Archive for November 2009
Just because it’s at the bottom of the screen doesn’t mean it isn’t vital for creating an informative and stylish homepage. Elliot Jay Stocks shows us how.
In the last tutorial we created a great-looking header for our fictional small business website. It followed an autumnal colour palette, using some elegant typography and some basic photo manipulation to set the theme for the site. We’re going to follow that up this issue by creating the footer to complement it.
If headers are the bold, striking elements that lead a user into a site’s content and give the first impressions, then footers might well be seen as the ‘parting thoughts’ of a website; a graphical bookend to all of the other elements on the page. They might not be very noticeable, but they’re there to do an important job.
There’s never been a better time to refine your approach to winning new clients. Richard Rutter, co-founder of Clearleft, examines the pitch process from start to finish and reveals how you can beat rivals and win every contract
For many agencies, pitching is seen as a necessary evil, that painful, time-consuming process required before the ‘real work’ can start. But agencies and their staff shouldn’t be scared of pitches.
With the right approach, pitching can be a fascinating and rewarding process, and not just from a financial perspective. I spoke to some leading design agencies and combined their thoughts with our experiences at Clearleft to guide you through the pitching process.
Craig Grannell explores some ideas for fine-tuning websites for Apple’s increasingly popular smartphone and its very smart browser, Mobile Safari
When it first appeared, Apple’s iPhone looked like a massive extravagance, and commentators were quick to leap up en masse and sing a rousing chorus of ‘It’ll never work’.
Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer opined: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” He then added another “No chance” just for good measure. John C Dvorak said the iPhone would be passé within months, and that there was “no likelihood” Apple could be successful in the mobile phone marketplace. And marketing expert Laura Ries claimed 18 months ago that: “The iPhone is likely to be the biggest flop of the 21st century.”
You wouldn’t let your bank give your PIN to a stranger, but some sites are taking a similarly cavalier attitude to security, warns Paul Annett of Clearleft
Before reading this feature, please pause and take a few minutes to send me your email address and password. I’m doing some research to see how many of my readers are friends-of-friends. I’ll only log in to your account to look at the address book. Honest.
No? You’d be surprised how many people happily do this via websites each and every day.
What is an average ecommerce conversion rate? Let me give you a word of caution first, then some numbers that may be helpful.
An average conversion rate is a tricky number, for several reasons. The largest reason is that it is very hard to compare apples to apples. The reason is that there are many factors that influence conversions that you can’t see.