EVERYONE knows that today being present on the web is essential for any business. There are a lot of services out there that let you build a fully functional website without the need of design, programming skills or content management systems. Website builders are a new way to create websites with just a few clicks: you choose a design, add the content that you want to promote and publish it for the world to see. These tools are all about making website building a simple and enjoyable experience, accessible to everyone.
Whether you’re a web designer or a front-end developer these services allow you to learn and improve new web techniques like usability and user experience, user interface, typography, JavaScript, CSS and many more.
Below I will give you a list of advantages and techniques which you, as a web designer, can learn from online website builders.
1. User experience (UX)
At its heart, UX design is about effectively addressing the needs and circumstances of your users, to produce an interface that is comfortable and even joyful to use. As if that wasn’t enough to tackle, your users’ needs are always changing, as people`s expectations, as well as technologies, constantly evolve.
A good way to learn user experience techniques is to spend some time browsing templates that already exist on website builders. Spending at least an hour a day looking and testing what professional designers of website builders templates have already created and tested with users may lead you to some useful skills improvement.
For example, if you need to design a website for an accounting firm and browse the templates from the “Finance” category, “Law”, “Consultant” or just “Business”, you will notice that the main color is blue. Why is it not red? This is because red symbolizes excitement, while blue makes people think more before acting.
This is just one example about how you can learn to improve your UX techniques. You should also pay attention to the menu location and the order of the menu items, text size, buttons, messages and everything that a user interacts with.
2. User Interface (UI)
User Interface design plays a very important role as the translator in the communication between the user and the applications’ back-end or core functionality. The goal of user interface design is to make the user’s interaction as simple and efficient as possible, in terms of accomplishing user goals.
UI techniques can easily be learned from the best designers and using online website builders. Working with their templates and browsing the existing created websites helps you find some UI design patterns. Some of these patterns are about the most crucial elements of a website, such as: navigation tabs, user registration and authentication, pagination, breadcrumbs, header and footer, fonts and typography, colors and images.
3. CSS and JavaScript techniques
CSS and JavaScript are the two most important tools for a web designer when it comes to user interface implementation. A lot of things can be done with a few lines of CSS, and if you want some animation and dynamics on your website you can simply write a few lines of JavaScript and it’s done. Thanks to the large community of web designers and software developers, nowadays the web is full of both good-looking and smart things you can do using these two tools. CSS has evolved so much that you can animate your website without the use of JavaScript. It’s called CSS3.
A good way of improving your CSS and Javascript techniques is to read someone else’s code and see how it’s done. You can either go on open source websites or find great projects or you can use web inspector tools to inspect websites that you see in action and that you like.
One of the fastest growing online website builders, IMCreator, has a lot of great, clean and easy to use templates and created websites.</p>
If you are a web designer and want to improve your skills in design try out at least one website builder. Some of them are free, but all of them are easy to use and help you learn great new techniques.
Erez is the owner and founder of website-builder.net. The biggest website of website builder reviews.