How has website development changed?
With the rise of PHP to the top of the language heap in terms of developer adoption and web usage at-large, it's no surprise that the top three open-source web content management systems in use today are written in PHP, namely--Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress. While features and functionality are comparable amongst the three, deciding which system to implement can ultimately hinge on several factors that vary across organizations and roles.
Whether you're exploring the whole RGB spectrum or bringing something fresh to black and white, color is one of the most important parts of website design. It's one of the first things users notice when they open up a site, and it instantly says a lot about the client and service or product they offer. Both color extremes are buzzing trends right now, so it's a great time to go ahead and experiment with using bold choices to add drama to your client's site. Here are some tips on when to go with monochrome and when to let your colorful fantasies play out.
There are many things for web industries to look forward to in the spring. Some of the more popular web design trends include mobile first design, deeply focused landing pages, and putting a face with freelance web development. People are building better sites and writing better blogs, and these trends are at the heart of it all.
Mobile First Design
Yeah, yeah, seems like we've been talking about this ad nauseam, but I recommend that you look at some real stats for a change. Have a look at your analytics to see just how many mobile browsers visit your site these days. This trend has been going on for a few years now, but it's only now getting to the point of overtaking desktop clients - - at least for some sites. This makes responsive design increasingly more important. Please share with us what you find.
The current web design trends take a turn to minimalism, with flat design coming out in the lead. When you strip away many visual elements that create a visual impact, you rely heavily on typography to make your design beautiful. 2014 is shaping up to be an exciting year for typography trends, particularly if you are working with responsive or flat designs for Joomla. Keep an eye out for these popular trends, and consider incorporating them into your own designs if they need a typography face lift.
1. The purpose of a blog is list-building/SEO/virality
So why do you have a blog in the first place? It is okay to admit that it's part of your digital marketing strategy, and a great blog can be a key part of that strategy.
Joomla's basic feature set is powerful, especially with Bootstrap being included in Java's core coding. Bootstrap is a collection of javascript and CSS snippets that are easily added to your website, the template, or modules. It provides a great deal of flexibility to an already great content management system, but sometimes you need features that Joomla and Bootstrap can't cover. The open source nature of this script provides fertile ground for an endless amount of extensions. When you're ready to go beyond Joomla's basic functions, a quick jaunt into the available extensions reveals a way to take your website to the next level.
Responsive design spells the difference between creating one version of your site and creating dozens. Instead of tailor making your website for each type of mobile device, you let the responsive design take care of the heavy lifting. When you create a responsive design with mobile device compatibility in mind, you want to keep a few best practices in mind.
Joomla sees its share of user interface trends, as the latest web fad passes from CMS to CMS. One of the latest UI trends is flat design. Instead of 3D elements galore, with gloss dripping off of Web 2.0 everything, you have simple, nearly minimalist designs moving to the forefront. One of the most prominent displays of flat design came from iOS 7, which revamped its interface to embrace this simple style.
No web designer is perfect, and failure is often an essential part of the creative process. You can have the biggest budget in the world for a site, but sometimes things go horribly wrong. Instead of stressing yourself out over a web design that simply doesn't work, do a postmortem and determine how the design went wrong, and what you can do in the future to avoid similar problems.
Once you've constructed your well-designed, responsive website, your users need to be able to spread the word about what they find there. Providing social media buttons is the basic method of encouraging people to share your content with their social media networks, and it's important to understand the best practices for posting these buttons. Here is an overview of social media buttons, to help you get started:
