We're happy to see that many designers and marketing consultants are adopting the YWD platform. Just the other day, another nicely conceived and executed website went live. Created by Sideren Brand Creation and Alignment and Thrive Design & Communications – both experienced Toronto-based consultancies with major clients in a variety of sectors – the Innovation Factory website provides a rich source of information for innovators and entrepreneurs in the Hamilton (Ont.) region.

www.innovationfactory.ca

Just by looking at the page layout you can tell it doesn't look like a canned website template. Not only is the look and feel clean and well organized but the brand is reinforced by the judicious use of the client's colour scheme. Also, the designers were able to use a grid that works extremely well in organizing a large amount of information. Specifically in terms of the use of the YWD platform, here are some of the aspects they took advantage of:

Content slider

This is a great tool to create slideshows – which can contain images, text, links, etc. Gone are the days of Flash; this tool requires no programming from the designers, and people can view it on their iPads.
»More info on YWD's Content Slider tool

Embed code

For their Twitter stream, the designers simply copied the code supplied by Twitter and pasted it into YWD's Embed Code tool. Notice how the Twitter stream inherits the overall text style of the website – not just the font and the colour but also links. The Embed Code can be used to insert a variety of 3rd-party code from not just Twitter but also PayPal and many others.
»More info on YWD's Embed Code tool

Social bookmarking

Interactive widgets for the selected networks of their client's choice appear on every page. They allow people to bookmark the page directly into their streams. YWD offers many options in terms of which networks to use, where to place the buttons, etc. That's done straight from YWD Designer.
»More info on YWD Designer

Total control over type

Since YWD supports not only standard fonts – like Verdana and Arial – but also a myriad (no pun intended to the designers out there) of other fonts, they've chosen Droid Sans. An elegant and extremely legible font, it works nicely with the client's brand. And notice how they took advantage of the precise line-spacing capabilities in YWD Designer to specify type that looks great on regular copy as well as headings.
»Fonts you can use with YWD

Options for mobile phones

Although they haven't created a separate mobile-optimized version of the website – included with every YWD package – specifically for mobile yet, the designers have defined a few pages that they'd rather not display on phones. That can be easily achived by simply setting an option in the the page properties. Notice how certain pages have a small "computer" icon on the website's back-end. YWD takes care of not displaying them on phones, which it detects automatically.
»Designing for mobile devices