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    • Posts Tagged ‘web designer’

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    Is Your Web Designer Legit?

    Friday, May 11th, 2012

    It is fascinating how the internet has revolutionised the world of business. Transactions have been facilitated and made easy with just a click of a button. Through web design, business owners can actually create a website that will help them inform their target clients about their products and services. With the advancement of internet technology web designers can also make websites which could handle online transactions such as shopping carts and payment interfaces. Managing finances online is also made possible through web design and web development.

    The Need For Web Design and Web Designers

    It is because of these vast benefits from the internet that having a website has become imperative for business owners. This makes web designers to be an indispensable part of business. Many Website Designers have been offering their services to those who would require it. Anyone with the proper knowledge in website design could offer their services as website designers and with the use of the internet web designers could actually get clients coming from different parts of the world.

    The Danger

    It is because of the fact that website designers could be hired from anywhere in the world there are some attached risks for those hiring their services. Many web design service clients have fallen prey to some unscrupulous website designers who would just take the money from the client without delivering the correct or expected output. The web design clients is opening themselves to the said risks when they hire a web designer, this is why it is very important for every business owner seeking to have their website built to be vigilant in the characteristics of a legitimate web designers. Such characteristics are the following:

    1. Provides Portfolio – a website designer should be able to present a portfolio of his works; he or she must be able to showcase his or her capabilities as the web designer. A portfolio must be readily presented as you ask for them.

    2. Have their own website – website designers offering their services must have their own website, not only to show their portfolio but to also show that they do have the knowledge in the field of web design.

    3. Makes Contact Details Available – a website designer must always make their contact details available from their website URL to their own mobile number. This is important to show would be clients that they can be contacted anytime regarding issues about their web design work.

    Conclusion

    So if you have already entered into contract with a web designers, maybe you should ask yourself, is your website designer legit? Do they have the different characteristics of a legitimate web designer as stated above?

     

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    Posted in Web Design Work |

    Increasing the Speed of a WordPress Site

    Saturday, April 7th, 2012

    Web designers know the fact that page loading time is already a ranking factor for Googles’ search engine algorithm apart from the fact that website visitors are easily bored and would tend to click away from a website that loads at a very slow rate. WordPress based content management system websites are considered to be the first choice of every web designer in their web design process because of the fact that the platform is free and the content management system of WordPress is reliable. However, there are several factors that affects the page loading time of a WordPress based website and sometimes if contributing factors to the slowing down of a websites’ page loading time is not remedied the consequence is a very “slow” website in terms of its loading time. If this would happen there are several ways on how you can speed up your WordPress websites’ page loading time.

    How to Increase WordPress Page Loading Time

    1. Utilise Content Delivery Networks – content delivery networks or commonly known as CDN’s is composed of several network of computers which can store data copies. Every data copy will be accessed by site visitors nearest to the location of the system computer containing such data copy, instead of having all your site visitors access your website server which might cause a bottleneck in your bandwidth which would eventually slow down your page loading time.

    2. Make a Minimalist Web Design – wordpress offers options on whether to put your post content in full or in excerpts at the blog page or at the home page, in order to speed up your home page or blog page use the excerpt option where a link will just be provided for those who wants to read the entire blog post. Another way is by limiting your archive page to display around five to ten posts only and not the entire content of your website, a way for making a minimalist website design.

    3. Optimise your Database – your site database contains all the content of your website it is therefore prudent to optimise this by weeding out options or content in your database which are not needed anymore, and are considered as dead weight. If you are not used to doing this there are several WordPress plugins that are made available for you to automate the optimisation of your WordPress database.

    Conclusion:

    Page loading time as a ranking factor or avoiding a click away from your visitor, whatever the reasons maybe it is important that you optimise your website in order to increase its page loading performance because anything short than that would be detrimental not only to your ranking, site visitor but also to your websites’ return of investment.

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    Posted in Web Design Work, Wordpress |

    What is a Bad Web Design?

    Thursday, March 29th, 2012

    Web Designers may unknowingly design a website that is not according to standards or which may not be presentable in the eyes of its target audience. Sometimes web designers are taken over by their desire to be overly creative that they tend to forget that there are certain, obvious, unwritten standards that should be incorporated in the design. This does not belie the fact that creativity should also be considered when designing a website.

    What is a Bad Web Design?

    Before we talk about what a bad web design is or the different features of a bad web design it is important that we would first know the reason why it is important to know what bad web design is. To simply put it, no web designer will ever understand the concept of what a good web design is if he or she does not understand what makes a web design bad. There are a lot of factors that should be considered when in order to determine a bad web design and the following are the most important ones:

    1. Dull or Boring Background – a web design is said to be bad when the background is dull, untexturised and distracting to the overall content of the website. The latter characteristic pertains to incorporating images that are tiled and goes in the way of determining whether such image is a content or a background.

    2. Unreadable Text – a website’s purpose is to convey or impart information to its users or visitors, if the text are too small to read or are causing strains in the eyes of the reader then it is said to be a bad web design.

    3. Little blue links – the default link structure for websites are in blue and are underlined. This tends to destroy the overall design especially if you customise such designs. Using the default links would not matter if it compliment the design however if it does not then it could be a sign of bad website design feature.

    4. Unnecessary Graphics – not all images should be incorporated in the website, it would be a bad website design if you would incorporate too many meaningless images, not to mention the fact that graphics, especially those that have large file sizes, would slow down the loading time of your website. Thus, when incorporating graphics you should choose those that convey meaning as well as those that would not interfere to your websites’ loading time.

    Conclusion

    In order to know what is Good we have to acknowledge the presence of the characteristics of a bad website design, therefore knowing the features of a bad web design is not a futile exercise as this would open up a desire to balance between creativity and good website design.

     

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    Posted in Web Design Work |

    What is New With HTML 5?

    Sunday, March 25th, 2012

    In the world of web design a lot of web designers out there are have been wondering on what features can the new HTML version offer that which was not already incorporated in the previous version? It is known that HTML have been adding or removing elements to their elements list and call it a new version, but nothing has been done to drastically change the structure of the Hypertext Markup Language in general, until HTML 5 was conceptualised. HTML version 5 promises a lot of changes with regards to how a website is designed and how it is structured.

    So What’s New For Web Design?

    For web designers out there one thing that would really be of help are the new structural elements which functions to create the website structure, previously, HTML only provide elements that may or may not be used for structuring the website however with HTML 5 there are specific structural elements with specific functions. The Following are the different structure elements introduced by HTML 5:

    1. <article> – this element denotes that the area is reserved and a stand alone area for texts such as comments, forum texts and or blog posts.

    2. <nav> – in previous HTML elements the navigation area was not highlighted, with HTML 5 however the navigation are is indicated by the <nav> element, this area will include or contains links within or going out of the website.

    3. <footer> – again, in previous HTML versions the footer area or section of the web page does not have an explicit element associated with it, with HTML 5 however, the case is different since HTML 5 have provided an element specifically indicating the area as the footer section.

    4. <section> – to indicate a general content for the website the <section> element was provided in HTML 5, such content could either be an application, image, animation, text among others.

    5. <header> – this element indicates that the content are for branding information or the main information about the website, it could be in the form of a text or an image.

    Conclusion

    With HTML 5, website design was given an avenue to indicate specifically the different areas within the website which makes it easier for website designers to discern the areas to be edited whenever there are some updates or any debugging works that should be done within the scope of the website.

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    Posted in Web Design Work |

    What You Should Understand About WordPress

    Saturday, March 17th, 2012

    WordPress is rapidly becoming the content management system platform of choice for many website designers or webmasters. This may be due to the primary reason that wordpress is a free content management system platform. On top of that wordpress is also full of free plugins that could easily be installed onsite. Whatever the reasons are the fact remains that WordPress is really a popular choice. Before launching a WordPress based website however there are several factors that web designers should take into consideration and should understand and these are:

    1. WordPress was originally created as a blog platform – although there are lots of templates that could transform WordPress from its original purpose, which is a blog platform the fact remains that after installation the default site output is blog based, thus it is the web designers’ duty to recreate the website according to the design that was conceptualised.

    2. WordPress is PHP language based – if you want to edit the entire look and feel of the WordPress platform you will require knowledge in PHP or the Hypertext Pre Processor. This is a must for web designers to understand if the web design calls for full customisation of the site.

    3. WordPress is Template Compatible – another aspect that every web designers must understand is that wordpress is compatible to most templates. This means that there are several ready made web designs that could be integrated with the WordPress platform. Understanding and knowing where to look for these templates will save you the time in designing the website.

    4. WordPress Could Be prone to attacks – one of the main factor that a web designer must understand is that because of the fact that WordPress offers a lot of plugins and templates to be integrated with the platform for free there is the threat that some plugins or templates may be an avenue to incorporate malicious codes or applications which could destroy your website. Apparently, WordPress’ strength is also its weakness.

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    Posted in Web Design Work, Wordpress |

    Evaluating a Good Website Design

    Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

    One of the main question that every web designer may be asking is, what constitutes a great web design? or at least what is a good web design? With the incorporation of creativity into web design evaluating it would be dependent on the person viewing the website. However, it would be good to know that even with the creative development of a website there are still some criteria that can be used in order to evaluate whether a website is good or not. Believe it or not a good design does not rely on the number of animations or the vibrance of colors but it depends on the following factors:

    1. Easy Navigation – making your website user-friendly is a big plus when evaluating the website. This is because websites are created not for the pleasure of the web designer but for the use of the website visitors. Easy navigation means that the user can easily go around your web pages in your website with ease and does not need a map and manual just to navigate the site.

    2. Consistency – every web page may have different content however its overall design must be the same. Consistency in the web design would give the impression that your visitors are within the website. If every web page is different in design the user might get the impression that he or she have already clicked out of the website and is already in another website. Thus consistency in the design is necessary.

    3. Design should capture the visitors’ attention – It is a known fact that a site visitor could easily click away from your website, this is why it is important that you create a web design that will be able to capture the attention of your visitors and would then have the ability to direct their attention to your content, this way your visitors’ curiosity will be satisfied and they would remain in your website for a longer period of time.

    Conclusion

    Regardless on the website design, evaluating a design to be good or bad rests on those three factors, thus it is important to incorporate them whenever you create your web design.

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    Posted in Web Design Work |

    The Three Characteristics that a Web Designer Must Have

    Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

    It is already a known fact that the process of web design is a very tedious process, it requires a mix of different web development codes such as the Hypertext Markup Language, the Cascading Stylesheets and Javascript. On top of that there are other server side scripting languages that should be taken into consideration. A web designers’ job is very tedious because also of the fact that he or she does not only need to know web development codes he or she must also know how to use different image editors for purposes of incorporating images in the web design.

    It is because of this gargantuan task that a web designer must also be imbued with different values and characteristics in order to survive the process of web design, these values or characteristics are:

    1. Hardwork – a web designer must be a hardworker, this means that he or she must be able to motivate himself or herself in finishing and delivering a quality output, anything short of that may result to the delivery of a low quality output.

    2. Creativity – a web designer must be able to think outside the box. This means that he or she must be able to conceptualise designs that are out of the ordinary. This is because of the fact that designs are just being repeated, in fact there are templates that are already abused in web design so for your website to stand out you have to have a website design that is truly unique and original as well as creatively done.

    3. Dedication – web design has a lot of pitfalls this is why if a web designer is not dedicated to what he is doing he will just abandon the project and the business entirely, dedication to work is important to successfully realise the website design that the designer have conceptualised.

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    Posted in Web Design Work |

    Where To Get Your Images For Web Design

    Monday, March 12th, 2012

    It is a known fact in the world of web design that images are necessary in order to create a stunning website design one that will capture the attention of your website visitors. Visual aesthetics are important because of the fact that it captures and retains the attention of your website visitors. One of the main problems encountered by web designers is on looking or searching for the images needed for their design. It is because of this problem that many web designers are taking a lot of time in looking for the images that they need and it adds time to the web design process which could delay the development of the website. Knowing where you could source images for your website design is necessary so that web designers could immediately know where to go. There are three different ways on where you could acquire images for web design, these are:

    1. Stock Photographs – if you do not have the time but do have the money to acquire images then stock photography is your source. Stock photographs are those that are contributed by different photographers where such photographs could be purchased by a web designer as a license to use the image in his or her web design. Contrary to popular knowledge stock photography does not only allow download of photos but they also cater to different illustrations or images as product of the use of image editors.

    2. Images that are free – there are some photographers out there that allow their images to be downloaded for free, why do photographers do this? well it is simply because they would like to promote themselves. Allowing free downloads would be for self promotion purposes.

    3. Royalty Free Photos – although the word free is stated the photos are not free by nature, royalty free means that the image license could be bought and you are allowed to use the image for different purposes without to pay renewal license fee, it is a one time fee for downloading this type of photo.

    4. Take the Photos yourself – if you have time and would like to make use of your original work you can take the photos yourself or draw the illustrations according to how you want it to appear in your web design. All you need is an image editor software and a digital camera.

    Knowing your sources of images would allow you to efficiently search for the image that will best suit your website.

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    Posted in Web Design Work |

    Things to Consider In Mobile Web Design

    Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

    Mobile internet is becoming popular every day, this is because of the fact that conventional mobile phones are rapidly being replaced by smartphones. Smartphones gives the user the power to connect to and browse the internet. This feature, along with the increasing number of free Wi-Fi hotspots makes the mobile internet browsing to be a lot more popular, add to that the fact that laptops, netbooks and tablet pc’s are also contributing to the use of the mobile network or internet. The point is, that mobile browsing is becoming popular and that there is a need for mobile website design capabilities for majority of websites. This is because of the fact that the web page that we know of is different from mobile web pages, which means the web design process differs from the conventional with that of the mobile. What will be presented in the succeeding texts are the things that should be remembered or should be considered when creating web design for the mobile platform.

    1. Consider the common device width – with the varying sizes of mobile hardware that is capable of viewing and browsing the internet web designers should consider the fact that there is a difference in the mobile web page with the normal web page especially for the size of such web pages. This is why it is imperative that web designers design the website to be able to accommodate variable sizes this way every image and text will conform to the screen size as the web page is displayed in a mobile device.

    2. Consider avoiding forms – forms that will require long answers should be avoided because of the fact that mobile users do not have the luxury of using a keyboard that will allow them to input data quickly and efficiently.

    3. Use Small File Sized-images – since you want your web page to be compatible with the mobile platform download or loading speed of the website is imperative, this is why you should design your web page in such a manner that your images would load faster making your website to load a lot quicker too, and to do this you must use images that are low in file size.

    Indeed the technology community is changing fast with the introduction of mobile browsing; every website designer must therefore be a lot more updated in these current trends in order to cope with the very demanding and competitive market for website design.

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    Posted in Web Design Work |

    What’s Up With Colors?

    Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

    In web design, the incorporation of colors is very important, this is because of the fact that colors adds to the “life” of the website. Proper blending of colors in web design is important in order to make your presentation fun as well as professional looking. Although image editors can provide a wide array of colors its place in web design is just limited, sometimes you need to add colors to your website design by way of the design layer using the Cascading Style Sheets. The incorporation of colors using Cascading Style Sheets is especially important when you try to add color to the website text or content.

    Adding color to the text is done by using the color property of CSS. There are three ways on how you specify the values of the color property the first one is by using the English language, second is by using the RGB method and finally by using the hexadecimal method. Although it is easy to specify the color value by using the English method the web designer is limited as to the color choices. Using the other two methods may be the way to go however the problem is the numerous number of color combination and thus there is also a myriad type of numeric combinations. So how does one find the exact color and the corresponding code?

    For the hexadecimal value using photoshop could give you the specific hexadecimal value for a particular color however if you do not have such application then you can resort to the RGB value and us Microsoft paint to know the specific RGB value for a particular color. The following are the steps that you need to do to identify the color you want in RGB.

    1. Open Microsoft paint.

    2. For the latest Microsoft paint click of edit colors.

    3. Once the color palette pops-out you can already choose a color you want at the right panel.

    4. Adjust the color according to what you desire.

    5. Notice the Red, Green and Blue values, these will be the values which you will utilise using the color property in CSS in RGB value.

    Thus, you do not need to memorise the whole table of color values for your website design, you just need help from another application in this case it is the Microsoft paint.

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    Posted in Web Design Work |

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