Web Design Blog

Last weekend I had a really interesting project. I redesigned and developed an existing site called MakeAGif.com to make it more user friendly and to give it a nice boost in traffic. MakeAGif is a clever site that was started by my favorite partner in crime, Troy Osinoff, that lets users create an animated .gif online out of still images they have on their computer in just 3 easy steps. The main problems with the old version were that it was hard to figure how to make a gif and once you had made it you were redirected to a page that was only temporary. Check out the old site by clicking the picture to the left.

With the new redesign, there are clear steps laid out to animating your gif and the form options are much easier to use. The script used to create the gif is a lot more fast and efficient now, as well. Once your gif is uploaded, instead of being redirected to a temporary page, you are redirected to a “Share Page” where you can link your gif to your blog, website, facebook and twitter pages.

Along with improving the UI and speed, I was able to implement some new features to the site. The most notable is the photo booth which allows you to take pictures directly from your webcam on the website and create a gif from from them instantly. I also had the site translated into Spanish and created a sister site called Animados Gif to be more user friendly to our Spanish-speaking traffic.

Since implementing the share pages and other features, traffic on the site has almost doubled in less than 3 days, with more people sharing and hosting their gifs right on Make A Gif, rather than uploading them elsewhere and sharing. Be sure to check out the redesign and to use the photo booth. Trust me, it’s addicting.

One major problem a user experiences when trying to stay on top of celebrity gossip on the Internet is that most celebrity news sites have a lack of direction and clear organization. Le Gossip aims to change all of that by striving to deliver better information on a more organized platform.

Anyone with knowledge of HTML can do this and trust me it will save you loads of time in the long run. The main idea behind this structure is that anything that is going to be on more than one page in your website is going to be called through a php include. The reasoning behind it is that if you ever plan on updating the design or structure of your site, you’ll be able to do so much quicker through this method because instead of updating each page individually, you’ll only have to update one file. It is also a wonderful solution because of how clean your markup will look.

This is part one of a mini-series of blog posts that I will be referring to as “The Flaws and Delusions of Web Designer Depot”

I don’t get particular enjoyment out of pointing out the flaws in others, but in this case it is so worth it. For over a year, WebDesignerDepot (Web Designer Depot) has been handing out terrible advice and ripped off posts to its users. Their articles lack attention to detail, sense, and quality of any kind.

I’ve coded a lot of websites for a lot of different designers and a common problem I experience with each one is something that should really be natural to them in the first place – the idea that form follows function. Most of this problem is rooted in the fact that they are not web developers. The most overlooked areas that I’ve noticed are those in SEO and in page load time.

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