Navigation is the most important part of a website without which no website can effectively operate. Achieving unique navigation that effectively fulfills its purpose is nearly akin to climbing Mount Everest. Having a unique navigation with perfect functionality makes the website easy to navigate, thus ensuring a better users experience.
Here, we have collected some sites with amazing and unique navigational elements that will not only inspire you, but will show you how to combine innovation with practicality. We hope you like this assortment. Enjoy!
CSS and JavaScript Based Navigation Menu
Small Stone The navigation of this site goes with the theme. This is a website of a US based record label that is evident through its navigation.
BountyBev BountyBev turns to their creativity to help make their navigation menu as unique and distinctive as it is.
I am Yuna Beautiful navigation with exceptional hover effects. Navigation menu goes up and down when you hover over it with your mouse.
Racket Truly exceptional and creative navigation that shows a hierarchy of menu up to its roots.
Side Show Press Shop An easy to navigate website thanks to its well designed navigation menu.
TapTapTap A restaurant menu like navigation is used here that looks really great. The navigation grabs the attention with its simplicity and creativity.
Studio-Output Beautiful and appealing navigation. Selected area becomes highlighted and provides necessary information to the visitors.
Got Milk Bold use of a centered navigation menu that never dislodges from its position. On hover, icons change to text.
CathyBeck This website uses a unique navigation style that opens and closes like a scroll when a menu is chosen.
Unfold Unfold has a simple yet most powerful navigation system that sets it apart from other websites.
Lab for Culture Simply creative navigation menu is used here that not only is functional but looks visually interesting as well.
El Studio Beautiful and easy to navigate website demonstrating the power of their navigation menu.
Acko The site navigation is designed from a totally different perspective. Worth mentioning.
Jiri Tvrdek Yet another creative way to present site navigation. Here the navigation is presented in the form of fruit bearing tree.
District Solutions Vertical tabs are very rarely used as navigation bars, but this website proves that they can look stunning if used properly.
Dragon Interactive Simple, neat and clean navigation that looks stunning with the stylish hover effect employed.
Helmy Bern The navigation has a grungy style and jQuery dropdown menu.
Andreas Hinkel Here the navigational elements are setup as handwritten captions on a Polaroid picture.
Cypher13 Cypher 13 possesses a flexible navigation that is supported by photographs and text. This style is appealing, practical and at times amusing.
Im Design Navigate the site through the arrows and certain other keys of your keyboard, Mac users may require their mouse on some occasions.
Studio Stemmler Studio Stemmler has a simple landing page. But the instant you choose a category, the interface transforms giving you several ways to access content.
Thibaud Another dazzling portfolio with innovative navigation, this one is based on Flash color samples to select from. Similar items are grouped together.
SensiSoft To help visitors connect with their creative navigation menu, SensiSoft puts a familiar-looking information stand in the center.
Flash Based Navigation Menu
Work Life Balance Centre Work Life Balance Centre uses a balanced navigation menu that emphasizes all the necessary elements.
Narrow Design This is a portfolio website where Nick Jones uses a simple but dynamic sort of navigation.
TBWA\HAKUHODO Navigation is based on a beautiful artistic scenario where every element used adds life to the site, simply magnificent.
Gleis 3 Overall the site is simple and plain, but creatively used navigation makes this website look out of the ordinary.
Marc Anton Dahme A unique concept of mouse and keyboard being used as the navigation that really stands out, all the while remaining practical.
Amore Navigational menu is set at the bottom of the web page and has some cool hover effects incorporated.
Grip Limited Here you can navigate with the simple scroll of your mouse or with the arrows keys of your keyboard.
65media Bold use of navigational elements on this site stimulates a visual interest among users.
Organic Grid Organic Grid uses an excellent approach to create navigation bars as if they are the main attraction of the website. Navigation bars move left and right when mouse over to it.
Innovative Imaging Professionals Here a beautiful navigation menu with hover color effect is used that gives the website a very unique feel.
Moodstream | Getty Image This website tweaks the mood sliders in order to squeeze your creative juices. This navigation style rocks.
Not forgotten Movie Here navigation is presented in the form of tarot like cards which catch fire when clicked. The cards are based on a devilish and freaky theme to match the feel of the website.
Marc Ecko This site’s navigation allows the visitors to take a tour of a virtual art gallery to move through the site’s offerings. A more traditional nav menu is also included.
Agency Net This is a New York and Fort Lauderdale based design studio whose website uses a dramatic and astonishing navigation design.
Nickad A flexible approach is taken while keeping the navigation easy to use. Stars when clicked change to navigation that simply look stunning.
Okaydave The navigation is set at the bottom of the web page which is out of the ordinary in and of itself. Different images are used to point to the same content.
Section Seven A colorful and vibrant pamphlet like navigation gives this site character and sets it apart from others.
Andreas Smetana You can navigate through the photo thumbnails either by using your mouse wheel or the arrows.
Back in January, we published an article on responsive design, “Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How to Use It.� Responsive design continues to get a lot of attention, but considering how different it is from the “traditional� way of designing websites, it can be a bit overwhelming for those designers who have yet to try it.
To that end, we’ve compiled this round-up of resources for creating responsive website designs. Included are tutorials, techniques, articles, tools and more, all geared toward giving you the specific knowledge you need to create your own responsive designs.
Responsive Design Techniques
CSS Transitions and Media Queries Elliot Jay Stocks provides insight into the combination of CSS media queries and CSS transitions. The basic premise is this: you use media queries to design responsive websites that adapt in layout according to browser width, and you constantly resize your browser to see how the website performs, but every time a query kicks in, there’s a harsh jump between the first style and the second. Why not use some simple CSS transitions to smooth the jump by animating the resize? A nice case study.
Responsive Data Tables Chris Coyier and Scott Jehl are experimenting with responsive design techniques for displaying data tables. By default, data tables can be quite wide, and necessarily so. You could zoom out and see the whole table, but then the text size would be too small to read. You could zoom in to make it readable, but then you’d have to scroll both vertically and horizontally (sad face) to browse the table. One solution is to reformat the table for better readability. Another is to display a pie graph from the data. Yet another is to adapt the table into a mini-graphic for narrow screens (rather than interfering much with the content when the full table is displayed).
Responsive Navigation Menus: Convert a Menu to a Dropdown for Small Screens Chris Coyier describes another technique for converting a regular row of links into a dropdown menu when the browser window is narrow. When the user is on a small screen and clicks the dropdown, they’ll get an interface to select an option that is nice and big and easy to choose. Obviously much better than displaying a tiny link.
CSS Media Queries and Using Available Space A tutorial from CSS-Tricks that discusses how to make subtle changes with media queries and how to use media queries in a single style sheet. For instance, if you have a fluid-width design in which the sidebar is 35% of the width of the page, depending on the width of the browser window, you could say, “If the browser is really narrow, do this. If it’s wider, do this. If it’s really wide, do this.â€� In the article, you’ll learn how to modify a list of links according to the browser’s viewport.
Responsive Images, Responsive Videos
Fluid Images Fluid images are a central aspect of a responsive design. This article by Ethan Marcotte gives a thorough overview on creating them using the classic img { max-width: 100%; } code snippet, as well as details to get you started.
Responsive Image: Experimenting With Context-Aware Image Sizing An alternative approach to fluid images by Filament Group. This technique allows designers to create responsive layouts that serve different image sizes at different resolutions. Effectively, it allows designers to create mobile-optimized images for smaller screens, and then serve higher-resolution versions to larger screens. Filament Group has developed this technique that uses .htaccess files and JavaScript to serve up different sized images based on the screen width. An alternative solution is to use tools like TinySrc which allows you to merely prefix all large images in your source code with a TinySrc URL, and the tool does the rest.
Responsive Images and Context-Aware Image Sizing Craig Russell has developed a technique that uses a server-side script (in PHP) to serve up images of several different resolutions. The idea is that within the PHP script, a nested array is used that lists image files and their relative percentage scales. In HTML, the image’s src attribute would be set to get the requested image’s id, but with no scale specified. A JavaScript calculates the percentage width of the image relative to the maximum width of the container, and this figure is then appended to the end of the src attribute as the scale parameter. The comments in the article contain some nice ideas and suggestions on how the technique could be improved.
Responsive Images Right Now Harry Roberts’ idea is to use the img element for the smaller of the two images, the image that you want mobile users to download. You would also have a containing div to which you apply the large version of the image as a background through CSS. You then hide the img from desktop users, and show them the large CSS background, and hide the background image from mobile users and just serve them the smaller inline image.
Responsive Images Using CSS3 Nicolas Gallagher’s method relies on the use of @media queries, CSS3-generated content and the CSS3 extension to the attr() function. By combining the content property with the CSS3 extension to attr(), you are able to specify that an attribute’s value should be interpreted as the URL part of a url() expression. In this case, it means you will be able to replace an image’s content with the image found at the destination URL, stored in a custom HTML data-* attribute.
Responsive Images Using Cookies Keith Clark suggests using cookies to serve smaller images to mobile users. Whenever a browser requests a file from a server, it automatically forwards any cookie data along with the request. If we use JavaScript to populate a cookie with the current screen’s dimensions, all subsequent requests made by the browser will pass this data to the server. In other words, the server would know the screen size of the device that is asking for the file.
Responsive Images With ExpressionEngine John Faulds presents a technique for responsive images that is different from the techniques presented above. It involves querying the device’s user agent string to determine whether it is mobile, and then setting a global variable that can then be used in templates to modify the size of the image output. Basically, only one image gets sent to the browser, but that image is different depending on whether you’re viewing the page on a mobile or desktop device.
CSS: Elastic Videos Nick La applies the max-width: 100%; snippet to videos and presents techniques that make HTML5 videos and object- and iFrame-embedded videos responsive. For the latter, the trick is very simple. Just wrap the embedding code in a div container, and specify a 50% to 60% padding-bottom. Then, specify the child elements (iFrame, object embed) and a 100% width and 100% height, with absolute positioning. This will force the embedded elements to expand full width automatically. Initially discovered by Thierry Koblentz.
Optimizing Your Email for Mobile Devices With the Media Query Wide emails often require horizontal scrolling, especially when there’s a large image. This case study by Campaign Monitor explains how emails can be optimized for mobile devices using media queries and offers a couple of useful techniques and snippets to be used right away.
Responsive Design for Email, the Largest Mobile Audience Another interesting case study that shows how the development team behind Beanstalk applied screen-size-specific media queries to target styles, and what design decisions were made to make the mobile email experience better.
Guide to CSS Support in Email Designing an HTML email that renders consistently across major email clients can be time-consuming. Support for even simple CSS varies considerably between clients, and even different versions of the same client. Campaign Monitor has put together a guide to save you the time and frustration of figuring it out for yourself. With 24 different email clients tested, it covers all of the popular applications across desktop, Web and mobile email.
Responsive Design Tools
You can build a responsive design from scratch, or you can use some of the tools listed below to speed up and smooth out the process.
Respond.js Scott Jehl’s fast and lightweight polyfill for min-width and max-width CSS3 media queries (for IE 6 to 8 and more). css3-mediaqueries-js is another script that enables IE 5+, Safari 2 and Firefox 1+ to transparently parse, test and apply CSS3 media queries.
WebPutty: Scientific Progress CSS Editing This tool is a Web-based CSS editor with auto-save feature and a real-time preview of your website. WebPutty also has CSS selector highlighting and SCSS support (for Sass and LESS), as well as Compass support. To use the tool, just embed a link tag at the end of your website’s head tag.
Debugging CSS Media Queries In responsive Web design, we’re working with different states, widths and viewport sizes. Johan Brook shares a quick tip for indicating (with pure CSS) which media query has kicked in. The article also provides a mixin for developers using Sass. A demo is available as well.
Responsive Design Testing This tool is for everyone who needs a quick and easy way to test their website design in multiple screen widths. Change the defaultURL variable at the top of the responsive.js file to your own site and navigate your website from within the frames.
Responsive Containers: Selector Queries This JavaScript by Andy Hume allows you to add selector queries and responsive containers to your design. Essentially, you can apply different class values to an HTML element based on its width.
Resize My Browser If you need your browser to display content in a certain window size this is what you have been looking for. Just click on the size you need and check out what your size looks like. Does not work in Chrome and Opera due to issues with the “ResizeTo” event.
Media Query Bookmarklet A handy tool that shows you exactly what size the viewport has and which media query just fired. Drag it to your bookmarks bar and have it ready when needed.
Responsivepx Use the information this little gadget provides in your media queries to create responsive designs.
ProtoFluid A tool for rapid prototyping of responsive design. You can prototype CSS on a variety of popular device sizes, orientations and browsers, be they phones (BlackBerry Torch, Google Nexus One, iPhone, Motorola Droid), tablets (BlackBerry Playbook, iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Dell Streak), monitors or televisions (720p, 1080p). You can preview designs right in the browser and use your development tools like Firebug. You might want to check an alternative tool ScreenFly as well.
Fluid Grid Calculator Harry Roberts has developed a calculator and generator of fluid grids for your responsive designs. Just provide the number of columns, the width of one column and the width of the gutters, and the tool will generate a fluid grid system in CSS for you. Handy!
Free HTML5/CSS3 WordPress 3.1+ Theme With Responsive Layout: Yoko Yoko is a modern and flexible WordPress theme. With the responsive layout based on CSS3 media queries, the theme adjusts to different screen sizes. The design is optimized for big desktop screens, tablets and small smartphone screens. To make your blog more individual, you can use the new post formats (like gallery, aside or quote), choose your own logo and header image, customize the background and link color.
Scherzo, a Responsive WordPress Theme This WordPress theme is a fine example of responsive design, displaying nicely on almost all devices and screens.
Responsive Design Templates
320 and Up 320 and Up works on the “tiny screen first� principle, whereby designs are created for mobile screens first, and then expanded for tablets, desktops, and large screens. It works well as an extension to HTML5 Boilerplate and as a standalone kit.
Media Queries for Standard Devices Here is a useful template for media queries for standard devices: empty placeholders for targeting devices and attributes that you might be interested in when making responsive designs.
Mobile Boilerplate Here is a customizable template for creating rich, high-performance mobile Web apps. You’ll get cross-browser consistency among A-grade smartphones, and fallback support for legacy BlackBerry, Symbian and IE Mobile. You’ll also get offline caching for free, fast button clicks, a media query polyfill and many common mobile Webkit optimizations.
Skeleton: Beautiful Boilerplate for Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Development Skeleton is a small collection of CSS and JavaScript files that can help you rapidly develop websites that look beautiful at any size, be it a 17-inch laptop or an iPhone. Skeleton is a grid that is responsive right down to mobile. It is well organized and well structured and provides most basic styles as a foundation.
Responsive Design Frameworks
1140 CSS Grid 1140 CSS Grid is optimized to work on screens ranging from the size of mobiles to 1280 pixels wide. It’s a simple flexible grid system that uses media queries for smaller screens, essentially stacking columns on top of one another.
inuit.css This CSS framework is built to provide a solid foundation for designs on smaller screens (such as tablets) and tiny screens (such as phones) straight out of the box with minimal effort. It also has a custom grid system builder for creating fluid grid systems.
Flurid Flurid is a liquid grid layout with up to 16 columns.
FluidGrids FluidGrids is a fluid grid framework that creates layouts based on 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 or 16 columns.
Less Framework 4 A CSS grid system for creating adaptive layouts. It includes four basic layouts (including tablet, mobile and wide mobile), with three sets of typography presets.
Fluid Grid System This fluid grid framework includes a typographic grid and baseline grid.
Tiny Fluid Grid Tiny Fluid Grid helps you generate your own fluid grid with 12, 16 or 24 columns, minimum and maximum widths, and percentage-based gutters.
Responsive Design Workflow and Strategies
The Responsive Designer’s Workflow Luke Wroblewski’s conference notes on Ethan Marcotte’s presentation about applying responsive Web design principles and workflows to the redesign of a major newspaper website. Among other things, Ethan explains how he approaches the responsive design methodology, what the design process looks like and how prototyping is done in the context of responsive design.
Content Choreography Read up on how to properly plan your site to live up to todays standards. Begin to choreograph content proportional to size to serve the best possible experience at any width.
Structured Content First In this presentation, Stephen Hay discusses a couple of troubles you might run into when structuring your content and argues that properly structured content is portable to future platforms. Stephen suggests that we think about creating and designing structured content first that caters to the lowest common layout denominator, whether this be a small screen or a text browser. This content should be able to go anywhere.
Design for a Target Experience First Another interesting perspective on a responsive designer’s workflow; Nathan C. Ford focuses on experience of its users first and then derives user scenarios and media queries from it. “There are goals for sites that reach beyond simple readability, where a lack of features can actually diminish the experience. I am working on such a project now. Our approach has been to peruse the research and tailor an optimal experience for the most likely user scenarios. Working out from there, we judicially edit and hone for each media query.”
More Responsive Design, Please This article by Jason Things covers responsive design based on a layout/content/capability/user intent scheme, which sheds interesting new light on the challenges that responsive design can create. It’s a well thought out piece and is certainly worth a read.
Breaking Development Luke Wroblewski took notes at the Breaking Development Conference while Stephen Hay talked about the realities of designing for different device experiences.
Patterns for Multiscreen Strategies Have a look at this simple but effective slideshow to get an idea of which core factors play a role in multiscreen concepts.
Responsive Web Design from the Future According to Kyle Neath, responsive web design is about a lot more than the size of your screen. This talk is about about how GitHub handles links, the url bar, partial page updates, and explains why Kyle thinks the HTML5 history API is the most important thing to happen to front end development since Firebug. An inspiring presentation.
Developing a Progressive Mobile Strategy In this presentation, Dave Olsen presents a progressive mobile strategy that consists of audience strategy, content strategy and platform strategy. Dave argues that to develop a sustainable and scalable mobile strategy, you need to answer the questions, “What value will the targeted audiences get from this content?� and “How do we develop solutions to handle both mobile and native now, as well as the devices of the future?� An interesting presentation.
Discussions and Points of View on Responsive Design
While not tutorials per se, the articles here give you valuable insight into why you should use responsive design techniques (and when you maybe shouldn’t use them).
Responsive by Default Andy Hume explains what in his opinion responsiveness is all about. It’s what a website does when it’s loaded into an unknown browser on an unknown device by an unknown individual. It’s “how you deal with “the most hostile software development environment ever imaginedâ€� (via Douglas Crockford). Like progressive enhancement it’s a strategy that frees you to work with the web rather than fight against it.” An interesting point of view.
The Case Against Responsive Web Design It seems only fair to include some dissenting opinions here about when responsive design is and is not appropriate. This article discusses why responsive design doesn’t always make sense from a user experience perspective. Take a look in the comments section, too. Luke Jones has a similar opinion.
A Responsive Mind A discussion on Jeremy Keith’s blog about the necessary parts of a responsive design and how to effectively create different layouts based on different screen sizes. Examples are included.
Responsive Enhancement An excellent introduction to responsive design as a way of thinking rather than as a tool or technique. Jeremy Keith argues that responsive Web design can’t be tacked on to the end of an existing workflow. Instead of pixel perfection, we should be thinking of proportion perfection. An inspiring read.
Mobile-First Responsive Web Design Mobile First Responsive Web Design is a combination of philosophies and strategies with the aim to achieve a wider application of best practices in the area.
Where are the Mobile First Web Designs? In this article Jason Grigsby presents the findings from his study on responsive designs, their features and appearance as well as general remarks on the state of art of Responsive Web Design.
Further Resources
Here are some additional resources for creating responsive designs that don’t fit neatly into the categories above.
Media Queries A growing collection of websites that use media queries.
Responsive Web Design, by Ethan Marcotte This book, written by Ethan Marcotte and published by A Book Apart, is a fantastic resource for learning how to design responsive websites. It covers the basics of the responsive Web, flexible grid systems, flexible images and media queries, and it gives insight into how to create responsive designs.
The Latest in HTML5 This slideshow covers some techniques and lesser-known HTML5 gems that could get implemented in browsers in the near future: among other things, server-side media queries with JavaScript and form-factor detection.
Would you like to see more round-ups like this one on SM?
Let’s face it: sales make the world go round. But as a Web designer, you’re concerned more with fonts, color, hierarchy and images than with the sales process. Some believe that designs sell themselves; while this may be true for a few designers, it is certainly not the case for most.
Whether you’re selling a prospective client on a website redesign or a potential client on a new home page, you have to demonstrate your design skills and show how your design will help them meet their goals. When it comes down to it, Web design is more about function than art.
Without any kind of sales background, having to sell our designs to a client can suddenly make us feel lost and far from our comfort zone. Image Credit
Whether you are a sole proprietor or a lead designer at a large firm, you are always selling your work. You may be selling a concept to a client or your boss, but when it comes down to it, you’re selling it to someone. And what are you selling? You’re selling ingenuity, a concept, usability, design harmony: you’re selling the creative. And because design is somewhat subjective, this sale is harder than most others.
If you learn how to sell yourself (without a sleazy sales pitch) you will be able to sell your designs more easily. This means fewer revisions, happier clients, more referrals, and a higher quality of work.
What To Do If You Don’t Know How To Sell
As a Web designer, you focus on what you do best: designing. But many designers get so caught up in the creative process that they fail to consider a business perspective. That is, they cannot articulate how their service will truly benefit the client. Without this ability, you will have a much more challenging time selling your services and designs to prospective clients.
So, what to do? Incorporate sales tactics without becoming a sales person. Follow these tips, starting with the initial meeting with the potential client.
Know Their Business
As you meet with the client, ask about their needs and expectations, and try to understand exactly what they want. You will refer back to this information in all of your meetings with the client, and it will reinforce your design when you review it with them.
Break down clients into different categories: start-up, established, service- or product-based, business-to-business sales, business-to-consumer, etc. This will help you select specific questions for each client.
Research what their existing website does right and wrong (if they have one). What does it have going for it? Where is it lacking? People appreciate honesty, but don’t offend.
A few areas to investigate:
How many sales and visitors?
If it’s an e-commerce website, how much sales are generated each month. How many unique visitors come to the website?
What is the conversion rate?
How many visitors convert into customers? What is the value of the average order?
How many repeat customers?
How many new customers return to make purchases? How often?
When asking these questions, think more in business terms than in design terms. The client isn’t really hiring you to design a website: they’re hiring you to increase their sales or generate more leads. If you can connect with them on this level, you will find that selling your design will be much easier.
Sell the Sizzle
The client is now intrigued and wants to learn more about your work. So, compare your portfolio of designs to their existing website (showcasing your newest work), and explain how your concepts can help them meet or exceed their goals. You could try flipping back and forth between website designs to emphasize the difference in quality.
Explain the key design elements, such as conversion-centric items and usability enhancements, and outline the major money- or lead-generating components. Explain how these elements will increase the client’s bottom line. If you can connect your design strategy to the real needs of the client, the design will have sold itself before you have even quoted a price!
Sell the Benefits
Cite the latest studies, statistics, industry trends, etc. Some people respond best to hard evidence; facts and figures.
Include the latest research to back up your design strategy. Use industry magazines, reports, benchmarks and case studies.
Paint a Picture
Help them visualize the new design with fresh ideas and examples. Use their own products, categories, services and content to help them visualize what you will do.
Discussing Price
Few of your clients will care about costs. They simply want a return on their investment. That’s right: people are willing to spend money if they know they will get it back many times over.
Your job is to demonstrate clearly that your product or service represents the safest and most secure purchase decision rather than merely being the least expensive or highest quality.
Our customers today are the most experienced in customer history. They know that there is usually a close correlation between higher price on the one hand and greater security and after-sales satisfaction on the other. Your task is to make this differential clear in your sales presentation, especially when positioning you product or service against lower-priced competition.
– Factors of Risk in Selling, Brian Tracy
Using the information gathered in the research stage, crunch the numbers and estimate how your design will increase conversions, leads, etc. Break it down into dollars and cents, so that the client can grasp the cost and benefit and you can make a convincing case for the investment.
Formulating A Proposal Or Contract
A true staple of the design process: the contract. This defines the scope of your services. Here’s what to include:
The process
Clearly explain or document the design process, from prototype to production. Include everything from market research to wireframing and user testing. Break down your methodology so that the client understands it.
Services to be provided
List all items to be included in the design, from the preliminary research to the favicon. Be sure to put a limit on relevant items (e.g. stock photography).
Client expectations
Clearly articulate what you expect from the client: for example, content, images, photography, turnaround time on deliverables and other assets. Include deadlines and the consequences of missing them.
The design strategy
Explain how many revisions are allowed and what’s included in one. Also, define how revisions above and beyond the specified limit are handled.
Buffer time
To play it safe, account for hours above and beyond what you think the design will take. Due diligence and research don’t always catch special cases. When you encounter one, having buffer time to make changes and additions helps a lot. Very rarely do I work on a project that doesn’t require this buffer.
Hourly rate
Tie in all these items with your hourly rate. Define your hourly rate for extra revisions, additional stock photography, etc. Now, when the project burns through your quoted hours and buffer time, you can fall back on the hourly rate.
What To Avoid
Knowing what to avoid is key to pitching prospective clients. Even with a strong pitch, not following the guidelines below could derail your effort.
Don’t Accept Every Client
Yes, this sounds like blasphemy, but it is very important when growing your business. Specialization truly is the key to success in design. Know who your ideal client is: e-commerce, social network, brochure website, start-up, small business, medium-sized business, large enterprise, non-profit;the list goes on. Know your strengths: lead generation, splash page, brochure website, etc.
Identify who you work with best? For whom do you achieve the best results? Focus on that market. Pass along to another firm any leads that do not meet your criteria (and maybe get a kickback for it). You will grow your business much more effectively this way.
Few firms do well by catering to all. This might work when you are starting out, but as you grow and land bigger clients, you will need to spend your time on projects that propel your design skills and company in the right direction.
Carve out a niche for yourself, and become the best in that niche. That sharp focus will attract more quality business than you would if you are all over the board.
Don’t be afraid to turn down clients or pass them onto a friend. If they don’t match your criteria, you most likely won’t be able to serve them best. Both you and the client will have lost.
Don’t Provide a Design Sample or Mock-Up
Prospective clients will often ask you to submit a sample design or mock-up for their website. They want to compare your work to that of other companies from which they are getting proposals, and they want a tangible product to make a decision. Don’t do it!
The reason is simple: you do not know the client’s needs yet. You haven’t delved into their business reality or market demographics, so you would be shooting from the hip.
Don’t devalue your service by sending a sample before getting a clear and comprehensive picture of your client’s needs and business structure. Gaining this understanding could take weeks, but it is critical when designing UIs.
Don’t Focus on Your Designs’ Prettiness or Awards
Pretty designs are fun, and awards boost the ego like nothing else, but they don’t usually give prospective clients what they need: results. Instead, focus on what your design will achieve for the client: increased sales, leads, sign-ups, page views and so on.
Don’t get me wrong: a good clean design will definitely help you in the sales process, as will design accolades and awards. But don’t think they will close the deal. Use them to reinforce your pitch or to show secondary benefits to the actual results you will achieve.
Be Cautious of Start-Ups
Ahh, the ever-popular start-up. I think every designer has invested some of their hard-earned money into developing a website for one new idea or another. But start-ups that make it are few and far between. The more start-ups you deal with, the more you will lose when their business plan (or lack thereof) doesn’t work as expected in six months to a year.
Many start-ups take a while to flush out their business plan, because they lack direction and focus. Expect much more hand-holding with these clients than with established businesses.
If you specialize in start-ups, then develop a methodology catered to their needs.
Never Ever Over-Promise and Under-Deliver
This should go without saying, but some designers are so anxious to close a deal that they sell themselves short and set the client’s expectations too high. If this happens, you will be hard-pressed to deliver a solution on time, within the specs and on budget.
Sticking to your niche helps you to set realistic expectations and to over-deliver them. Simply stated: sell what you know, and do what you know. You will get fewer surprises, and I guarantee you will end up with much better designs.
When in doubt, ask an associate or friend for a quote or to review your proposal. Make sure your time estimates are accurate and that you are charging accordingly.
Other Sales Strategies
Listening and note-taking skills (the things we were taught in school) are indispensable; unless you have a photographic memory. Take notes in every meeting with a client, and log them somewhere. Listen to your client, and try to understand their needs. Ask for clarification when you get lost.
Always send a list of references, even if the client doesn’t ask for it. It’s a nice touch and builds credibility. I also like to mention that once the project is completed, we would like to add their name and testimonial to our reference list.
Incorporate a few of these tips into your meetings. You (and the client) will benefit from them instantly.
Further Resources
Brian Tracy International
Outlines skills that you need to increase prospects, get more appointments, close more sales and put more money in your pocket.
Zig Ziglar
An expert in sales motivation, goal-setting and personal success.
As bloggers, wanna-be writers and hopeful freelancers, we hear, probably on a daily basis, just how important guest blogging is. We know we should be guest blogging which means we know we should be actively seeking out new blogs and new sites as potential homes for our precious content. And usually, considering we’re “writers,� we think we’re fairly good at putting words on a page and drafting an informative, helpful, hopefully even mildly entertaining piece of work. After all, we can write all day long, but if it doesn’t offer benefit to a site or to a blog, there is no site manager (no matter how burnt out or desperate for content), who is going to put that on his beloved page. And we can’t blame him. Those of us with our own blogs know how thin the line is regarding how willing we are at approving content and promoting it on our site. (...) Read the rest of Good Blogging Etiquette for Guest Posting Hopefuls
In the past we have presented our readers with some inspiring and well designed infographics to demonstrate this useful presentational route that many are taking these days for content delivery. By taking statistical data that would normally be dry and otherwise lacking, and designing the information in such a way that it becomes not only more digestible, but also exciting and somewhat interactive. Today we are doing it again!
As bloggers, wanna-be writers and hopeful freelancers, we hear, probably on a daily basis, just how important guest blogging is. We know we should be guest blogging which means we know we should be actively seeking out new blogs and new sites as potential homes for our precious content. And usually, considering we’re “writers,� we think we’re fairly good at putting words on a page and drafting an informative, helpful, hopefully even mildly entertaining piece of work. After all, we can write all day long, but if it doesn’t offer benefit to a site or to a blog, there is no site manager (no matter how burnt out or desperate for content), who is going to put that on his beloved page. And we can’t blame him. Those of us with our own blogs know how thin the line is regarding how willing we are at approving content and promoting it on our site. (...)
