web design Archives | Iteration Group | Product / UI / UX Consulting Firm

Cheaper AND Better - Use ThemeForest for Basic Web Sites

Need a basic "marketing" web site? For your company? For your new product? For your nonprofit?

You know, the typical Home Page, Who We Are, What We Do, Contact Us, etc. In the old days, we would pay a designer somewhere around $5,000 to design and build a really simple site from scratch (goes up from there).

Those days are over. Head-on over to ThemeForest and browse their "Site Templates." You're bound to find one that you really like.

Most are:

Meticulously designed using the latest technologies (HTML5, CSS, JS)
Well-documented and very easy for a technical person to edit
Extremely flexible, with lots of different layouts to choose from Responsively designed, so they look great on Web, Mobile and Tablets

You still might need a designer to make some custom modifications, but the end result should be a much better site at a lower overall cost.

by Iteration Group

Human Faces Can Increase Conversion Rates

Are you using faces of smiling happy people in your apps and landing pages? You should think about it. They've been proven to increase conversion rates in a few ways.

In the Netflix example, above, you can see a happy family staring in the direction of the sign up form. Nextflix has been using this since at least October 2007 (per an old presentation of ours). Folks tend to look where other people are looking.
This phenomenon was further proven in this study (baby example above). You can see the eye-tracking results when the baby was facing forward and when the baby was facing the text.
37 Signals (popular app company) did some pretty extensive testing of human faces. They A/B tested a whole bunch of different faces, and, for their product offering, the guy above was the winning landing page (probably because he's relatable to the target audience).

by Iteration Group

Use These Mockups: Lots of Design Patterns in Balsamiq Mockups (BMML) format

For those of you that use Balsamiq Mockups, here are a bunch of templates I created that you might find handy.
Download them all in one ZIP file (90KB).

I find myself re-using many of these elements when I design applications (especially the boring/tedious/must-have features, like Forgot Password, Sign In, 404 page). Enjoy!

The following mockups are included in the ZIP file:

Home Pages