AB Design
AB Design
I work with small and medium-sized companies worldwide. My services generally include full-stack website design, SEO support, site optimization and ongoing consultancy.
Typography is an important aspect of website design. It impacts heavily on the site's look and feel, and at times can help transform even the blandest website into something inspiring. The most basic considerations when choosing a typeface are whether you like the characters and how they render at different sizes.
Font weights also warrant consideration. With clever use and subtle variation, they can help delineate blocks of content, provide visual cues, and break up the monotony of long walls of text. Use the dropdown below the Planet Earth text to see how different font weights affect presentation.
Planet Earth
Adding typefaces to a website is easy. Google Fonts offers dozens to choose from and they're all free. You can even optimize the font files that Google serves. By requesting only the characters you're likely to use, and omitting obscure glyphs or foreign accents, you can decrease file sizes and gain a small but useful benefit in terms of page loading performance.
It's essential that websites load quickly. To help web designers assess page loading speeds, Google has developed PageSpeed, a tool that monitors performance and gives technical advice on how load times can be improved. I use this tool to optimize my clients' websites and at times have achieved near 100% scores.
Responsive design describes the techniques that ensure websites can be viewed on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones. These devices all have different screen sizes, so websites need to adapt accordingly. All sites I make are responsive and tested thoroughly on all platforms.
Content strategy is a core part of web design. A good, site-wide content strategy will always focus on delivering content effectively to target audiences, but might also include social media initiatives to promote new products and services, or gap analyses to detect opportunities for fresh content that could rank well on Google.
Content strategy also involves deciding what type of media to use. For example, while clients sometimes request home page slideshows, usability studies have shown time and again that this sort of media isn't particularly effective. Most users tend not to sit around and watch slideshows. Generally speaking, media that's known to work best on websites includes: