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Eye of the St Louis web designer in Chicago

I have had an incredibly busy week, working on web and logo projects and meeting with five new prospective clients. All is good but only now on Friday afternoon have I found a few minutes to write a blog post.

I spent a fabulous few days in Chicago last weekend and the view from the place I stayed was definitely eye candy for the St Louis web designer (or should that be “the Chicago web designer”)
You can see lake Michigan in the distance which was encrusted with “icebergs”


2010 © St Louis Web Designer

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How to work with your web designer during the design phase of a project

Last week I talked about How to Hire a Web Designer , today lets tackle what to expect and how to work with your web site designer during the design phase of a project.



What to expect

  • Your designer will create a look and feel of key pages of the site and you will be presented with jpegs of these pages. Nothing will be “clickable” at this stage.
  • The site will most likely be populated with Lorem Ipsum. This is because the designer needs you to concentrate on the graphical elements and layout of the site and not get bogged down in copy.
  • The design phase is a very collaborative phase, expect a few rendition of a design based on feedback you give.
  • You will be given a time frame in which to critique. Imperative to keep your project delivery date on target.

How to Evaluate

  • How do you feel about the overall look and feel?
  • Does the color palette work for you?
  • How about the white space?
  • Are there intuitive navigational elements
  • Are there obvious call to actions?
  • To what element of the design is your eye drawn?

Giving Feedback

Don’t be afraid to be brutally honest in your feedback. If the design is not working for you on any level it is much better to be upfront. However a simple “I don’t like it” is no help. Your designer needs to understand what it is about the design that is “not floating your boat” and will help guide your evaluation process to fix on the elements that need to be addressed. For example, imagine you have a real aversion to the color purple and the inclusion of a purple element is causing “tunnel vision” Sometime just tweaking the color palette of a design can have the effect of ” I don’t like it” to “I love it”.

In short being able to articulate  your likes and dislikes will ensure you end up with a design you absolutely love.

Signing Off

Once your designer produces the “winning” design” you will be asked to sign off on the design. Making drastic design changes after this point can effect the coding efforts during the next stage of the project and typically incur additional costs.

2010 © St Louis Web Designer

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How to hire a website designer

Hiring a web design company can be a daunting task. Here are three steps to make it a little easier.

The Planning

  • What are your internet goals. Setting your objectives is the foundation of any project and creating a web site is no exception.
  • Create a “must have” list. For example it may be really important that your site include a blog or that it is configured so you can maintain it yourself.
  • Got some ideas on the architecture of your site? Get out a pad of paper and pencil and create a rough sketch
  • Don’t be intimidated to do a little research, e.g Check  Godaddy to see if can you get the domain name you want.
  • Get online and start browsing, bookmark sites you like, they don’t have to be in the same sector as your business or organization but this exercise will help determine what appeals to you and also enable to articulate your design preferences.
  • Check out your competition

The Search

  • Try a simple Google search for your area. Here are the results for St Louis web design.
  • Word of mouth, ask members of your business network if there is anyone they can recommend.
  • Found a web site you really like? Very often a web design company will have a simple link at the bottom of the site directing visitors to their web site.
  • Draw up a shortlist of design companies you would be interested in meeting.

The Meeting

  • Arrange to meet three design companies.
  • The research you have already done will put you in a great position to talk about the specifics of your project.
  • Do they seek to understand your business?
  • Are they goal/objective driven?
  • Do they listen?
  • Ask to see a portfolio of their work. Does it show a diversity of style or does everything look the same? 
  • Do they know their limits or will they try and sell you “everything”
  • Discuss the creative process they follow. Is it flexible?
  • Do they seem like a good fit for your project, do you feel a connection?
  • Will you enjoy working with them?
  • Ask them to put together a comprehensive web design proposal which outlines all the specifics of your project, pricing and terms and conditions.

You’re Hired!

The contract is signed, the deposit  paid and the project  is well underway. Is it time to site back and relax? Next time I will talk about how to work with your web designer.

2010 © St Louis Web Designer

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Color palettes and web design

Last week I talked about  how color can be used in website design.

Quick pop quiz. What do the follow three web sites have in common?

The answer is ORANGE

Does the use of orange in these designs conjure up the same emotions or associations?  Lets take a look at a breakdown of their color palettes.


The color palette used in this site results in a cozy and friendly feeling. The use of orange here really adds warmth.


Teaming orange with cool blues produces an invigorating pop which not only helps guide the eye but also adds an element of energy.

Here again orange has been teamed with blue but in this case the use of yellow and orange adds a sense of friendliness and approachability.

So three designs and three different emotions, warm and friendly, invigorating and approachable.

2010 © St Louis Web Designer

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The uses of color in web design

Color is one of the most important tools in a web designers tool box. It happens to be one of my favorite.

The uses of Color: Define: Engage : Differentiate

Color can can be used to define, think of brands like T Mobile (they have a trademark for Magenta) , UPS ( What can brown do for you) and our very own Indigo Image.

color_logos

It can be used to engage – look at these example of call to action elements.

And can be used to differentiate, look how the use of color on this web site is tied into the navigation.

Colors are also associated with different emotions and meanings but interestingly these emotions can change depending on the palette in which they are used.

Stay tuned for more about color palettes next time.

2010 © St Louis Web Designer

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A couple of time saving Google Tools

Here are two time saving tools recently launched by Google.

Firstly if you are a blogger and use Twitter to promote your blog posts (it was one of my best uses of Twitter – Can Twitter Help My Business), Google’s Feedburner now incorporates a “socialize function”. This allows Feedburner to automatically tweet any new blog post directly to Twitter. It can be customized in a variety of ways including

  • Post content: Title, Title and body or body only
  • Inclusion of a link
  • Automatic creation of hash tags
  • The ability to add custom text

A nice little time saver, you can read more about it here: AdSense for Feeds: Socializing your feed with Twitter.

Secondly is the Share button built into the latest Google Toolbar, download it here.
The share button enables you to send any page you visit to a huge variety of social networks, blogging accounts, email address anything from Facebook to Yahoo Bookmarks. It provides a shortened version of the URL – particularly useful for Twitter accounts where you are limited to 140 characters.

As usual both of these tools are offered for free. What tools are you using to save time?

Click for more tips and tricks

2010 © St Louis Web Designer

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Zoe Feast Web and Graphic Designer

I have an usual name, Zoe Feast. That’s Zoe with a long “eeee” sound at the end and Feast pronounced Feast… as in Thanksgiving Feast. It really is that easy!

As a self marketing project I have made use of my name and launched ZoeFeast.com today. It follows the lines of a ” business card website”, inspired by this great blog post. A simple, one page portal to my networks and company.

I broke away from my Indigo Image corporate brand image for this project and enjoyed the creative freedom.

What unique aspect do you have with which to market your business?

2010 © St Louis Web Designer

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St Louis Web Designer’s question of the day: Do you provide web hosting?

Do you provide web hosting? This is one of my popular “Frequently Asked Questions”.

The short answer is no, but the long answer is yes.

We are a web design company not a web hosting company and are happy to leave the intricacies of web hosting to the experts. However we can work with any web host of our clients choosing (or recommend a hosting company). This is a seamless process for our clients and all the nuts and bolts of getting a site live are taken care of. Once their site is ready we will open a hosting account suitable for their needs, upload all the files, configure email addresses and make sure their domain names are pointing to the right place.

This one stop shop type service is what most clients are wondering when they ask “Do you provide web hosting”

2010 © St Louis Web Designer