Designing for 2012 - websites and more

First, I will talk about the state of design today. I can start off by saying that there is a handful of great designers that have all of the right principles in mind that do some unbelievable work. They are out there. Sadly, most companies don't use them.

Sometimes it's their nephew or friend who is "great with computers" or someone who attended college a while back for multimedia, but in a whole smaller businesses get results that are less than what they deserve when it comes to their website work and design.

Here are some important design factors for 2012

Design for mobile:

Your website may look beautiful on a 19" monitor, but what about a 4" phone? More and more people are using their mobile devices as their way of getting on the internet. It truly is becoming the "personal computer", replacing that thing you blow off with the air can once in a while and plug into the power surge. You can tackle designing for mobile in different ways. Usually, you can create an entirely different site, throw it on a subdomain, such as m.yoursite.com, and redirect mobile traffic to it. To take that a step further, certain sites can be designed for specific phones, such as the iPhone and Droid. You can also do it a bit simpler on a content management system, where you don't have to create the information twice. Just create mobile templates to route the traffic to.

Implementing Social Media

Facebook usage pretty much has passed email usage by now. Think about that. That is astounding. Really, more people are apt to check their Facebook than their email. Since social media is so important, why not tie it in so users can have their lives at their fingertips at all times?

Designing for social media could easily have it's own book, let alone blog post, so I will just mention a few implementations that can be used for a better experience

• Facebook fanbox widget
• "Like" this page
• Recommendations
• Site specific comment box
• Live twitter feeds, styled to your site
• more

QR. Link a graphic to your website

What a cool way to sync your business card with your website. Or anything in print for that matter, using a QR code easily lets users with smartphones access any URL. If you look around, all of the large corporations seem to get this concept. Yet, this concept seems to fall on deaf ears with the small to mid sized companies.

Although the concept isn't brand new, the idea for a small business to use QR codes still seems to be new. This makes using QR codes an important step for any small business looking to stay ahead of the competition with technology.