Inside Design 9

Although businesses will already have overall business and marketing plans in place, there is an increasing need for a separate strategy document specifically for the digital environment. With business plans typically looking three to five years into the future, there’s a need for more nimble plans agile enough to cope with a rapidly-changing online world.  Read more

People can be impatient. They don’t much like waiting in queues. They don’t like delays on public transport. And they definitely don’t like slow mobile websites. It’s an unfortunate fact that whilst 64% of smartphone users expect a website to spring into life in three seconds, the average website takes around eight seconds to load.  Read more

From mind maps, bubble charts, cartograms and wordles to waterfall charts, dot plots, candlestick charts and sparklines, data presentation can get a bit overwhelming. So if you have a range of important and interesting facts and figures that you need to get across to your audience, and you want a bit of artistic flair to boot, what’s the best way to do it? Enter the infographic.  Read more

With desktop, mobile and social technology developing so rapidly, websites can all too quickly seem clunky and outdated. But whilst it might be tempting to start afresh on a blank page, don’t be too hasty.

Okay, so there might be times when a site is receiving little or no traffic anyway, or is so old that starting again might be the best option, but before you delete anything, you might find that there are more advantages to starting with what you already have.  Read more

Whether you want to show street directions for customers visiting your company headquarters or want to pinpoint your branch locations, adding a customised map to your website can provide useful information and extra detail for your users. Incorporating your own logo and including locations such as train stations and parking areas make it both functional and user-friendly. But that doesn’t mean it’s exciting.

Luckily, there are plenty of ways in which you can add character and creative flair to what can otherwise be somewhat dull and uninspiring.  Read more

Probably the biggest UI design trend this year, flat design wholeheartedly embraces the ‘less is more’ approach. Stripped back, simple and clean, its aim is to focus on honesty, integrity and functionality, where beauty of form is dependent upon content.  Read more

Want to improve your SEO ranking, generate more traffic to your website and increase your clickthrough rates by up to 30%? Don’t mind spending a little bit of extra time ensuring that this happens? Then Google rich snippets are just what you need.  Read more

Mobile website design can be daunting. Does it need to be different from the desktop version? If so, how? And how will you ever cater for differing devices and screen sizes? Here, we’re keeping things simple with six easy tips.  Read more

Microcopy is the plethora of small pieces of text that make a website, mobile app or retail product easy to use and consumer-friendly.

The unsung hero of good copywriting, typical examples include words on labels, buttons, menus, notifications, headlines, form elements, checkouts, error message, auto-responders and calls to action. Its purpose is to help clarify, explain and direct, as well as ease a user’s concerns and promote consistent branding.  Read more

M-commerce (or mobile commerce, to give it its full name) is quickly becoming big business. With some predicting that mobile sales will reach $31 billion by 2018, others estimating $86 billion by 2016, and some going as far as $108 billion by 2017 just in US sales alone, no one seems to really know how quickly this market will develop. But regardless of the statistics, what is clear is that mobile commerce is growing, and growing fast.  Read more