Boylen

Part of the “Boylen experience” is the chance to team up with our inspired creatives.

Our website design, branding and creative team sharing the same office space as our tech staff is.
Boylen’s web design experts talk the language of imagery, visual hierarchy and the importance of white space. Code is replaced by colour palettes.  Threads and tokens are trumped by typefaces and textures.

It is where strategy loses its hard edge and visual concepts emerge. 

So, do you need to stand out? To connect with customers? Breathe new life into a tired brand?

From inspirational home pages to ad campaigns and sales brochures, we have the experienced web design staff at hand. And we’d love to help!

Free quote here

Never lose sight of the fact that a website design project should be enjoyable.

We’re obviously biased because we choose to be web designers for a career. And while we know there’s a lot to think about for large and complex sites, don’t lose sight of the fact that this is a creative process. You’re allowed to have some creative fun to achieve an outstanding result.

Also remember that creativity is directly linked to business outcomes. It’s been proven countless times. Software leader Adobe found that approximately 60% of people will choose a beautifully designed website, over a dull site. Another often cited statistic is that 94% of users’ first impressions of your company – via your website – are design related.

One more stat: Goodfirms reports that four out of ten people will leave your site because of outdated design. 40% is not a chunk of customers that you want to turn away when better website development is so achievable.

The Blueprint For Complex Web Projects
The bigger your website and the more complex it is, the more important it is to break down the planning into distinct stages. For example, you can develop separate plans for:

• sitemap and navigation 
• content 
• imagery, including video, custom designed graphics and infographics
• search engine optimisation
• ecommerce requirements
• etc.

Another area worth its own segment is web design for small screens. In 2023, perfect web design for mobile phones will be even more important than ever before. So as you prepare for your next web design or redesign venture, have you thought about the critical elements that you need to include in your small screen composition? Think of the messages that are absolutely critical for your organisation and then work from there.

Like any business project, it’s best to have one easily accessible location to keep all of your assets. It may seem old fashioned but having a series of folders that are clearly labelled is the best way to go.

That way, everyone on your website design and development project understands where the files are and can identify them easily by the file name.

Make sure that all components are simple to transfer. There are many solutions on the market and you should discuss it with your web designer, who may be able to suggest the best solution based on their experience. At Boylen, we are very flexible, provided it’s secure. We’ve shared documents via Dropbox, Google and many other methods. 

Simple Website Construction
Of course, if you are just looking to build a simple website of three to five pages, there is no need to over-engineer the process. We’ve worked with clients who have drawn a simple sitemap and shown it to us. For a small site, that’s totally fine!

They’ve emailed us a few Word documents, their logo and a handful of photos they’ve had taken – and asked us to do the rest.  Sometimes we have clients that don’t have photos, so we either arrange an entry-level photo shoot or use stock images. The message here is that if you are time and resource poor, don’t let that stop you from moving forward. We can do all of the heavy listing for you. 

In our experience, the best thing you can do is jump on a phone call. There’s never an obligation and most design companies are happy to have a chat about what it is you’re trying to achieve and provide advice. You also get a chance to assess whether or not the designers are people you can work with.

Final Word
As a final piece of advice, the best course of action for many companies is to just get started!

We speak with too many companies that have continually found reasons to delay their website redevelopment because they are too busy elsewhere. Then, when they launch their site, they are left wondering why they didn’t glue a website redesign on their priority list so much sooner.

Further Reading

How targeted graphic design is a smart business strategy

Graphic design has many benefits

Choosing the correct font, its sizing and spacing, can make all the difference when engaging in typography centric web design.

Get it right and typography design flies! Nike is a famous example.

Some companies have the resources to develop their own, totally unique typeface. Standard Chartered teamed up with Lippincott and won a swag of gongs at the Transform Awards Asia, including “Best Use Of Typography”. The new brand identity also took out the “Grand Prix”.

Why go to this expense? Big brands make this investment because it helps them stand out in crowded markets.

But most web design doesn’t have the funds to work at that scale. That means relying on off the shelf type and working creative magic with it.  If you’re doing your own research, a few we suggest you look at include:

• Geometric sans serif fonts (in vogue, so there’s a ton of them to choose from)
• Cosmica
• Saol Standard
• Brixanos
• TT Rationalist

Web design and typography

Most of what you read online about type and website design relates to “text”. It’s concerned, primarily, with legibility.

But the potential of fonts bringing web design to life is unlimited – and incredibly powerful for brands.

Esteemed designer and design critic, Michael Bierut, once declared: “Good typography, first, makes words readable. At its best, it does something more: it helps express the animating spirit of the ideas behind the words.”

What he is referring to, we believe, is the intersection where brand personality meets type in a perfect union. The person who is unaware of a company can ascertain the character of the organisation by the choice of their typeface alone.

By the way, he’s the designer that wrote the epic book of case studies with an equally epic title: “How to use graphic design to sell things, explain things, make things look better, make people laugh, make people cry, and (every once in a while) change the world.”