing and vice versa (an eg. of social comparison). They share photos, professional experience, their most liked books and sports and a lot more.

How Social Identity Play Out on Facebook?
Suppose Mr. A made a post saying, “Amazing performance by XX Rock Band in Louisiana.” One of his friends likes his post. This friend’s “like” pops up in the news feed of one of his friends, Alisha, who lives in Louisiana and is a deadly fan of XX Rock Band. Alisha sees the post too and clicks on the link to Mr. A’s profile. Checking his profile, which is set to be accessible to friends of friends (they’re in-group!!), Alisha sees that he lives in Louisiana and is a fan of his favorite music star, Justin Bieber.

Alisha then sends me a friend request over Facebook. In response to the request, Mr. A checks out her profile and observes that she has similar interests, lives in his city and is friends with similar people. Consequently, he accepts her friend request. This shows a clear example of strengthening a social tie and reaffirmation of the in-group identity of individuals.

What Facebook gets out of it?
You might be wondering, what benefit Facebook gets out of all this. After all, people don’t pay to be its users. The truth is: This social identity and influence have greatly benefited the entrepreneurs.

Facebook tracks data exchange within individuals in ways we can only imagine. Some of the effects can be seen through the advertising and promotions being carried out on Facebook. For example, it is possible that Mr. A and Alisha are now on Facebook’s list of Louisiana residents who are fans of XX Rock Band and they’ll start seeing paid advertisements in their feed from local venues that host such music events. A real win for Facebook and the advertisers!!

Final Say
Social influence provides key concepts to be addressed through UX design. Through incorporating these concepts of social identity into design, you can influence people in ways you cannot even imagine. Moreover, it will give a competitive edge over your rivals.

Defining Grid in terms of web design
Grid is basically a series of horizontal and vertical lines positioned at regular intervals. The grid is useful in web designing as it helps creating an order. The style is best for those who want to have a cleaner and organized look of their website.

WWW gives preference to grids
Web standards change with time and with presently, World Wide Web is giving a special preference to the sites developed with grid format. With so many efficient CSS-based grid frameworks like Blueprint and 960, it has become quite easy for the designers to create incredible websites in less time duration. Although, there are many web designers that still need to realize the potential of grid based design.

Grids allow exploring possibilities
Some web designers have wrong notion about grid based design that they restrict realization of their creative side while designing. But the real fact is that grids can actually facilitate creativity by rendering them a framework that is not only easy to use but suitable to meet a wide variety of web designing requirements. In fact, it helps the web designers to find answers for questions like:

• How wide should the measurement be?

• How should be the placement of folios?

Above all, grid allows strengthening of layouts and streamlining the complete website development process that eliminates any future modifications issues. With easy access to large amount of information in the form of documents and other resources, one can easily create a web design that is not only unique but full of eye-catching effects.

Choosing a base unit for measurement
It’s crucial to choose a base unit for the layout before getting started with the grid-based web design. Taking pixels as the base unit of measurement is preferable, but since individual pixels are too small to create a grid, the designer needs to align the items at a 100% scale.

File creation and baseline grid set-up
File creation and set up of baseline grid requires perfection. In fact, Fireworks offer an interesting and simplified panel which lets the designer control the properties of grids. As an example, it allows easy editing of colors.

When you are creating a new file for web layout, it’s important to take into account the width of the canvas; and it is preferable to go with the fixed width way. This is because it offers a greater control over the measurement and no. of characters available within each line in a column. As of the layouts, they should be limited to approximately 960 pixels in width. This will easily accommodate in 1024 x 768 screen resolution which is a common screen size.

Finally

Integrating grid-based web design approach in web development ensures a way to build websites that are flexible and rich in graphics and functionalities. Grid-based design is strongly backed up by stability and visual strength that will surprise you with its outcomes, no matter what type of website you are designing.

As such, the pros and cons of these fixed navigation bars can be listed as below.

Advantages

• Enhanced usability
The fixed navigation bars make the browsing experience on website a lot easier. Having these ensures a main menu of options at an immediate disposal of the user, especially if the website has large amount of content on a page.

This is beneficial in several regards, but main benefit is speed. A smooth and fast flow through the website is very important. With an always present guidepost set firmly at the top or side of the screen view, a site owner does not need to worry about his or her user reading or navigation experience being damped.

This is extremely significant when the site is dealing with enormous amount of content. Popular examples of this concept come in the form of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Both of the sites feature news feeds with infinite information being loaded up at the bottom of the screen.

In the absence of these bars, user can often waste hours digging through the never ending lines of content, links, and other material.

• Enhanced Speed
Also, when there is a lot of content on the site; for example, take a website listing a range of content on travel destinations. This content may include history, possible visiting time and places, cultural heritage and a lot more details pertaining to a destination. Basically, it’s a lot to scroll through. But with a sticky bar at the top, navigation turns a lot quicker and easier allowing a user to find the required information in no time. In fact, the amount of time this technique saves is really appreciable.

• Prevailing Popularity
The popularity of fixed navigation bars is quite commendable. Every other site is using these to increase usability. This makes it even more demanding. Not only this, it adds a great effect to the website.

Disadvantages

Despite of its advantages, many critics argue that these sticky navigation bars can be superfluous addition to a perfectly usable website at times. In some cases, a website already has a smooth flow, and as such the fixed navigation bar can often seem like a waste of space.

Though it is flashy, it can also be unnecessarily apparent meaning it keeps popping up even when it is not required.Some people might see it as interesting, while other might find it irritating.

Also, at times, the bars seem to take up space unnecessarily. Although, the problem can be addressed by shrinking the bar; once the user has scrolled past its initial appearance.

What’s more?

Apart from simple space constraints, there are other practical concerns for developers too. For instance, fixed navigation bars are usually difficult to transform into mobile format. Also, it leads to a complicated design that can increase page load times.

Final Word

All in all, there’s not much to complain about fixed navigation bars. The concerns are subjective, but when talk about user experience, subjective concerns are certainly justified. As such, it’s the duty of developer to determine what the targeted audience desires from the website and act accordingly.

Why you should create a style guide?
A style guide usually doesn’t seem necessary for a small company that has a single working designer. But if you’ll look at the bigger picture, you’ll realize its importance. Suppose there is only one designer, working on a project, in a company. All the tasks like designing logo, website, business cards, and other marketing material are assigned to him.

Now, a year later the company grows in size, and they feel a need to hire a second designer. The current designer will be required to all of the guidelines for the brand like colors, logo specifications, font, etc. to the new designer. This conveying of information should be accurate and any left out can create a problem.
With style guide, at your hand, you can simply hand over the details without any hassle.

Basic elements of style guide
The exact elements in a style guide depend on the size of brand and type of marketing materials being used. Although, the common elements are listed below:

Fonts
There is a consistent set of fonts for every brand irrespective of their marketing materials. Representing these fonts, with proper examples and character sets, is very important. There are many things that need to be mentioned in this section including font type and size, or any particular style or weight for a font family.

Colors
The colors should be spelled out with accurate details. This includes enlisting hex codes for web use, CMYK and Pantone color values for printing purpose. To accurately transfer color between web and print, exactly listing your preferences is a good option.

Logo
Logo size and placement details are also important. Many logos lose their effect when displayed too small. In such cases, you can specify the minimum size to display the logo or an alternate logo to be used for small sized display.

Specifying the amount of empty space around the logo is also important so that the logo doesn’t lose its effect. Many other details can be included like alternate color scales for logo, the acceptable backgrounds (transparent or colored background), any type of box or border that can be used to encase the logo.

Icons or images
If there are any specific icons or images that are used commonly, then they should be included in the guide. Including a direct link to the icon set is a good option; it will avoid confusion due to icon names.
Specifying whether any particular style of images should be used or not, is always recommended. For instance, you need to apply a vintage filter to the image, or only black and white versions can be used.

Other web elements
Keeping things like button style, hierarchy and form elements consistent across multiple pages is quite challenging. With a defined set of rules in style guide, it becomes a lot easier. Design layouts and grid standards are also worth mentioning.

So, it is quite evident that creating a style guide for designing purpose is really beneficial and every company or designer should look up for it.

Identifying the mindset of target audience for mobile websites

The mobile device is used at all times of the day and at various places by the users, like while watching TV or having dinner at night, while getting bored at workplace, or while travelling. Depending on the usage location and time, users react differently to different advertisements and products on mobile e-commerce stores. They may or may not be in a purchasing mood.

In such a case, strategically placing different banners on the home page of your website, such as price promotions or discount offers is quite beneficial. While the morning users may love discounts, TV dinner viewers might like something else. For example, a banner saying “Bored of watching boring daily soaps? Grab an exciting DVD set of latest movies”.

Some mobile shoppers are comparers; some are deal lovers; some social shoppers while rest are just time passers. So, you need to deal with each one of them in a different and smart way to lure them into buying your products.

Also, poorly performing mobile sites or apps can annoy or frustrate the users and lead to distrust.

Measuring conversion

First, you need to understand the term ‘conversion’. Conversion may occur in three ways, as given below:

• The visitor comes to your site and actually purchases a product.

• The visitor follows one of the social channels; share, tweet or like your product or website; post a review; subscribe; etc. leading to social promotion of your website.

• The visitor completes a task. It can be anything like filling out a poll or entering a competition.

We then need to set some smart goals to track and measure our success. These goals also help us to remain focused on the project and not end up with over-specifying or over-designing the website.

Spotting design factors that affect conversion rate

Some design factors directly affect the customers while browsing an e-commerce website from a mobile device. These are as given below:

• Hierarchy and Navigation
Space is a luxury for mobile devices. So, there are limitations as to providing mega menus to browse through multilevel categories. Thus, it is recommended to prioritize key features and content and instead provide an easily accessible search box at a good location. Adopting off-canvas navigation is a way to go.

There are many navigation methods like list, matrix, bottom or top menus. The best approach is to use a fixed menu at the top that would offer the best usability. Each of the menu buttons can then be expanded to get a navigation list along with the subpages that load through a matrix menu.

• Embedding attractive images and photographs
Photography can completely make or break a website’s appeal. The mobile consumer desires to see images and photographs that enchants them and encourages them to buy the product. For instance, sometimes the same product shot at different angles give different impression about that product to the consumer. Also, including detailed shots of products plays an essential role in the buying process. If it is a combination product, taking individual shots of each part is recommended.

• Typography
If the users have to zoom in the screen to read the text, it annoys them instantly. So, make sure you exploit the typography skills wonderfully.

• Finger Friendly
All the finger hit targets should be wide enough to facilitate easy pressing otherwise the user have to give extra attention while doing the same and it can make him/her frustrated.

• Effective use of color palette
Contrasting colors should be used to design buttons for clearer perception and action call. If the hit target blends in the webpage, users are likely to miss it.

Other factors include appropriate copywriting, finger-friendly and legible forms and a perfectly designed product page.

Planning in this way makes you deliver a well optimized mobile e-commerce website that is well targeted to the potential customers and that converts more visitors into buyers.

We need to learn that a simple layout always works and keep users interested. Instead of filling your website with too many images, colors and other elements, just keep it simple.

Whitespaces are really helpful in this regard. They allow you to create a simple and elegant design. They are one of the most important elements of web design that contribute to improved readability and website performance. But what are they?

Whitespace

Whitespace is empty space (or negative space) on the website. Although the term refers to white space, it’s not necessary for the area in question to be white only. It’s just the empty space around the elements in the webpage layout.

Whitespace tends to come in many forms like space in between images or graphics, margins, columns and even lines of text. While it appears to be made of nothing, it should not be really treated in that manner.

Treating it so, can make you miss real opportunities of designing a truly aesthetic and appealing website.

Benefits of incorporating whitespace in web design

• Make a brand/website luxurious
Increased white space demands the designer to craft a brand message more smartly, as it needs to be embedded in a more restrictive space. Also, users will view the website with more white space as the one whose content is more critical than its screen space. Consequently, a brand seems more luxurious because it is sacrificing more screen space and instead focusing on content messaging.

Big brands always use this technique to better highlight their content like deals and promotions for example. Even the brand name has sufficient white space between its characters.

• Improve readability
The smart use of white space on website can boost readability and legibility. If the text is squashed (more text is made to fit in a given space), it can get in the way of comfortable reading, leading to bad user experience. More white space allows easy reading of text, adding to comprehension.

Simply writing great content for your website is not going to work. You need to present it in a clear format by including whitespace. White space should also be embedded between different sections of content. This not only improves the reading experience, but helps breaking up content into various parts for easy grasping of information.

• Makes colors more vibrant on the website
It is one of the simplest and most direct benefits of using white space. White space makes other colors stand out on the website and appear brighter. This makes the site quite catchy in the eyes of the user by emphasizing the depth and intensity of the colors.

Use of white space by search engines

The search engines like Google and Yahoo are big advocates of white space. They clearly understand that loud backgrounds and advertisements can distract the users while searching for a particular topic. Therefore, white space dominates their search pages, especially Google’s. Yahoo, though, includes a long menu bar at the top; the idea is almost the same.

Hence, there is a need to make the web designers understand that they are not required to embed each and every element or color into the webpage. Instead, they should give emphasis to white space in their design that can readily create a powerful impact on the users. Whitespace, if used smartly, can be used to highlight brand’s message, enhance readability and legibility and make the color scheme quite radiant.

In fact, a good approach to using whitespace is to think as a user. More specifically, you need to put yourself in the user’s place. For instance, ask yourself what you would like to read. Would you like to read squeezed or well-spaced content? Would you like to read properly organized information that is divided into columns or clusters of information thrown away at several places? You will yourself get the answer.

As such, whitespace is getting high popularity lately, making it a trend that will continue for long, as can be envisioned in the given scenario.

To many newbies plus a few old designers, typography is all about fonts. In a sense, it’s not wrong, but typography is a lot more than that. It has a broader scope than just selecting a charming font and pasting it on your design.

Before understanding the true role of typography in designing, it’s essential to understand typography first.

Typography is an art of arranging type and is made up of several parts, like Type Size, Ascender, Descender, Counter, X-height and Baselines.

Importance of Typography in Web Design
Typography includes every element that affects web design like length of line, size, layout, color and type. As web design continues to evolve, it is important to keep in mind that typography is the vital element holding the design together. Without typography, the sites would be filled with boring fonts resulting in poor user experience.

Create a healthy user experience
The first impression is the last impression and typography helps you create that perfect first impression. It enables you to create a healthy user experience that lasts. Users may get enticed by your site without even reading a single word or clicking any button. It can help you create an atmosphere that evokes an immediate response.

Structure content on website
When there are millions of websites out there, content is the only thing that can make you stand out of the crowd. As a fact, 95% of the total information on the web is written content.

Elicit feelings in audience
Typography can be used as a strong tool to evoke feelings in the audience. By choosing fonts and color of text, and arranging them intelligently, viewers can be influenced greatly. On the other way round, if you cannot create designs that can create an emotional connection with the audience, you would run the risk of losing them forever.

Helps in Branding
When it comes to creating a brand, typography plays a very important role. You can define and distinguish the brand with smart typography. The designer has to have a crystal clear understanding of typography to relate logo, font and typeface on the website.

Acts as a Guide
Loading your site with good content is not sufficient; you have to present it in a way that impresses the user. With the right use of typography, you can better guide your audience through the website, and make them focus on more important information. A better arrangement of text and selection of font size and colors can help create a visual hierarchy.

Makes Content Attractive
No matter how seductive or appealing your content is, it is useless if you deliver it in 10 point Times New Roman. With an efficient use of typography, you can make your site content look as attractive as possible.

Maintains Consistency
The site filled with too many different fonts or has changing rules, looks unplanned and disorganized and may drive away visitors. Typography can help pull your website together. It helps to maintain consistency among all the elements, resulting in better user experience. With consistent font, typeface, size and color, the user will find the order in place and will be happy to surf the website.

Typography is more of an integral part of web design. An intelligent typography can make a website more engaging and enjoyable. It has the power to deliver content effectively on the website making it easier and readable for the audience. In short, typography is essential to a successful web design and its importance cannot be denied in any way.

Here enters HTML5!

HTML5 offers the perfect solution for this problem. The WORA (Write Once, Run Anywhere) feature of HTML5 is the main reason why it enjoys and maintains such a strong position in the mobile world. HTML5, which was initially created to develop static catalog websites has come a long way, where it is capable to handle applications in fields ranging from business intelligence and gaming to social engagement and entertainment. Factually, has a share of about 68% in the mobile development industry.

Now, let’s discuss the features of HTML5 in more detail, which makes it the future of the web.

• New Tags in HTML5
The new tags in HTML5 are introduced to enhance the HTML code and make it more meaningful. For instance, initially the developers were using div tag, but now they are offered with a whole set of new tags like header, footer and nav. This has turned HTML into a lot more productive language.

• Supports web applications offline
With HTML5, it is possible to create web applications which can be used without internet access. Moreover, they function equally smoothly as with an Internet Connection. In fact, it also allows one to save data to local databases.

• Storage Capabilities
HTML5 enables you to store important data on client device which can be easily synchronized back to the server whenever required. This ensures continued functioning of your app even when the user is not online.

• Excellent Connectivity
HTML5 greatly speeds up the real time chats and gaming applications ensuring better communication. With HTML5, video conferencing can run directly in the browser without any need of plug-ins.

• Support for integration of video and audio
With HTML5, it is possible to integrate audio and video into the browser without the need of Flash or Silverlight. Previously, it was not possible to embed videos into the web pages directly. Due to this, businesses developed their own video players, which, though functioned smoothly, but downloading external plug-ins for the same was quite irritating. But now, thanks to HTML5, the process is simplified.

• Ability to embed special effects and 3D graphics
With HTML5’s new tags like canvas, developers can now produce amazing visual effects, which were only possible with Flash or CSS initially. May be it’s time to say “Bye Forever” to Flash now. Also, there are other features like 2D Canvas and WebGL that HTML5 a better choice.

• Develop high performance applications
HTML5 enables developers to make fast and robust applications. The JavaScript running in the background does not affect the webpage performance and you can do a lot more functions such as clicking and selecting, in parallel.

With a majority of developers shifting to HTML5 for their projects and native mobile developers wishing to lessen the use of native technology, HTML5 is sure to become the most preferred platform of choice for development in the coming future.

Also, from the above discussion, it can be easily inferred that HTML5 has a great scope and soon, a web application will be able to work on almost all mobile platforms, and it will work on any HTML 5-compliant web browser, regardless of whether it is deployable on a mobile device or a desktop.