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Web DesignFebruary 15, 2013 Re DesignHi All The site is going through a major Re design to bring it inline with 2013. Some things might stop working occasionally as we perform this upgrade but we will try and keep any disruption to a minimum. Mark
December 18, 2012 Web designing toolsWeb designing is often considered as an art. A website is the first thing which a potential user encounters related to any product or service and it depends on the design of the site to turn that potential into reality or otherwise. There are different tools and software available on the internet and combined with rich doses of inspiration and innovation, web designers can go a long way using some of them. Firebug is one of the most popular applications. This open source, in-browser web development tool for Firefox has many options such as on-the-fly HTML as well as CSS editing, a logging, analyzing and debugging Java console and a Document Object Model inspection application for quick verification of the elements, as well and their co-relations. It has become quite a rage, developing its own extensions like YSlow and FirePHP. Adobe Photoshop comes next in the popularity meter, for both Windows and Mac users. This graphic editor is useful for tweaking images, development of web graphics. What sets it apart is the wide array of tools and options this software has on offer. A designer can extend his imagination to the widest possible realm and Photoshop has the tool for his needs. Filters Brushes, Actions, Scripting and advanced features like Layer Comps and Revert are some of the most famous tools. Another of Adobe's masterpieces is the Dreamweaver, available for both Windows and Mac. A complete package, it includes syntax highlighting, an excellent code hinting, an FTP client, project and workflow manager and lastly, the Live View which is used for previewing the codes. A shareware tool for Mac OS, Panic Coda is an alternative which reduces the amount of applications required for website development, such as FTP client, CSS editor, etc. It has a one window system using a tabbed layout for editing, file transfers, SVN, CSS, and a highlight called 'Books', which embeds searchable books on the website. The simplicity and efficiency of the design ensured it bagged the Best Mac OS User Experience by Apple in 2007. Coming from the Adobe's stable, Adobe Fireworks is a useful vector graphics editor, available both for Windows and Mac users. Unlike Photoshop, this is developed specifically for web designing and makes the task of web layout prototyping and raster editing very easy. It has an option of 'slicing' the mock design to rapidly create prototypes and allows packaging of the design as a PDF file and optimization to make the entire process lightweight. This is of course, not an exhaustive list. Depending on one's style and preferences, the tools' choice can vary from person to person. Mark
July 17, 2012 Knit one Perl onePerl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Practical Extraction and Reporting Language is a common acronym used for Perl is a general-purpose UNIX scripting language to make report processing easier. The latest version to be released is Perl 6. Perl is one of the most commonly used programming languages used online. From the point of view of a non-programmer, there is not much difference between Java, Perl or even PHP. Perl hosting is widely influenced by the already existing technologies like the C programming language and is quite popular on Linux and UNIX platforms. It does not make use of system specific features Apart from being versatile enough to work on all main computing platforms, Perl can be used for advanced level programming also. Perl is successfully used in system administration, programming of network and graphics, etc and can also be used in apps that need database access. Perl is also a good option when it comes to encryption of sensitive information such as online transactions, safe and secure login, etc. Because of such features Perl hosting has become a viable option. Perl hosting allows you to make use of CGI Perl scripts. You can also take advantage of the in-built Perl modules with Perl hosting. Hosting companies that provide top-notch Perl hosting will make sure that the Perl scripts of the users is provided with optimized performance. Thus, the user will be able to make use of fast and reliable Perl hosting servers with Perl scripts.
June 9, 2012 Web Designing- an overviewThe internet has done something which is not so visible or expected from any other kind of societal innovation ever made, perhaps after the invention of wheel-redefining our lives. It has spawned off a wide range of professions which have been able to affect millions and giving a fresh outlet for the ever increasing creativity and innovation of man. One among those arts is the art of web designing. Web design is, broadly what the name suggests- the task of designing websites. It incorporates various disciplines which are used in this work of websites production, as well as their maintenance. Some of these various disciplines include web graphic design, interface design, user experience design, authoring and search engine optimization. Some designers perform each task by themselves and some work in groups, each member being assigned a particular task. It all boils down to designing the website to give it a proper expected front-end look, which we, as the website users will experience and interact with. With the birth of internet in 1989, the evolution in web design was natural. In the starting years, a line-mode browser was enough to view text pages on the World Wide Web. With the creation of the Mosaic browser by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, graphical design including images and sounds was incorporated in web designing for the first time. The proceeding years saw a change, both in terms of rules governing ownership of the internet as well as in terms of the end product-the websites. Cascade style sheets, Dynamic HTML and Javascript are some of the notable technological revolutions in the domain of web design, which have made it what it is today. The technology used in web designing depends on the stage of the production process it is being used for. Standardized mark up, either hand coded or WYSIWYG editing software generated are the tools used for creating websites. HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is the platform of web designing, the language in which the codes are to be written. eXtensible HTML (or XHTML) is a widely popular tool with much stress on accuracy. The latest version, HTML5, supporting XML serialization is available now. For the users to edit the contents of an existing site, there's Content Management System, which doesn't require the user to have any knowledge of the complex HTML. A designer should have a proper working knowledge of as many languages as possible, the common ones being HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and Flash and he performs the job of managing the visual aspect of the website, including the layouts, formatting etc.
June 5, 2012 User Interface DesignA user interface is the final front-end screen which is available for interaction by the user. This is the final display a web developer has on offer, and it should ideally be as lucid and comfortable as possible, to maximize the user experience. No wonder, it is also sometimes called 'user-centered design'. It basically depends on striking the balance between the technical and the visual aspects of the website. It should be flexible enough to allow any modifications or update in the future, and should do its job without any unnecessary frills and attention. The process of interface design involves a series of phases, each having its own preference order depending on the end product requirement. It starts with the functionality requirements gathering assembles a list of functions required by the system and the user needs. Then we have the user analysis, where the potential users are evaluated in various parameters such as their usage of the website, its essentiality in their lifestyle, their expectations in terms of the visual styling of complexity, etc. The information architecture designs the process flow of the system and prototyping develops wireframes, either paper prototypes or interactive screens. The prototypes are the most basic look of the intended site and focus mainly on the layout of the system. Interface design has undergone a lot of research and debate, particularly on fixing the standards for designs. The discussions have resulted in an IFIP user interface reference model, which includes four dimensions-input/output, dialogue, technical/functional and organizational dimension. Research has shown that a variety of programming for GUI can be made possible by ways other than writing the code.
May 17, 2012 Web designing toolsWeb designing is often considered as an art. A website is the first thing which a potential user encounters related to any product or service and it depends on the design of the site to turn that potential into reality or otherwise. There are different tools and software available on the internet and combined with rich doses of inspiration and innovation, web designers can go a long way using some of them. Firebug is one of the most popular applications. This open source, in-browser web development tool for Firefox has many options such as on-the-fly HTML as well as CSS editing, a logging, analyzing and debugging Java console and a Document Object Model inspection application for quick verification of the elements, as well and their co-relations. It has become quite a rage, developing its own extensions like YSlow and FirePHP. Adobe Photoshop comes next in the popularity meter, for both Windows and Mac users. This graphic editor is useful for tweaking images, development of web graphics. What sets it apart is the wide array of tools and options this software has on offer. A designer can extend his imagination to the widest possible realm and Photoshop has the tool for his needs. Filters Brushes, Actions, Scripting and advanced features like Layer Comps and Revert are some of the most famous tools. Another of Adobe's masterpieces is the Dreamweaver, available for both Windows and Mac. A complete package, it includes syntax highlighting, an excellent code hinting, an FTP client, project and workflow manager and lastly, the Live View which is used for previewing the codes. A shareware tool for Mac OS, Panic Coda is an alternative which reduces the amount of applications required for website development, such as FTP client, CSS editor, etc. It has a one window system using a tabbed layout for editing, file transfers, SVN, CSS, and a highlight called 'Books', which embeds searchable books on the website. The simplicity and efficiency of the design ensured it bagged the Best Mac OS User Experience by Apple in 2007. Coming from the Adobe's stable, Adobe Fireworks is a useful vector graphics editor, available both for Windows and Mac users. Unlike Photoshop, this is developed specifically for web designing and makes the task of web layout prototyping and raster editing very easy. It has an option of 'slicing' the mock design to rapidly create prototypes and allows packaging of the design as a PDF file and optimization to make the entire process lightweight. This is of course, not an exhaustive list. Depending on one's style and preferences, the tools' choice can vary from person to person. Mark
January 23, 2011 Choosing Your LookThere are, literally, millions upon millions of possibilities for how to make your website look so that it not only reflects you or your company, but offers the best experience to your visitors. This results in more visitors and more revenue for you. If you choose a look that is really neat but hard to read, you will alienate visitors and lose revenue. Here are some tips on what to do and not to do when it comes to website design. Background If this is a business blog or website, you want to go with a light background such as white. This always makes it easier to read black lettering. If you choose a dark background you run the risk of it being too dark for the reader to stick with for any length of time, as it's harder on the eyes to read white lettering than it is black. Also, choose background images carefully because they can slow down the site and make the text hard to read in some areas. Text Make sure your text is easy to read and does not conflict with the background of the site at all. Also, when creating text links, make those in colors that will stand out to a small degree, don't use a color that is too close to the text color because people will not be able to see the link very well. Lastly, keep the font to a size that is easy to read but not so big that it looks odd, 10pt or 12pt is about the size you want. Layout The first thing you need to remember about web design is that people are coming to your site for information and they do not want to spend time trying to figure out where the important stuff is located. Make the layout easy to use and follow. The more, shall we say, interesting, the layout of the site the harder it can be to figure where stuff is. Graphics Keep graphics to a minimum if you can. This, of course, does not apply to product images, as people will want to see those. You don't want a lot of unnecessary graphics clogging up the pages and you really want to stay far away from animated gif files. These are normally very poorly done and convey a sense that the site is run by an amateur.
September 2, 2010 Corporate Identity Logo DesignWhat is Corporate Identity Logo Design?
August 1, 2010 Why you should ask to see a website design portfolioA website design portfolio is package of completed websites done by and kept by a web designer. Today a website design portfolio can be kept electronically either on a website or can be obtained by requesting it from the web designer. A website design portfolio is important for many reasons and any good, experienced website designer will have one. Website designers keep their website design portfolio updated because this is the proof of their abilities in web design. If you ask a prospective designer to let you see their website design portfolio and they cannot produce one, ask yourself why not? Even a new designer should be able to produce a website design portfolio of sample sites completed. For a serious website designer, a website design portfolio is the selling point to new customers. If you are planning on getting a website or improving the one you have, ask the graphic/website designer to show you a website design portfolio of previous work. Not only will the contents of the website design portfolio highlight the person's skills, it may also give you ideas for your own site. It is your money and you have the right to see the website design portfolio before committing to employing someone to design your website.
March 8, 2010 Website Logo DesignThe Ins and Outs of a lonely Website Logo Like any other type of branding, your website logo design stamps your identity on the mind of your visitors and customers. Customers often identify a company by its logo, so a website logo design should capture the values and services of the company. Ours says quite a lot even if it is abstract. A great website logo design is one way to get ahead of the competition. Such a logo does not have to be complicated or overdone to say what you want it to say, but it must be memorable. A well done website logo design can act on the subconscious of customers so that the first company they think of in your line of business is yours. No serious online business should operate without a website logo design that does the following: signify the company's values and services, and ultimately appeal to the target audience. The wrong website logo design can convey the wrong message and drive customers away. If you aim to appeal to young, hip customers you want to use a website logo design that they can relate to. On the other hand, if you are aiming for a sophisticated crowd, then your website logo design should be simple and classy. The most beautiful website logo design can be rendered useless if it is targeted at the wrong audience. Remember your website logo deisgn should first and foremost show professionalism and instill brand loyalty.
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