Our web design blog posts.

In the beginning, website hosting services were a niche offering… and then, the internet exploded. Now, the number of web hosting services is in the hundreds of thousands, each promising better client features than the next. So where should you be hosting your WordPress website? And what should you do if you need to migrate your website to a new host?  Here’s why migrating your WordPress website to a new host may be the best strategic move for your organisation’s online presence. Who is WordPress? Founded in 2003 as a blogging platform

Every business needs a solid marketing strategy, especially when you don’t have access to the resources and budget that bigger organisations tend to have. Fortunately, there’s no reason why a smaller budget should hold your business back – these days, success is all about marketing strategically and intelligently rather than simply having the biggest billboard or the most expensive prime time ad slot. To make your marketing work for your business, it’s essential to get to grips with the fundamentals, which is why our marketing team

If you are running a business and want a solid online presence, you’ve probably heard of WordPress, along with competitors like Drupal and Wix. Choosing the right content management system (CMS) for your business website is a critical decision because it will determine how your website works, how it is managed on an everyday basis, its security, how easy it is to modify, and much more. We’ve developed a useful guide to the WordPress CMS to help guide this decision, showing the features, pros and cons of this market-leading CMS. What is Wor

Most businesses today realise that having a website is a basic business need, especially with consumers increasingly using the internet for everything from researching their next holiday, getting design inspiration for their home’s interior, and online shopping. The next step is deciding whether you want a custom website design or to use a template design – and that can be a slightly more difficult decision, especially when your expertise isn’t digital marketing. So, here’s some insight into the pros and cons of each option, what to co

If you are considering running a business from home, you’re not alone! The events of 2020 were a catalyst for many people when it comes to working. With the onset of remote working, businesses unable to run, and other challenges, running your own business became a much more viable and popular solution than it had been in past years. To help you out, we’ve put together a quick guide on running an online business from home, including the legalities and some tips on how an expertly designed website can help your business succeed. Defining you

Yellowball has been announced as a Gold 2021 Winner in the dotCOMM Awards 'Best Website Redesign' category for our new website for Comedy Carnival, which went live in 2021. Comedy Carnival are one of London's leading standup comedy clubs. With a consummate reputation as a brilliant night out, their comedians are always hilarious, sometimes outrageous, but always seriously funny.Yellowball's design and engineering team partnered with Comedy Carnival to entirely redesign and rethink their website from the ground up, including integrating the

Just 30 years ago this year, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee published the world’s first website. Since then, this has grown to 1.88 billion websites around the globe. But as an internet user, you’ve likely noticed that there are plenty of websites that are frustrating to use, unattractive to look at, or full of errors. As a business owner, you really don’t want one of these websites to represent your brand – after all, it’s hard enough to compete with hundreds of similar businesses online and even harder to get target customers to

Just like a physical store or office space, remodelling and updating your website is an important part of keeping your business an up-to-date and appealing space. However, there’s much more to a website redesign than a fresh, new look. By rebuilding the site from the ground up, the redesign process upgrades your website for improved functionality, better content quality, and faster performance, creating the best possible user experience and customer journey – and becoming the foundation of successful digital marketing strategies. What is a

Website design is an area that’s creative and constantly evolving, bringing new and interesting ways to showcase a business online. In 2011, parallax scrolling was an emerging design trend, but by 2021, it’s become a well-established and popular way to enhance the visual impact of a website. Here’s some insight into how the parallax scrolling effect works and some stand-out examples of this visually engaging graphic design technique. What is the Parallax Scrolling Effect? This is when the website background images move at a slower pace

A website gives your business a valuable online presence – unfortunately, this visibility not only attracts clients and customers, but it can also attract cybercriminals. If you have a website for your business, it’s important to ensure its properly secured against. Security breach to keep your records and data safe, securing your business and your reputation. Are small business websites safer from security breaches? The reality is that smaller business websites are very appealing targets for cybercriminals. Attacking a large corporation

No matter how useful your services, how innovative your product, or how unique your business is, it’s not going to succeed unless you have one thing: happy customers. Like every industry, marketing and advertising constantly changes and evolves, from newspaper and radio ads to TV ads and billboards. Today, marketing is digital. And as with all things digital, the options are endless – to the point of becoming overwhelming. Here’s how to evolve your marketing strategy for a digital world, cutting through the flash and fervour to talk about

One of the most recent trends in the web design industry is a one-page website. In this design, rather than having different pages for different products and services, visitors can see everything they need to know about your brand and business on, well, one page. It’s a simple and elegant solution that’s understandably appealing to many small business owners, but it’s important to understand both the advantages and disadvantages of this web design option before you take the plunge. That way, you’ll be able to choose the option that work

To recap we’ve now explored how to prep both teams for the scoping project and also covered the main structure of how to scope a website. Before we move on to using a SoW during the project we just wanted to pump the brakes slightly.As we’ve mentioned before, we can’t just focus on the development side of life so running with that piece of advice we’ve split this article into design and development. We’re going to be looking at some of the larger items that you will want to cover in your scope and also some common pitfalls to look

Welcome to part 2 of our website scoping series. We previously looked at some of the benefits of scoping a website project and how to prepare teams for what could quite easily be considered a project before the project!Now that we understand why we are scoping the website I suppose we better get on with it. In this article we will be tackling the main bulk of ‘how to scope a website project’. We’ll be covering the following main points:Non-development items Preparing information Project objectives Sitemaps, user flows &

It’s a wonder how there are so many digital agencies. Yes, it’s a service that isn’t sector specific and as such the demand is high. But it’s not an easy sell. A lot of businesses and individuals have had bad experiences with SEO agencies and just about everyone knows/has experienced a nightmare website project.The designing and building of websites has become somewhat of a natural lifecycle. It’s something that we all have to do (some of us more than others), so let’s look at how and why scoping a website project can prevent th

This will resonate with anybody who has been involved in website design over the past decade.If I had a pound for every time someone had used the Apple website as their favourite website example….I still wouldn’t be able to afford a pair of Nuraphone headphones. I suppose I’m not taking into account inflation or interest.Regardless, the Apple website has been the default answer for longer than I care to remember. Most clients nowadays are even aware of it being the most stereotypical answer. It’s hard to argue with. For a decade

On 3rd of September 2019, our Head of Design and Managing Director held a talk at AutumnFair 2019 in regards to “Building an E-Commerce Website that Works for You and Your Customers”. Having had such a positive response from those at the talk, we thought we’d transcribe the talk to share with the world. Without further adieu, here’s a number of useful tips for e-commerce sites, from improving an existing site, all the way through to designing and building a website bespoke, from scratch.  The process of developing an e-commerce we

Have you ever designed an interface or website and spent hours selecting the perfect font for your UI to find that as soon as your XD or Sketch designs are developed into a coded website, your ever so carefully selected font now looks a lot different on a web browser? Often the main issue as web designers we find is the font increases in weight. This can be a very frustrating realisation and can result in a website that you’re not completely happy with or more time spent finding a compatible font. Why do fonts render differently inside a bro

Setting foot into the world of opening your own Shopify shop is an exciting time for any new entrepreneur. However, it’s important to make sure that it’s the right thing for you and that you have all of the facts and information before diving into your new business venture. So without further adieu, let’s get down to brass tacks. Pros Usability Shopify’s ease of use for businesses and consumers alike makes it an attractive solution to an often complicated problem - eCommerce. When setting up an online store the more that can be autom

A picture’s a picture, right? Not when it comes to web design and SEO. Believe it or not, image optimisation has a dramatic effect on your website’s SEO. So dramatic, in fact that we wrote an entire blog on it! Each file type has its own benefits, drawbacks and have their purpose. So, what’s the difference between PNG and JPEG? GIF and SVG? A Picture’s worth a thousand words (or 1,091)... Before we dive into the ins and outs of image file types, we’ve created this handy infographic for you to download, share with co-workers or frien

Visual Hierarchy (VH) is the design principle that outlines the order in which a user of any given website interacts with and processes information on a page. By manipulating elements of a website to have a clearer hierarchy and designing a site effectively around this principle, designers can influence the importance that users perceive information across the website to have. You can guide your user’s eyes around through your website, focusing on CTAs and integral pieces of information. The 8 elements of Visual Hierarchy are:Positioni

What are Cookies? What exactly are cookies and when we’re accepting them, what are we signing up for? There are a few different types of Cookie, but they primarily fall under the umbrella of being key-value data that is stored by your browser which is then sent back to the web server. They carry your information from one web session to another and saves a server from having to deal with huge amounts of data storage whilst building a profile on your browsing habits. This might sound very Orwellian but if you’ve ever logged into a website su

No, you haven’t hit your head and ended up back in 2007. Custom cursors are back like they never left and they’re the latest accoutrement to website UI/UX worldwide. These aren’t the gimmicky space invaders and sparkling unicorns of yester-year. The latest generation of custom cursors are sleek, sexy and designed with the user in mind… for the most part.  Are they worth it?  As with everything, it’s not necessarily the product - it’s how it’s made. Similar to the iPhone/Android debate, whilst some people love the physical desi

Microinteractions are often overlooked features when you’re busy designing and building a website. When searching for “Key factors to consider when building a website”, none of the searches returned results on the first page of the SERPs even mentioned Microinteractions. This is despite the fact that they’re one of the key pieces of functionality. They provide useful feedback to users when they interact with (and become initially involved with) your business online.  What are Microinteractions?  Microinteractions (MIs) are small, in

We are looking for a talented Junior Designer with passion, ambition and drive to join our fast growing digital marketing agency. As a Junior Designer, you will be responsible for the design and artwork of digital and print-based collateral supporting our expanding design and marketing teams.Who are we?Yellowball is a digital marketing agency specialising in website design, search engine optimisation and graphic design. We work with businesses who are committed to their digital marketing and our clients range from funded scale-ups t

Designing a new website can be an incredibly exciting time for a business. All those ideas that have been discussed internally since the last site went live, grand plans for global domination, a new lease of life for the marketing team. Opportunity awaits!It does not matter whether you are using an external web design agency, an internal team or are designing the website yourself. Nor does it matter if you are designing your website on Adobe XD ready to be given to developers, or are utilising more templated drag and drop editors, to help y

Preaching the value of mobile has been the rhetoric since internet usage on mobile phones overtook that of desktops back in 2016. Web design agencies and clients alike have adopted responsive design, some are even designing their sites as ‘mobile-first’ to satisfy the change in device usage amongst their target audience. As such, we don’t think you will need convincing that incorporating mobile friendly designs are a good idea, the facts leave very little room for argument. What we want to do is to highlight the difference between respons

You want a new website. What are your options? We’re not in 1998 anymore. The internet is no longer in its infancy, and most of us use the internet on a daily basis. We’re not here to persuade you that websites are critical components of a successful business, you probably know that already. Yes, there are businesses that don't need a website, but their numbers are decreasing on a daily basis.Google is the Yellow Pages for the modern consumer to help them find anything and everything – a new cafe to have brunch, how a giraffe cleans

UX and UI are both terms that are bandied around a lot, but there is often confusion as to what the difference is. There are important differences between the two, but they are becoming increasingly inter-mingled, as it is very tricky to have one without the other. This guide will outline the key differences and some of the history and theory of UX and UI design. The Basics UI (USER INTERFACE) UI, or User Interface, is the surface look of a website and UI designers aim to maximise the usability and efficiency of a website. They will take int

For years now Adobe has led the way in web design with its Photoshop software. Some designers also use Illustrator or even InDesign to create design prototypes. Photoshop was originally created by the Knoll brothers as primarily an image editing software in the 1980’s but in today's digitally led market Photoshop had been adopted by web designers worldwide as a preferred platform to create beautiful website designs. However, in recent years other softwares have emerged, trying to take over the throne that Photoshop has long held.We have e

What does website conversion mean? I am sure you have heard the phrase ‘website conversion rate’ being bounced around the office or at networking events, but what does it actually mean? Essentially it is the measure of how good your website is at getting your users to do what you want them to. Whether that be get in touch, request a brochure or buy your products.Having a good conversion rate should be the top priority for any website; after all if you are going to invest time, money and resources into a site then you want it to deliver

Content first design. It’s pretty much what it says on the tin. Creating your website’s main messaging and content before starting the design process.As designers we can completely understand the urge to charge ahead and kick start the design process. The content stage can often be far more time consuming and complex than you might initially think and usually requires the most investment from your end. When you have just signed off to start a website design project, to hold off on seeing the actual designs seems deflating after the init

As web interfaces continue to evolve, it is becoming increasingly important not to get distracted from the main purpose of a site: to deliver a message. In order for this message to successfully reach your audience, the website needs to be easy to use - intuitive, with good information architecture and (preferably) beautiful.As the web has evolved, it has become an alternative world - a new “dimension” where we while away hours upon hours. Crucially, the web is all-inclusive and accessible. Therefore one factor we must not forget when i

A beautifully designed website with well-constructed copy will be undermined if the accompanying imagery is not high quality. Impressive imagery will engage the user, instigating authenticity and professionalism.Furthermore, studies show that visuals are not only processed 60,000 times faster than text by the brain but they also transmit significantly more information. Therefore, the right imagery improves the user experience, allowing visitors to navigate your site with ease and enjoyment. As a result, they are less likely to become frustr

Minimalist design is everywhere. As a trend, it has been around for a long time with varying levels of popularity. While there are plenty of examples of early minimalism, its current form dates from the post-war era especially, such as Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s infamous “Less is more” quote. It is characterised by a complete focus on what is valuable and essential to the user, minimising or stripping away any unnecessary distractions.In a society where our senses are increasingly overstimulated, minimalism is a movement wit

Branding is one of the most fundamental aspects of your business to get right. It is the appearance of your business, it is your reputation and it is the beating heart of your organisation. Yet so many companies fall short of seeing the importance of a strong brand, or how to go about creating one. ‘Branding’ is a word that’s thrown about a lot, but what does it actually mean and what does it encompass?Essentially, a brand is people’s perception of a company, from their customer service and reputation to their logo and much, much mo

We’re looking for a seriously talented Designer to join Yellowball, our fast-growing marketing agency to get stuck into a variety of exciting live projects. As an Integrated Designer you will be undertaking the design and artwork of digital and print based collateral as well as website design. As a Yellowball designer you will be working on a variety of projects so adaptability is key! Who are we? Yellowball is an award-winning creative agency working with clients ranging from start ups through to larger blue chips across London, the UK and

At Yellowball we are avid users of both Trello and Atlassian's JIRA to plan, track and collaborate on design projects, content marketing and much more. We have loved spreading the word about these systems, helping many of our clients make the transition to these cloud based project management platforms. It is therefore big news for us, and many marketing and design agencies globally, that Atlassian have announced their acquisition of Trello this week. Reportedly paying $360 million in cash with shares and options bringing the total to a hefty

Information Architecture (IA) is the method of structuring and organising content. The term is used in a variety of industries but as you might expect we are referring to it in the context of websites. Just like the foundations of a building, information architecture is the essential building blocks of a website. Without it, the rest of the site could fall apart. Despite this, IA can be an underestimated part of the web design process. Furthermore, often it is wrongly based on opinion alone, as opposed to careful research and planning. The aim

User experience (UX) is used to describe the way a person feels when interacting with a system. In a modern context, the term is most commonly applied with regards to a person’s experience with a website, web application or digital software. The aim of UX is to provide a high level of usability and satisfaction in order to establish an overall refined and exemplary experience for the user.The aim of this blog series is to consider the various factors that play into the broad topic of UX design. In this first post of the series, we will di

Yellowball have successfully planned, designed, developed and launched hundreds of successful web projects in the last few years. This experience has given us a unique insight into the best and most effective ways to manage and oversee the successful delivery of projects for our clients. To achieve this, we deploy a range of project management methodologies for website design and development, depending on the requirements, complexity and time scale of each project. One methodology that is becoming increasingly successful is agile. What is agil

Clearly for followers of English 2003 was a year of triumph at the Rugby World Cup but 2015 held only the disappointment of failing to make it out of the group stages. The images should show a difference between Tom Wood’s palpable disappointment and Martin Johnson’s elation, but unfortunately Martin Johnson’s brutish face is not capable of displaying such joyous emotions. Either way, the rugby result is not the only difference. The design of the BBC website in 2003 is in stark contrast to its present iteration in 2015. There are a whole

How users perceive a website is paramount to its success; does it give them value? Is it easy to use? Is it enjoyable to use? These questions run through their subconscious as they interact with the web. If the answers are positive to these then it is likely that they’ll be converted into a regular user. Here we want to share with you some expert tips to User Experience (UX) driven design.You have probably guessed that User Experience (UX) is essentially how a person feels when interacting with a website, application or piece of software.

The new Google update, dubbed #mobilegeddon has turbocharged conversations around the need to be ‘mobile friendly’. Although we would certainly not argue against the importance of being mobile friendly in order to appear on mobile Google searches (it is very, very important), in actual fact only the top 5-8 results on Google get any meaningful traffic from the search engine.  So if your website does not rank on Google’s mobile search results, do you need to invest in a mobile friendly site?  Let’s weigh up the pros and cons, as well a