June 1, 20248 min de lectura

📖 7 Key Lessons For Web Design after 100 Websites · The Bunker #87

Hi friend 👋🏻!

A Newsletter in which we talk about UX Design and the Freelance Journey, dedicated to those who are starting out in both worlds and who feel identified.

From The Bunker, we accompany you on the way.

Phew, I think I've built around 100 websites by now.

Did you know that to consider yourself an expert in a subject, you need to have put in approximately 10,000 hours?

10,000 hours is roughly 416 full days. Considering you work about 300 days a year (more or less), it makes sense that about 416 days would be enough to become an expert in something.

But of course, these are 400 days of full focus on a single task.

It really makes sense; it's the minimum necessary time to acquire sufficient knowledge.

In today's post, I'll share my top 3 tips or things to keep in mind when creating websites:

1. 🔎 Spend more time on research

Without hesitation, a cool website ultimately comes down to your ability to create new things, but more importantly, your ability to select the best material, to later extract the best content for yourself.

In other words, you will produce a good result based on how good your references are.

That's why it's super important to dedicate the necessary time to research and not treat it as a superficial task.

Undoubtedly, my best websites have been when I've taken the most time to gather enough references.

There were projects that could have been much better if I had spent more time looking for references and super cool projects, thanks to dedicating enough time. At least for me, I notice a big difference.

2. 🚧 Practice as much as you can

I know this is advice that's been mentioned very frequently, but it holds true: the more you practice, the faster you'll get.

This is something that motivates me, but at the same time, it scares me because the more I practice and learn, the more I realize how little I knew, and every time I look back, the difference is overwhelming.

Even in my best months, I always end up saying in the following months: How much I've improved.

It's too important to get your hands dirty to not practice enough.

3. 🧘🏻‍♂️ Not all your websites will be bangers

Picasso had to create almost 100,000 pieces of art, for you to remember only 3 or 4.

This is important to understand, and it will relieve a lot of pressure when creating → Not everything you do has to be a banger; there will be days when your designs are just okay.

The important thing is not to break consistency and keep practicing as much as you can. Don't stress and don't force yourself to make your next website a thousand times better than the previous one. Take it step by step.

4. 🖌️ Branding is extremely important in web design

We are all aware that maintaining a certain style on the web is important, but when I refer to branding, I mean something more → You need to design an almost unique branding strategy for each website you make; it's very important.

A website where branding has been worked on will look a thousand times better than one where someone simply chose four colors they liked.

When you work on branding, everything breathes a very consistent harmony, from the color of the buttons to the style of the icons you use.

If you use rounded buttons, you can't use a library of rounded icons; everything has to make sense.

5. 📖 Learn from others, spend time really looking at how others do things

One of my best learning experiences in my growth with Webflow, from not having any idea about Webflow to becoming a Webflow Professional Partner → has honestly been my ability to stay honest and open to learning.

I was eager to learn, and the first thing I had to do was accept that there are people who know how to do things better than I do.

So learning from the best is the best way to make better designs.

That's why, with every website that seemed cool to me, I took a screenshot and stopped to think about what made that website cool.

Why is it so well built? Is it the harmony of the colors? Is it the images? What is it?

Regarding the graphic design of the web, you can take a screenshot and evaluate the design, and regarding development, you can spend a good amount of time evaluating with inspect element how that person built the website.

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6. 🧱 Don't use placeholders

I understand that placeholders exist to design layouts when you don't have information to work with.

I understand this, in fact, part of my process always starts with placeholders.

But a website is purely content. And the content dictates the structure of the entire website.

My templates, the websites with my clients… → Everything is marked by the structure and shape that the content gives to the entire website.

That's why I always try to stay as far away from placeholders as possible, and if I don't have text, I use ChatGPT to generate that content.

Additionally, another positive aspect of not working with placeholders is that you will end up sharing your work, and working with real content will always give a much more realistic touch to the content. And if in the end, for presentations, you'll have to use real content anyway, it's better to do it from the beginning.

Also, working with placeholders is, in my opinion, a bad practice, something that has been done wrong for a long time (and I have to include myself), with the excuse of not wasting time on real content. But as I mentioned before, everything is marked by the final content → And in many cases, it's hard to imagine the final product if you don't have the content that will ultimately go on your website.

In other words, it's not wasted time.

7: 🌅 Images are almost the most important part of the website

A website can have a good structure, good content… but if it doesn't have good images, nothing serves any purpose.

It's incredible to see the importance of images in web design.

Before, I would use any image, but now I try to think very carefully about what type of images I will use to align with the mood and aesthetics of the website.

And those are really my tips; I think I could come up with 3 or 4 more, but we'll leave that for a future post.

I hope you loved it.

🎁 Bonus: Don't work with music, pay full attention to the details.

This is a somewhat utopian topic, honestly → The issue of working with music is something socially accepted by everyone; no one sees anything wrong with working with music.

However, I find it very effective to work with music when I want to come up with new layouts: when I want to work on visuals and when I want to experiment with my next project.

At the moment when I have more or less decided on the structure, I focus on the details. That's when I stop the music and pay full attention to what I'm doing (just like now, I'm writing without background music).

It may not seem like it, but really, when I work with music and then stop it, I notice a huge difference in the level of detail I can achieve thanks to paying maximum attention to what I'm doing.

If this has helped you, please let me know.

Cheers, Jordi Espinosa.

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