Something about Website Design

Every satisfied customer on every website starts in the hands of a experienced web designer. This professional has the ability to capture the client’s vision, bring the design elements to life, and ultimately create a website that appeals to consumers. This is not easy task since it involves both creative and technical abilities, so a top web designer is experienced in many different disciplines. 

Likewise, an in-demand website designer will also have insights into the business and marketing worlds to understand how a website can meet a client’s needs, convey their brand, and help embrace new customers online. This knowledge is used to maximize things like lead generation and overall engagement levels.

Web Design vs. Web Development In A Nutshell

In essence, web design refers to both the aesthetic portion of the website and it’s usability. Web designers use various design programs such as Adobe Photoshop to create the layout and other visual elements of the website. Web Developers on the other hand, take a website design and actually make a functioning website from it. Web developers use HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and other programming languages to bring to life the design files. 

Web Design – A Closer Look

Web designers must always begin by considering a client’s website objectives and then move on to an Information Architecture (IA) to set a website’s information hierarchy and help guide the design process. Next, web designers can start creating wireframes and finally move to the design stage. Web designers may use several basic design principles to achieve an aesthetically pleasing layout which also offers excellent user experience.

Design Principles

Balance – It’s important for web designers to create a balanced layout. In web design we refer to heavy (large and dark colors) and light (small and lighter colors) elements. Using the correct proportion of each is critical to achieving a balanced website design.

Contrast– In color theory, contrasting colors are ones placed opposite one another on the color wheel (see also complementary colors). Web design offers a few other areas where contrast is applicable. Designers look at contrasting sizes, textures and shapes to define and draw attention to certain sections of the website.

Emphasis– We touched on this a bit when discussing contrast. Emphasis is a design principles founded in the intentional “highlighting” of certain important elements of the website layout. It’s important to note that if you emphasize everything on the page you end up emphasizing nothing. Imagine a page in a book where 80% of the content is highlighted in yellow…does anything really stand out? This is the time to take a look at that Information Architecture for direction.

Consistency – Also called repetition or rhythm, consistency is a critical web design principle. For example, clean and consistent navigation provides the best user experience for your website visitors.

Unity – Unity is the relationship between the various parts of the website layout and the composition as a whole. Based in the Gestalt theory, unity deals with how the human brain visually organizes information by grouping elements into categories.

Web Development – A Closer Look

Web developers, sometimes called programmers, take the design created and build a fully functioning website. To put it (very) simply, think of the design as a non-interactive “picture” of a website. Developers take that design and break it up into it’s components. They then either use just HTML or a more dynamic approach incorporating programming languages such as PHP to develop the various website pages. More advanced web developers may choose to utilize a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress or Joomla in order to streamline development and allow clients an easy way to maintain and update their website.

Web developers may convert a static layout into a dynamic website by using image and content sliders, active states for links and buttons, and other interactive elements.

Defining your project and writing a perfect job description

It pays to do a little bit of homework before hiring a web designer since it can have a drastic effect on the overall price and the quality received. For example, a simple website without any large customizations can be launched with a pre-made theme at a minimal cost. This may not be suitable for websites anticipating lots of custom layouts and/or extensive traffic, so it’s good to know up front what type of designer will be required or if you’ll also need a developer.

Web Design Job Post Template

Take a look at an example web design project description. Keep in mind that many people use the term “job description,” but a full job description is only needed for employees. When attracting a freelancer as an independent contractor, you typically just need a requirement of work, job post, or any other document that describes the work to be done.

<Project Title>

Project Overview

ABC Company is looking for a web designer to create a custom theme for our e-commerce store. This project will be to create a responsive, mobile-friendly design.

Deliverables include:

Mock-ups for each page of e-commerce site (approximately 20 pages)

Custom navigation and HTML elements

Graphics integrated into two homepage carousels (12 images total)

Setup of online shopping basket

Deadline for deliverables:

All tasks must be completed by <date>.

This project requires the following skills:

Expertise working with <design software>, <mobile/responsive framework>, <Adobe Photoshop>, or <CMS template builder>

E-commerce experience is a plus

Understands responsive design

The work will also require a great view for detail and preliminary retail experience, preferably in the electronics/automation industry. We would like to begin this project no later than <date>, so we plan on hiring a candidate by the end of the week.

Analyzing Web Designer Profiles & Portfolios and Hiring Freelancer

After posting a detailed, well-thought-out project description that defines what you’ll need from your web designer, it’s time to start analyzing proposals. How do you select the top talented designer for your project?

Experience, Smartness & Work

When it comes to finding the top talented web designer, start by reviewing for portfolio samples that match your requirement. Be sure to ask freelancers about their experience with other facets of design as well, and consider the overall goal for the website being built. 

Finally, it’s important to verify that a web designer understands the brand in question and its overall goals online. A qualified professional will be able to give a list of any expected obstacles, plus estimate the amount of time the project will take and the total cost. Since complex website projects could require months to complete, a good working relationship is essential.

With the right freelance web designer, you can end up with a finished product that brings your vision to life. Just take the time to create a detailed project description, review each freelancer’s proposal and portfolio, and ask them a few web design interview questions to determine if they’re the right fit for the project.

Kind words are worth much and cost little. This creates opportunity: when you can’t out-spend the competition, the solution is to out-support them.

Here are 14 tips from the support documentation of world leaders in providing best customer service. I hope these will help you in improving your customer service.

1. Practice sympathy, Patience, and Consistency: Some of your customers will be full of queries, some just chatty, and others plain mad. You must be ready to handle all of them and provide the same level of service every time.
2. Good customer Service may be a Continuous Learning process: Every customer is unique and each support situation is totally different. In order to handle surprises, sense a customer’s mood, address new challenges consequently, you've got to be willing to stay learning. Strive to have a deep understanding of your customer’s challenges and still search for better ways to deal with them.
3. Train customer service agent for understanding product detail: The training and development program must cover all aspects of how to deal with issues, talk to customers, and resolve problems.  Apart from that, your team should believe in and understand your product before they are sent out with the task of pacifying a customer. If your team does not know the product or the service well enough, then they will not have enough knowledge to tackle an issue.
4. Solving a problem as soon as possible: When customers complain, your team must acknowledge the issue quickly and try to resolve it timely.
5. Use technology to assist them: Customer support can only be performed accurately if we mix the technology with the humanistic approach.
6. Add live chat to your website: Live chat can help your customer support team to interact with the customer in depth so that the customer can get resolved his queries easily.
7. Use customer service templates: It’s important to keep your standards high and your response times low. Don’t waste keyboard strokes for every basic and common question. Build professional templates so you can respond to customer with ease and professionalism.
8. Maintain a positive attitude: It is very important that your team keep a positive and bright attitude when managing your customers. If you maintain an accommodating and inviting attitude, then you will easily avoid conflicts.
9. Apologize for any inconvenience: Whatever the issue, and whatever role your company played in the issue, you need to apologize to the customer. If the consumer’s credit card did not work, tell them you’re sorry for their inconvenience or that it happened.
10. Listen to your customer: One of the simplest ways in which to serve your customer is by listening to them from the beginning. Most customers contact or reach bent on your support team to when they want to convey a message or a problem. Therefore, the first and most important thing you can do is to hear them out completely.
11. Never say “I don’t know”: When your team represents your business, they need to speak as if the business itself is speaking. So, once an executive says “no”, Customer instantly diminishes the value of your business. “No” isn't an answer. If a customer is facing a difficulty, then your team should try and resolve it, one way or another.
12. Admit your mistakes: If you mess up, admit it, even if you discover your mistakes before your customers do. Admitting you messed up builds trust and restores your customer’s confidence in your service. It also allows you to control the situation, re-focus the customer’s attention, and fix the problem.
13. Follow up after a problem is solved: Follow up with your customers to ensure their issues were resolved properly and that they were satisfied with the service. Give them a call, send them an email etc.
14. Always close conversations correctly: Every conversation you close with a customer should end with you saying “Is there anything else I can do for you today? I’m happy to help!”

Everyone should be feeling the customer’s pain points. When your whole company is encouraged to be involved in customer service, knowledge of problems, bugs, and features becomes illuminated for the entire team. There’s no faster way to make improvements that drive your business forward.

Applying for a data scientist job can be an intimidating task as there can be many things to take care in an interview process — right from justifying the practical knowledge to showcasing the coding skills. While we have earlier discussed articles on how to crack data science interview and what are the things to keep in mind while appearing for an interview for data science-related roles. This article deals with some of the things that you might be doing wrong if ever you are rejected in a data science interview.

Here are five things you may have been doing wrong:

Not focusing on the job description: The definition of data science jobs is not always the same and may mean different roles and responsibilities for different companies. Some of the commonly required skills may be a PhD in statistics, Excel skills, machine learning generalist, Hadoop skills, Spark skills, among others. The job description largely varies for every company and it is important to thoroughly dig it and carefully look for specific skills, tools and languages. It is important to display the skills that the potential recruiter is looking for so that they can shortlist you easily.

No specific distinction of technical skills: The technical skills in data science and analytics industry is quite wide and not mentioning your strengths correctly might jeopardise your chances of cracking the interview. For instance, it might not be apt to just say machine learning skills as it might include a whole spectrum of things ranging from linear regression to neural networks. And these sub-areas might further require knowledge of specific tools and software such as Python, Keras, R or Pandas. It is always advisable to give specific skills that you master than describing generic skills as might confuse recruiters of the exact skills that you pose.

Incorrect information and rephrasing work experience: To suit the data science job roles, many a times candidates rephrase their previous work experiences such as in the IT or software domains to present it as data science job roles, which might disguise your abilities initially but expose the depth and understanding of the skills later. You might have included job description aligning in a way that suits data science job roles but you might not have a deeper experience in it, which may get noticeable by recruiters during a one-to-one interaction. Mentioning of incorrect or misleading facts may also lead to recruiters rejecting you. For instance, the resume may state achieved an accuracy of say 90% on the test run, but what are the baseline and state-of-the-art score for this dataset to claim these numbers?

No mention about the projects that you have worked on from the scratch: Many times the only projects that a candidate mention in a resume are the ones they have done on Kaggle. While Kaggle is a platform for a lot of researchers to explore avenues in data science, it also serves as a source of practice for people who aren’t a pro in data science field and are trying to make a transition, mentions a recruiter in one of the forums. There are different kinds of the audience at Kaggle such as those who are playing around with the dataset or getting to know how problem-solving in data science works like, without having actual experience in solving or creating a new data science problems. So, listing just Kaggle project might be good but not definitive of how good your data science skills are. Even if it a Kaggle project, it is better if it is done from scratch. Other than that, it is important to mention the projects that you have worked on. It gives recruiters a chance to understand the problems you faced and the way you approached the problem, thereby giving them a glance at your problem-solving abilities.

The resume is full of buzzwords and no concrete proof of your skills: While the resume may suit the job description, but there are chances that you are rejected if there are too many buzzwords in the resume and no concrete way to prove that you actually pose those skills. You may mention in the resume that you have had experience with Hadoop, Excel or certain areas, but if you have showcased it real-time on platforms such as GitHub, it convinces the potential employers of the skills you have. They can look through various projects you have been a part of and see how you have dealt with real data. Hiring managers like to see the time that a candidate has spent from start to finish. Having a portfolio gives recruiters just that. There may be fancy sounding terms in the resume, but if you don’t have a proof to showcase it, you might be rejected for a potential data science job role.