Web Design – Kindling

How Every Web Designer Can Protect Their Business By Using Service Delivery Agreements

Although it does not happen very often to web designers, there can be occasions when a client, for whatever reason, claims that the website a web designer has delivered was not what was agreed upon. The claims can range from the website not having the appearance they asked for, fewer pages than agreed, or lacking functionality that they thought it would have.

Now, we should not be so naive to think that there are not a few rogues who sadly give the vast majority of professional web designates a bad name by selling clients short and quite rightly those clients have every right to be aggrieved. However, if we focus on web designers who genuinely strive to deliver great service and great websites, we have to consider the scenarios where clients dispute what was agreed upon.

One of the key problems that cause such situations is that the agreement to design and create a website was done verbally, or if it were done in writing, it has the scantest of details as to what should be included. This serves neither the web designer nor the client and is why, when a dispute does happen, neither has anything to back up their side of the argument.

This can escalate and the dangers for the web designer are that they are not likely to receive final or full payment from the client, and worse, the client could set about rubbishing that web designer’s reputation by going on a crusade of posting negative reviews about them on the internet.

So, if any web designers are reading that and hoping there are ways to avoid such a situation, the good news is there are. Prime amongst them is using service delivery agreements, which are ideal for businesses that provide services such as web designers.

15 Non-Negotiable Web Design Principles That Should Apply To Every Business Website

When you consider that online data shows that there are over 1 billion websites in the world, it is safe to say that web designers have been busy. It is also true to say that no two of those 1 billion websites will be 100% identical, either in how they function or how they look. There may be some that are similar, but we can be certain none are exactly the same in all ways.

Without meaning to contradict ourselves, many of those websites which have been professionally designed will have several commonalities. By that, we mean that they will have been designed by web designers following a set of key web design principles and best practices. For any website to be remotely successful, it must have been created by following what we like to call ‘non-negotiable” web design principles.

These principles are what form the foundation of top quality website design and are why those web designers who follow them without fail are the ones who create the best websites and earn the most praise. Here are fifteen of the non-negotiable web design principles we are referring to.

7 Website Design Features That Are Growing In Popularity

Web design is something that never stands still. Just when you think you might have seen everything there is to see, and have a handle on what is current, along comes another trend, update, or new website design technology that moves everything on once more. We say this not to suggest it is negative. In fact, it is quite the opposite as it means that web design never becomes stayed or boring, which can only be a positive.

Positive as it is that web design is in a constant state of evolution, one problem that does arise is that you can lose track of what is currently popular for designing websites. This is especially so if you work outside the web design bubble and wish to know which current web design trends you should be discussing with the designers creating a new website for your business. To help you, we have outlined 7 web design features currently popular and likely to remain so for some time.

#1: Smaller Logos

Whilst having effective branding on your website will never cease to be important, there has been a move away from ‘in your face’ branding. In other words, huge logos dominating the home and other pages are out. Instead, smaller logo designs that appear more like icons are in, as this frees up much of the prime home page real estate for other, more important design elements.

Heartbleed

On Monday, April 7th, a major bug in the popular SSL library OpenSSL was announced, generally known as Heartbleed. The vulnerability, in a nutshell:

Without using any privileged information, authentication codes or credentials we were able to steal the secret keys used for our X.509 certificates, user names and passwords, instant messages, emails and business critical documents and communication.

Kindling uses OpenSSL on our servers for HTTPS connections, and as soon as the vulnerability was announced we began working to mitigate our exposure by upgrading our versions of the affected libraries and invalidating any secure keys that might have been leaked. Our hosting provider, Amazon Web Services, also quickly moved to prevent exploitation of the vulnerability within their infrastructure.

Keep Employees Engaged in Innovation with Responsive Design

We live in a multi-device world where we spend our time in front of a variety of digital screens: laptops, projectors, plasma televisions, CRT monitors, retina LCDs, Hi-DPI smartphones, tablets, phablets, and more.

Placeholder image of devices

Choosing which device to use depends on context: where you are, how much time you have, and what you want to accomplish. Great ideas, however, don’t care about context. And they won’t wait until you’re sitting in front of your office computer to materialize.

At Kindling we understand this, which is why we’ve built a responsive web application that enables you to capture, share, and collaborate on innovative ideas no matter where you are or what electronic device you have available. Supporting multiple contexts through responsive design means more participation from users, which means more collaboration amongst people, which means better ideas for your organization. Everybody wins!