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Content versus Design

Posted on November 1, 2012 by skulkaew

Design, it’s totally and completely inescapable and impossible to overlook.

In publishing eras past, it was an afterthought. Content was first and foremost and appearance a secondary or tertiary concern. If you’re shaking your head thinking, “Content is still king,” I’ll touch on that in a moment. But over the course of the last century or so, there’s been a shift in focus between the two, and that much is evident in the changes we’ve seen with newspapers, and how front page formatting has evolved over time. There are a lot of reasons as to why this his happened, but I’d like to focus on how reader demographics have changed, as have their reading habits, without oversimplifying everything else. Because we consume information significantly differently than we did five, ten and fifteen years ago, organization has been changed to facilitate and streamline that process. The slideshow below shows how The Los Angeles Times has changed since its first edition from a paper crammed to the brim with information to something more cogent and palpable for readers.

“The Los Angeles Times” Headlines from Bravo Design, Inc.

Online, a website’s design is just as important as its content, if not more so, and can be the difference between a visit and a pass or a qualified lead versus an unacceptable bounce rate. To be clear, when I say web design, I’m not just referring to its aesthetics. I also mean its usability. Yes, content will drive traffic and have visitors coming back for repeat visits, but most guests won’t stick around initially if your page is difficult to navigate through or you’ve used GeoCities to build your business page. That’s not actually possible since the service is defunct. And yes, there are always exceptions to the rule, but you know what I’m getting at. There’s a direct correlation in increased conversion with a well crafted website, even if it has its shortcomings, and subpar metrics with one that’s poorly designed. This tidbit of advice isn’t esoteric. It’s money in the bank with real world application.

So what do you do? You build better. Sure, you can use your site but can your guests? If you paused for even the smallest of moments before answering that question, listed below are web design considerations you should mull over.

First and foremost, consider your goal(s). I can’t stress this point enough. What do you want from your website? Are you looking to increase readership for your fratire blog or are you selling <insert anything> or just schooling the general public on your service offerings? In Alice in Wonderland, there’s an exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat that’s paraphrased: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” The quote is all-applicable to life, love and, most of all, your website. Figure it out and then plan accordingly, then plan some more and then execute.

Who’s going to be using your site and how will they be using it? Web content and print content are totally and entirely not the same, so you’re going to have to tailor your writing style to the demographic you’re targeting with their browsing habits in mind. Remember, no one (including marketers) likes marketese so try not to write that way. Next, ask yourself if you’re being engaging? Good design and substantial content will draw users in, which makes them want to connect with you. Without personality, your visitors aren’t going to feel compelled to stay, and this can be detrimental to your conversion rates in the long run.

Manage attention and try to not squander user patience. Two points to think about are lowering barriers to pave the path of least resistance and not providing too many options. The less action that’s required for a visitor to access your site, the better. First-time users who want to read an article or peruse through your site probably aren’t going to want to fill out contact forms or register accounts, and are apt to bounce when confronted with the like, so don’t make them do that. Second, if you’re offering way too many choices, your average user is going to have a difficult time making up their mind. That’s the difference between going to a restaurant that has what seems like an endless menu with samplings from each and every continent and going to one that serves three different kinds of hot dogs.

Last but not least, simplify. This point, though seemingly intuitive, is often the hardest to apply. The best designs speak for themselves, and as Dieter Rams said once upon a time are “as little as possible.” With minimal or no instruction, a child should be able to use it. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. You just need to focus on the essential while pruning away everything else.

If you’re still shaking your head, when it comes to content versus design, I’ll cede that they’re equally important, but that’s all. You can leave a comment below if you fervently disagree. If you’re thinking about shopping around for web development assistance, we have a write up listed in our design blog, which might help out in your search. When I initially wrote the entry, I forgot to include that the expert you hire should be SEO savvy, but you already know that. Just remember that the best designers are translators who can turn a vision into something tangible and that our portfolio is also pretty groovy.

If you’d like to download this entry in Word format, click here: Content versus Design.

Photo Credit: Tactile Design Group

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Web Design Update

Posted on August 21, 2012 by skulkaew

We were contacted by FASteambanners to redesign their website with a Flex application offering that would allow customers to design their own sports team banners.

Bravo Design, Inc. custom developed a Magento e-commerce based site as our Flash/Flex development network partners concurrently created the “Design Your Own Banner” application. We also developed several custom functions and a custom shipping “Time in Transit Estimator” that was integrated with the UPS API, which allowed the client to manually update their ship-out dates by product type.

The main project goal was to allow FASteambanners to have a more robust web presence and to be able to compete with the other banner printing companies that were rolling out their own custom banner builders. While several of their competitors appeared to use clipart packages, FASteambanners was illustrating each piece of clipart with the same quality that allowed their airbrush business to thrive.

During the project, the client was informed that their current hosting company would no longer be supporting several of the PHP4 scripts, designed 12 years prior, that ran the website. As a result, our web development team worked strenuously to complete the project in time for the fall sports season, a very busy time for FASteambanners which would average up to 45 custom banner orders a day.

The website launched successfully, and our client is ecstatic that their products are now being listed, on average, a good 30-50 positions higher on Google’s respective search results.

To see more of our web design work, click here.

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Aesthetics and Usability

Posted on July 30, 2012 by skulkaew

In a study by Antonella De Angeli, Alistair Sutcliffe and Jan Hartmann done at the University of Manchester, the three concluded that the perception of information quality is affected in a manner resembling the halo effect in person perception. The halo effect or halo error, given its name by psychologist Edward Thorndike, is a “cognitive bias in which our judgments of a person’s character can be influenced by our overall impression of him or her” and “can be found in a range of situations—from the courtroom to the classroom and in everyday interactions.” In Thorndike’s first study done in 1920, he tasked two commanding officers with evaluating their soldiers in terms of physical qualities by rating their “neatness, voice, physique, bearing and energy,” along with their personal qualities in terms of “dependability, loyalty, responsibility, selflessness and cooperation.” What he discovered was that “the correlations were too high and too even,” meaning that a high score in a physical quality would trend across all the other results, more specifically, those relating to personal qualities. Conversely, a negative attribute would correlate with the rest of that soldier’s results. What’s interesting is that these results aren’t limited exclusively to likeability. Attractiveness also produces a halo effect. In 1972, Dion K. K., Berscheid E. and Walster E. conducted an experiment at the University of Minnesota where participants evaluated the photos of an attractive individual, an average one and an unattractive individual along with 27 personality traits like altruism, assertiveness, stability and so forth. Participants were then asked to predict the future happiness the photos’ subjects would have in regards to marital, parental, social, professional and overall happiness. What the results overwhelmingly showed was that participants believed that attractive subjects would have more desirable personality traits than their average and unattractive counterparts.

One of the takeaways from the first study I mentioned, done by De Angeli, Sutcliffe and Hartmann, suggests that there’s a correlation between the aesthetic qualities of an interface, its perceived usability and the overall user satisfaction with that system. With a more aesthetically pleasing site, users tend to find the website more credible and easier to use. Noam Tractinsky would later prove that this phenomenon is not culture specific. According to Donald A. Norman, the writer of Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, “The result is that everything has both a cognitive and an affective component – cognitive to assign meaning, affective to assign value. You cannot escape affect: it is always there. More important, the affective state, whether positive or negative affect, changes how we think.”

The caveat is that beauty is contextual.

Though attractive products are perceived as easier to use, purchase decisions are based on actual usability. They are conceptually at least because I still don’t know what my girlfriend bases hers on. Just kidding. But ease of use is measured as having a smaller learning curve. It’s efficient and memorable, and it requires less training and support. That being said, the frequency of error should be low, as should the subsequent consequence. Norman writes, “The human perceptual and attentional systems are tuned to notice discrepancies and problems, not that which is expected. So we tend to notice things that distract, that impair our ability to get something done, or in the realm of aesthetics, that are particularly distasteful. We do indeed notice especially attractive items (or people), but quite often the attention drawn to the appearance can be detrimental to the task. So the best designs are often the ones that are least noticed.” On a site, users want problems solved whether that takes form as an answer to a question or a product or service that makes their lives easier. The process that provides that solution should be as painless as possible. Ideally, given the option to have a do-over, a user would still opt for your product over that of a competitor’s.

It’s important to understand that how we perceive a site evokes an array of emotions and attitudes that affect our attitude towards the content, the products being sold, the company itself as well as its credibility. A site’s attractiveness will draw users in and will incentivize them to stay, but it doesn’t complete a site on its own. Without usability and substance, those very users will grow listless and move on. Joel Spolsky argues that, “Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.”

Aesthetics and usability form the user experience, and as that’s optimized, your site’s likeability and credibility increase, so does the likelihood that a user will complete a transaction. If you’re looking for some professional help, you can contact us here. We’d love to hear the details of your next project. And not to be immodest, but we’re pretty good at what we do.

Photo Credit: Buzzle.com

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Picking & Choosing

Posted on July 24, 2012 by skulkaew

I was at the mall this last weekend, passing some time before seeing The Dark Knight Rises when I stopped in at a T.J. Maxx. As strange as it may sound, I really enjoy stopping by stores of the like just so I can peruse through the home and electronics sections. It’s not so much because I expect to buy something useful at a heavily discounted price. I just like the random goods. The typical electronic section at a store like T.J. Maxx or Ross consists of digital tire pressure gauges, the perfect pushup, cheap headphones and a whole slew of other products that have escaped various recalls over the years. There’s no order or sense to it. This last time I was there, I snagged a leather travel size grooming kit complete with tweezers, nail clippers, hair trimmers and more for $13. Sadly, but not too surprisingly, the trimmers didn’t work. Even with new batteries, they refused to turn on. Was I mad? No, not really. Part of buying something at a heavily discounted price has a lot to do with implicitly acknowledging the fact that I might be settling for a suboptimal product, and I think that’s perfectly acceptable because I would rather skimp on a replaceable grooming kit than say, my health insurance.

When you think about it, businesses aren’t all that different in that they have to pick and choose which investments will best serve them. Because most startups don’t have much going as far as cash flow goes in their infancy, they bootstrap. Bootstrapping means using the startup capital available, which typically consists of personal savings, credit cards and loans, and trying to extend that as far as possible while keeping other costs down because you can’t spend money you’re not making, not for forever at least. Amongst some of the common tips for reducing expenditures is keeping teams lean by hiring only those critical to success, giving out equity versus cash upfront, outsourcing and, lastly, cutting back on marketing and public relations. Mark Cuban, to the ire of the PR industry, pointed that out when he blogged about the last point. To summarize, he said that the cost of the service and its actual value are misaligned, and that a CEO or someone on the management team should be tasked with outbound communication to garner buzz and media coverage. It’s only later on, once a company has matured and passed this phase, that it might be more practical as time becomes the more valuable commodity. But right out of the gates, it’s better to skimp on something on like marketing and advertising rather than something critical, like electricity.

When you think about it, all of this is more obvious than it is revolutionary. If I were trying to sell you a car, we probably wouldn’t disagree that owning a vehicle has value though that much depends more so on where you live. Coming from Texas, I can assure you that not having one there is terrible when everything you need to go to is far and wide apart, and the public transportation system is abysmal. But just because car ownership has value doesn’t mean you should go out and buy one right this minute. You might not be in a position to for any number of reasons.

That being said, the same is true for the services we offer. Bravo Design, Inc. develops really great websites, and our design and print production work is bar none. While I may have violated some unspoken rule of blogging with what might sound like shameless promotion, it doesn’t make the prior statement any less true. I’ve written a few articles on design since I started here, but I thought this would be a good time to point out the elephant in the room. Attractive products with better aesthetics, whether that comes down to packaging design or an item itself, are going to be chosen over ones that don’t have those qualities. A better looking, better functioning website is going to be perceived as more authoritative, and more attractive marketing collateral is not only going to command more attention. It lends itself more credibility. I’m sorry. I didn’t make the rules. You might disagree with all of the above but if you were having chronic migraines, you’d probably trust WebMD over this Geocities site though you should definitely contact your general practitioner before attempting to diagnose thyself.

Employing a professional designer might not be in your cards for the near future. But when the time does come, we’d like for you to keep us in mind. Your website, and all of your marketing collateral equate to interactions with your prospective clients. We’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating. We recommend you put your best foot forward.

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A Bravo Design, Inc. Update

Posted on July 19, 2012 by skulkaew

Bravo Design, Inc. is proud to announce that it has completed development and launched websites for three of our clients in the last week.

Bootsy Bellows was the first to go up. It’s a nightclub owned and run by actor David Arquette and members of h.wood group, Darren Dzienciol, John Terzian and Brian Toll. Located on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, the club has made a huge splash in the short time it’s been open boasting celebrity guests like Robert Pattinson, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, his girlfriend, Selena Gomez and many more.

The second was for The Son of an Afghan Farmer, a film written and directed by Matthew Levin. The movie follows Muhad, a student from Afghanistan who comes to college in California but is recalled back prematurely, and the changes he undergoes trying to live and thrive in between those two very separate worlds.

Finally, the website of Los Angeles based director / cinematographer Mark A. Ritchie was given a redesign. Mark favors simple, clean designs and took a minimalist approach to his website. The site exists to showcase his excellent work, and he doesn’t want any other design elements interfering with it.

Our regular visitors might notice that we redesigned our site. Love it? Hate it? Let us know in the comment section below.

To see more of our work, click here.

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Actionable Metrics vs. Vanity Metrics

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Daniel Arriola

Throughout advertising’s history, drawing a line from a traditional asset to a sale has been notoriously difficult, but the Internet changed that. Early on, it offered a distinct advantage over its older, offline predecessors: measurability. But despite the enormous progress made, measurement is still one of the major challenges facing both the industry and business owners. Unfortunately, the majority of data made readily available by analytics packages are vanity metrics that scrutinize at a superficial level. They’re useful in the right context and will tell you if your site is engaging or not and how visitors interact with it. But vanity metrics don’t necessarily correlate to more important numbers like cost of new customers acquisition, lifetime value, revenues and profits nor do they affect overall marketing or business goals. Vanity metrics are only focused on because they look great in press releases. The analytics that entrepreneurs should be more concerned with are actionable metrics that help them make decisions.

Think about your most recent website traffic report. What have you done with that? Do you know what drove those visitors to your page? Do you know what actions to take next or how to leverage that traffic? A business that only cares about its daily hit count is the same as a store that only cares about the number of people who come through its doors but not necessarily that they purchase anything. Generally speaking, marketers and advertisers tend to believe that whatever they were working on that immediately precedes a spike in traffic (i.e., new products, promotions or policy) probably caused it. We infer causation from correlation. We aren’t, however, quick to jump on the sword when the numbers go back down. The reality is that a response to a marketing program may often be the result of the cumulative effects of an entire campaign rather than a response to a single advertisement or promotion.

Moving forward, goals should be reoriented not just to validate that you’ve built something people want but also to confirm that your efforts to grow your business are fruitful and paying dividends. This is where you establish and define your product’s unique value proposition. So what should you be focus on instead? Listed below are ways to finding metrics you can act on that will impact your bottom line.

Not everyone who comes to your website will make a purchase or complete your designated call-to-action. That’s a given. Conversion funnels reveal when or where visitors drop-off and are used to mitigate this on a page-by-page basis. An analysis of visitor flow path diagnoses the problems that derail conversion, leading to improved usability and/or the implementation of more effective calls-to-action at each step of the way. Remember that users will almost always opt for the path of least resistance so make it easier by simplifying the process for them. The only problem is that they don’t track long lifecycle events, and almost all of them use a reporting period where events generated in that period are aggregated across all users skewing numbers at the fringes of the funnel.

That’s where cohort analysis comes in. This involves segmenting your users into smaller groups, using shared common characteristics or experiences within a defined period, to compare against one another. As an example, let’s say that you’re wanting to increase sales on an application on the Android Market. To do so, you group together users who download the free demo on week one, those on week two, those on week three and so forth. From there, you might find that of the first group, X% went on to purchase the application. Of the second group, Y% made purchases. Of the third group, Z% went on to make theirs. At that point, you’re able to evaluate any changes made which correlate back to your results and fine tune from there. This prevents influxes in traffic due to blog updates, PR/advertising, your competitors or extraneous variables from skewing your numbers.

In A/B split-tests, you have two versions of an element and a metric that defines success. To determine which is better, say it’s a new homepage layout, you randomly split your website traffic between two groups and measure their performance based on visitor flow, bounce rate and/or whether or nor your designated call-to-action is satisfied. At the end of testing, you can select the version that performs best for real-life use. Split testing is effective because it definitively confirms or denies if changes in layout, copy, design, etc. are beneficial not.

Figuring out which metrics to use, and which ones to discard, is difficult because every business is different, and the process is one that iterates itself over and over again. The best solution for you is the one that works best for your customers and/or users so don’t assume too much upfront. Measure what matters. It’s easy to think that more reports is better, but it’s not. The key is to have as few as possible. When in doubt, remember that users seek out sites in a goal-oriented fashion (e.g., to learn more about a company, to sign up for a newsletter and/or to shop). Provide a great first experience, and they might just come back and make a purchase.

If you have questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the fields below. To learn more about how Bravo Design, Inc. can contribute to your growing business, click here or fill out a contact form by here.

Photo credit: Doug Savage of www.savagechickens.com

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Sustainable SEO

Posted on March 22, 2012 by skulkaew

If there’s one thing that’s certain when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), it’s probably the fact that search engines are in a constant state of flux, continually evolving to keep up with users’ needs. PageRank, used by Google, determines a page’s prominence by tallying inbound hyperlinks that act as votes of confidence. High-quality inbound links provide context about the subject matter of a page and serve as an indicator of its quality and popularity. The more votes cast for a page, the higher it rises on a search engine report page (SERP). While it isn’t the only factor used, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of Google’s web search tools.

As long as this remains so, there will exist a market for purchasing inbound links that artificially inflate page ranking. There has been, and will likely always be, networks geared towards spinning out content and building hundreds, if not thousands, of links for this exact purpose. BuildMyRank.com (BMR), one of the more well known networks that offered thousand of low-quality links at a reasonable price, announced its closure this week after the “overwhelming majority of its networks” were removed from Google’s search index.

If you’re wondering whether using a network like this is in violation of Google’s terms of service, the answer is yes.

Companies seem to not mind or know about the risk/consequence associated with getting caught (e.g., devalued rankings, possible deindexing, etc.) or even acknowledge the fact that the originating site might have nothing to do with their own or, worse, be obscene. In the coming weeks and months, we’re likely to see additional closures as well as the collateral damage for sites that employed companies who peddle similar services. While it may have seemed like a viable strategy to optimize your search engine ranking, beforehand, companies that generate countless numbers of links for this singular purpose really aren’t providing a service of value to anyone. They create artificial online relationships for the sole purpose of optimizing said ranking. So while it may not explicitly be black hat in terms of the quality of the content, it’s definitely not creating value for search engine users. And while that may have worked well in the past, Google is quickly learning to find and remove these networks, their clients and their affiliates from its listings.

A more sustainable SEO strategy centers on using techniques that will survive the test of time regardless as to what criteria search engines change. Afterall, who wants to get delisted from any given SERP?

Develop Quality Content, Build Links and Promote
One of the best ways to improve your ranking, as well as shape your branding and how your audience your audience perceives your company, is to invest in unique and relevant content development. The more useful it is, the greater the chances are that a reader will share it. The easier it is to share, the better. As search engines work to more effectively incorporate an individual’s social graph into SERPs, the more heavily your social back links will weigh in. If you’re creating content in-house, whoever is developing content for the site should have a clear understanding of the business, its target audience and its goals and objectives. Before publishing content, ask, “Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?”

After publishing, promote it aggressively. Link building through traditional efforts like outreach, guest contributions, social media and leveraging partnerships is a great way to obtain SERP prominence. Focus on a few important social networks, rather than spreading yourself thin over too many, and engage and interact. Share your articles to your community by posting links of your important posts or content but try and avoid overwhelming your followers.

If you prioritize your users before your page ranking, the latter will follow in suit.

Markup Pages for Search Engines
Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is rendered into HTML, it becomes difficult to recover the original structured data. Search engines can benefit greatly on-page markups that enable them to more readily decipher information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web.

Schema.org provides a collection of tags that webmasters can use to mark up content elements in ways recognized by major search engines, like Bing, Google and Yahoo!, that rely on markups to improve search results making it easier for people to find the right web pages. Additionally, there are geo-specific schema tags that can be leveraged to further send signals as to which audience the content is intended for including organization names, addresses, contact information, geo-coordinates, etc. Not only does this improve the user experience, but it also helps attract a searcher’s attention to your content and will likely increase click-through rates.

Stay Current and Competitive
This should be the most intuitive point but to be a serious contender, you have to stay current. Current is the minimum. Two steps ahead is better. Know what’s going on in your industry, on your own website and in the SEO community. Because the competitive landscape is constantly shifting, you’ll need to continually monitor and adapt your SEO strategy as problems arise so pay attention to your website metrics. If you’re using Google Analytics, you’ll know how many unique visitors are scoping out your site, how much time they’re spending on it, what content is most frequently being read, what keywords are being used to organically find your page and much, much more. If you’re not, you need to. Agility will help you turn on a dime but only if you can see where you’re going.

Yes, that requires a lot of time and energy or one intern. Just kidding. But there are a countless number of forums, articles and other free resources for SEO professionals to learn about more about the trade. If you’re managing your business’ SEO and marketing campaign(s), there’s no reason to not leverage this.

Lastly, focus on the long haul and decide where you’ll be one, five or ten years from now. Inevitably, there will be goals that can be further broken down into milestones that must be completed along the way to make progress. The purpose isn’t to create a concrete plan that will ensure your company’s passage into the coming century. It’s to address your strengths and weaknesses, so you can leverage and mitigate them respectively. As was the case with BMR, the problem is that short-term decisions have a habit of contaminating long-term success. One of the best ways to not only succeed, but to flourish, is to not shoot yourself in the foot.

Photo Credit: www.searchcowboys.com

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Breaking All the Rules

Posted on March 19, 2012 by skulkaew

Creating web design that’s intuitive and easy to navigate through are qualities that web developers continually strive towards in order to maximize traffic and increase usability as best as possible. Those qualities make overall use more enjoyable which, ultimately, plays a critical role in a website’s success. While there are generally accepted conventions, best practices and design trends. For every rule, there is always an exception. Let’s keep in mind that guidelines are not definitive answers. Listed below are rules to break (or at least consider breaking):

Usability should be directed at the “lowest common denominator.”
Web design is, and always will be, about problem solving. The constituency that comprises your user base will be widely disparate, and that’s a good thing. What that doesn’t mean is that the quality of the site and/or its content should be sacrificed in favor of tailoring to the “lowest common denominator.” Give your users some credit and treat them how you’d want to be treated. If it’s worth your users’ while, they’ll figure it out.

Information needs to go above the fold.
“Content is king.” I know. You know. You hear this 94 times a day. It’s the quality and usefulness of your site’s content that will determine the success of your site. While the layout plays a significant part in the effectiveness of your delivery, it doesn’t mean that information needs to be scaled back or, worse, crammed indiscernibly into a single frame. Books have pages that must be turned in order to move backwards and/or forwards, and websites have content that must be scrolled to on and off the screen.

Instructions have to be ultra specific.
I’m not really a Mac kind of guy. Outside of now, I’ve only had to use one once. Despite the lack of incredibly specific directions in the form of a manual, replaced with my sense of pride that renders me unable to ask my more tech savvy coworkers for help, it’s pretty easy to figure out. This same principle applies to the text deployed on a page. At the end of a short teaser for a blog article, there’s no need to have anchor text that reads: “Click here to read this full article.” Something as simple as “Read more” will suffice. There are going to be times where giving users some extra instruction is necessary, but you’ll be able to figure that out on a case by case basis.

Make Your Site’s Goal Obvious.
Something that really gets drilled into the minds of young designers is that a design should instantly tell viewers what they are looking at before they read any text. Brand recognition is important for large corporations, but the smaller guys sometimes need to approach the game differently to attract a viewer’s attention. Be mysterious every now and again. Holding back can intrigue the viewer into wanting to learn more. Applying this technique to web design can greatly increase the time that users stay on your site.

The point of this post is to think outside of the box. It’s not encouraging you to break rules just for the sake of breaking rules. If you do so for the wrong reasons, you’ll probably see mixed results at best. While unconventional design can be dangerous and even damaging to your reputation as a designer, standard convention should be used if there are no better alternatives. If, and when, you do come up with a better way to present something, the choice becomes obvious. So approach every new design with a question in mind, what is the best way to execute this element? Keep the user and their tasks in mind and if you think of a great and innovative way that will improve their user experience, go for it. Maybe your idea will become the next great design convention. If it fails, you can always fall back on what works for others. When it comes to breaking all the rules, as Robert Francis Kennedy famously said, “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

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Finding the Right Designer

Posted on February 28, 2012 by skulkaew

If you’re looking for a website designer, it’s probably because it’s outside your skill set or you lack the time to invest into building or modifying a website yourself. If you’re starting from scratch, you should know that you can’t create a website without spending some amount of money, even if that’s just buying and registering a domain. While that dollar amount depends on what kind of website you want to make and the goals you want to accomplish through that website, having a plan will help in mitigating cost as best as possible.

Remember, the mission is to build a business platform that your customers can utilize whether that be researching your products and/or services offerings or completing online transactions. The developer you hire will primarily be responsible for taking the vision you have for your business and its offerings and turning that into a website by incorporating the right elements to achieve the look, feel and functionality you want.

Between picking an agency or finding a freelancer, because there are so many options, finding the right designer is difficult more often than not. There are a few things that you will have to keep in mind while searching through the ranks. Freelance designers are usually cheaper to use in the short-term. The downside is that your project may extend beyond the scope of their abilities, which will ultimately lead to a parting in ways. When it comes to something as valuable as the perception of your company and future sales of your product or service, cutting corners should be the furthest thought from your mind. Compare pricing and check for guarantee(s) offered by vendor. The prices will vary from one designer to the next, but the focus should center on the quality of the work shown and whether you actually like it or not. Doing your research here will payoff down the road.

Check out potential designers’ personal websites. Portfolios showcase progress in a designer’s trade and are one of the best, if not the best, indicator for future success. 99.9% of the time his, her or their best work will be displayed here, and it will probably answer a lot of your initial questions.

Remember, it’s not enough that your website look cool. It needs to communicate a message effectively. An important consideration would be whether or not the designer’s styling is compatible with the vision you have for your website. A question to ask yourself is whether or not you actually like their work. Is it effective?

This question has been listed already, but I can’t overstate how important it is. Paying for an ineffective website is the rough equivalent of buying a broken <insert anything>. Sure, you could fix it, but you’d probably prefer to get it right the first time around. An additional question to ask yourself is whether the design is user friendly or not. If you haven’t read our blog on “Usability and Website Ergonomics,” make sure you do so. It’ll supply you with some additional considerations for website development.

Once you’ve compiled a list of candidates, interview. Check for reviews and/or client testimonials on search engine reports (e.g., Google Places) and on their website. These should serve to show how a designer performed professionally and whether or not the client was satisfied with the final product. Throughout the process, some of the prospects will take the time to send you questions about you and your business. This is important because a designer needs to be empathetic towards you, as well as your end user, and know as much about your business as possible for them to create a website that accurately reflects your vision.

An ideal candidate has the passion and curiosity to constantly learn more about how people interact with digital products. Like any other hiring process, finding the right person for the job is largely dictated by trial and error. Conceptually, like golf, it seems easy. The actual execution is a completely different story. The most important takeaway here is that this exercise is an investment in your company where the end goal lies in facilitating transactions and increasing overall revenue.

Bravo Design, Inc. has been in the business for over a decade and continues to surpass its clients’ expectations in an extraordinary way. With a wide range of service offerings including: new media development, logo, web, graphic and key art design for traditional and digital media as well as packaging and outdoor advertising, the staff here is committed to serving your needs.

We’ll take the time to learn more about you and your business and provide the tools necessary for you to forge genuine relationships with your consumer. To learn more about how Bravo Design, Inc. can contribute to your growing business, fill out a contact form by clicking here.

https://vimeo.com/bravodesignince

Ergonomics and the User Experience

Posted on January 9, 2012 by skulkaew

While this should go without saying, your website has a huge impact on your sales and the number of clients you can, and will, close. How your website looks and performs will determine how the public perceives you and your business and can decide how successful a new marketing campaign can do post-implementation, so design is an essential part of any marketing campaign and a necessity to compete in a media driven world.

Furthermore, it will serve to develop your authority as a trusted provider. Whether you actually sell your products and services online or not, your website exists to initiate and catalyze visitor conversion. This might take the form of an actual checkout, the filling out of a subscription form or a free quote. In any case, conversions are taking place on your site.

If you’re considering a redesign, this blog should supply you with some of the considerations necessary to making the decisions that will facilitate an overhaul while positively impacting your overall profitability.

The usability and user experience (UX design) both affect the conversion rate of your site and will directly have an impact on revenue generated. Neither hinges completely on specific details like color theory or font selection as much as it does aspects like cross-browser and mobile compatibility, content management systems, site architecture and so forth. The scope of the UX is directed at affecting “all aspects of the user’s interaction with the product: how it is perceived, learned, and used” (Norman).

UX design begins by learning about a business, doing market research to understand its users and understanding how a service can be developed that would affect them in a meaningful way. Thus UX design has become a critical turning point in defining business strategy and provides a baseline for said decisions, but a UX driven process doesn’t end at implementation. Its focus extends into ongoing testing and continued development down the road. The easier potential clients find it to connect to you, the more likely they are to turn to you for their needs.

Moving forward, below are simple tips to better usability and UX.

1. This point should be the most intuitive. Critical elements; especially, those that aid navigation, should be emphasized. The site’s capabilities and limitations should be easy to discern. High contrast between text and any background used should increase legibility. That typically means using dark text against a light background.

2. While being unique and standing apart from the crowd is normally considered good, sometimes you have to follow conventional wisdom and do what everyone else is doing. Usage patterns, behavior developed from extended web use, expect that links be blue. It expects for navigation to be straightforward. Users should be able to find information quickly and easily despite the length of a document. This can be utilized with search functions, indexes, table of contents and so forth.

As a sidebar, Jakob Nielsen performed a usability study on search boxes. While this might not sound fascinating, it found that the average search box length is 18-characters wide, and that 27% of queries were too long for it. Extending it to 27-characters would accommodate 90% of queries.

3. White space, or negative space, improves comprehension and builds hierarchy between elements on a page. As information gets densely packed into a document, it can become difficult to comprehend and/or unreadable. What is a cipher eventually leads to abandonment. Employ margins, padding, scale and spacing. When repeatedly and effectively utilized, it helps develop an identity and rapport between you and your user.

4. Usability testing and diminishing marginal return tie in together on this point. A second study by Nielsen found that five test subjects would reveal around 85% of all problems with a website. It would take an additional ten testers to reveal the remaining quirks. In the smaller group studies, it was found that the first one or two users discovered the larger problems. The other testers would find smaller ones and confirm what the first one or two had already found. While the biggest delta is going from zero to one tester, any testing is better than no testing.

Michael Smythe, winner of the Designers Institute of New Zealand Outstanding Achievement Award, gives this definition for design, “Design is an integrative process that seeks resolution -not compromise- through cross-disciplinary teamwork. Design is intentional. Success by design simply means prospering on purpose.” In the long-run, effective design is an investment that increases the bottom line by capturing new market share and bolstering customer retention.

If you have any questions as to how Bravo Design, Inc. might contribute to your growing business, please visit us at http://www.bravodesigninc.com/contact/ or leave a comment on this page, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Donald Norman: Invisible Computer.
Jakob Nielsen & Hoa Loranger: Prioritizing Web Usability.
Jakob Nielsen: Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users.

https://vimeo.com/bravodesignince

WordCamp LA 2011 – Design, SEO and Selling WordPress

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Daniel Arriola

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to speak at Los Angeles’ WordCamp about my experience with WordPress and how we’ve developed countless websites for individuals and businesses using this amazing platform.

WordPress Design

While talking about design, I used one of the latest websites that Bravo Design, Inc. created for World Wide Digital Services, a film rental equipment company that commissioned a new website for their expanding entertainment industry connections. This website was used as an example of what WordPress can do and how it can break the mold of what people have come to expect from the open-source blogging CMS.

This WordPress theme was custom designed and developed by Bravo Design, Inc. starting from WordPress’ basic Twenty Ten theme.

“Oh, that’s like a blog isn’t it?” Yes, but that’d be like saying: “Wow, that’s a pretty nice Maserati… that’s like for running errands isn’t it?” There is much more to WordPress than the platform’s original blog functionality.

WordPress Search Engine Optimization

So we know that WordPress is ideal as a blogging platform, and it’s true that WordPress is already pretty optimized for search engines straight out of the box. So let’s just have a quick recap of what the search engines like, and what they like about WordPress, shall we?

Search Engines Love Keyword Relevance. Probably more than anything, search engines love finding people results that are extremely relevant to their search query. But the trick, well not really a trick, is finding how the search engines rate/rank relevance. So here’s a breakdown of where to put your keywords throughout your site.

Domain Name / Subdomain
URL of a webpage
Title of a webpage
Meta data of a webpage (description, keywords)
Tags on the webpage (h1, h2, a)

So while these are some good places to put a small and specific assortment of your keywords (usually no more than 5-6 per page), the search engines (primarily Google) place a greater importance on a website’s traffic, PageRank (the number of quality websites linking to it), and how frequently it’s updated. Important stuff to remember.

Using WordPress puts you in a great position to compete on the search engines: 1. Blog = Frequently Updateable 2. Keywords / Custom Themes = Great Keyword Placement / Usage 3. SEO = Great plugins for updating search engines about website changes. All that’s left is providing your website visitors with interesting and useful content they’ll enjoy and share with their friends (Traffic / PageRank; it’s not all easy but it doesn’t have to be hard).

Selling WordPress

Probably the greatest way to “selling” a client on WordPress is simply providing them with a demo. The biggest hurdle that a lot of young designers and new upstarts have trouble with is finding the right client. Selling WordPress should not be hard, finding the right client is what will take up your time.

I’m a fan of the soft sell when dealing with WordPress. Does the client need a new website? Does the client need a new design? How is the client competing on the search engines with other businesses in their industry and approximate location? Once these questions have been answered you can make your judgement on client. Not everyone needs a website (well, that’s not true, but not everyone realizes that they need a website) and trying to force a website on a client is counter-productive. Oftentimes, I’ll meet with a client, we’ll talk about websites and WordPress but they’ll pass on the job. Maybe a month will go by and the client will get back in contact with me ready to get a website going.

Plant the seed, give it a little water and let it grow into a stronger desire and understanding of websites and the internet environment. Provide them with resources to do more research on their own; be helpful; not forceful.

Finally, be nice. That’s it. Be patient with your clients. They don’t know as much as you (that’s why they are coming to you), and it’s your job to show them how they can improve their business with a customized and focused web presence. Your job is to help them, and convert them to the web way of life (sometimes easier said than done).

The slides from my WordCamp LA 2011 Presentation are available for download, here.

https://vimeo.com/bravodesignince

HTML Basics For Beginners: Part Three Image Styling

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Daniel Arriola

In this series of tutorial articles, we’ve covered HTML basics like how to Embed Links In Your WordPress Website, and How To Style Text In Your WordPress Website. Now we’re taking a look at our <img> tags (for images).

WordPress allows us to simply upload and manage all our media content, but sometimes we need a little extra style thrown into the mix. We’ll be taking a look at how the <img> tag is used, and how we can make a few simple styling modifications on-the-fly.

So let’s first examine how WordPress inserts the <img> tag when an image is uploaded and Inserted Into The Post. Here is what the HTML will usually look like after “Insert Into Post” is selected after an image is uploaded. I have also chosen not to include a link, and the none option was selected for the alignment.

<img src="http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg" alt="" title="photo_helicopterbunny" width="450" height="333" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-725" />

What will be
displayed:

If you’ve already read the previous two articles, one thing that may stand out about our <img> tag is that there is no </img>. This is because the <img> tag isn’t surrounding anything other than the attributes contained within the tag itself (i.e. href, width, height, title, alt and class). We will notice, however, that at the end of the tag there is a /> that closes the <img> tag specifically. Let’s mess around with some of the attributes to see how we can change the image…

<img src="http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg" alt="" title="Cutest Bunny Ever" width="225" height="166" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-725" />

What will be
displayed:

Please take note of the changes made to the title, width and height attributes. The href was left the same, still linking to http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg, but let’s make a change to a different (perhaps even cuter photo. Hit it!)

<img src="http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/11_03/RabbitKit2NSPA_468x316.jpg" alt="" title="A Bunny Under A Pile Of Kittens" width="468" height="316" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-725" />

What will be
displayed:

Here we see that I’ve changed the href attribute to link to another image that has not been uploaded on our server (hence, no http://www.bravodesigninc.com/… in our href attribute).

Most likely, you’ll be using your images around text in your WordPress posts and pages, so let’s see how we can have both displayed properly.

<img src="http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg" alt="" title="Cutest Bunny Ever" width="225" height="166" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-725" /> Pardon my Greek, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis placerat mauris ut sem auctor ut consequat nisl dignissim. Maecenas aliquet, nisi eu elementum porta, orci mauris porta urna, euismod condimentum urna ligula vel urna. Integer eu turpis ac ligula adipiscing bibendum ac ut sem. Aenean vestibulum felis lacinia augue laoreet congue. Phasellus ultricies convallis lacus, nec pharetra tortor commodo sit amet. Sed imperdiet, magna facilisis dignissim eleifend, mi felis sodales mi, et rhoncus turpis nulla a tortor. Integer pretium lacinia facilisis. Maecenas vitae tempus nulla. Duis hendrerit, nulla quis tristique fringilla, sapien odio convallis odio, eu hendrerit dui odio iaculis odio. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae.

What will be
displayed:

Pardon my Greek, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis placerat mauris ut sem auctor ut consequat nisl dignissim. Maecenas aliquet, nisi eu elementum porta, orci mauris porta urna, euismod condimentum urna ligula vel urna. Integer eu turpis ac ligula adipiscing bibendum ac ut sem. Aenean vestibulum felis lacinia augue laoreet congue. Phasellus ultricies convallis lacus, nec pharetra tortor commodo sit amet. Sed imperdiet, magna facilisis dignissim eleifend, mi felis sodales mi, et rhoncus turpis nulla a tortor. Integer pretium lacinia facilisis. Maecenas vitae tempus nulla. Duis hendrerit, nulla quis tristique fringilla, sapien odio convallis odio, eu hendrerit dui odio iaculis odio. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae.

You’ll notice that the class attribute in my <img> is has ‘alignleft,’ the alignment option that I selected before I inserted the image into my post.

Let’s see what is displayed when I have my image in the middle of the text…

Pardon my Greek, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis placerat mauris ut sem auctor ut consequat nisl dignissim. Maecenas aliquet, nisi eu elementum porta, orci mauris porta urna, euismod condimentum urna ligula vel urna. Integer eu turpis ac ligula adipiscing bibendum ac ut sem. <img src="http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg" alt="" title="Cutest Bunny Ever" width="225" height="166" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-725" /> Aenean vestibulum felis lacinia augue laoreet congue. Phasellus ultricies convallis lacus, nec pharetra tortor commodo sit amet. Sed imperdiet, magna facilisis dignissim eleifend, mi felis sodales mi, et rhoncus turpis nulla a tortor. Integer pretium lacinia facilisis. Maecenas vitae tempus nulla. Duis hendrerit, nulla quis tristique fringilla, sapien odio convallis odio, eu hendrerit dui odio iaculis odio. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae.

What will be
displayed:

Aenean vestibulum felis lacinia augue laoreet congue. Phasellus ultricies convallis lacus, nec pharetra tortor commodo sit amet. Sed imperdiet, magna facilisis dignissim eleifend, mi felis sodales mi, et rhoncus turpis nulla a tortor. Integer pretium lacinia facilisis. Maecenas vitae tempus nulla. Duis hendrerit, nulla quis tristique fringilla, sapien odio convallis odio, eu hendrerit dui odio iaculis odio. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae.

So to sum up what we’ve covered, let’s take one more look at the <img> tag and it’s attributes:

<img src="http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg" alt="" title="Cutest Bunny Ever" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-725" />

What will be
displayed:

The tag starts with: <img
src=”http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg”, is the URL to the image file.
alt=””, alternate text visible if/when an image doesn’t load properly.
title=”Cutest Bunny Ever”, title that will appear when the user rolls over the image
width=”225″, width in pixels
height=”166″, height in pixels
class=”alignleft size-full wp-image-725″, the class that WordPress applies to your image based on your options selected before inserting into post. (e.g., alignleft, alignright, alignnone, etc.)
The tag ends with />

I hope this has been a helpful article regarding updating the images in your WordPress website. We’re always looking for ways to enhance our tutorials, so if you have an idea, or an issue let us know!

https://vimeo.com/bravodesignince

HTML Basics For Beginners: Part Two Text Styling

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Daniel Arriola

If you haven’t already, check out our first article in the “HTML Basics For WordPress Beginners” series, available here.

Part Two: Styling Our Text With Tags

In our first lesson, we covered how to use the <a> tag to embed links on our webpage. Now we’ll be looking at some quick and easy ways to style our text on the fly. Let’s dive right in…

This text is about to be bold.

What will be
displayed:

This text is about to be bold.

We just made use of the tag that will make our text elements bolder and help them stand out. Again, like the <a> tag we reviewed, there is an opening tag: () and a closing tag (). Let’s try out making something italic

This text is about to be italicized.

What will be
displayed:

This text is about to be italicized.

Again, we can see the effect that our tags have on the text that they are surrounding (as always, being sure we use both the and tags to wrap around the text to which we want to apply our italic style. Now let’s underline some text…

This text is about to be underlined.

What will be
displayed:

This text is about to be underlined.

We are able to underline text using the tag. I’m sure that by now you are seeing a pattern of how our tags, wrapped around our text elements, are creating the various styles we’ve seen so far. Just as I did in the previous article, I’ll emphasize how important it is to close our tags (i.e. , ).

Let’s take a look at all our styles in one line:

I'm important, while I'm sarcastic, and I should be remembered.

What will be
displayed:

I’m important, while I’m sarcastic, and I should be remembered.

So what if we want some text to be bold and italic? Calm down, I’ll show you right now…

This text isbold and italic.

What will be
displayed:

This text is bold and italic.

Notice how the tags are nested within the tags. Imagine that the tags represent a box, and each style is its own box. We are putting our text into our italic box () and then taking our text in the italic box and placing it in the bold box (). Now let’s have a look at the tag…

This text isred.

What will be
displayed:

This text is red.

Ok, so if you’ve had very limited exposure to HTML, you’re probably asking yourself “What exactly does #FF0000 mean?” First things first, looking at the tag we see that similar to our <a> tags we have an attribute (color) with a value of #FF0000. #FF0000 is a hexadecimal color value that all browsers will recognize (and yes, the # sign is important). For more information about HTML colors, check out: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_colornames.asp; it’s a great resource.

We’ll also find that we’re able to use actual color names as well, like ‘blue’, ‘red’, ‘green’ and ‘honeydew.’ Again, the full list of color names and their HEX values is available at: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_colornames.asp; definitely worth clicking into and browsing for a minute. Let’s try some colors out.

All the colors of the rainbow: &#60font color="red"&#62Red&#60/font&#62, &#60font color="orange"&#62Orange&#60/font&#62, &#60font color="yellow"&#62Yellow&#60/font&#62, &#60font color="green"&#62Green&#60/font&#62, &#60font color="blue"&#62Blue&#60/font&#62, &#60font color="indigo"&#62Indigo&#60/font&#62 and &#60font color="violet"&#62Violet&#60/font&#62

What will be
displayed:

All the colors of the rainbow Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet

Don't matter if you're Black or White

What will be
displayed:

Don’t matter if you’re Black or White

What's the difference between <font color="greenyellow">Green Yellow</font> and <font color="yellowgreen">Yellow Green</font>?

What will be
displayed:

What’s the difference between Green Yellow and Yellow Green?

So now you have acquired a great deal of power from learning about the tag, but with great power comes great responsibility. Do Not Abuse These Tags on your website. Color styles are neat, but you don’t need your professional website looking like the Rainbow Connection. So please, as a professional web designer I am asking (maybe even begging) you not to overuse these tags. Practice moderation in life and design. That being said, have fun!

https://vimeo.com/bravodesignince

HTML Basics For Beginners: Part One Embedding Links

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Daniel Arriola

If you’re reading this post, chances are you were referred to it by the Bravo Design team regarding your new WordPress CMS website. I’d just like to take a moment and emphasize, probably again, how incredible the WordPress CMS platform is. Faster load times when compared to Joomla and Drupal, and optimized more efficiently than any other CMS right out of the box. Bravo Design Inc. primarily uses WordPress for all of our website commissions because we are all about empowering our clients. So how can we empower our clients further? By showing them some quick and easy HTML basics for making their websites easier to update and keeping them looking great.

Part One: Using The <a> Tag To Embed Links

Let’s get started with the HTML tags you’ll be using the most, starting with the <a> tag. Every time you’d like to insert a link in your post, you’ll be using the <a> tag.

Let’s take a look at how a link is coded in HTML, don’t worry this’ll be painless.

<a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>

What will be
displayed:

Google

So we see that the only thing visible is the text that is surrounded by the <a> and </a> tags. This is a fundamental concept of HTML; making sure you always close your tags. Forgetting to do so can have some pretty hairy results.

Let’s take a look at an example where a client has forgotten to close their <a> tag.

One of my favorite websites that I use to search the internet is <a href="http://www.google.com">Google. I use it all the time, and I definitely prefer it to using <a href="http://www.bing.com">Bing</a>.

What will be
displayed:

One of my favorite websites that I use to search the internet is Google. I use it all the time, and I definitely prefer it to using Bing .

You’ll notice that the link for http://www.google.com is active for all the text until the next <a> tag is called around the word “Bing.” So we see how forgetting to close our tags can have a drastically adverse effect on our code, so if you take one lesson from this series: Remember to close your tags!

We’ve covered how to use the <a> tag, so let’s take it a step further and make a link open in a new window. Take a deep breath, it’s only an additional 15 characters.

<a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank">Google</a>

What will be
displayed:

Google

The output looks exactly like our first example, but when we click on the link (go ahead, click it) the link opens in a new window (or tab, depending on how you have your browser configured). The extra snippet of code, target=“_blank” tells the browser that this link should be opened in a new window. By default, the target attribute equals “_self”, meaning that the link will open in the same window that you are browsing.

A good practice is having links within your website (i.e. http://www.mysite.com/services, http://www.mysite.com/about) open in the same window, and having links that lead off of your site (i.e. http://www.google.com, http://www.bing.com) open in a new window.

By now you’re feeling pretty confident about putting links into your website, so I’ll show you just one more cool feature before we move on. What if we’d like to show some more information for our links without taking up more room on our web page? We can do this easily, with use of the “title” attribute in our <a> tag. Let’s try it out.

<a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank" title="The internet's most used search engine">Google</a>

What will be
displayed:

Google

Doesn’t really look like much, until we roll over the link with our cursor. After holding the cursor still over the link for a moment, we’ll see the title that we entered in our code. So this is a cool way to add some extra information to our links without taking up too much space on our web page.

https://vimeo.com/bravodesignince

Bravo Design, Inc. – A Web Design Update

Posted on November 24, 2010 by Daniel Arriola

The new web design for Bravo Design Inc. is already under way.

A brand new look and feel for Bravo, was brought about by the need for a new updated portfolio. After almost a year, we needed to get some of our most recent projects uploaded to the website. The task was daunting as the old website didn’t have a simple way to upload new portfolio content without going into the site files modifying lines of code.

We had incorporated some WordPress functionality in our old site, but we weren’t taking advantage of the unquestionable scalability of the open-source CMS framework. So in using a symphony of plugins and some heavy customization of PODs, Bravo Design Inc. 2.0 was conceptualized and developed.

Check back soon for new portfolio content and site updates!