Bye Bye? Are You Losing Customers Because of Your Website's User Experience?

  best practices, user experience, web, web design, website      0 comments    Posted on May 8, 2013 by Erin

Have you ever just given up on a website because of usability flaws? You know what I mean: you've tried to use a website, but it feels like the publishers purposefully wanted to keep you from buying their products, completing your registration, or whatever it is you set out to do on their site. Sometimes, if the user experience is so thoughtless, it doesn't take very long before a customer abandons the site and goes with a more "frictionless" competitor.

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5 Things to Think About When Redesigning Your Website

  tips, web design, web development      0 comments    Posted on April 30, 2013 by Cameron

I like to think website redesigns are a bit like kitchen remodels:

1. Just as kitchens are where everyone congregates at a party, so are websites the heart of every organization's brand. Like Nick pointed out last week, websites still rule. Redoing your site or your kitchen is a major part of your brand (or home).
2. Without proper planning—hell, even with proper planning—website redesigns can have little surprises that come along the way.
3. Website redesigns only happen every once in a while, and most people aren't contractors web developers.

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Need a dotted stroke that can scale for retina display designs?

  photoshop, retina, web design      0 comments    Posted on March 19, 2013 by Erin

I've been using Photoshop CS6 for several months now. And yet, a really nifty feature evaded me until this past week, when I needed to find a way to make the dotted strokes on my Photoshop map graphic scalable for retina display purposes. I thought I'd share in case this feature has evaded you, too, or in case you are looking for reasons to upgrade to CS6!

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Experimenting with Options for Responsive Wireframing

  mobile, process, responsive, web design      0 comments    Posted on January 29, 2013 by Erin

At Blueprint, we are actively working to revamp our processes to better accommodate our clients' needs for mobile-friendly and responsive web design solutions. It used to be effective to create one wireframe and design comp to show clients what a final, developed homepage would look like. But these days, that approach only goes so far toward helping us plan — and communicate to our clients — how a site layout and design will look and change when viewed on different devices.

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If we can make websites responsive, what about online advertising?

  mobile, online advertising, responsive, web design      0 comments    Posted on October 22, 2012 by Erin

At Blueprint, we design websites, landing pages, print materials, and online ads. With election season upon us, these days we're especially busy with the latter! For any given campaign, we typically design an ad at 300x250 pixels — a standard ad size. Once our client approves it, we resize it to any other required dimensions (commonly, 728x90 and 160x600, but sometimes also 300x50 and even smaller for display on mobile devices). This very manual process takes significant time and has left me wondering, if we can make websites responsive, is there a way we can make advertisements responsive? (for a description about responsive web design, see my earlier post, Blueprint Goes Responsive)

Unfortunately, the answer is not so fast. Some quick research confirmed my suspicions about some of the complications and gave me a sense of where the industry is in making it a common practice. I thought I'd share...

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How We Look at Political Websites

  design, navigation, politician, Tracking, user experience, web design, website      0 comments    Posted on April 17, 2012 by Amy

Ever wonder how users look at political websites? A recent user experience study by Usabilla reveals the likes and dislikes of visitors to 2012 Republican Candidates' websites.

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Fresh, Fun Ipsum

  tips, tricks, web design      0 comments    Posted on June 14, 2011 by Amy

We’re always looking for ways for design to be fun. Instead of conventional Lorum Ipsum for our text filler, there’re options.

We’re partial to spicing up our mocks with Bacon Ipsum. Instead of using standard Lorum Ipsum filler text for our mocks, we our filler text has woven in delicious meaty morsels alongside traditional latin text. 

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