A common sight on the web is the trends in web design that leads to websites that look similar to each other. Sometimes they tend to look REALLY similar. I have had clients that wanted to use design as inspiration from another site and i’ve done those projects to, but only as a developer instead of a designer. I don’t know how GoAssign decided to design their website, but I guess we can all agree on who they have been inspired by.

Campaign Monitor have been a well-known website for its design for some time now so there’s no question about “who was first”.

Freespee.com is the website of my current employer. The company was about to launch their biggest product release and the website was in need of a redesign.

The new website was developed by me (Graphics in Photoshop/Illustrator and coding in php/css/xhtml). The main purpose with the site was to make it a portal for all Freespee visitors and users, everyone from high executives to “ordinary” civilians. A generic theme was created for the site, to match the different applications such as Freespee Analytics, Freespee Voice and Talky.

A carousel is used to display latest news and different cases.

Gränby Centrum is a shopping mall located in my hometown Uppsala. They have just released a new updated design/structure of their website. Unfortunately they have not really done the job quite as good as you would hope.

The website is a lot better than the previous one, that was based on Flash and not very intuitive when it came to giving the visitor a worthy experience. Gränby Centrum is a big shopping mall with about 60 stores and 5 restaurants so my guess is that the agency who created the website could charge a good sum of money. Of course I can’t  know what the client wanted in this case, but what I do know is that if you are a webdesign agency you optimize a website for search engines. This isn’t the case for Gränby Centrum!

The first thing that came to my attention was the use of weblinks. A good URL structure is very important for the search engine to index the content. Instead of using “/index?pageId=1″ it should be something similar to “/about-this-site”.

Unique titles and inline content headers is another part that is used for the making the life of search engines easier. Every page should have a unique title in the header, and preferably it should be the same as the h1-tag that is used as a header in the inline content. Unfortunately Gränby Centrum doesn’t have any of the titles.

Luckily some SEO has been done for Gränby Centrum someway down the road, because the Serp is quite good overall. I’m not saying I have the perfect solution always, but as a webdesigner i’m not proud when a work has been poorly done. I just think the responsible of Gränby Centrum should do the job that is expected in 2010. =)

Finally I have managed to get my digital home redecorated! A soft brown feeling has been used and I’m actually quite pleased with the outcome. The idea for tolvhundra.com this time is to be a place where I can clear my thoughts on the blog or just let you know about my latest work!