Google Chrome

Being one of the first to launch a Google+ brand page (and obviously having some first hand knowledge with the platform), Google Chrome’s own brand page is very well done. The 5 main images all link together cleverly, and the page is kept updated frequently with news on Chromebooks and links to the official Google blog for more detailed information.

BMW

BMW have also spliced up one feature image into 5 separate smaller images that serve as a great introduction to their brand page. They’ve also made sure the content they’re sharing (while obviously promotional) is very high quality, and feature YouTube videos and images of their latest supercars.

Time Magazine

Time Magazine faced the challenge of making sure that their new, modern Google+ brand page was in keeping with their classic, prestigious image. By using the 5 image slots to showcase some of their more iconic issues, they’ve been able to claim their space on Google+ and still have the gravitas that they’ve built up over the years.

The Muppets

The Muppets have an entirely image to Time Magazine - they need to be seen as fun, creative and quirky, and their Google+ page doesn’t disappoint. Exclusive content is shared on the page, including images of the characters with celebrities, as well as videos and trailers for the new film. The 5 images used all match up, and suit the look and feel of the page perfectly.

Starbucks

Starbucks have always been good at promoting themselves online, so it’s no surprise to see them putting effort into Google+ too. High quality, instagram-effect images are proudly displayed, and the page looks great - but Starbucks earn extra points for actively talking to others on Google+, from asking people which circle they want to be placed in to offering buy one get one free vouchers.

Red Bull

Red Bull, the energy drink which wants to be associated with high energy sports, has done a great job of keeping their brand image and their Google+ page very closely linked. They’ve always been great at coming up with creative, unique designs for social media sites, and they don’t disappoint here - instead of 5 static images, they’ve been able to use animated gifs, all matching up to show one big image of BMXers in slow motion.

YouTube

YouTube, being a Google company, will also have had a heads-up on how to style a Google+ page, and unsurprisingly they’ve done a great job.  Their 5 image joins together and reflects the creativity that YouTube sees each day, while they also ensure that interesting videos are posted frequently.

Angry Birds

Angry Birds, the ultra-popular iPad and iPhone game, has also taken advantage of the 5 images to create a brilliant standout image, showcasing each of the birds - even the main logo image is used to form part of the scene. They also keep the page up to date and use it to talk to fans - even going as far as to have votes on which characters people prefer, as well as keeping people informed about new updates.

Pepsi

Pepsi’s Google+ page has been designed beautifully, with the 5 image layout all matching up and following the look and feel of the brand, and they even make sure to talk to their fans - although they perhaps don’t post anywhere near as frequently as some of the other brands we’ve featured.

Zappos

Zappos have clearly put some work into their Google+ page, and use it to showcase that they’re “more than shoes” by prominently featuring clothing, handbags, beauty and “at home” in their profile images. Like Pepsi, they may not be posting particularly frequently, but the page still looks lived in and has clearly been thought about and designed with the brand in mind.

Are there any Google+ brand pages you’ve found that you think deserve a mention? Let us know in the comments. You are welcome to add your G+ page if you like?

About the author

Dan writes for Christmas gift ideas experts The Handpicked Collection, who offer gifts for her & him. He’s a big fan of creative product design and spends his spare time outside of work studying graphic design.

Other Google+ Brand Pages?

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If you’re a writer and know a lot about social networks like Google+, social media marketing or design, mobile marketing  …… or owning a small business, you can give great advices on branding, marketing, productivity, dealing with clients (and other related topics), or you can write ‘how-to’ posts, please get in contact with Sebastian.

Sometimes, it’s even the simplest interfaces that are the hardest to build - when you have a huge amount of features and only a limited amount of space on the screen, it can be challenging to cut features out, or hide them elsewhere in the app (yet still have them be accessible). We’ve created a collection of 15 applications that have done an astonishing job of uncluttering the interface and leaving a beautiful, simple design that’s a joy to use.

Tweetbot

Tweetbot by app designers Tapbots is an iPhone app that makes tweeting easier, and has clever shortcuts for viewing entire conversations and for favouriting tweets.

Hipmunk

Hipmunk aims to take the agony out of booking a flight online by displaying flight search results in a much simpler, easier to understand way.

Square

Square allows you to take credit card payments on your iPhone or iPad, easily.

New York Times Skimmer

Skimmer by the New York Times is a different interface for browsing through news, predominantly designed for tablets. As it’s name suggests, it makes skimming through news stories easy and fun.

Batch

Batch is a new iPhone app which makes uploading and sharing photos through Facebook & Twitter a breeze.

TeuxDeux

TeuxDeux is a task management app that makes adding and crossing off tasks simple. It’s perfect for people that like their to-do applications minimal and unfussy, but still beautiful.

Greplin

While Google handles searching the web, Greplin aims to help you search through your life. The app connects to your email accounts, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, and lets you search everything all in one go. Despite it’s complexity, the interface has been kept beautifully simple and elegant.

Oink

Oink is the newest iPhone app from Digg founder Kevin Rose.  Instead of rating places, Oink allows you to rate the things inside - everything from the best coffee in a café to the best films on at the cinema. The interface is uncluttered and sophisticated, and it’s beautiful design feels natural and intuitive to use.

Calvetica

Calvetica is an iPhone calendar app that aims to provide a minimalist way to organise your life. It’s clearly had a lot of attention, design-wise, but it’s also simple and easy to use, whether you’re drilling down to specific events or just quickly glancing at it - it’s simplicity gives you the information you need, and nothing else.

Flipboard

Flipboard is an iPad app that turns RSS feeds into easy-to-browse articles, like a digital magazine. The interface is both beautiful and intuitive, which makes the whole experience fun.

Stypi

Stypi is an online document editor, similar to Google Docs, which allows multiple people to all work on writing the same document at the same time. It’s a fairly complicated idea, but it’s been executed perfectly here - following the Apple philosophy, Stypi “just works”.

Basecamp

Basecamp is a project management tool which has both a web interface and an HTML 5 mobile optimized site. Both interfaces work perfectly for the medium they’re on - it’s always easy to navigate around and view calendars, timelines and tasks and clearly a lot of thought has been put into usability.

Twitter for iPad

Twitter’s official iPad app looks simple, but hides a wealth of features and shortcuts. Selecting a tweet and sliding down with two fingers, for example, reveals the whole conversation. It’s a brilliant example of a stunningly elegant user interface.

Reeder

Reeder for iPad makes RSS feeds easier to browse through and has clearly focused on making a simple, beautiful and usable app. Scanning through articles and blog posts is very intuitive and the design of the content is easy to read, with plenty of white space.

Things

Things for iPad is a task management app that allows you to tag tasks, add them to particular projects and archive old tasks in a logbook. Despite having quite a few features for power users and fans of “getting things done”, the interface keeps things simple - only showing you what you need and never cluttering up the screen with unnecessary distractions.

Are there any user interfaces that you think deserve a mention? Let us know in the comments.

About the author

Alex writes for printing experts Print Express, who specialise in postcards, business cards and flyer printing.

Other Beautiful User Interfaces?

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If you’re a writer and know a lot about app design, mobile marketing, social networks …… or owning a small business, you can give great advices on branding, marketing, productivity, dealing with clients (and other related topics), or you can write ‘how-to’ posts, please get in contact with Sebastian.

Additional main features

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Readers can access their entire social network from your content. Friend tagging, and social sign-in and syncing options make your content the central hub of the conversation.

It is also possible to generate user profiles with points with a user’s recent comments, blog posts, rating, social links, and more, all in one place. Blogs get profile pages too!

Feel free to check out their complete and detailed feature list.

1. Create mobile or local value within 3 minutes

Realize the environment of using mobile phone. People are in the subways to work, waiting for the bus or just spending some time at home on it. In each case they amount of time online on mobile devices is much lower than on a desktop computer. You need to create a value to the user withing the first 3 minutes. If not - you lost, because the reader didnt have enough time to consume your product or service or is not satisfied with it at all, so he comes never back to you again. Provide value! The next app from the competition ist just 2 seconds and clicks away! How to provide value? Try innovative or cost effective products. Try something new, like location based services (for example friend-finder, or like facebook places).

2. Styling for mobile devices

The style of mobile phones are an important issue. When you have decided that you need to embrace the mobile, you need to consider the diverse eco system of your mobile application. You are deciding to have one of the fastest growing segments on web and you need to know the mobile eco system. It has many browsers, screen sizes, connection speeds etc. these days, Android system is gaining popularity. You should try to think in a bigger picture. You should have a good visual consistency, minimized scrolling and a web page transitions maintained with the desktop site.

3. Set A Default Zoom for mobile devices

You may want to consider to get rid of any extra white space. For example, if your site is cantered and has white space on the left and right sides, visitor will likely want to zoom in to see things more clearly

4. Resizing Images

If you have a small screen, it also means a small size for readers. You should try to avoid any kind of heavy loaded images. Instead, resize the images on a web browser. You need to optimize your images and links. Every mobile person will appreciate that as it makes them easy to zoom in for reading or watching

5. Automatic detection of mobile devices

Typing is something that many people tend to avoid. There are various methods of automatic mobile detection and some of them include User agent detection and a so called “DEviceAtlas”, which are very effective. They supply information of the capabilities of many devices.

6. Think about navigation

Your website may include headers and footers like a regular website, but when any one surfs your website through a mobile, all this does not matter. Try to avoid all things that may not be of much interest to the readers. Eliminate all kinds of unnecessary links to destinations, as they do not have much mobile priority. On the other hand, try to add something that may be interesting to the viewers. E.g you could add a ‘search’ form on the header or you could also add contact information on top rather than bottom, depending on your service

7. Easy to find link to full content version

How many times does it happen that your readers might not find the main information they were looking for, when they are browsing through the mobile version? So, it is good to add a ‘Full Site’ button on the footer so that they can have a glimpse of all features on your website.

8. Shorten your links

Nobody likes to type in long complicated links into a mobile browser. In times of twitter, shorten your links using services like bit.ly.

9. Consider Text And Spacing

Keep in mind the behaviour of mobile users on your web site. If links appear close together, they may be to difficult for users to click on the correct one with a mobile device. Also, small text does not suit well on a mobile device. Keep these things in mind when optimizing your site for mobile users.

10. Measuring Mobile audience

If you know the percentage of the mobile audience that you have, it makes your work much easier. You will see what your readers prefer and how they navigate. You know the popularity of pages and and where you need to work on. For knowing that, you need to get closer to the audience and listen to them and track their behaviour.

Mobile Tools and Strategies

I’ve been doing some research on the best tools for your mobile friendly version and find the following very useful to implement in your communication strategy:

11. Mobify

This is a perfect theme for your website that gives you complete control over mobile site along with CSS. You also get some tools that help in managing all kinds of advertising of your websites.

12. WP Touch

This theme for wordpress helps you in showing your contents in a beautiful way and increases the page loading. Its design was inspired by Apple’s app store design specs. The importance of this application is that it does not interfere with your regular web themes. It beautifully transforms a Wordpress blog in to web application experience when you view it from iPhone, iPod, NAdroid and Blackberry touch.

13. MoFuse

This has become very famous. Over 23.000 blogs are using it for their mobile versions. MoFuse lets you easily create your contents, promote and build it and lets you track your own audience. The more visitors you get, the more it helps you in generating more sales and increasing income. Some of the big brands are like Mash able and Read write web are using it.

14. Mippin Mobilizer

This tool helps you to mobilise your site. You must follow some steps in order to mobilise your website. You also get full control towards your branding and logo. Hence, this makes it possible to monetize your mobile site. As your site is mobile, then surely it will be generating more and more visitors and in turn it will give you much more profit. There are advertising tools for your mobile site to increase your income.

15. Wirenode

Almost 40,000 mobile web pages hosted in Wirenode and among them are some famous brands such as Ford and Reebok. It only takes about 5 minutes to get a mobile version of your site up and running, and gives you features such as mobile widgets, mobile polls, RSS mobilization and forms.

16. WP Tap

WPtap offers a comprehensive mobile Wordpress theme for your website. WPtap provide mobile themes and plugins that can directly convert your website into a WordPress-application experience when viewed from the iPhone, iPod Touch, Android Smartphone and Blackberry touch-based. It comes completely with all the features for a standard WordPress blog: search, login, category, tags, archives, photos & more. In addition, WPtap also offers many customization features through a user-friendly panel Wordpress admin.

17. Mobisite Galore

With mobiSiteGalore allows you to easily build, publish & share a complete a mobile website that is guaranteed to work well on many mobile phones. The design template is owned by mobiSiteGalore and allows you to fully customize the colours, fonts and layout on the page to create a unique view of a mobile version of your site.

18. Zinadoo

Zinadoo allows you to create a mobile version of your website in just a few minutes. With Zinadoo you can also optimize your site for Google Mobile with keywords and tags. You can also make use of their special mobile widgets.

19. MobilePress

MobilePress is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to change your blog into a mobile friendly blog when viewed on mobile devices. MobilePress also allows you to create custom mobile themes for different handheld devices and mobile browsers like Opera Mini, iPhone and Windows Mobile.

20. Showcases of mobile friendly websites

Below is a set of examples or showcase of websites with a mobile version that might give you inspiration

• 15 Beautiful Examples of Mobile Website Design Done Right
• 35 Beautiful iPhone App Website Designs
• Showcase of 20 Mobile-Friendly Popular Design Blogs
• 60 Mobile Web Design Showcase
• 40+ Best Mobile Website Designs

Have more tips, tools or strategies?

Go ahead and join the discussion! If you liked this post, why not subscribing to KnowTeBook.com or check out our Facebook or Twitter page?

Write guest posts for KnowTeBook

If you’re a writer and know a lot about design, coding, …… or owning a small business, you can give great advices on branding, marketing, productivity, dealing with clients (and other related topics), or you can write ‘how-to’ posts, please get in contact with Sebastian.

This kind of scenario happens with every user in search of information on the Internet. After all, every user has several websites to browse through and choose. The need of the user is sadly not always the first thing that is taken into consideration whilst designing any website. Website owners and web designers then need to think and know whether the website performs as is expected for their business!

The most important thing for any website is interactivity. Why interactivity is what many would question! Well, the reason is that a website needs to capture attention and keep users on the page within the first few seconds. Yes, the first few seconds a user spends on the page is of utmost important. And whether people agree or not, the old saying where first impressions make the last impressions holds true! A website that can capture attention of the user to keep him/her on the page can be termed as truly successful!

Things to know for web design:

• Your website should be user-friendly
• The website should attract attention
• Study the target group for the design process
• The information should be presented appropriately
• It needs to highlight important points clearly
• Use of interactivity to keep users on page

Websites that engage with interactivity

Wrangler

We all know about the popularity of the brand Wrangler. This website displays the products in a very unique way. As seen in the image, a user has to unzip the jacket to browse the website further. The visuals then unfold in a very interesting manner. The collection can be viewed only after the user performs some action on the website!

Mnatwork

The design company, magneticNorth has used interactivity in a creative way. Their simple concept of drawing and discovering gives an exclusive touch to the website. At first instance, the website only has one statement in the beginning, which is ‘Draw and Discover’. As a user actually draws across the screen, various elements about the website are discovered. The display of their portfolio in this creative manner speaks volumes about the company!

Bebopjeans

Bebop, a lifestyle apparel company has displayed the required information in a creative way. The use of Flash with graphics and the entire presentation keeps users on the page. There is an interesting mix of elements. These creative web pages keep users interested for more!

Extre

This clothing store has made use of interactivity to displays details. This sure is attractive as compared to websites that place rows of photographs next to each other. Every bit of information is displayed through the circular forms of the plant. It engages users on the page whilst displaying information.

Apple Ipad

Also big images catch the users eys as Apple is used to do. This helps in presenting the information about the service in an engaging manner. Users need to perform some activity on the page to view more information. The design along with the content thus needs to be catchy!

All these examples of websites are uncommon although the topics can be termed as common. To put it across simply, there are so many websites related to clothing and accessories. Yet, it is not always the brand name that can cause users to browse through a website. An attractive website will do all that and much more for any web designer or web master.

So, do you have what it takes to make your website successful? Looking forward to your replies!

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About the author

Poonam Agarwal works as Program Manager at Harbinger Group and is looks after for Raptivity Web Expert, software to bring web pages alive through Interactivity. This software helps to add interactivity to websites without programming! She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering and is an active blogger.

Write guest posts for KnowTeBook

If you’re a writer and know a lot about design, coding, …… or owning a small business, you can give great advices on branding, marketing, productivity, dealing with clients (and other related topics), or you can write ‘how-to’ posts, please get in contact with Sebastian.

This is mine As you see with many inspiration.

Check them out here at Ashad’s website.

“To put the list in context,” says Gatt, “we’ve identified some broad trends that dominate the new crop… and which are in tune with the next generation of the web… which is no longer random data, but tailored, highly intuitive and delivered in real time.”

Read his trend predictions at mediapost.

Demo

Features

• real 3D Transitions
• flat & phong shading
• horizontal or vertical cubing
• transition direction - left, right, up, down
• duration & delay
• z-multiplier
• cube color
• automatic forward-backward transition direction manager
• to override global settings for each transition …

Requirements

There are no special requirements for setting it up and running other than a limited knowledge of web authoring:

• Flash Player 9+,
• XML Basics,
• SWFObject (embedding .swf files into web pages),
• Applications for image editing (especially for creating & exporting slides).

License

You can use CU3ER free of charge for your personal and/or commercial projects. CU3ER may not be redistributed or resold to other companies or third parties. Specifically, CU3ER may not be redistributed as part of a content management system or online hosting solution. Neither the name of CU3ER nor the name of it contributor may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. Any credits or copyright notices must remain intact.

See inspiration source for mega drop-down menus.