Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Web design has a lot of trends that are constantly changing, the old ones get away, the new ones emerge in an endless process of design evolution. So no wonder that there are endless discussions of web design trends going on and on all over the Internet – even we have published the web design of 2009 trends review. So now we’re after something that’s currently popular. We have even managed to find a couple or reviews of top trends for 2010 done by WebDesignLedger and DesignTutorials4U. These guys have done a great job but we feel like we have a couple of ideas to add.
By the way, all of the trends are illustrated with our own templates’ designs. After all, we do not only talk about trends, we actually follow them. Enjoy!
1. Social Icons
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Trend description: Social network icons are getting bigger and bigger (just as their value grows). Besides, they often get customized according to the general website style.
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Ok, here we go with the results of our research – as you know it, in this research we were kindly assisted by our audience. So it appears to be that in our first Halloween research post we were right and wrong at the same time. We were right about the fact that there are not much websites that really pay attention to the Halloween design customizations. Come one, 40 websites or so suggested by thousands of our audience… That’s not as many as we expected.
On the other hand judging from what we have received, there’s more that we were able to find initially. Anyways, it’s good to know that our audience really did help us without making us look like idiots that didn’t see something obvious 
Plus, we have already started contacting the participants who’ve been suggesting the customized websites and delivering the prizes to them. In case you didn’t know, the prizes are 10 free unlimited hosting accounts from JustHost, 5 free templates from TemplateMonster as well as significant discounts both from TemplateMonster and JustHost. By the way, we want to address the participants (and the winners) – guys, please allow 2 business days for the prizes to be delivered, ok? No one will be forgotten.
Ok, enough of talking. It’s time for some rating. Please welcome the Top 20!
20. Ehow
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19. Bagolitas
Halloween Customizations, guys, is a useful experience we should say. In fact it brings lots of benefits to the site owners attracting the greater customer pool and consequently the amount of profits. If you take care about wonderful foundation to your site visual look, someone will surely notice you.
But as previously, in case of hosting sites, we have encountered with the absence of good Halloween customization examples in a sufficient number. Or else, we may suppose that they do exist, but are thoroughly hidden.
Update: Ok, we assume you might have seen some decent halloween website design customizations. So let us know of those and enter your chance to win the killing Halloween treats from TemplateMonster.com and JustHost.com including free website templates and free unlimited hosting packages. Please see more details in the promo post.
And what we have as a result? The great mass of websites does not have enough serious approach towards customization issue. And in the long run, we see Halloween customizations that, in terms of design execution, leave much to be desired. Many thanks for them even! At least someone undertakes the festive actions for the holiday. By the way, TM home page Halloween customization design is upcoming, shortly (or maybe it’s there as you are reading this).
Have a look at the rest of the bravehearts:
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By the way, this particular customization made by Enom is the best we’ve seen while searching. The elements of customization perfectly fit the design. Way to go, Enom!
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Many times in your life you have probably seen these petrifying 404 error pages which meant nothing but that you’ve lost your way surfing the web in your pursuance of certain objectives. The 404 error declares that the user’s request was able to communicate with the server, but the server couldn’t find what was requested. And that is probably the only useful information you would find reaching the “zero between fours” dead-end default pages.
TemplateMonster.com shares the point of view that it’s not always supposed to be that way. The 404 error pages must be your light out of the trouble but surely not a common state of “welcome, you’re in Deadlock”. 404 pages should contain helpful information for example Main Page or Site Map links or what’s better – widgets that endeavor to find the correct web page the user required. The visual representation of 404 pages is a question of substantial importance. It’s essential that when someone is looking for something for relatively long period of time without any success he gets rather annoyed with 404s but smart appealing visual elements might cheer him up.
Here are some more useful advices for you to think over your four-Oh!-fours:
Set up your navigation system.
As it was mentioned above, you should provide alternatives for navigating user’s way out of a 404 error page. These could be widgets that find the correct web page, links to your home page, site map, help info, search tabs, assumption lists(e.g. “Perhaps you’ve meant”, “Maybe you would like to …” ), etc.
The Medium is the Message.
Do not forget that even through 404 error page you are communicating with your visitors. Think over the message you would display.
Be careful! Linguistic tips.
Displaying the list of probable errors never put misspelling error or any other assumptions, accusing the user of being sloppy or inattentive, first. Leave them to end your list and better present them in a rather smooth way.
Brevi manu! (latin for ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’ ).
Stay informative and at the same time do not provide too much information. Give the users appropriate amount of suggestions to help them find their way out.
Be user-friendly.
Spread some friendly mood on your ‘route 404′. Cross out sever “Error 404. Page Not Found” and change it for more amicable “Ooops!…” or “Sorry…” or else.
Creativity is the key.
Think different! Find unconventional ideas to present your 404 error page. Thus you’ll make your visitors remember your page.
In case you’ve got really excited with this topic we recommend you to visit SmashingMagazine.com 404 error pages review (as well as part I of their best 404 pages review and part II which also rocks). Plus there’s a similar review of 60 best 404 error pages made by hongkiat.com – all these guys have done a great job of collecting these pages and popularising the “404 Error pages” topic. Here are some excellent examples of creative 404 error pages:
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Oktoberfest is still out there (in case you’re reading this before October 4th) and there are still tons of interesting designs related to that. What we present today is something truly unique – no one has ever before published a collection of brewery-related Twitter backgrounds. So that’s exactly what we have for you today – enjoy.
Please note: by reading this post you confirm that you are at least 18 years old and that you are aware of the drinking responsibility. TemplateMonster along with the review listing items below in all ways advocates the drinking awareness terms and popularizes the responsible and moderate drinking.
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For a couple of weeks each year the whole world starts spelling October with “k” instead of “c” – that’s a good sign of Oktoberfest. And that in turn means beer fests all over the world – including TemplateMonster. Don’t get us wrong, we don’t drink while at work, but as a design company we are having our own beer fest. We have compiled a second part of world’s best beer-related websites (the first part of Best Beer Websites review was published earlier this year on St. Patrick’s Day). The today’s ones are mostly local websites of world’s top beer brands but that doesn’t mean these websites are less spectacular. Enjoy!
Please note: by reading this post you confirm that you are at least 18 years old and that you are aware of the drinking responsibility. TemplateMonster along with the review listing items (breweries) below in all ways advocates the drinking awareness terms and popularizes the responsible and moderate drinking.
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Every beer website is meant to keep the audience involved – after all just showing off the nice beer bottles is no longer considered cool. This website keeps you involved with the nice and simple Flash application – you upload your photo and may see yourself next to Zeca Pagodinho – a famous Brazilian singer.
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That’s a British beer website and although U.K. is not traditionally considered a top brewing territory it still has its share – including the websites. This one has a grunge or punk style design – as well as the beer brand concept itself.
As you previously know, Template Monster originally published a post entitled Ugliest Websites of World’s Top Hotels that caused a burst of comments both criticizing and encouraging. This fact couldn’t leave us indifferent, and consequently, we made Supersonic Redesign of the worst (in our opinion) hotel website – the website of the Hotel Goldener Baer in Vienna. For all that, we got even greater amount of feedbacks (many thanks for them), and what was truly exciting that one of the active participants of the dispute, mentioned above, drew a sketch depicting his own vision of a new design for Goldener Baer website. As we know, in any design, as well as in any web design, various approaches are possible. Thus and so, we invited Steven to complete his sketch and write a guest post on Template Monster’s blog to acquaint our readers with alternative (in relation to our) redesign variant.
It should be noted that our approach is in marked contrast to Steven’s. He initiated with logo and corporate style changes. We focused on a website, and intentionally didn’t make any logo modifications since it would have entailed the change of corporate style which is far expensive than simply website redesign. Through differential approaches, we cannot accede to Steven’s criticism of our variant, but we have concluded to leave the original text to let the readers decide whose approach and whose variant is better.
So gain a deep insight into what Steven Moseley has written:
“Although the original Hotel Goldener Baer website looks about 15 years outdated and poorly designed, it contains a visual language that speaks very directly to the “character” of the Hotel.
How so? The Goldener Baer is a historic structure – textural, rustic, quaint. Consequently, the hotel’s website is also very textural, rustic, and quaint – indeed, to a fault, but that’s beside the point. The site has “character”. We’ll get more into what that means later.
Although the Supersonic Redesign of the website is unarguably more professional and usable (vastly so), the character of the Gold Baer somehow got lost in translation.
The redesigned website no longer speaks a rustic, quaint language. Instead, it speaks a corporate language, with chamfered boxes, radiused corners on buttons, pastel green and blue colors, and soft gradients. The only real texture in the site is in the background, but it doesn’t “feel” old-world. Instead, it has the feeling of mid-20th century wallpaper (not the kind you put on your computer desktop – the kind you actually paste onto walls!) In the new site, the stone textures, gold highlights, and serif typography used in the old site are all gone – and along with them, all of the character that define the hotel.
Since their very first days Flash-based website environments have been a matter of obsession for millions of Flash artists and graphic designers. Not long ago having a website with this sort of 3D-style environment has become really popular and that’s when we started seeing more and more websites of this kind. So now we present a collection of websites based on Flash environments – please welcome.
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SensiSoft
Since most of the websites of this kind are so creative for their navigation solutions this one can be called a typical one – it does have an original navigation solution.
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Zeroix
This one’s navigation may not be as awesome as with some of the others but it does have one of the most impressive graphics on this list (or maybe even the most impressive). All of the website’s elements are based on custom 3D models designed exclusively for this website – even the background. Not to mention the mini-game of website’s preloader.
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Today we’ve came up with a new review – this time it’s about the worst websites of hotels that are actually great. It’s hard to tell why they tolerate the designs like these – perhaps because they think they’ve done a good marketing job before and nothing can ever spoil their image. We’re sure there’s no need explain how wrong that position is. The websites in the list are arranged in direct proportion to how bad the design is and inversely to how famous the hotel is (so the worst website design of the best hotel would be #1 on the list). Anyways, time for some critique:
10. GoldBear Hotel
Ok, this one may not be the most famous hotel but it surely has the worst website design. It’s terribly outdated, the website layouts like this one were used back in 1990-s. As a matter of fact we even expected to see the photo of Jean-Claude Van Damme somewhere on this website and thought we’ve heard Vanilla Ice and East 17 singing in the background once we saw it all, after all that’d be quite easy to explain. On one hand since it’s not world’s #1 hotel it cannot afford a premium website, on the other hand – when you’re not on the top you have to do something to get there (including having a decent website).
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9. Hotel Opera
This hotel appears to be another fan of postcard-style (reminds me of the BlueHost.com website mentioned in the worst hosting websites post). It has absolutely unusable navigation menu and they seem to have used what we call a “chaotic” approach in arranging the images and functional clocks (not so functional after all). But hey – at least they have a Flash animation and a kick-ass favicon!
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Captain Revelation (as well as ourselves) has no rest since last Friday when we’ve discovered that so many of world’s top hosting companies neglect the importance of a website design. Think about it for a second: the companies providing websites and fighting for customers actually ignore their own corporate websites. Yeah, that is really something a design company like TemplateMonster may be worried about.
Take a look at a couple of hosting companies we are sure you all have heard of:
We don’t mean to be offensive, but this one kinda looks like these postcard-style websites popular back in late 1990s. And it seems to be optimized for what – 640 by 480 pixels screen resolution? In fact this design hasn’t been updated since 2003 – that’s a long time people! Time to do something about it!
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This one looks like a Christmas tree to us. It’s now that old though, that’s a good thing about it. However this kind of design approach does harm the functionality – it’s hard to navigate all these blocks.
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