Like Steve Jobs, Good Web Developers Prioritize Design

Apple’s Steve Jobs was famous for prioritizing design in any consumer product that he produced. Like the great maestro, web developers Ukraine have followed suit and take design very seriously for producing work that stands out.

As their reputations have grown, Ukrainian tech firms have increasingly sought to gain an edge over their competitors around the world. Design skill is a part of that value proposition.

The Role Of Web Design

Any web development effort needs web design talent, along with development experts. Designers perform important tasks like

  • Preparing website mockups in Photoshop
  • Hand-coding HTML
  • Creating custom graphics and images
  • Designing typography for apps and websites

Having highly skilled designers can make the difference between an average website, and a website that quickly gets traction among customers.

The visionary Steve Jobs placed so much importance on getting the best design that, according to Apple Insider, he gave chief designer Jony Ives more power than anyone else at Apple.

Web Developer A Key Part Of Building The Site

While web designers are critical to your apps, this alone will not make a successful website or app. To turn great designs into fully functional software, you need web developers. These professionals understand computer programming languages like JavaScript, Python and Ruby.

In recent years, however, development costs have trended upwards with soaring need for developers worldwide.

Managing Development Costs By Outstaffing To Ukraine

To reduce UI creation and development costs, many organizations are now outstaffing to firms in Ukraine, the rest of Eastern Europe and elsewhere. To see how much you can save with outstaffing, consider the following analysis of development costs in Ukraine vs Western Europe.

VenturePact data gives $30/hr as the average for a web developers Ukraine team versus $80/hr for a Western Europe team. Actual figures vary widely, however, we can see how Ukrainian teams become more cost-effective.

development costs for ukraine vs western europe

How To Make A Website That Meets Business Goals

Making a website that drives your business involves more than just design and development. Technical teams are now paying extra attention to the user experience and usability of a website.

In addition, search engine optimization results, as reported by Backlinko, indicate that fast websites are a requirement if a website is to rank well. According to the report, 75% of users would not return to a site that took more than 4 seconds to load.

Looking beyond mere functionality to these important features will lead you on the path to a website that engages users and improves your business.

User Experience Can Make Or Break Your App

User experience has become an important consideration for the web. Many teams now employ UX experts whose job it is to improve the user experience of websites. To understand the need for such experts, let’s see how user experience helps users.

User experience:Person’s perceptions and responses resulting from the use and/or anticipated use of a product, system or service.

User experience includes all the users’ emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, behaviors and accomplishments that occur before, during and after use. International Organization for Standardization.

Websites with a great user experience make it easy for users to find the information or functionality they need. In addition, the design will be appealing and suitable for the type of audience at which the website is aimed.

Responsive Web Design Another Critical Consideration

With the rise of mobile devices, a new term has entered the web design lexicon: responsive design.

In its guide to responsive design, Smashing Magazine gives the following definition for responsive design.

Responsive design:

Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. Smashing Magazine.

To make your site responsive, it will need to use coding standards that adjust the user interface based on the available screen real estate. This means, for example, using narrower grid sizes on mobile devices and wider grids for desktop computers.

Paying attention to responsive design has become particularly important given that mobile device users now account for a majority of traffic to many websites. The following chart uses data from StatCounter on the latest worldwide web traffic distribution to show the proportion of mobile vs desktop traffic.

world wide traffic mobile vs desktop

With well over 52% of traffic coming from users on mobile devices, websites that lack responsive design will deliver a bad user experience.

This can lead to users choosing other websites or apps that better suit their needs. If you are an ecommerce shop, for example, a bad user experience on your website can lead users to shop at your competitors instead, lowering your sales.

Finding The Best Website Design

When it comes to finding the right approach for your website, you have a variety of design types to choose from. These days, flat UI has risen to prominence, however, a great designer will know which style suits your app best.

Webdesign Trends To Choose From

Website trends come and go, so it helps to familiarize yourself with modern trends. Behance lists some of the popular front-end trends today, which include:

  • Mobile browsing (responsive design) – designs that take a mobile-first approach
  • More flat design – simple and minimalistic designs, now with features borrowed from Material Design
  • Innovative scrolling and parallax – move objects relative to the line of sight, creating motion in the designs
  • 3D – designs that utilize 3D to achieve depth on the screen
  • Cinemagraphs – usage of gifs with specific moving elements, adding a life-like dimension to the work

Finding Design Inspiration For Your Project

While it may be tempting to overload on trends, frequently, the right design is influenced only in small part by trends. The key thing is to select elements that play well with your content and serve the functionality of your website.

Many teams find that it helps to look in the market at what others have done, then add their own ideas to that.

Here are some places to find web design inspiration and ideas that can help you settle on the right design.

Website What It Is
DesignSpiration Curates ideas, visuals and websites to use as a launching point for your own designs
Best Web Gallery An online gallery showcasing designs across website categories
Awwwards Provides web design trends and example websites that are implementing good design
Beautiful Pixels Focused on showcasing the most beautiful user interfaces the editors discover around the web

How To Use Website Builder Software And UI Frameworks

Do-it-yourself website builders have become popular as a low-cost way to create a website in next to no time.

Builders like Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and Weebly can create everything from a basic website to a full-fledged ecommerce site. The teams behind website maker tools use state of the art designs to ensure your sites look professional. Additional customizations may require hiring a designer or developer to work on the site.

Another time-saving tool when it comes to web design is the use of UI frameworks. The most popular of these are Twitter Bootstrap and Zurb Foundation. Using a UI framework gives your team a standard set of UI widgets and conventions, such as grid size, responsive design, and other optimizations. As a result, building your custom website becomes much faster than coding all elements of the user interface from scratch.