This post is written by Charlotte Lamb, designer for I to Eye

When I start designing a website all I have is the information from the client, perhaps a logo or a colour and a few words about what they would prefer their site to look like and the kind of customers they want to reach. I always try to combine all the things the client wants and their target audience into the design so that the site will look attractive, be easy to navigate and respond to the need for lots of text, lots of pictures or sometimes a bit of both. At the beginning anything is possible and that can be an exciting place to start.

With the Niall Catlin site I had a really fab modern logo to start with, strong colours (black and orange) and a description that the site needed to look modern and clean and have a list of the plumbing and heating services provided displayed on the first page. The site design evolved through playing with the logo shapes filled with montaged photos onto a cleaner line of boxed photos to help describe visually the areas they work in.

I think the final site looks great when browsed, very clean and simple but with plenty of space on the pages to describe the services Niall Catlin Plumbing and Heating provide and some of their excellent testimonials taken from the Check a Trade website. Visit the new Niall Catlin site by clicking here.

If you would like I to Eye to design your website or take a look at your website and redesign it then why not contact us? If you would like to see other sites we have designed for clients click here to visit our gallery page.

Posted by Charlotte Lamb, designer at I to Eye

Today I am going to introduce you to one of my favourite minimalist designs, as far as websites can ever be minimalist with all those buttons…

The owners of a new business: Basingstoke Apartment Services, came to see us at I to Eye with some specific ideas about the kind of clean and simple site they really wanted.  It is easy for sites with a lot of content such as photographs of properties and their interiors to become cluttered and difficult to navigate. Basingstoke Apartment Service also had lots of other information they needed to include for landlords as well as tenants and it became clear they needed something that would allow all this information to be easily read by site visitors.

The top part of the site acts as a sort of compressed navigation and corporate information banner as it neatly includes the contact numbers as well as all the navigation buttons alongside the logo.

It was important to get some photographs on the pages to relieve the intended white space and I designed a simple grid that allowed photographs of the local area to be included as well as the strapline for the company. The text for all the pages re-uses the red, grey and black theme that the company logo suggested to me when I saw it.  A grey keyline helps to draw the eye down the page as well as defining the edge of the site pages. Each page is bookended by the red footer that carries the text version of all the links.

The site is now updated regularly with new properties and the design allows the company to present a corporate image unified with all their paperwork and advertising to customers.

Visit the site by clicking here.

Posted by Charlotte Lamb, designer at I to Eye. 

The next website I am going to look at is one that I to Eye have been working on for a long time, we have seen the site change and develop as the business itself has changed over the last few years.

Relish People is a company that organises life changing classes and events to help participants build up their confidence, meet their goals and improve their lives. Wendy and Kim run the business and work with both individuals, groups and with businesses in the south of England and their infectious enthusiasm has shaped their website from the beginning.

Originally the site had a collection of hand-drawn illustrations used to convey a sense of fun around a subject that can be hard to articulate with design and now the site has a growing collection of photographs the owners feel are appropriate to the ideas being put forward.

Probably the most eye-catching aspect of the site is the bright purple colour chosen by Kim and Wendy. I began to understand just how important is was to them when I heard they have painted their office the same colour! Because the colour is so bright and welcoming I simply drew a curved banner to act as a frame for the navigation and pages to hang off.  The advantage of the design is that with each new course Relish do they can update the site easily.

Relish liked the banner design so much it now also features on their printed flyers, a real success!

Go and visit the site here.

JPEG is fine for most presentation requirements, provided that the compression is not to high when the JPEG file is made.

If your images are large and paint up slowly on the screen try saving them as PNG files, they should then paint up quicker than JPEG files, but the overall size of your PowerPoint presentation file may be larger.

You should ensure that all bitmap images (i.e. scans etc.) are saved as RGB format files, rather than CYMK. This simply means that the colour information in your image is made up from RED, GREEN and BLUE (RGB) rather than CYAN, MAGENTA, YELLOW and BLACK (CYMK). Computer screens and  projectors all build up images using RGB, however colour printers tend to use CYMK to reproduce colour images.

Posted by Charlotte Lamb, designer at I to Eye.

For my first blog post (ever) I am going to take a quick look at one of our more recent web design projects and examine some of the the reasons behind the decisions I made when designing it.

 Janet Ashfield of Mpowerme is a life coach and she came to I to Eye for a re-design of her existing website. In contrast to many clients Janet already had a lot of written material for the site and because of her existing site she also had ideas about how the site would be structured and the audience she wanted to reach. So my contribution more than anything else was to provide a design that would allow her text to become the centre of attention and provide a means for the visitor to navigate through the pages easily.

So the design became a series of boxed links on the hame page to allow visitors to locate the precise service they were interested in and an array of links across the top of the pages so any page can be accessed at any time.

 I followed the style and colours of the logo Janet already had closely because it had a lot of impact and it felt right to extend it across the website balanced by the white background of the pages.

 Go and visit the website here.

My all time top web design tip to sell goods and services from your website is really simple.

Know your market, know your customers, identify their ‘pain’ and understand the barriers to making a sale.

Then design your website to address those issues.

In the last few weeks several of our customers have had telephone calls from domain name registration companies claiming that a man has tried to register a number of domain names similar to those used by our customers.

They then go on to say that the man registering the names won’t give his name and they have rung our customer to check that it not a member of their staff registering the names.

Our take on this is that it is just a sales technique to pressure our customers in to buying additional names. In fact one of our customers has purchased some more names as a result of one of these calls. However we await to see if the names actually get registered.

The companies making these calls have good looking websites with telephone numbers and address details. However when we have ‘Googled’ them they do not appear.

Our advice is that if you really feel the need to buy more names use your usual supplier, never buy names from a company that cold calls you.

We always recommend the use of the simpler styled fonts such as Arial, the characters have a constant thickness. Fonts such as Times Roman, with thin vertical strokes, can be difficult to read at a distance. Instead of using the underline feature to emphasis titles, it is better to use colour or a bold style of font. From a distance an underlined F will look like an E and an I can become a L.

If you have not used a standard Windows or Mac OS font such as Arial  you may need to install the font on the second computer.

If you have used a number of scanned images, audio or video clips you should check to see if the second computer is of a high enough specification to play the presentation correctly.

Check to make sure that you have imported all your images and not embedded them or appended them, otherwise they may not display correctly on the   second computer.

If you have not used any video, audio or linked files in your  PowerPoint presentation you need only burn the presentation file to your CD-ROM. Scanned images and clipart will be included in the PowerPoint file if they have been embedded and not linked, so you do not need to burn the individual scans or images to CD.

If you have used video, audio or linked files you will have to burn these to the CD. You must ensure that they are burnt on to the CD in the   same relative position to your PowerPoint file as they were on your hard drive.

The easiest way to achieve this, is prior to creating your presentation collect   together in one folder all the video, audio and linked files you are going to   use. Then create your PowerPoint presentation in the same folder, by burning the folder’s complete contents to CD your PowerPoint file will retain its relative   position to your media clips and hence know where to find them.