Redesigning for the future
During January 2021 I have been taking the time to develop my skills and make a website that I hope will engage people. This website has started to become my passion project. The background will change colour according to the time of day. (Dark mode as some of you may know.) Others are more subtle but they help with the readability of the site and the overall feel.
The idea is more important than the tool.
In the early stages of developing this website, the design was terrible. (Templates anyone?) But I have learnt more as I went along. There are times on my journey where I have spent hours and days fixing code that I have broken, and it could be because I have simply forgotten to close a paragraph or a tag. This is why it's so important that the code is clean and to make comments and notes so that I would know what each element is. I have used to rely on proof-readers like Grammarly and Ulysses exclusively, but I have found out that sometimes spelling mistakes get missed at times. Other times I find that it's trying to correct me when it's grammatically correct of that correcting
Customer (or user) first.
At the heart of a brilliant website is the user experience. Is it easy to use? I have given a lot of thought through the links with the underlines of the links. I wanted the tone be friendly, and I hope that it's conveyed here. The language is something that I have thought long and hard about. The sentences should be short and easy to understand. Likewise the content of each blog post should be relevant to the title.I do jump into different tangents but hopefully it's minimised to make the content on-topic. the blog should be fun to read and I hope that you learn something new from each blog post.
Navigation and copy are two of the design principles that I've given a lot of thought when I created DijonVu.com. Is the website easy to navigate to where you want? Does it load up quickly? Is it accessible? If the website loads quickly on a poor internet connection, you can guarantee that it will load super fast on a good connection.
The copy conveys the personality of the website. Words are important. I have often been reading and re-reading my copy to ensure it flows and that it is concise. I have to re-read my edits to see if it flows and that my paragraphs stick to a topic. Sometimes I have to delete sentences and paragraphs as they don't add value to a particular topic or that the wording isn't clear for you, my reader.
Get inspiration from different places.
When designing for DijonVu.com I try to get my inspiration from many different sources. I want to mix and match different design elements and styles of writing. I will often look at different websites for inspitarion. I will look at the feel and see how I can incorporate that into my website. Sometimes magazine design can help me with the way I want the website to look.