2012-1
22

Harnessing the Power of Online Wed Design Contractors

Category: Website Design | Comments Off

As a business owner, you must have a pretty good idea of what you’ve spent in salaries, benefits and other operating expenses in the past year. Hiring good people in your area can be difficult but moreover, expensive. Of course, this isn’t to say that you shouldn’t hire people in your area, but you should also still be considering all of your options.

One of these options is to hire an external contractor online. An online contractor is relatively easy to find online. Since there are plenty of good classified listings and job listings for part-time as well as full-time contractors, you can choose which you would like to hire and which works best for your needs at the moment.

Hiring external contractors gives you the advantage of being able to hire quality people at a fraction of the price. This is because you don’t typically provide these contractors with benefits as you would your regular employees. You also don’t have to spend money on providing them with equipment (unless they need specialized equipment) for the job they do.

Web designers who work as contractors basically have all they need since they conduct their jobs at home to begin with. At the same time, remember that since they work from home, you won’t need to provide for any type of transportation cost or hazard pay because they aren’t actually heading over to your location.

There are really only two costs that you should think about, basically the amount of money that you will be paying them for their services and some sort of internet business insurance to also protect you in case of any problems.

It can be expensive to get yourself a competent and capable web design team but you can definitely do something about that cost by using the services of online contractors. Make sure you consider them among your options when building your web presence.

2012-1
4

Tools For Optimizing Your Site’s Graphics

Category: Web Design Software | Comments Off

According to Google, “content is king”. Yes, that’s true to a certain extent, but you can’t discount how important it is to have a well-designed blog, especially if you want to make it successful enough for you to be able to blog full time.

There are lots of areas that come into play when designing a good website layout, but in this article we’re going to focus on the use of graphics and how to use them to have a great-looking website. You have to go beyond simple HTML and CSS and venture into graphic software tools to create, modify, and enhance your blog’s graphics.

When it comes to making graphics, there are two categories of tools: bitmap drawing tools and vector drawing tools, the former being simple to intermediate and the latter being more advanced and designed for professional developers. Here are some good options for website designers:

  1. Adobe Photoshop. There is not much to add: Photoshop is so widely used that not only does everyone knows exactly what it does, but they also know that it’s the best at what it does.
  2. Paint Shop Pro. If you can’t afford Photoshop, this is a good option for you. It is almost as versatile as Photoshop, but is much more affordable. It’s the graphics tool of choice for many webmasters.
  3. Web Graphics Optimizer. This software (which is also a lot more affordable than Photoshop) is a great image optimization tool (it allows for up to five different image versions); whatever you need in terms of size and image quality can be handled quite adequately, so you can give your site that polished look.
  4. I can’t omit G.I.M.P. but since it’s basically an open source version of Photoshop I figured there was no need to really elaborate on it.

Any one of these tools will totally do the job for your site’s graphics. But there are two final words of caution I always like to throw out: 1) don’t get so hung up on pretty layouts that you never launch your site and 2) don’t make your graphic files so big that they cause your site to take forever to load!

2011-12
20

The coding aspects of web design

Category: Web Design Help | Comments Off

I know lots of people who manage their finances quite well without being able to give you an llc definition. Similarly I know people with no technical competency whatsoever who have been able to produce great websites in collaboration with their web designers. The Web is a relatively young medium of communication and interaction and everybody concerned is still feeling their way around. Even Web design professionals cannot claim to know everything and, if you’ll learn a few basics, you could help in creating your dream website.

The first aspect of coding is that it should comply with a set of standards. Virtually anything that is manufactured is based on a set of standards that provides comfort and reassurance to the customer. I am sure that you will never buy a car that is not built to some kind of acceptable standard. Nor would you buy a house that does not conform to building codes. This is why it is worth your time to validate your WebPages by using some kind of HTML validation service

You may have heard people say it the code should be semantically correct but what does this actually mean? Semantics in this context refers to the interrelationship of signs and symbols and the meaning that they actually communicate. In other words, the (X)HTML markup should not relate merely to the appearance but to the document itself. If you get a few of the major basics right, any further tinkering can only result in improvements that are marginal. This will ensure success by itself because there are other elements to consider but you will certainly build a stable platform.

Finally keep in mind that presentation should be separated from content. This means that your HTML markup has no role in the appearance. Anything to do with the looks should involve the CSS.

2011-12
13

A User-Friendly Website Design

Category: Website Design | Comments Off

I’m not a website design specialist. I’m just a user and me and my family are owners of econi.org. We review fashion and accessories websites and report on their layout and how easy or difficult they are to navigate through.

Econi.org

Over the past few years we saw a clear trend. While not too long ago, webmasters utilized a lot of pop-ups and flash, nowadays’ credo is to keep things as simple as possible. They recognized that, as a general rule, a user doesn’t like any surprises. So in other words, if you are browsing through a website and click on a link where it says “Additional Information about this home theater system” and then a new window pops up where you are being asked to sign up for a 2-week cruise in the Caribbean, chances are you will close everything and never come back.

Even the larger sites, such as the Tory Burch Sale Outlet for instance, moved away from anything that could potentially perceived as a distraction or annoyance. Instead, now you get a menu bar with a handful of choices and plenty of user-friendly content. And studies have proven that this new trend directly correlates with an increase in sales, because visitors feel it’s a trustworthy and valuable website.