The Best Website Designs: A Review

We recently stumbled across a website called 'The Best Designs' and it has an enormous collection of some of the best experimental and trending website design in the world. It's a great collection, but how useful is it to the small business owner and to marketing professionals like ourselves? Most of the websites on Best Designs are creative professionals like us, and are extremely image heavy. There's not a lot of content information and some of them are 'Scrolling' websites, which means they're one page and you're taken around the website via javascript. Not very SEO friendly.

If you didn't know, Integraphix not only builds websites, but we also are a Chicago marketing company that assists with Brand messaging, Identity, Logo Design and Graphic Design, and Internet Marketing. We have a unique perspective on how websites should be built. Let's take a look at some of the contenders.


Bagigia
Their website is very simple, and has almost no content whatsoever. The design is highly interactive, and begs the user to do a lot of clicking to get where they want to go. It looks nice, but it doesn't function nicely. The user must even hover over the button to 'Show Navigation' instead of it being readily available. Take a look.

Home Page

Bag Selection

Lightbox Gallery

Contact Form

I was lucky to get the screenshot of their very nicely designed navigation as it hides quite well. When you select a color on the back selection page, a tiny, almost unnoticeable box pops up and asks you to look at the gallery or add to cart. The only page that isn't somewhat confusing is the contact page. It has a form. About as blunt as you can be, but this website, however beautiful, is not meant for marketing. Let's move on.


Beg Bicycles
This website is all about the hipster. They're using large background images, very trendy for the times. We've done this as well, and they use it the same way. It's a great way to open up a website instead of box it in. This website is e-commerce though, so all of the important information is located inside the interior framework, and the fonts are super tiny. Take a peek:

BEG Homepage

BEG Product Page

BEG Product Detail

This is a very cheery, romantic and girly website (although they do sell to men), and it works much better than the Bagigia website above.

G'Nosh 

This is one of the coolest websites ever! Looks-wise at least. They're doing the 'aerial view' thing where the website viewer is literally flying over a desk or table. That being said, if you're not as internet savvy as I am, you're going to have trouble navigating this site. There are little clues in the illustrations about where to click; simple arrows, CSS tricks that pop up when hovering over a link, and there's a little bit of a normal navigation bar up top, but otherwise - you're left scrolling over some random, though very cool images of food. Another thing to note about this website: it's only one page. SEO down the tank at that point. It scrolls up and down via Javascript and you never leave the homepage. Cool, but not great for marketing. 

Home Page

About Us 

Special Sauces

Contact Area

All of these websites were missing key features in the design and process of their functionality on the web and in the marketplace. SEO, Calls to Action, Readable Text, User-Friendly Navigation. Most of it was missing. So 'making it pretty' doesn't always work.

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