web design brisbane Archives

Posted on Oct 5, 2010 by Lesley Hays

The skeleton in the website: wireframes get an airing

What are wireframes and why does my project need them?

If you’ve ever done a website project with us, you’ll know all about wireframes! They’re the black & white skeletons of a website that show where all the content and features will go before we delve into colours and images. They help us make decisions about functionality and positioning without getting caught up in how dark that gradient is or whether red is the right colour for this button.

We also use them to finalise how much copy is required, what areas of a page are featured, how many images we’ll need and whether they should be landscape or portrait, for starters!…

Posted on Sep 21, 2010 by Lesley Hays

Why projects fail, your website sucks & nobody reads your blog! (Weekly round-up Vol. 73)

The two key causes of web project failure – Smart Company
…and how to avoid them! Craig Reardon explains how 1) major changes of direction can throw a project out of wack and chew up budget and 2) competing phases that don’t align can create dominos of missed deadlines.

4 Reasons Your Website Sucks – Hubspot
How to make your website not suck: make sure people can find you (search engine optimisation is a start), focus on your client/user (talk about them, not your company), have clear navigation and calls to action (more important than “wow factor” or bleeding-edge design), don’t automatically play sound or video (people will leave before finding the “off” button).…

Posted on Aug 10, 2010 by Lesley Hays

Weekly round-up (Vol. 67)

This week we’re looking at website conversions and take a trip back to the future. But first… whatever happened to Google Wave? Well, apparently not much and just last week, Google effectively canned it.

RIP Google Wave – Mashable
Google’s revolutionary product that blends email, instant messaging, file sharing & wikis “didn’t get the uptake they’d hoped for & Google won’t be continuing to develop Wave as a stand alone product.” It only launched in 2009.

Here at Bluewire, we think the problem was the product’s contagiousness, or lack thereof.…

Posted on Jun 28, 2010 by Lesley Hays

Weekly round-up (Vol. 61)

Critique me, Please – 50 Weeks of UX
How well can you handle critique of your work? Joshua Brewer talks about how being open to critique leads to “better communication, greater creativity and more transparency”. So should you practice being critiqued?

List of common misconceptions – Wikipedia
If I told you that Napoleon wasn’t unusually short or that the Great Wall of China can’t actually be seen from space, would you believe me? What about that Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb? If that’s not blowing your mind yet, check out the Wikipedia article on common misconceptions!…

Posted on Mar 29, 2010 by Lesley Hays

The Northside’s best kept secret lets loose online

March has seen the launch of the brand new online face of St Patrick’s College, Shorncliffe. Last year, the school decided they needed to have a website that reflected their values and the high quality of their education. So, Bluewire Media came in to take them through an internet strategy designed to discover the best way to do just this.

The new website’s “go live” date, St Patrick’s Day, was well publicised in the school’s frequent newsletter, so the launch was a busy day — the stats showed over 300 different people went on to check it out on the 17th alone!…

Posted on Dec 24, 2009 by Nic Peck

A day in the life of a Bluewire Media developer

When people ask me what I do I normally say “I work at a web design company.” Sometimes that’s enough, but the more curious of people ask “but what do you do there?” I thought writing a post about it would help me formulate a ready-made answer to that question.

So here it is:

We can generally split our development work into 3 types, which I will call Project development, Help desk & Internal development.

Project development refers mainly to the process of building websites from designs produced by our designers.…

Posted on Aug 31, 2009 by Adam Franklin

James Adonis – 12 Leadership Training Mistakes

Employee engagement expert, James Adonis first appeared on my radar several years ago when a friend forwarded his newsletter to me. James’ writing style and management style immediately resonated with me so I signed up.

Since then, I have recommended his newsletter to many peers and have also featured it as a best practice case study when I spoke about email marketing at EMSA in 2008.

I had the fortune of meeting James for the first time in person when he gave a seminar called “12 Leadership Training Mistakes” in Brisbane.…

Posted on Aug 13, 2009 by Lesley Hays

Hitting the Launch button

The “launch” is what a website project is all about. It’s our common goal: the whole project team, the client, third party contributors—everyone!—strives towards making it a reality every day. But for many people, what actually goes into making a website live is a great mystery…

There’s no secret “launch” button.

BoxUK.com have written an amazingly comprehensive “Launch Checklist“. With 58 boxes to tick off between getting approval and moving into the maintenance phase, it’s no wonder this part of the project always seems to take longer than expected.…

Posted on Jul 10, 2009 by Adam Franklin

Brilliant real-life web design tips from Google

Matt Cutts from Google’s Search Quality Team gave this compelling workshop-style presentation on 28 May 2009 at the I/O conference in San Francisco.

He politely critiques actual websites that people in the audience have had the opportunity to submit for review.

He offers amazing web design tips covering:
– how to improve website usability
– tips for having search engine friendly URLs
– how to avoid being black-listed as SPAM & avoiding attacks by spammers
– how to make your words easier to read
– making your navigation simple to use
– using keywords for more visitors and better search engine optimisation (SEO) results
– how to make people buy more easily from your shopping cart
– how to YouTube videos effectively

It is quite a long video, but you’ll be rewarded for your time!…

Posted on Jul 9, 2009 by Adam Franklin

The Secret to Wow Factor is Invisible Design

This was also published on Digital Ministry on 10 July ’09.

If you’re interested in designing great websites you should definitely read this article called Great Design Should Be Experienced Not Seen by Jared M. Spool on UIE.com.

It resonated with me because many prospective clients and agency partners regularly ask, “can you show me some web design with wow-factor?”

It’s a question that can be tough to answer succintly and politely, as the website design alone shouldn’t make you go ‘wow’—if it does, in my opinion it is bad web design.…