Vauxmoore, the Nottingham Vauxhall specialists, have just had a new site from FCS Websites. The new site uses some jQuery trickery for the internal tab navigation, and Jamie’s awesome FormLord jQuery plugin for the contact form

Click the image to visit their new website.

When designing websites for clients, there is often a tug of war between what I think looks good, what the client thinks and what the projected users will think. There is no right and wrong to what makes a site appeal to certain people, but recent research suggests there might be gender differences.

Press Releases - Key Website Research Highlights Gender Bias

The article states that “websites which might appeal greatly to one sex are a total no-no with the other.” This is an interesting finding, but is gender too blunt a distinction? This is likely to touch on individual colour preferences (Maybe by season, as with House of Colour… ), introversion/extraversion and many other personal characteristics. While this research is good ammo for making a point with the less objective clients, I can’t help feeling that it is more subtle than male/female.

I have taken to looking at what my clients are wearing - this can give an insight into their colour preferences. It is important to stress to them that they are not making a site for themselves, they are making it to appeal to their customers. Therefore I need to know who the site is aimed at and what their preferences might be.

There is a lot of overlap between web design and psychology, providing the scene for a lot of crossover research. However, Psychology is still struggling with modernist concepts and Aristotelian yes/no distinctions. Post-modern and constructionist ideas will have much to say about web design and user interface creation.

FCS websites have been working on www.wilsonfieldmarketing.co.uk recently, for a company that help people reclaim their Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) premiums on loans etc if they were mis-sold the policy.

It is a budget site, but still has an attractive graphic design and a spam protected contact form. Good coding practices mean that it is already ready for search engine optimisation and works on all major web browsers. We also took care of creating print ready artwork for a PPI refund flier and turned the whole thing around in a short time frame to fit in with the shop opening deadline

I have set up a wiki to serve as a place where I can keep all my Umbraco notes. We have been developing a number of sites using this free .NET content management system, and have learnt a lot during the process.

The existing documentation for Umbraco has been translated by the looks of it, and confused me (especially as a complete noob to it). There is lots of stuff all over the net, but I want to keep it all together to help me while I am developing.

Hopefully, the Umbraco community will also contribute to the wiki, or at least gain some benefit from it! It’s my way of giving something back to the community, as the software is free and various people have helped me out with what must have seemed like stupid questions and problems

Nick

I spoke to a potential customer for a website today, and it wasn’t good. He thinks he knows how to make websites because he knows how to load Dreamweaver. He doesn’t like “gimmicks” such as the beautiful, easy to use and classy Lightbox image viewer. He doesn’t want to pay very much. He is basically ignorant of what is involved in a quality website, and offensively opinionated with no concept of what his visitors will want to see. He only cares about what he wants to see.

Bear in mind this guy couldn’t even log in to a control panel, and asked if he could change his name servers from an FTP session within a web browser. It is often said that your bottom few customers (in terms of budget and pleasantness) will sap all your time, end up comissioning shit websites that you don’t want on your portfolio and will make you wish you had told them to fuck off in the first place. I think I’ll pass on this client…