People come always on the first place

Like it or not, your website it will be always designed for your buyers and not for you. Design it for interaction.
No matter how much you would like to argue about this there’s no place in the online world today for “I don’t like it”. Even so designers and web companies heard this a lot from their customers and not only from small or mid-size customers but even million dollar companies. Well, guess what, it’s not important if you like it or not. The fact that you might like it is a very hoped conincidence but in fact like it or not for the purpose of your website that’s completely irrelevant. You’ll ask yourself how’s that comes? It’s pretty simple in fact, your website is built for your customers or prospects and the main focus of the website should be on them as well on properly presenting them whatever you are trying to sell to them.

Keep it simple and usable

Usable websites as well as usable designs don’t need a map. User interface design is meant to guide people not to confuse them.
Here’s a lot of talk. What simple means ? In our opinion simple means effective, means presenting your information ins such a way that it looks presentable, it is comprehensible and most important it brings your message quickly and clearly in the fastest possible time. There is no secret that people that are looking for something over the internet – whatever they are looking for – are in a hurry and have very short attention spans.
Your website should present to them what interests them. They’ve most probably got to your website by doing a search. Considering for example they searched for “professional writing” don’t let them read two paragraphs of text until they will finally reach relevant content. If you can’t achieve their attention in a very few seconds they are likely to hit close window or to return on the search page looking for a more relevant result.

Keep it briefly, short and if it’s possible to even illustrate your message somehow using graphics, illustrations, pictures then you already got them.

Build for findability

Building a findable website is not extremely hard but it requires a lot of patience, attention and one of the main keys is Information Architecture.
Without any doubt being found is essential to any business and no one can argue that this can play a major role in evolution of a business, both offline and on-line.
Having an extremely clear code, using proper tags and clearly marking in code several parts of your code makes it search engine friendly which is a major advantage. Going forward use proper page descriptions, keywords and so on. This way you can be sure that web spiders will love your website. Most of the internet traffic comes from search engines, so whatever you can do to make this properly it’s definitely gonna pay the effort.

Everything serves a purpose

What doesn’t make any sense to be there it shouldn’t be there. Information architecture along with usability serves the purpose of making things easier for the people that visit your website.

Being brief and concise is not only a concept, is a goal. You don’t need to build a large number of pages just for the sake of being indexed or having more content available. But creating proper pages and website structure keeps things clean and organized. If people are gonna ask on your website “how did I got here?” you have a problem. Remember that people don’t usually order from start. It is possible they will not buy anything for the moment but to keep in mind or note a product for later reviewing. Being sure they can find the way back to that product later is essential.
Think about it, you’ll never buy from someone if you return on their website and you can’t find again the product you’ve just seen yesterday. If your website is presenting a lot of services/products group them and be careful not to look overcrowded.

I think that this article really covers the basics about having a website that performs. Further than that trying to write proper requests is another major step if you’re trying to get a request for proposal ready. As much as you can detail your concept and idea about your business you will just shorten the time needed to get an effective proposal.
Always try to keep in mind that nothing just happens. It has to me made to happen as well as your website has to be properly built in order to achieve remarkable results that everyone’s after.

I am keen to hear your questions about this article and I’d love to see in your comments what you consider essential for a performing website. Don’t hesitate to comment and address to us your questions about this topic.

Initially I thought “Holy biscuits! Not another resume website! …” For Krop, this move made perfect sense as they already have a popular job board for creative professionals like myself. So while allowing users to search for jobs, why not allow companies to search for people using their online resumes and creative portfolios? Nice and a smart move for Krop.

Great design & usability Krop!

I am not writing this post to announce a new service from Krop. Instead, I am writing about the usability and ease-of-use for the new service. The trend “if I can call it so” started a good while ago when Coroflot launched a similar service.

From the start I was really impressed about Creative Database’s form usability, meaning the initial stages of the sign-up form. Clean, simple, and different from similar services, Krop only asks you to fill in the very minimum of information they need in order to create your account.

Krop’s user-friendly signup forms

Then I started to upload some images for my portfolio since that was the most relevant part for me as a designer. Also worth mentioning is that I found the administration interface design of the gallery so simple that a 5 year-old kid could do it. Plain, simple, and functional.
I successfully built my gallery in about a minute, which is a record when it comes to building an online portfolio. I didn’t even have to prepare the pictures in a previous stage. Instead, I just picked them from my work folder.
Images uploaded while I continued to add new images, so when I was done uploading a few pictures, I wasn’t forced to wait for the uploads to complete. The pictures were already uploaded and I was ready to move to the next step.

If you choose to fill in your resume along with your portfolio, you’ll be guided through the same simple process with only a few steps. Please note that all forms/pieces are presented in such a way that even if Krop asks you the very same information to build your resume, you can still have it simple and clean and you are not required to fill in long and boring forms.

Awesome user interface design Krop

Since Creative Database is a free service, you can’t tweak the interface design and you are limited to 10 images for your portfolio. But if you choose to upgrade your service to the PRO subscription, you will be able to upload unlimited sets and images, map your domain, RSS, and choose between four default styles at this point.

Well, I can say more than congratulations Krop – awesome work! I really hope to see more similar services coming. And I am not referring to portfolio services, but clean websites with easy-to-use interfaces and good user-centered interface design.

Focus on your users

In a digital era when there are so many online services and web apps coming online every day, it would be essential to always pay attention to the people that will use your service. Make your service clear. Design it sleek and most importantly, pay attention to not waste my time as a user of your service. Try to anticipate and avoid any situation that can or will at any point confuse me. And more importantly, try not to get me lost somewhere in the process. Simplify.

It’s really disappointing to see in 2009, companies that launch web based applications still consider they are doing you a favor. Think twice before you launch your interface design to the world. As a user, I am doing you a favor by picking your product instead of your competitor’s product. They may have a better user interface design. Or maybe your competition has practiced usability standards. Make your products work for your users and you’ll be astonished by the results it will deliver to your business.

Ready to see my Krop portfolio?

You can view my Krop portfolio at http://krop.com/bistrian/. Tell me what you think. I am keen to hear your comments as well as what you do consider as being good interface design.

Another piece of recognition for Supraelastic and for myself as it’s owner and again appreciation shown to our work.

Thank you guys for having us. Appreciate.

We will like to congratulate with this opportunity the 1st place winners  Orasul Suceava.ro (original themes section) and GonzoDesign (adapted themes section) as well to BroHouse and CyberLawwhich share the same position with us but for the adapted themes section. Not the last congratulations to the 3rd place winners Rubique (original themes) and  Arhi Blog (adapted themes section).

Thank you for the trust and support you show to our work. we will do our best not to disappoint.

Why did it took us so long ? Well obviously we’ve had a lot of work lately so as usual our own site was left behind. We do know that’s not at least a decent excuse and we’re not looking for one anyway. But here we are finally on-line and kicking!

Why supraelastic ? Because a lot of things changed around, because we’ve changed our focus, because flexibility and adaptability is more important. Because we like to make it matter.
We do encourage suggestions and we’re open to hear what you have to say, what you like and what you don’t,  just use our contact form to get in touch and we’ll do our best to promptly respond to your thoughts and messages.

We also need to address special words to Microsoft which as usually gave us a lot of headaches ignoring web standards.
With this occasion we’ve just remembered to ourselves that ie6 is a complete pain and we’ve decided to drop support for this browser. That of course doesn’t mean we’ll totally ignore it but the support for ie6 will be limited from now. We’ve put a lot of pain in making it work anyway so you can browse properly but we are strongly suggesting you to update your browser. Safari, Firefox, Camino, take a wild guess – it’s up to you in the end – but they all look more reasonable than the creepy Internet “damn” Explorer.

We’re looking forward to hear from you.

Regards and thank you for your visit.

Do come again!
SUPRAELASTIC