If you’re shopping for an image editor, this is very easy to use for cropping, brightening, etc. The program also has lots of advanced features if you’re into illustration.

The Pro model, now known as ‘Designer Pro’, also is a fully-functional web design program, with lots of drag-and-drop and instant update features.

The stand-alone design product Web Designer, is also available without the image editor.

A lot of the research which has been done is available for free or a small charge. For instance, we know things like the first place someone looks when they land on your page (upper left-hand corner). We know that the more clicks someone has to make to find what they are looking for, the more likely they are to just give up. We know that the more information you have on a page, the less likely they will immediately see what they are looking for, even if it is right there.

So the question is, how is your listing design working for you?

The issue is that while there are numerous different types of design in use (and apparently many of the different types successful), what matters is whether a design is working for you to make you money. How can you measure that?

Well, if you did it yourself—especially if you are not particularly skilled—are there errors on the page? Is it broken? Can you tell? Things like typos, grammatical errors, broken code, non-working buttons, and missing images need to be fixed, first of all. If you can’t tell by looking, have someone else look at it to see if they see anything that you missed.

Do you have a statcounter on the page? That will help you see how much traffic you are getting.

But if you’ve had a design up for a long time, it’s pretty much impossible to tell whether making changes would help you or not. It would be a mistake to simply assume that it will or won’t.

If you get a new design, put it up and WATCH CAREFULLY to see what happens. It’s not about your tastes and whether you like it. It’s about whether it inspires your customers to make purchases.

You may find your traffic and/or sales increase. You may find them drop off dramatically. I have heard several girls put up new designs, pleased as all heck, who took them down really fast when they found their business died off.

It was as “ON” I first met her. She wanted the background removed from an image. I felt sorry for her, as she described her health issues. We had a couple of long calls. She described to me how a designer had taken $2K and failed to deliver the website she was supposed to get, leaving her with purchased software (photoshop, dreamweaver, paintshop pro) that she found unusable.

She felt designers deliberately talked down to her by speaking in incomprehensible jargon rather than everyday language she could understand. She did not see any value in trying to learn what the terms they were using meant.

I charged her a few dollars and gave her the image in several sizes. She came back and wanted support to install it on her listings in a payment mail button. I gave her the code to do that, but it was not what she wanted. She wanted me to take a piece of javascript she said some friend had given her and make it work using her image. She wanted me to do it for her. She did not want to know how it was done so she could do it for herself. I explained that I didn’t know any javascript and had no idea how to make it work, that all I knew is that I had never seen it done that way.

She emailed me back with a snarky, “A friend of mine did it for me for free.” And she posted on the forum outing me for ripping her off by giving her the image in a format she could not use (.gif!) and failing to give her what she needed. That a designer could not do what some friend of hers was able to do for free.

I blocked her on all her accounts I was aware of and put a notice on my help site that I did not work with javascript at any price.

Time passed and she contacted me on a new account of hers, “FA”. Or was it “F A”? It turns out she was still blocked on the old account she had renamed. The account she contacted me on was a spacing variation of the real account she needed the work done for.

She had a story about how an inexperienced designer had given her something she was unable to work with after charging her several times the initially-agree-upon amount. Silly me, I guessed who it was and should have contacted the girl to get the scoop.

We did not speak on the phone this time. I don’t recall if we did IM’s. But I know we did emails, hot damn! I got at least 2 emails every waking hour, and she wanted them all responded to promptly.

I ended up reworking a sliced-image photoshop template to make it easier for her to work with, to match up something that wasn’t quite right and fulfill her stated needs. I did not ask for money, but she paid me generously. I spent a great deal of time on the project.

Finally it was finished, and she now pointed out that she was not able to do something she needed to do – she needed an expanding text box in a certain location, which you don’t get in a photoshop template. without. asking. in. advance. Which she had not done, and which I would now have to start all over again to do.

I was finished. I wanted nothing more to do with this, as I now realized who she was.

She told me a friend had fixed it for free. She posted outing me on the forum for cheating her by giving her back a sliced image template – a table coded up for the images. Apparently she later sucked some other designer into trying to fix it, too, and it became the epic of “The $200 Template”, where yet another helpless, naive newbie was portrayed as victimized by flirt designers who cheat them and veteran flirts who won’t give a newbie a break.

The pattern: Complaints that veteran flirts and designers cheat newbies, and she is here to help by warning them, sometimes trying to “help” with “tutorials” trying to convince them to use low-grade html editors that apparently she can’t even use herself. Or warning them to be prepared to get the designer to agree to demands for unlimited communication in advance, and to be prepared to sue her.

I see posts like that and I get flashbacks.

I still get emails from her various personae trying to get me to work for her, unaware that she is well-known.

She pretends she is someone the designer does not know in order to get them to work for her.

Radioactive is the word.

I really feel sorry for someone who cannot permit herself to learn to do things for herself, who is incapable of communicating her needs. Or I would if she was not so resolutely malevolent and vindictive. How can someone lead their whole life blaming everyone else for the same things that go wrong, over and over again?

However, you can use a color name or hex code if you use inline CSS (cascading style sheets). At the top of your listing, put the following code:
<body border="0"style="background-color:black">
if you want it black. Use another color name (test it first) or a hex code, a 6 digit letter and number code for colors beginning with a ‘#’.

Copy it exactly, especially the spacing.

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

Link

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

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!

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.