Entries Tagged 'Design considerations' ↓

I undoubtedly suck at Photoshop, since I don’t have it. But I have been watching this series of tutorials based on a guy’s breakup with his wife. It’s incredibly entertaining, and if you actually did the tutorials, you would be a lot less sucky at Photoshop.

If you haven’t been watching these, start with season 1 episode 1.

Link

Note: There are online article directories where website owners place their writings for the use of other webmasters looking for content for their sites. When their article is reprinted by another webmaster, their site is credited by google for having quality content.

These directories are pretty hit-or-miss. There are hundreds of categories, and bazillions of articles. Some of the articles are real gems, some have excellent information but are badly written, most are irrelevant. If you’ve got a vanilla website, you might check them out. Read the Terms of Service before you use an article you find in a directory.

When I find an interesting article that looks like exactly what I would have wanted to have written for this site, I’ll reprint it here.

Guidelines to Choose the Best Web Designer

By James Elliott

It takes immense talent and skills to design a web page which is creatively designed, neatly coded, easily downloadable, displays properly on different browsers and above all, can be indexed easily by search engines as well. This is why it becomes more important to choose a company which has a team of talented web and graphic designers, equipped to give you a high quality web solution.

Here are some useful tips to help you choose an efficient web designer.

Check out the previous works

Ask the company to show you the portfolio of their web designs. Most good web and graphic design companies will have a neatly done portfolio in their website itself.

The prior works of the designers highlight not only their talent but also what you can expect from them. Analyze whether all the pages are easy to navigate, whether the designs are impressive and professional, is the layout effective etc. Only after you are satisfied with the previous works, you should move further.

Give importance to HTML knowledge

Make sure that the web designer uses HTML to build a site along with cascading style sheets i.e. CSS. The knowledge of CSS is important for a designer as CSS allows the designer to easily and quickly make system-wide changes to the site.

This helps in saving time and energy and of course, cost. A good designer must be in the know of these things. If your designer is not familiar with CSS, then you’d better leave the task for some other designer.

Know about the features

Inquire what kind of features your web designer can provide you in your website. There are plenty of features available in web solutions today but you must know what exactly you would need. Your web designer must be able to suggest you the features that would make your site attractive and user-friendly.

For example, if you are building a product-selling site, you can have some flash components to enhance the appeal of your home page, a good admin panel to manage visitors and sales, security features to ensure secure payment gateways and so on.

Updating criteria

It is essential to know beforehand, how the web and graphic designer plan to have the site updated. It is better to have the ability to update the website on your own with the help of Content Management System (CMS), or user-friendly admin panel type interface which allow one to make changes to static content. Paying the designer every time you need to update your site is an expensive proposition and quite unnecessary in today’s hi-tech web world.

Performance of your website

To make sure your website performs well, ask your designer beforehand about the time required for loading a page and search engine indexing. If your site takes more time to load than the average website does, take it as a warning signal. It might be due to bad HTML coding. A good web designer will code the page in a way in which it loads within seconds and is easily indexed by search engines.

Get in touch with previous clients

Apart from just going through the testimonials online, it is worthwhile to get in touch with the previous clients and ask them about their experience with the web design company and the web designers. You can contact them either through phone or e-mail them seeking their opinion whether they were happy and satisfied with the kind of quality and service they have got.

These are just few guidelines that can be taken into consideration while looking for a good professional web designer. These are by no means the only criteria but it will surely help to find the good ones who can be trusted with your dream project.

James Elliott is a website designer who offers Affordable Web Designs in UK. His Web Design in UK is quite popular and his articles have been appreciated over various online platforms.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=James_Elliott

There are a lot of means of “protecting” your photos, text, or site itself that can leave you vulnerable, thanks to the fact that anyone can click “View => Source” in just about any browser. Now if your security measures include javascript, commonly used to disable the right click menu—among other things—the surfer can still look at your source code to see what you’re hiding. Some people will be made more curious by the fact that you’re obviously hiding something, even though they might have right-clicked on a photo just to see who your image host is.

Also, keep in mind that javascript only works when it is turned on. Most scripts have no effect when the user turns off javascript, as many users do.

Anyway, anyone who wants your phots badly enough can always take a screenshot of your page to snag your images.

It’s best to prominently watermark all photos of any size, so at least if anybody saves them, your character name, website, contact info, etc, will always be with the photos.

Here’s a little tale of a website which had a javascript login protecting its membership area. It was a simple issue for someone with even half an idea of how javascript works to look at the code and figure out how to get in. Having a security method which is useless like that is worse than having none. Clearly they put things in the private area thinking they were secure, rather than completely accessible to anybody curious enough to look.

HACKED!

If you’ve never made a banner, there’s a few things you should know. I’m not going to tell you how to make a banner image now. That’s something you would do in your image program, and there are so many options I couldn’t tell you what to do. If you have an image program but don’t know how to use it, I suggest getting a nice, thick book to help you with that.

First of all, a banner is a 468×60 image, in other words, it is 468 pixels wide and 60 pixels high. This is the standard size. Most topsites require you to submit a banner this size to their site and reject any other size or shape.

When designing a banner, keep in mind that this is the advertisement that your potential customer will be seeing when deciding whether to visit your site and/or call you. It needs enough information to give them a reason to click it. If you don’t have a website, you may want to put a phone number on, so that someone who can’t call right now can write it down to call you later.

But you don’t want too much information. The space is small, and it should be the colors and images that catch the attention of the surfer.

It also needs to be attractive and sexy, so most banners have photos and some sort of effect.

Most banners are animated because animated images are more eye-catching and you can put more info on a banner if it is animated in two or three frames. Just make sure you test your banner before putting it out on the web. Someone who reads relatively slowly should still be able to read all text on the banner. If your text goes by too fast, they won’t be able to read it at all! Slow down your animation if you need to. Each frame can be assigned its own speed in a good animation program.

The last consideration is that many toplists host banners, and some of them - I’m thinking Phone Sex Central here - have a very low filesize they require, in order to keep their site from loading slowly. More frames, images, and effects mean a larger filesize. You may not be able to make your first, second, or third choice and still stay within the limit. Design is an art, and skills come with practice. Good luck.