Archive for March, 2009

Simple Web Design Software

simple web design software
What is the easiest software to get for creating a simple (non-preset templated) website?

I have several large websites (mySQL, Ajax, php heavy type sites) that I had created by engineers/web developers. I want to tie all my sites together by a simple web site – but I want to create it myself. I do not want to use anything that only offers pre-designed templates (like the new iWeb from Mac) as I do not want a “theme!”

Can anyone recommend some easy to use software (preferably Mac). I have Adobe CS2, but the web app is not so easy to use.

I could ask my engineers, but I want to learn some basics and try this myself. Any software leads would be great!! Thanks.
Good answers already! I am open to an Template based application like iWeb, but would like it to have a non-themed template. Or a very generic template (which iWeb does not appear to have). I will check out Dreamweaver – it is not part of CS2 (it has goLive, inDesign,etc…)

If you want something easy to use, use Adobe. If you want something simple, use a text editor and learn to create a web site.

You have to learn either to use the program or to write it yourself – there’s no “click here, click there and you have a website” program – unless you want to use something pre-written.

You’re eliminating all the possibilities. You’ll have to change your specs and choose something possible. It’s like asking how I dig a hole without using any machinery and without digging it by hand or using explosives.

Web Page Layout Design

web page layout design

What Requires Special Attention When Designing a Web Page?

When designing a web page, one has to consider how they are going to attract and retain visitors. One way of reaching online users is to design a website that ranks high in the search engines. Achieving a high search ranking requires creating a web page that is search engine friendly.

To build a search engine friendly web page, one should implement the following tools:

1. When a search engine ranks a website, they assess the value of the content. Web content needs to be relevant to the website’s purpose and rich in relevant key words. Relevant keywords should be included in the headlines. As well, the content has to be relevant to the site’s product or service. The text should be easy to read and free of spelling and grammar errors. The page should have an introduction and conclusion with a clear purpose of the site. Try to update your web page with fresh content regularly.

2. The design and layout of the site should be professional and unique. Pages should be quick to load so you should use small graphics and pictures that are professional and relevant to the site. Every image should have an “alt” label and a text link. Bright colors, irrelevant pictures, and odd flashing animation will result in a low search engine ranking. The layout should be consistent with uniform colors. The web page should be easy to navigate and the various applications should blend well. The site’s navigation bar should be clear with professional titles. As well, your contact information should be easy to locate. A site map is an important part of the web design. You should also make sure that you do have any “page not found” error pages. Every page should include the appropriate domain name and professionally designed logo.

3. Make your web design interactive. This will give your site a boost in search engine rankings. You can use such applications as a Blog, chat room, surveys, polls, discussion boards, contests, user feed back forms…etc.

4. Reciprocal linking is important to achieving a high search engine ranking. These links should be relevant to your site. Consider posting to business directories. Don’t use link farms and other low quality link sites as they will only lower your search engine ranking. Embed text links in your content paragraphs to increase your ranking.

A professional website design tells a visitor and search engine robot that your site is professional and trustworthy. Search engine spiders and robots score professional websites high in the search engines. Because a high search engine ranking is so important, designing a web site takes time and good planning. There are professional web site design companies that are experts in creating web pages that achieve high search engine rankings. Using a web design company will significantly increase your search engine ranking.

Because the majority of online users use a search engine to locate a website, it is essential that your web pages are designed to be search engine friendly.

About the Author

We utilize
Vancouver web design
to generate dynamic results for our clients. We understand our clients’ needs and we employ trends, tactics, and technology to deliver clear communication. To learn how to gain a competitive advantage through the Internet, please visit us!

Writing For The Web Course

writing for the web course
on what web site or link can i get information on the law of graft (bribery) and corruption for china.?

i need the information to write a term paper for my chinese law course and i can’t get a hold of any books.

Try this one:

http://www.chinatoday.com/law/a.htm

Creating Websites That Sell

creating websites  that sell
Where can I sell samples of some digital art designs that i created?any good websites out there cheap or FREE?

most of my work has adult themes so no kiddie sites or sites w/o the option of restricting the views.

Try Corbis.com

Online Designer Shopping Websites

online designer shopping websites

Designing a Website With Marketing Experience

Most web designers have no idea how to make money on the internet, with anything other than their design services. Keywords having good keywords are one of the most important areas to consider when designing a website/webpage. This will also help you with creating and designing your T-Shirts and shop/website to suit your target audience. For example if you write an e-book on web designing then this may sell great on “guide to web design” website.

One method of thinking about designing a new website is to use a mind mapping process, or to draw up a spider diagram. For more detail go to: www.impacts-audio.com. Differences between Building, Designing and Marketing web presences Understanding the differences between designing a website, building a website, and making a website visible online will help ensure that you choose a website developer that can meet all your goals and demands. Simply put, designing an awesome content rich website is not enough. A web designer needs to consider a variety of online selling principles while designing an e-Commerce website.

Graphic Tools for designing your own website online is also available. Step Establish the Website Establishing a website consists of three steps: securing a domain name, designing the website, and finding a web hosting service. Choose a HTML Editor Before you can begin designing your new website, you will need a piece of software called a HTML Editor or sometimes called Web Editor. The time and effort you spend on designing your website will be obvious to your visitors and will result in sales.

Color choice should also be dictated by other, less obvious ambitions, when designing or re-vamping a website. I was personally involved in everything from designing the website to sales and marketing to product design and project management to customer support and beyond. Whether you are building a brand fresh website, or re-designing an old website, or currently using a web design company for ongoing maintenance, these tips will help to make sure you are getting the best deal.

Let’s talk about couple of important point I choose to discuss –Web Designing & Web hosting – Lets say you have chosen one of the best web designing company in your area to design & develop your website with the best of your information and they have finished the website designing in couple of days now your website is ready to host on a server. “Well, driving high traffic to your site is important, but what’s even more important, is designing a website that makes them stay. For more help visit to: www.html-lockdown.com. But before you think about designing your website, it is vitally significant to select a popular topic, with preferably high paying commissions – after all, you won’t profit from anything without any website visitors, no matter how excellent your site looks.
www.15-ways-to-boost-website-response.com

www.thedesignbuild.com

About the Author

ama au author

Copy Writing Services

copy writing services
Turning a hard copy book to text then to .mp3 audio?

Okay, so I want to turn a hard copy book, well a couple of books into text then turn that into a .mp3 or something that I can burn to a disc and listen to it in the car.
Basically, it’s for my personal use, but I want to know what are the risks? Like will I be violating any copy writes or anything else that’s against the law? I know that with software you’re allowed to make one (1) copy for yourself as a backup, but can I do that with a book? I need to know ASAP, and I need to know what I have to use, but please don’t suggest anything expensive, also if there are services that would turn a hard copy book into an audio CD I would really like to know about that too if it’s not an expensive option, or does something like that even exist?
Thanks for all relevant answers in advance! I’ll check back to give somebody ‘Best Answer’
Any option of any cost is acceptable too, I also recently found A LOT of books open on public domain, for free.

Obviously, if you already have a copy of the book in a text format, that is going to save you a lot of typing.

Many books can already be found online, in a text format. (For example, I bet I could find “Tom Sawyer” online.)

If the book you want isn’t already in a text format, you must first take the time to type it. Save it as a text file.

Then you could use one of the many free “text to speech” programs that are available. They are getting better all the time. (Five or six years ago they were still pretty bad.)

Once you have an audio file of your text, if it’s not already in the mp3 format, you would again have to use a program to convert it to MP3. (There are many free conversion programs out there.)

Obviously, if your “text to speech” program can save it directly to an MP3 file, you just saved yourself a step.

If you do this just for personal use, to use and listen to in your car, (meaning, you won’t sell this) I don’t think you will have any legal problems.

Are there services that do this? Probably. A Google search for “text to mp3″ or book to mp3 or something similar should turn up something.

Good luck and have fun.

Mobile Web Designer

mobile web designer

Web Design Philippines

One of the most popularly used web design techniques of today is called the Tableless Web Design or the Tableless Web Layout. This has been around since the start of Style Sheet Languages including CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) and XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language). Instead of HTML tables, style sheet languages such as CSS are used to arrange elements and text on a web page. CSS was introduced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to improve web accessibility and to make HTML code semantic rather than presentational.

The Start of Tableless Web Design
HTML was originally designed for sharing scientific documents and research papers online. But as the Internet grew into the mainstream in the, and became more media oriented, graphic designers sought ways to control the appearance of the Web pages presented to end users, which is by designing a layout of the page. To this end, tables and spacers have been used to create and maintain page layout.
Though very effective, this caused a number of problems. Many Web pages have been designed with tables nested within tables, resulting in large HTML documents which use more bandwidth. Furthermore, when a table based layout is linearized, for example when being parsed by a screen reader or a search engine, the resulting order of the content can be somewhat confusing. Visit an online Web design Philippines site to learn more about using CSS in web design.
Powerful WYSIWYG editors such as the Macromedia Dreamweaver (now known as Adobe Dreamweaver) arrived on the market which meant Web designers no longer needed a good (or any) understanding of HTML to build web pages. Such editors indirectly encourage extensive use of nested tables to position design elements. As designers edit their documents in these editors, code is added to the document which is sometimes unnecessary. Furthermore, unskilled designers may use tables more than required when using a WYSIWYG editor. This practice can lead to many tables nested within tables as well as tables with unnecessary rows and columns.
The use of graphic editors with slicing tools that output HTML and images directly also promote poor code with tables often having many rows of 1 pixel height or width. Sometimes many more lines of code are used to render content than the actual content itself.
As the World Wide Web boom receded in 2001 and the Web development industry shrank, coders with more experience and greater industry experience were in higher demand. In a large number of cases UI development was carried out by coders with greater knowledge of good coding practice. It was around this time that many became critical of messy coding practices and the idea of tableless design began to grow.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were developed to improve the separation between design and content, and move back towards a semantic organization of content on the Web. The term “tableless design” implies the use of CSS to position HTML elements on the page but it should be noted that tables and CSS are not mutually exclusive. Many experienced HTML coders use CSS to manipulate tables frequently.

Advantages of Tableless Web Design
There are several advantages as to why CSS is much more efficient than using tables. These are Accessibilty, Bandwidth Savings, and its Maintainability.

Accessibilty
Because of the Internet’s rapid growth, disability discrimination legislation, and the increasing use of mobile phones and PDAs, it is necessary for Web content to be made accessible to users operating a wide variety of devices. Tableless Web design considerably improves Web accessibility in this respect. Screen readers and braille devices have fewer problems with tableless designs because they follow a logical structure.
As a result of the separation of design (CSS) and structure (HTML), it is also possible to provide different layouts for different devices, e.g. handhelds, mobile phones, etc. It is also possible to specify a different style sheet for print, e.g. to hide or modify the appearance of advertisements or navigation elements that are irrelevant and a nuisance in the printable version of the page. Check out and visit an online Web design Philippines site to learn more of what CSS can do for a web site.

Bandwidth Savings
Clever implementation of tableless design can produce web pages with fewer HTML tags thus reducing page download times. Using external style sheets to position page elements means more mark up language may be cached and further reduce download times for subsequent pages using the same resources.
Poor implementation of tableless design can result in many more lines of code used per page element which can increase download time. Tables have a defined set of rules which are clear and concise while tableless design often involves working around browser inconsistencies.
Tableless design does not necessarily imply bandwidth savings. If implemented correctly, the bandwidth savings are generally minor at best. It is still possible to build a lightweight web page with tables. The use of WYSIWYG editors or the technique used by the web page’s author will have a much greater influence on page download times.

Maintainability
Maintaining a website may require frequent changes, both small and large, to the visual style of a website, depending on the purpose of the site. Under table-based layout, the layout is part of the HTML itself. As such, without the aid of template-based visual editors such as HTML editors, changing the positional layout of elements on a whole site may require a great deal of effort, depending on the amount of repetitive changes required. Even employing sed or similar global find-and-replace utilities cannot alleviate the problem entirely.
In tableless layout using CSS, virtually all of the layout information resides in one place: the CSS document. Because the layout information is centralized, these changes can be made quickly and globally by default. The HTML files themselves do not, usually, need to be adjusted when making layout changes. If they do, it is usually to add class-tags to specific markup elements or to change the grouping of various sections with respect to one another. Learn how professional web designers use CSS to maximize the usability and effectivity of web sites by visiting an online Web design Philippines site.

Use of Tables in Modern Day Web Design
Because of the term “tableless web design”, some have interpreted this design strategy as an unconditional repudiation of all tables in web design. This has caused some to avoid tables even when tables are appropriate. Using divisions to simulate a table for the display of tabular data is as much a design flaw as using tables to simulate a division. Some sources clarify this distinction by using the more specific term “tableless web layout”.
On the other hand, using tables in web design, although most common, does not necessarily equate to using the table element (and related elements) defined in HTML 4.0. CSS also specifies a “table model” which allows the semantics of “tabular representation” to be applied: the “display: table” element. In this way, the decision and definition for tables is transferred from HTML to CSS. One reason this distinction is sometimes overlooked is because of the lack of support for the CSS table model in Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 8 is the first version of the browser to support the CSS table model.

About the Author

Margarette Mcbride is a copywriter of Optimind Web Design and SEO, a web design and seo company in the Philippines. Optimind specializes in building and promoting websites that are designed for conversion..

Cms Web Designers

cms web designers

Web Design & Development; Numerous Approaches & Benefits Of It!

Although the art of web design and development may sound little simple and easy going, but this belief is far away from the reality because there are many are many approaches to web design and web development. However, what plays a leading role in the development of a site is its theme and purpose. For example, if the purpose of a business is to spread information and awareness among the people then suggestively its design should be little informative and in sync with the information. If the purpose of the website is to sell products and services then its design has to be from selling point of view and sales undertone. Apart from the above mentioned, there are many other factors that are of importance for example, graphics and images that are presented on a website also play a crucial role, thereby deciding the look of the site and feel of the site.

Thus in simple words it can be said that there are many factors that leads to making of a site beautiful and attractive. However, it is worthy enough to be stated that websites are perfect representative of a business/organization in the vast world of internet, thus it is very necessary for you to pay attention on every minor detail whenever you think of getting web design services. So either you want your website to be generated by web cms or from the old conventional way, you need to properly analyze what all things you actually need to incorporate in it, be it the images, graphics or any other type of designing or functional element.

Never-the-less, it needs to be mentioned that effective web designing is the only one that has a perfect combination of beauty and functionality in it. Also because a perfect website is indeed the one that is highly functional to provide optimum level of comfort to the users and also beautiful enough to catch and retain their attention. It is because of this reason ethical web development and designing (like web design Hong Kong) incorporates a framework to visualize and conceptualize the idea and later for bringing them into action.

Some of the factors that play a promising role in website designing are:
•    Theme of the website.
•    Purpose of the site.
•    Target audience.
•    What products or services it will be offering.
•    Latest technologies it aims to use.
•    Functionalities it has to offer.
•    Color combination, images, graphics, font size, title text.
•    Budget and many more.

These factors not only contribute heavily to effective web design and development, but also make it smoothly accessible for the users and online visitors, thereby enabling it to attract more of the targeted traffic and add to the business.

About the Author

Ben Ma, the author of above article has written various articles related to web development, web design, web cms. Find out more and relevant information about web design & development, content management system, ecommerce solution by visiting http://www.source.com.hk/

Web Content Designer

web content designer
How to get out of Web Design/Development?

Hello, I am in need of some advice on how to change jobs/careers out of web site design and development. I have had various temp contract jobs over the past 2 yrs and I am tired of the job security. It seems to me that in 2007, with all this cheesy myspace, youtube, and user generated content, web design is a very broad term, and amateur designers with no background are using the web for crap, and on the other side their is too much software, languages to learn, and each back-end web project is various, to focus on 1 thing, just redudant content management and uploading through an interface. And alot of jobs now are 20hrs.prt time, web designer/SEO, or 20 freelance asp.net programming on some stupid intranet, not even worth being a full-time employee.
In everyones opinion, is this type of work worth a day job, or just part, contract, remotely from home?
Also, how can you transfer into another type of work , when all your skills are web-related?
Need serious professional advice.

I feel your pain. Even when you do get a good, interesting project, your client changes everything enough that your design goes down the drain and looks like cr@p. There are still a steady stream of businesses just now getting on the web, but if you don’t build an interface for them to update the site, then you’re stuck doing all their updates forever. With the thousands of templates available for $50-60 it can be hard to charge what your time is worth to design smaller sites. You get the people who say, “my nephew can do my site for $100!”

I think the best thing to do with your web skills is work on projects of your OWN. Build an affiliate site and sell someone else’s products or come up with something that will enable you to sell advertising on your site. Working for yourself on your own projects is a lot more fun. I know you still need something that pays the bills, but you can easily do your own stuff and maybe a few outside projects from home if you are disciplined to work at home.

Maybe you can go more toward graphic design, which goes hand in hand with web skills. Or find a fun company to work for and work on their site. After about 6-7 years I’m turning down web projects right and left just to work on my own stuff for a change. Good luck!