Website for Kitchen worktops client

[Cloud]

As Paul says, the site was created in WordPress. There might be a way to do this with xara but not used it for a while. One of the benefits of WordPress is that one doesn't have to think too much about responsiveness, its mostly handled by the theme.

[behzad]

As always nice work, but no offence to you, I am talking overall. Websites are all looking the same, columns and rows due to responsiveness. I prefer Xara, that way I can design as I wish for the mobile version.

[pauland]

As always nice work, but no offence to you, I am talking overall. Websites are all looking the same, columns and rows due to responsiveness. I prefer Xara, that way I can design as I wish for the mobile version.

SITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Cough.. ;-)

Yes, sites do look similar, but that says more about the web designer than using Wordpress or Xara.

https://www.creativebloq.com/web-des...press-11121165

[behzad]

I think again not referring to this case, overall designers are no longer designers and have limited their creativity by using templates and technology that has driven speed over creativity to deliver for the budget. I get it, when a client does not have enough money, most tend to resort to templates and you see examples galore. I mean look at DIV and you can see that every site is a sister or a brother of another LOL. Paul, no need to cut and paste my (Site under construction) to glorify yourself over my comments. Have a look at a few websites I did in the xara gallery. You have taken my comment which was a general one and thrown it at my face and made it a personal message. Really sad that you do that.

[pauland]

I think again not referring to this case, overall designers are no longer designers and have limited their creativity by using templates and technology that has driven speed over creativity to deliver for the budget. I get it, when a client does not have enough money, most tend to resort to templates and you see examples galore. I mean look at DIV and you can see that every site is a sister or a brother of another LOL. Paul, no need to cut and paste my (Site under construction) to glorify yourself over my comments. Have a look at a few websites I did in the xara gallery. You have taken my comment which was a general one and thrown it at my face and made it a personal message. Really sad that you do that.

Behzad, you really need to kick that "under construction" into touch. It's been there for a very long time and it's one of those things that should never be on any website. I only put it there to motivate you to remove it and a sense of irony about how Xara gives you freedom.

The frameworks (such as bootstrap) can incline people to create "me too" websites and the proliferation of wordpress templates make that easier, as you say.

I would argue that Xara is far from immune from that. Back in the day people used to talk about Xara web design and never mention the template sites supplied by Xara. These days people are always complaining if they lose access to those templates and so I don't see that much difference between Xara and Wordpress with regard to boilerplate websites.

You can produce "different" high-design websites using Wordpress, just as you can with Xara, it's a question of the time we put into it and the skill that we have. I can't really claim to have any website produced by me that isn't a "me too" site at heart, though I've never used a template to make one.

I hope your annoyance with me doesn't last too long and that energy is channelled into more development and the removal of the "under construction" that should never, ever be used.

Paul

[behzad]

Fair Annoyance removed and so will be Under Construction. Been busy with client work but need to get my site up and ready. Peace

[pauland]

This site was recently produced using Bootstrap (not by me).

I think it's an example of sites not having to look the same.

http://tramastudio.mx/

[Cloud]

The problem is that a site can look however one wants it to look but at the end of the day, the client wants the site to look good, not be different for the sake of it, there is such a thing as user experience, and sites like tramastudio work for a creative company but a client would balk at it. site visitors expect certain things; easy navigation, fast loading, and no distractions, whoever decided to have the damn music in the background needs a good talking to. Too much 'creativity' may be good for the designer or the client even but when it comes to the actual site visitor then certain rules have to be followed.

Also, we only use the theme because Wordpress demands a theme, the actual website is created from a blank, very few professionals use themes, site builders have allowed them to create as they wish without all the restrictions and bloat of a theme. Plus with some pagebuilders, one has as much or more freedom to design as one wishes. Any element can be placed anywhere using absolute positioning. But at the end of the day, the site visitor is the king, we don't want them annoyed by music, we don't want them waiting forever for 'effects' to load and we certainly don't want them getting confused with how to navigate the website.

[Cloud]

Just to show why a website is designed a certain way and why user experience is essential (speed is a massive contributor to user experience) Here are screenshots of the ssf worktops site and the trama studio site, notice the speed difference? And the page file size difference. A business website's goal is always to sell a service or a product, one can't sell a product or service if the potential customer is confused, annoyed or sat around waiting for the website to load. K.I.S.S.

[behzad]

I totally agree with you Cloud. I always admired your work and by no means meant to put your work down. I was just mentioning how web creators and not designers, which sadly everyone can design a website from a template do not consider the pointers you have mentioned because they are not educated in SEO and UXI etc...

Also the few sites I did for my clients using xara all have gotten low scores with the site that you did the testing with. All the scores are due to the output of Xara. Things like Leverage browser caching ,Combine images using CSS sprites,Defer parsing of JavaScript, Optimize the order of styles and scripts and so on. I also hear that Xara is focusing in the future on more SEO optimization, I could be wrong but read it somewhere.