dig-tech-webdesign

Research: First Steps for Designers

2009-06-08T15:44:00.000-07:00

Research: First Steps for Designers

By Elliot Jay Stocks

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Elliot Jay Stocks

Always aspiring to create a unique look that's out of the ordinary, Elliot Jay Stocks's design is frequently featured in online and offline publications. His work is showcased on various design inspiration web sites, where it's used as an example of how accessible web design can still look beautiful. Elliot is also known to write about design trends, issues, and techniques for industry-leading publications such as Practical Web Design and Computer Arts Projects. He can be seen regularly at design conferences around the globe, taking to the stage as both a speaker and a workshop host.

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In his new book, Sexy Web Design, Elliot Jay Stocks shares the methods he uses to create stunning web interfaces—and one of the most important steps is to do some research. In this sample from the book, Elliot explores different ways to gather inspiration and cool ideas for your next project.

We’ve been hired by an events promoter to build a website for an upcoming event for Web industry professionals. The goal is for the visitor to buy an “access all areas” ticket for the event; the design should have a huge impact on users when they visit, the interface should be usable and clutter-free, and they should be really impressed by what they see. But before we even think about touching Photoshop, we need to do some research.

Let’s begin with the first logical step, and analyze the brand values associated with the event. These in turn will be the core messages that the site needs to convey. Let’s imagine we ask our client for some brand values, and they give us the following ideas to work with:

fun and exciting: more than just a conference
credibility: advice from the absolute experts
inventive and innovative: a group of creative people open to new ideas

Already that might start conjuring up some stylistic ideas in our minds, but let’s leave that for the moment. We should be asking ourselves: what makes up an event site? Our client has yet to specify the actual pages they want, so we’ll help them out by brainstorming:

Home: an introduction to the event; leads people into other parts of the site
Bookings: to sell the ticket types
Schedule: for details about the event
Speakers: an easy glance at the experts involved
Venue: where the event is located and the facilities available
Sponsors: may appear in the sidebar or footer, rather than a page of its own
Community: parties, links to social networks, photos, and so on

Let’s take a look some of the values we want to convey with our site, and take a peek at how other event web sites go about it.

The Element of Fun

Events—or, more specifically, the kind we like to have in the web community—tend to emphasize the convivial aspect. Who would’ve thought that people like to hang out with their friends and colleagues for a social drink?

With the fun element being such an important selling point, it makes sense for us to give this a lot of prominence on our web site. Although it’s important to stress the knowledge that can be gained at such events, we all know that we’re just as interested in the parties! That’s why we’ll suggest to our client that a whole page should be dedicated to social gatherings happening around the event, with the imagery of the site portraying a fun, party-like atmosphere.

Gravitas and Authority

But we mustn’t get carried away with all this fun malarkey. We need to make it clear that this is a credible, serious event, too. Otherwise, how else are delegates going to convince their bosses to pay for this out of their training budget? The web site for Web Directions North, shown below, is neat, clean, and means business.

Going to an event is meant to be an educational experience, especially when a workshop is involved. The Sidebar Workshops site we see in the figure below does this well by explicitly stating What You’ll Learn right near the top of the page, and again right underneath the registration information. As well as the prominent position, the text is short and easily digestible: a nice, memorable chunk to take away.

Inventive and Innovative

Our client also wants us to ensure that the design suggests a feeling of invention and innovation. One way to present this idea with the most impact will be to create a design that breaks the rules slightly, whether that’s in terms of color, layout, or type. As we look around for inspiration for our design, we’ll be sure to keep our eyes out for examples that exemplify this goal. The real opportunity for trying something new will come later, however, when it’s time to plan the aesthetics of the design.

Achieving a Balance: Information and Atmosphere

Balancing the display of information while conveying the right atmosphere is a huge challenge.

When I designed the Future of Web Applications (FOWA) Miami 2008 site, I attempted to get the best of both worlds by giving the site a fun kind of feel with the beach in the background, but keeping the information neatly organized in the foreground. You can see this on the schedule page in Figure 1.3, with the clear separation of time slots and information. We decided that it would be more helpful if I designed some icons to visually indicate each type of session; that way, users could clearly see if it was a presentation, a lunch break, or a party, and so on. This allowed for the opportunity to throw a bit more of the playful feeling into the mix, so I threw in some little dudes.

The Sidebar guys kept the schedule looking fairly businesslike on their Workshops site, seen in Figure 1.4, but it still looks terrific, and is a great example of attention to detail.

What Matters the Most?

If you think about what might be the most important information relating to an event, you might say date, location, and price—but in all likelihood there are other elements that entice potential attendees.

Most events’ web sites recognize celebrity appeal and make their big-name speakers as obvious as possible, like dConstruct, shown in the figure below. The reverse is also true: if the event lacks many web personalities, they’ll play down the speaker list. Sometimes the speaker list is so unwieldy that they choose to exclude it from the homepage altogether, and instead focus on more general information, as demonstrated by the South by Southwest Interactive homepage below.

Venues and locations can sometimes be a drawcard for delegates. And when the location is also a popular holiday destination like Miami, then you should really shout about it.

Brand Consistency

Brand consistency is the goal of keeping a consistent look, feel, and message across all of a company’s communications, including its web site. Depending on the project, you could find yourself in one of a number of potential situations. Let’s take a look.

From Scratch

If the brand for the event is yet to exist, then our site will be providing the beginnings of a defined experience and acting as a style guide for other events to follow. Be mindful that limits may still apply, though: this might be the first event, but it should probably tie in with already established concepts by the company. That might translate to a simple action like incorporating the parent company’s logo into the footer, or it may be more complex: there could be a particular set of style guidelines that we have to follow, such as a color scheme or font.

Redesign

If previous site designs exist, then you should maintain consistency, but each event could have its own voice, or theme. You can use previous versions of the site as a guide to design elements you could reuse. Perhaps you could use a different color palette, yet still maintain a similar design template.

Tie-ins

You may need to create a design that closely ties in with a previously established identity. The An Event Apart web site seen below has its own branding, but incorporates the exact same look and feel of its sister site, A List Apart. Rather than taking only small elements of the design patterns as you might find when a child site is borne of a parent company, the two are treated as equals: two sides to the same coin.

For our project, we’ll need to incorporate the company logo of the organization running the event—but we’ll have free rein when it comes to the actual event branding, since it’ll be the first of its kind (that is, the first scenario—From Scratch—above). This will demonstrate how you can be creative while still operating within a few guidelines. Guidelines are good, by the way: they take away some of the scare factor of a completely blank canvas!

Inspiration Resources

So far we’ve been looking to other events’ web sites for inspiration, but we don’t have to stick to that niche. It’s become quite popular to collect examples of first-rate design and archive them as sets on Flickr, an image-sharing service. To start off, check out Patrick Haney’s massive collection, and the Web Design Inspiration Flickr pool which he administers. For even more Flickr sources, check out Vandelay Design’s list of 99 Flickr groups for design inspiration. And numerous web sites exist, such as Smashing Magazine and UI Pattern Factory, that are excellent sources of interesting design examples.

Atmosphere Inspiration

Let’s get an idea of the kind of atmosphere we’d like our site to have—the feeling we evoke through color, subject matter, and texture. You may be familiar with the concept of a mood board, which describes a general collection of images, textures—almost anything that conveys the same mood you want to achieve. Let’s take the term wooden: a traditional mood board might entail, for example, cutting out images of wooden furniture from catalogs or photographs of trees from magazines, and then laying them down on a canvas to make a montage.

Oh, and by the way, it’s unnecessary to use an actual board—any surface (physical or virtual) will do! There is even a variety of software tools available to help you create your own mood boards if you want to do so digitally. The figure below shows a mood board created in Photoshop from public domain and Creative Commons-licensed images found on the Web.

Collating a photo set on Flickr is akin to the action of creating a mood board, particularly when researching atmosphere. I’ve collected some, which you’ll see below.

Composition Inspiration

We aim to create a unique and interesting web site, setting it apart from the kind of site you see every day. A noteworthy way to stand apart from the other sites is to think of an unusual composition or layout. We'll need to take a few risks in the interests of originality, so I’ve been collecting design examples which follow the same mantra. Of course, we’ll still be mindful of the site’s usability—it’s important to stick with what users will understand—but you’ll see that even a little thinking outside the box can go a long way. Here’s my composition set on Flickr:

Functionality Inspiration

Our site will contain a number of functional elements, like navigation mechanisms, a ticket purchase form, a schedule, and plenty more. It’s useful to look at all the different ways other designers have chosen to implement each of these elements.
Chris Messina has been collecting examples of user interface (UI) design on Flickr for years now, and his collections go beyond pure inspiration into the realm of an indispensable resource. You’ll also find a wealth of UI examples collected at Pattern Tap, where users have collected, tagged and commented on widgets from all over the Web.

Look Outside the Web

I’m a keen believer in the idea that if you only use web sites for inspiration, you’ll only ever build a web site that looks like other web sites. Of course there’s nothing wrong with that—it’s essential that a web site looks and behaves like one—but you risk your design growing stale if you search for stimuli in only one place.

There’s a whole world out there full of outstanding design—architecture, fashion, product, packaging ... why confine yourself to one medium and limit your creative potential? Take your trusty camera and go for a walk—collect photos of signs, textures, anything that grabs your fancy. Doodle in a notebook whenever you have an interesting idea. Before you know it, you’ll have a huge collection of inspiring material from the real world.

If you look at the world of print design in particular, you’ll see most of the same principles of web design at work. After all, the new discipline of web design is derived from years of print design tradition, but with a few of the limitations and freedoms reversed. So there’s still plenty of inspiration we can take from the print design world to better inform what we can achieve on the Web. I’ve collected some offline examples in—you guessed it—another Flickr set, shown below.

Collection Tools

I’ve been saving interesting and inspiring snippets in my Flickr profile, but it’s not the only way.

RealMac Software—the team behind web development application RapidWeaver—have recently released LittleSnapper, a Mac application that allows you to collect sources of inspiration from the Web and share them with your peers. It’s a nifty new tool for Mac-based designers, and one I’d heartily recommend.

For Windows users, TechSmith’s Snagit application captures screenshots and screen images, with a library you can use to organize your screenshots by tags, URLs, and date.

Then there’s Evernote, suitable for both Mac and Windows, an all-encompassing note-keeping application that you can access from just about everywhere, thanks to versions for your desktop, phone, and web browser. You can create, upload, and save images, text and audio, and if there’s text contained within the image, Evernote’s optical character recognition (OCR) engine will identify it and make it searchable. That's very handy for when your notes archive becomes rather large!

Research: an Ongoing Process

Research is one of the most valuable ways to spend your time as a designer. Keep your eyes and mind open, and let yourself be influenced as much as possible. Ultimately, the more research you do, the more likely your design will be a success.

If you've enjoyed this excerpt from Sexy Web Design by Elliot Jay Stocks, then you'll love the complete sample chapter. Even better, buy the book and begin creating stunning web interfaces today.

The Best Structure for your Flash Site

2009-06-08T15:39:00.000-07:00

The Best Structure for your Flash Site

By Mark Angeletti

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Mark Angeletti

Mark runs Search-This.com, a resource site for Internet marketing and web development. He also enjoys talking about faith, music, and all things web-related on his blog, What a Savage.

Mark Angeletti has written 4 articles for SitePoint with an average reader rating of 8.

View all articles by Mark Angeletti...

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Adobe's (formerly Macromedia's) Flash application is, according to them, "The industry's most advanced authoring environment for creating interactive web sites and digital experiences." However, many users have trouble structuring their site efficiently within Flash.

When Flash is opened, a blank canvas appears, and a single layer with multiple blank frames displays, waiting to be used, as you can see in the image below. There's little guidance on how to proceed, and many different directions that one can take. So it's easy to see why users can become confused.

Over the past six years of working with Flash and helping others with their own Flash projects, one thing has become clear to me: no two Flash web sites are laid out the same. Sadly, over 90% of the Flash sites I've seen are not structured efficiently; some are horribly inefficient. While there may be no one right way to structure a Flash web site, some ways certainly are better than others.

Keep in mind that when I say "structure" I'm not talking about how your web site looks; we don't care how your web site looks, at least, not in this article. Structure is about setting up your Flash site with Keyframes, ActionScript and MovieClips, and controlling the Flash playhead. Good structure can make your site load faster, make it easier to manage and update, and keep unexpected things from happening. A bad structure can increase load times, make it painful to make changes in future, and cause unexpected headaches. The principles explained in this article apply to all Flash site designs.

In this article, we'll develop a navigation system. Though it might seem trivial, this will serve as a good example for this article and the techniques can be applied to any project you're working on, be it a full Flash web site, a Flash poll, or a Flash RSS reader. Incidentally, I've created all of these in the last month, and all exhibit the structure that we'll see here.

Now is a good time to go ahead and download the necessary files so that you can follow along. That code archive contains a Flash FLA file, an XML file, a CSS file and a PNG image.

Inside the .fla

Once you open the navigation.fla file, you'll immediately notice how empty it looks. This file contains but 2 layers spanning 4 frames. Almost all my Flash 'creations' have a similar structure: typically no more than 5 frames and a handful of layers. If your Flash structure looks like the one shown in the image below, you're doing something wrong -- it's a good thing you're reading this article.

Let's start with a tip: Never use Scenes. Scenes can cause unexpected results from the playhead. The playhead doesn't really move from scene-to-scene gracefully. Depending on your Flash site, you may or may not notice this. But, if you're playing a music file and your playhead moves to another scene, you can witness problems as the song skips. For this reason, you won't find more than one scene in our file.

Let's examine each frame one by one.

Frame 1

Frame 1 is always -- and only -- used for setting global variables. This works well, as the playhead hits this frame first, sets our globals and moves on to the next frame. We never return to frame 1, ever. It's important always to control the Flash playhead and know where it's located at all times. Now, let's look at the code:

var xmlFile:String = "navigation.xml"; var cssFile:String = "navigation.css"; var nCounter:Number = 0; var yPosition:Number = 0; var nTotalButtons:Number = 0; var astrImages:Array = new Array(); var astrText:Array = new Array(); var astrLinks:Array = new Array(); var image_mcl:MovieClipLoader = new MovieClipLoader(); var mclListener:Object = new Object(); // Formats our textField var my_css = new TextField.StyleSheet(); // fun with filters (new in Flash 8) import flash.filters.DropShadowFilter; var distance:Number = 2; var angleInDegrees:Number = 45; var color:Number = 0x000000; var alpha:Number = .8; var blurX:Number = 2; var blurY:Number = 2; var strength:Number = 1; var quality:Number = 3; var inner:Boolean = false; var knockout:Boolean = false; var hideObject:Boolean = false; var filter:DropShadowFilter = new DropShadowFilter(distance, angleInDegrees, color, alpha, blurX, blurY, strength, quality, inner, knockout, hideObject); var filterArray:Array = new Array(); filterArray.push(filter);

Here we see our global variables: some strings, some numbers, and some arrays -- your typical variables. But, wait. Some not-so-typical variables are also present: a MovieClipLoader, a StyleSheet and a Filter.

The MovieClipLoader class allows us to implement listener callbacks that provide status information while SWF, JPEG, GIF, and PNG files are being loaded into movie clips. This is a lot handier than the dated loadMovie() class, which failed to provide us with any information on how much of our file had already been downloaded. We'll use the MovieClipLoader class later to load our button image.

The StyleSheet class lets you create a StyleSheet object that contains text formatting rules for font size, color, and other styles. We'll use this StyleSheet in frame 4 to format the text on our navigation buttons.

Filters are new to Flash 8; they allow us to add some cool effects to our objects. For example, we can apply drop shadows, blurs, glows and bevels to objects. We'll apply the drop shadow filter to our text field later. Some will say, "Big deal. If I want a drop shadow I could use Photoshop or Fireworks for that." You could, but then your text would no longer be dynamic, as ours is.

Keep in mind that all the components that make up our Flash site don't reside in Flash. Perhaps I should have used an exclamation point instead of a period for that last sentence? Let me say it again, "All the components that make up our Flash site don't reside in Flash!" This approach allows for easy modification later. If, for example, I no longer like the image chosen for my buttons and I want to swap it out, that's no problem. Or maybe I want to have the button say something different, or perhaps I want to add or remove a button later. Neither will be a problem; in fact, I won't even have to open Flash to make these changes. That's very handy indeed, especially when you're creating a project for someone who doesn't have Flash, or much in the way of technical knowledge.

Before we move on to frame 2, notice our 3 arrays. These arrays will store the data for our buttons. Once our XML file has been parsed successfully, each array will be filled in with the proper data. This happens in frame 2.

Frame 2

To recap, what was the main purpose of frame 1? If you said, "Global variables", you get a gold star. If not, run down to Starbucks and get some coffee and come back.

The main purpose of frame 2 is to gather external data -- typically, literal files in the form of XML. If you haven't looked at our navigation XML file, this would be a good time to do so. This article is not intended to teach you XML, so just take a look at the structure and what's in there. We have a total of 4 buttons; each button is assigned an image, some text and a link.

A note to all you non-Flash 8 users: you won't be able to use a PNG image. You'll have to use the provided JPEG image and make the changes in the XML file. Previous versions of Flash are only able to load JPEG files.

Now, let's look at the code in frame 2. I'll break it down as we go.

var xmlData:XML = new XML();

We start by instantiating a new XML object and call it xmlData. The XML object contains all the methods and properties we will need in order to work with XML data in Flash.

xmlData.ignoreWhite = true;

Flash will read all spacing contained within the XML file, including empty text nodes. As this is not the desired result, we simply tell Flash to ignore white space.

xmlData.load( xmlFile );

This line loads an XML document from the specified URL. Remember, xmlFile was declared in frame 1 and set to "navigation.xml." Because our FLA file resides in the same directory as our XML file, we need only give the name. Had our XML file been located in a directory other than the one that houses our FLA file, we'd have included a relative path.

The load process is asynchronous; it does not finish immediately after the load() method is executed. When the load() method is executed, the XML object property loaded is set to false. When the XML data finishes downloading, the loaded property is set to true, and the onLoad event handler is invoked.

xmlData.onLoad = loadXML;

Here we set the onLoad event handler to call our function loadXML. Let's look at the function:

function loadXML(loaded) { if (loaded) { var xnRootNode:XMLNode = this; trace( xnRootNode ); // number on buttons nTotalButtons = xnRootNode.firstChild.childNodes.length; // fill arrays for (var i = 0; i astrImages.push(xnRootNode.firstChild.childNodes[i] .childNodes[0].firstChild.nodeValue); astrText.push(xnRootNode.firstChild.childNodes[i] .childNodes[1].firstChild.nodeValue); astrLinks.push(xnRootNode.firstChild.childNodes[i] .childNodes[2].firstChild.nodeValue); } //everthing is loaded; we can move on gotoAndStop(3); }

This function runs only when the XML file has finished downloading and the loaded property is set to true.

If the XML file has completed loading, we execute the following code:

var xnRootNode:XMLNode = this;

We create an XML node variable (xnRootNode) and set it equal to this; this being the XML data that was just loaded.

nTotalButtons = xnRootNode.firstChild.childNodes.length;

At this point we need to talk about searching our XML to locate the values we need. This is a good time to revisit our navigation XML file.

In order to retrieve values from an XML file, we step through the family tree until you find the desired value. So in our code, xnRootNode.firstChild.childNodes.length;, the first child, is

and it has 4 child nodes -- you guessed it, they're our 4

Building RIAs with the Adobe Flash Platform

2009-06-08T15:29:00.000-07:00

Building RIAs with the Adobe Flash Platform

By Andrew Muller

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Andrew Muller

Trainer, mentor, developer, blogger, and presenter, Andrew Muller has been involved with Rich Internet Applications in Australia since 2002. He's also a certified Adobe instructor for Flex, AIR, ColdFusion, Flash, and Connect, and an Ambassador and Community Expert for Adobe.

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The Flash that you thought you knew has changed. It’s grown up.

In this article, I’ll explain some of the technologies that make up the Flash Platform, how they fit together, and how you can use them to build RIAs. Pay attention, because there will be a quiz at the end! The first 200 people to submit their answers will receive a copy of The Adobe Flash Platform ActionScript Reference for Rich Internet Application Development (that’s the print version) delivered to their door for free, thanks to Adobe.

The transformation that Flash has undergone has been occurring for some time, and many developers are aware of it. Every day I hear of a developer building a powerful new application for the Flash runtime that performs tasks like connecting to enterprise solutions powered by SAP or Oracle—and all with the full blessing of those vendors. Flash has evolved beyond the Skip Intro button for which we used to hate it, and has become ubiquitous—helping the browser perform way beyond the text rendering that it was first built for.

It was Macromedia (back in 2002, in their pre-Adobe acquisition days) who coined the term Rich Internet Application (RIA). The introduction of this term coincided with the release of a set of new custom components for Flash MX, thus supplying Flash developers with a set of UI components and providing them with a means to build their own. Flash already contained the ability to make a call to a remote server without forcing a page refresh, but with the release of ColdFusion MX that same year came Flash Remoting, which allowed applications built with Flash to pass serialized data to the server via AMF (Action Message Format).

These two products—custom components for Flash and Flash Remoting—and the synergy that could be experienced by combining them has since been expanded many times in the six-and-a-half years since they were first released. Recently, these technologies have been termed the Adobe Flash Platform. This umbrella term describes a collection of Adobe products, including multiple runtimes, development tools, and servers.

Adobe Flash Platform (click to view image)

The Flash Runtime

The Flash Player is the cornerstone of the Adobe Flash Platform; it offers the developer a single, cross-platform runtime with all the capabilities of the Internet today. It supports more than just vector animation—it’s also a multimedia player. In fact, the majority of all online video today is delivered via Flash, with the capacity to offer true High Definition video via the same H.264 codec used in Blu-ray.

The runtime can communicate with application servers via web services, HTTP, and remote object calls without the need to perform a browser refresh. Additionally, the player has had VoIP capacity for many generations, and it’s possible to build and deploy collaborative applications with Flash that can include text chat, whiteboarding, and the sharing of desktops across operating systems.

A lot of effort has been invested into making sure that Flash-based RIAs work successfully for the wide variety of devices and operating systems. For example, Adobe and Google together have recently announced the successful implementation and development of a virtual user that Google uses to retrieve text from Flash content; this enables the content to appear in Google’s search results. Adobe is constantly improving the performance of accessibility within the Flash Player and its compatibility with screen readers for the visually impaired. Deep linking and browser history compatibility are features present in the open source Flex framework for Flash applications; these aim to eliminate the kind of navigation problems encountered with dynamic content in Ajax-based RIAs.

Adobe has successfully matured the Flash runtime in the short time that they’ve had it as a product. With each iteration, particularly Players 9 and 10, significant improvements in performance have occurred; Player 10 now offers hardware acceleration for advanced graphical effects. Flash Player 10 also introduces new functionality, including 3D effects, custom filters and effects, advanced text support, and dynamic streaming for improved video performance.

Flash Player 10 is the latest version of the browser plugin; it’s available for Windows, OS X, Linux, and Solaris. Flash Lite 3 is a scaled-down version of the runtime for use on mobile and handheld devices.

Look—up in the AIR!

And then there’s Adobe AIR—a new category of runtime that combines Flash Player 10 and WebKit (the web page rendering engine behind Safari and Chrome) into a stand-alone runtime capable of running offline applications. The runtime is available for Windows, OS X, and Linux.

Adobe AIR was introduced by Adobe mid-2008 after a lengthy public beta cycle. Developers can use their web application building skills to create apps for the desktop and deploy them via AIR. The AIR runtime incorporates functionality missing from the browser, such as access to the file system to create, delete, and maintain files and folders.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;SCRIPT language='JavaScript1.1' SRC="http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N5620.sitepoint.com/B3669301;abr=!ie;sz=300x250;ord=[unique-string]?"&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/SCRIPT&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;NOSCRIPT&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://ads.aws.sitepoint.com/phpadsnew/www/delivery/ck.php?oaparams=2__bannerid=941__zoneid=77__cb=c3fbababf1__maxdest=http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/N5620.sitepoint.com/B3669301;abr=!ie4;abr=!ie5;sz=300x250;ord=[unique-string]?" target="_blank"&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;IMG SRC="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/N5620.sitepoint.com/B3669301;abr=!ie4;abr=!ie5;sz=300x250;ord=[unique-string]?" BORDER=0 WIDTH=300 HEIGHT=250 ALT="Click Here"&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/A&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/NOSCRIPT&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Adobe AIR supports drag and drop interaction with the operating system, network connection detection, and SQLite for local storage of data; the latter can be easily searched with standard SQL queries. If Acrobat Reader is installed on the client machine, AIR will utilize that software package’s capabilities for rendering PDFs. A version of the AIR runtime for mobile and handheld devices has been hinted at by Adobe, although there’s yet to be a release date announced.

Of course, all of these tools are free to download, and Flash Player is bundled as part of a Windows and OS X distribution.

Development Tools for RIAs

Flash CS4 Professional is the latest iteration of the Flash authoring environment. Originally an animation tool, the Flash IDE can also be used to program Flash movies using ActionScript, an ECMAScript-based object oriented programming language. It has the necessary tools for ActionScript authoring, including an ActionScript editor and an advanced debugger. Flash CS4 is both a tool for designers and developers, and while it’s possible to create whole applications with Flash, Adobe has created a framework for Flash applications called Flex (check out some of the Flex tutorials on sitepoint.com).

Originally released as an enterprise platform (with an enterprise price to match), Flex is now a free, open source framework for building applications to run within the Flash runtime. Flex applications are authored in a combination of two languages:

MXML, a declarative XML-based language in which tags represent classes within the framework; it’s principally used for UI layouts and behaviors, and ActionScript 3, an object-oriented language typically used for client logic. Developers with a Java background will find ActionScript intuitive and may be tempted to author with it entirely.

The Flex framework contains over 100 extensible UI components. It can be downloaded for free as part of the free Flex 3 SDK, which also contains a stand-alone compiler.

Flex Builder (click to view image)

A number of open source frameworks have emerged to assist Flex application development. The most popular of these is Cairngorm, an open source project managed by Adobe. Others worth looking at include Mate, a tag-based, event-driven framework; and PureMVC, a lightweight ActionScript 3 framework for creating applications based on the model-view-controller concept.

While the Flex framework and Flex SDK are free, the Flex development tool, Flex Builder, is a commercial product (although it’s free for educational use). Flex Builder 3 is an Eclipse-based IDE, and is available as either a stand-alone application or as a plugin for Eclipse. There are versions of Flex Builder for both Windows and OS X, and a beta version is available for Linux.

Flex Builder supports the editing of MXML, ActionScript, and CSS files, including code completion, tag insight, and syntax coloring. It also includes a visual layout tool, to facilitate the positioning of components in a WYSIWYG environment.

Flex Builder is available in two editions, Standard and Professional. The Professional edition includes a charting library, performance profiling tools, and support for automated functional testing. Projects built with Flex Builder can be deployed either in the browser via the Flash Player, or as stand-alone applications via Adobe AIR.

Servers

A Flash application is able to retrieve data from a remote server via HTTP calls; this can be done with either of the Adobe tools mentioned above. With Flash MX, Macromedia introduced a once proprietary binary data transfer format for communication with an application server called Action Message Format (AMF); this has recently been made open source. AMF borrowed the means to describe the structure of data from the SOAP protocol; automatic translation of this format was provided with the Flash Remoting classes and service that was included in ColdFusion. AMF has also been reverse-engineered and is available for a number of application servers; AMFPHP, WebORB, and RubyAMF are examples of that reverse-engineering.

Adobe now also have an open source, Java remoting and web messaging technology that Flex and Adobe AIR applications can use to connect to Java server logic called BlazeDS. This uses the same AMF protocol mentioned above. BlazeDS integration has recently been added to the Spring framework to make Spring-powered RIAs with Flex front ends possible.

Adobe have additional server products that also support AMF; ColdFusion has been previously mentioned, while another is LiveCycle Data Services, which also includes Flex Messaging for real-time data push and publish/subscribe messaging.

The Adobe Flash Media Server group of products are also included within the Flash Platform. The Flash Media Interactive Server can be used to build Flash-based collaborative applications, which can include features like streaming Flash video, VoIP, chat, webcam chat, and online gaming. The Flash Streaming Media Server is capable of streaming both live and on-demand Flash video.

The Near Future

Adobe’s long-awaited technology preview, Thermo, was released to attendees at Adobe MAX in November 2008 under the new name, Flash Catalyst. This is an interaction design tool for RIAs that will be released as a public beta in the first half of this year. Flash Catalyst will import design comps created in Illustrator, Photoshop, or Fireworks, making use of a new interchange format introduced with all the CS4 design tools called FXG.

Flash Catalyst can convert the design elements in the artwork into design and interactive elements for an RIA project with workflow; this gives it the ability for an interactive element like a scrollbar to go back to Illustrator for some design tweaks to occur. Flash Catalyst converts elements like buttons or scrollbars into Flex custom components. Interactions and timeline events are added visually to projects in Flash Catalyst, but in reality the application is creating the whole project as MXML. Under the hood, Flash Catalyst is another Eclipse-based application just like Flex Builder.

Flash Catalyst is already listed as a part of the Flash Platform; the MXML that it produces is incompatible with Flex 3, but will be compatible with the next version, Flex 4 (code-named Gumbo), which is in public beta. Flex 4 has graphical enhancements including an implementation of FXG, and customizable components.

Another new project related to Flash that was released at Adobe’s annual developer conference MAX late last year was Alchemy; this is a research project that allows users to compile C and C++ code to run on Flash Player 10. There were quite a few good examples of how additional functionality could be added to Flash-based applications using existing libraries, including encryption, support for RAW digital photographs, and PDF creation.

Conclusion

Adobe’s Flash Platform offers the RIA developer a powerful, ubiquitous runtime in the Flash Player; within the browser it’s a case of code once, deploy everywhere, as there’s a version of the runtime for all major operating systems. The Flex open source framework gives developers the ability to build rich interactive applications to run in both the browser and on the desktop via Adobe AIR; it provides the ability to connect to data through a number of different connection types.

If you’re building a Rich Internet Application, and haven’t checked out the technologies that comprise the Adobe Flash Platform, then now is a good time to start. We’ll be publishing more articles on these topics over the coming months on sitepoint.com, so stay tuned!

In the mean time, test yourself on the contents of this article by taking the quiz. The first 200 people to submit their answers will receive a print copy of The Adobe Flash Platform ActionScript Reference for Rich Internet Application Development, delivered to their door for free, courtesy of Adobe. Take the quiz now!

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Andrew Muller

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Push Buttons In Photoshop

2009-06-08T15:25:00.000-07:00

Push Buttons In Photoshop

author_dougcloud (click to view image)

By Doug Cloud

Push buttons are a good, tactile addition to your Website. Not only can they enhance a clean, professional design, they can also add an element of tangibility, which can be important in the online environment.

This tutorial will show you how to make buttons that appear to "push down" when a visitor places their mouse pointer over them. While the steps below may seem excessive for making this kind of effect, it is important to note that this process creates a more crisp, clean, legible button image than those you will find proliferating the Web. Try it!

Step 1. Shape and Colour

Open Photoshop and create a new document that's 117px by 65px, resolution 72, in RGB mode, with a white background. Use the Zoom Tool (keystroke Z) and zoom in on your image by 400%. This will make working on the button easier.

Create a new layer and name it "Back", then take the Marquee Tool and draw a rectangular selection in the middle of the canvas. Make this selection 80 pixels long and 20 pixels wide (to see the size of your selection make sure the Info Palette is visible; if it isn't, go to Window > Info).

Choose the color you want the "Back" to be. In this tutorial I used a light sky blue (#0099CC). Make this your Foreground color and then hit Alt+Delete to fill the rectangle with the color. Finally, deselect (Ctrl+D).

1215_bar_1 (click to view image)

Step 2. Button Up

Create a new layer, and name it "Button Up". Take your Pencil Tool from the tool bar and make sure the tip size is set to one pixel. Make your Foreground color black.

With your Pencil, draw a rectangle similar to the one on the left using the Back layer as a guide -- right along the top, and three pixels from the bottom.

1215_bar_2 (click to view image)

Last of all, click the "eye" icon to turn off your Back layer, which will make it easier to do the next steps.

Step 3. Apply Gradient

Select your Magic Wand from the toolbar. In the Properties bar for the Wand tool make sure the Tolerance is set to 30, Contiguous is checked, and that Anti-aliased is off. Now select the inside of your rectangle.

1215_bar_3 (click to view image)

Now click on your Gradient Tool in the tool bar, and make sure that Foreground to Background is selected in the Properties bar. Set your Foreground color to #51CEF8, and your Background color to #0E6D8D.

1215_bar_4 (click to view image)

Draw your Gradient Tool from the bottom to the top, then deselect.

Step 4. Finish Button Up

Now take the Pencil again and use the same light blue color (#51CEF8) we used in Step 3 to draw a strip down the left side of your rectangle.

1215_bar_5 (click to view image)

Next, use the dark blue color (#0E6D8D) from Step 3 to draw a strip along the bottom and up the right side of your rectangle.

1215_bar_6 (click to view image)

Grab your "Button Up" layer and drag it down to the "Create a new layer" icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. Put this layer below the "Button Up" layer and name it "Button Down".

Turn the "Button Down" layer off for now by clicking the little "eye" icon next to it.

Step 5. Shadow

Create a new layer and place it below both your button layers. Name this one "Shadow".

Turn your "Back" layer on again by clicking the "eye" icon next to it. Use the Pencil to draw a "shadow" similar to mine using the dark blue color (#0E6D8D) from Step 3.

I turned off the "Button Up" layer so you can see the exact shape of the shadow I drew.

1215_bar_8 (click to view image)

Here's how the shadow looks with the "Button Up" layer on.

1215_bar_7 (click to view image)

Step 6. Finish Off

Now turn the "Button Up" layer off and turn the "Button Down" layer on. Select your Move Tool from the toolbar and press the "down" arrow key on your keyboard twice. Now turn this layer off and turn the "Button Up" layer back on.

1215_push_anim (click to view image)

Ok, that's it for making the buttons. Now let's create some text and then save the buttons for use on your Web page.

Step 7. Create Text

For the text, I used the Verdana font, size 10, in white with no anti-aliasing (when working with a font of this size I never use anti-aliasing). I also added a drop shadow to make the words stand out from the button a little more. You can add any words you like at this stage; perhaps use the names of the pages to which the buttons are going to link to (I'll use the word "About", as the button will like to my "About" page).

1215_bar_9 (click to view image)

Your layers palette should resemble the one shown here. Notice I have the "Button Down" and "Background" layers turned off.

1215_layers_linked (click to view image)

Now click on the small squares next to each of the visible layers to link them. Click on the small arrow in the upper right hand corner of the Layers palette and choose Merge Linked.

Tip: If you select a layer before you link it, the resulting merged layer will have that layer's name. For instance, on the left I've highlighted "About", and when all the linked layers are merged, the resulting layer is automatically named "About".

Step 8. Copying the File

Once you've merged the layers press the following keys in the order shown here:

Ctrl+A to select all
Ctrl+C to copy
Ctrl+N to create new document
Ctrl+V to paste

At the third step you can name your new document (for instance, as the file contains the About button in the "up" state, you might name it about_up).

1215_about_example (click to view image)

Now highlight your buttons file (clicking on the title bar will highlight it) and press Ctrl+Alt+Z (to Undo) until you get back to where you were in the Layer palette example in Step 7.

1215_layers_linked_b (click to view image)

Step 9. Button Down

Now we need to make the "down" state of our button.

Turn off the "Button Up" layer and turn on the "Button Down" layer. The first thing you'll need to do is move the word "About" so that when someone clicks the button on your Web page it will appear that both the button and the word "push" down.

1215_about_anime (click to view image)

Highlight the type layer that has the word About in it, select your Move Tool, and hit your down arrow key two times.

Now link the layers as you did in Step 7, and follow the directions in Step 8 to merge, copy, and paste into a new document. Name this new document about_down (or choose a name of your own).

Make sure you go back to your original button file and use Ctrl+Alt+Z to undo your changes back to the state in which your layers are not merged.

You should now have two separate documents -- one containing the about_up button,

1215_about_up_sample (click to view image)

and one containing the about_down button.

1215_about_down_sample (click to view image)

You will need to repeat these steps for each button you want to create. Remember to name each button accordingly. You can use different colors than the ones we used here -- just make sure your Back layer is always the same color as the background you'll be placing the buttons on.

Doug has been a commercial graphic designer for 23 years, and had his own comic strip for a while. He's been doing Web and graphic design work for the last 5 years.

Grungy Tech Effect

2009-06-08T15:21:00.000-07:00

Grungy Tech Effect

By Adam Polselli

Create a cool texture that's kind of grungy, kind of techy, and works really well for collages and backgrounds.

Software Required: Adobe Photoshop 7.0

Step 1 - the New Document

Create a new document, 300x500, with a white background. Set your colors to the default by hitting the "D" key on your keyboard. You want black as your foreground and white as your background.

Next, go to FILTER > RENDER > CLOUDS.

797_adam1 (click to view image)

Step 2 - Motion Blur

Go to FILTER > BLUR > MOTION BLUR, and use these settings:

Angle: 0
Distance: 55 pixels

Click OK. You should now have something that looks like this:

797_adam2 (click to view image)

Step 3 - Liquify

Next go to FILTER > LIQUIFY. Select the "Shift Pixels Tool" from the left hand toolbar and keep the default settings, Brush size: 64 and Brush pressure: 50. Now, using quick, sweeping strokes, begin at the top of your image and sweep back and forth across it with slightly overlapping strokes. It should take about 8-10 overlapping strokes to cover the whole image. If you mess up, don't panic! Simply click the "REVERT" button on the right side of the window.

797_adamliquify1 (click to view image)

If you've completed this step correctly, you should get something similar to the image below. Don't try to be exact -- this is an experimental step you can have fun with!

797_adam4 (click to view image)

Step 4 - Contrast

Now we need a little more contrast. Go to IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS > BRIGHTNESS/CONTRAST and use the following settings:

Brightness: 15
Contrast: 55

Click OK, and you should have something like this:

797_adam3 (click to view image)

Step 5 - A Little Colour

Now let's add a little color. We don't want to use too much, because we're trying to keep a sort of metallic, steely look, but we need enough color to add some interest. Go to IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS > HUE/SATURATION (Ctrl + U) and select the "Colorize" checkbox. I used the following settings to give it the look of cold steel, but feel free to experiment.

Hue: 218
Saturation: 13
Lightness: 0

Click OK.

797_adam5 (click to view image)

Step 6 - Accentuate Highlights

This step is optional -- I used it to accentuate the highlights and shadows. Simply go to IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS > REPLACE COLOR. With the eyedropper tool, go to your image and select a pure black. Then, in the "Replace Color" window, change the "Lightness" to -40. Leave Hue and Saturation alone, and click OK.

797_adam6 (click to view image)

Step 7 - Water Paper

Go to FILTER > SKETCH > WATER PAPER. Keep the default settings and click OK. There you have it! A cool, simple, and fun texture that you can use almost anywhere. Be sure to experiment with your own settings -- I guarantee you'll find something even better along the way. Now, if you'd like to use this as a corner background image on a Webpage, continue to the next step:

797_adam7 (click to view image)

Step 8 - Prepare for Web

If you'd like to use the image you just created as a corner background on a Web page, simply select the Eraser Tool, grab a big 200 px feathered brush, and erase the area around the bottom and left or right side of the image. You should get a nice graphic that you can place in the corner of a Webpage. Enjoy experimenting!

797_adam8 (click to view image)

When Adam isn't occupied with school work, he is busy with being an Advisor at the SitePoint Community Forums, adding to his design portfolio, and managing Get the Look and the rest of the Adam Polselli Network.

Airbrushing Landscapes

2009-06-08T15:16:00.000-07:00

Airbrushing Landscapes

By Daniel Piechnick

Not being much of an artist myself, I was surprised to realise how easy it is to make realistic miniature landscapes using the airbrush.

To start with, make a new layer, and use the selection tool to select a small circle, about 150 pixels in diameter. I've drawn the circle here, but you don't need to do that -- you just have to have to have a circular selection.

Now, select the airbrush, and set it to size 27 (or thereabouts).

Step 1. Roughly airbrush the lower part of the circle. Don't remove the light sections, as they add a bit of colour variation, and that accidental bump at the right can stay -- it could be useful as a hill.

Step 2. Get a light blue colour, and repeat the process to create the sky.

Step 3. Select the brightest yellow colour, then apply it to one spot for a few seconds to make a sun.

Step 4. To draw clouds, select the sky's colour (use the eyedropper, or Alt+Click). Then go to the colour picker and select a colour that's slightly lighter than the sky. Use this colour in a kind of circular scribble to create the cloud. To make the clouds more realistic, select another, similar colour, and colour over most of the clouds (if you take a closer look, you'll notice the right cloud contains two colours).

Step 5. To make a river, use a darker blue colour. Zoom in and use a smaller brush for the stream that tapers off to the horizon. As with the clouds, go over the river with a similar colour.

Step 6. Just for fun, I thought I might put in a pyramid to finish off. You'll need to zoom in and use a small brush to do this one. When you're finished, remember to use Stroke, to put a black outline around the circle.

That's it! I've used this technique to illustrate a couple of sites, and in the header for a couple of my sample sites. Happy airbrushing!

Daniel runs Pegasus Web Design Resources and works as a professional Web designer in South Australia.

Ion Fire Cloudbursts in Photoshop

2009-06-08T15:14:00.000-07:00

Ion Fire Cloudbursts in Photoshop

author_brianpoirier (click to view image)

By Brian Poirier

Ever want a neat effect like any of these?

797_fire (click to view image)

797_cloud (click to view image)

797_web (click to view image)

Would you believe they're all made the same way, except for one simple step at the end?

Well, this tutorial will show how you can make these types of effects (which I call "Ion Fire Cloubursts") in just a few easy steps, requiring no third party add-on filters. And the effect is easily customizable!

I'll assume that you know the basics of Adobe Photoshop (adding layers, using gradients, etc), and anyone with a basic working knowledge of Photoshop should be able to easily reproduce and expand on this method.

Step 1: A New Image

First off, make a new image, and add a new layer (for a total of two layers). Rename Layer 1 "Effects", and name Layer 2 "Clouds". Then, make the Cloud layer the active layer (it's where you'll do most of the initial work).

Note that the image can be of any size, but should be RGB with a transparent background. In this example I used PS 6 and made my image 500x500, 72 DPI. The images in this article were reduced to a 300x300 size for easy display, although some resolution and appearance of the effect is lost this way.

Step 2: Choose your Colors

Select two colors. Colors that are not similar are the best (i.e. don't pick two blues). These two colors will end up being the main colors of your effect (although some extras do get added in the process). I'll use the colors FFCC00 (a gold-like yellow) as the foreground color, and 330000 (a maroon) as the background for this example.

Next, use the Clouds filter (Render>Clouds). Then use the Difference Clouds twice (Render>Difference Clouds).

You should get an image that looks something like this:

797_stepno2 (click to view image)

Step 3: Applying Texture

Now run the Craquelure filter (Texture>Craquelure) with the settings in the following ranges:

Spacing: 70-100
Depth: 2-3
Brightness: 8-10

This adds some roughness and irregularity to the clouds.

Next, run the Polar Coordinates filter (Distort>Polar Coordinates). Choose "Polar to Rectangle" as the method.

Note, that using Polar Coordinates is not strictly necessary. However, if you want to make the 'flame'-like effects appear on some of the images, which looks much better, Polar Coordinates will help you achieve that effect.

Ok, now you should have an image that looks something like this:

797_stepno3 (click to view image)

Step 4: Grain and Ripple

The Grain filter is next (Texture>Grain). Use the settings 90, 20, vertical. You can adjust these settings a little and experiment for slight variations, but don't stray to far from the settings given here.

Follow with the Ocean Ripple filter (Distort>Ocean Ripple), with the settings of 9, 9. These too can be changed, but I find these settings work best. This filter can be run twice if you like for more distortion -- how much you should use will depend largely upon the size of your work, and the colors involved.

In the example below, I only used it once. Note that the actual image in Photoshop is much brighter than this reduced version.

797_stepno4 (click to view image)

Step 5: Set your Layers

Now set the layer to Color Burn (on your Layer's Palette). You can try some of the other settings as an experiment (Color Dodge, etc). I also use an Opacity of 100%, but can also be changed as needed.

Now select the Effects Layer and hit D on your keyboard to access the default colors (Black & White), and choose the Gradient tool.

Step 6: Gradient

Now here comes the fun part, where you can make whatever type of effect you want!

Use the gradient tool on the Effects layer. The type of gradient you choose, as well as the direction and the location of the gradient's placement, really matters. Depending on the type and placement, etc of your gradient, the following versions of the effect can be made:

This flame effect is made using the Linear Gradient from top to bottom:

797_fire (click to view image)

This cloud or nebula effect is made by switching the colors around (with white as the foreground), and using the Radial Gradient:

797_cloud (click to view image)

A line of fire, or burning bar, is made by keeping white as the foreground colour, and using the Reflected Gradient:

797_fireline (click to view image)

A Web effect can be made by playing around with the gradients. For this example, I used Foreground to Transparent gradients on a black-filled background:

797_web (click to view image)

The variations are endless, and combining different gradients together will allow you to make numerous versions and types of effects. Here are some other effects I created using the steps above, but with a little experimentation:

797_samp1 (click to view image)

797_samp2 (click to view image)

797_samp3 (click to view image)

797_samp4 (click to view image)

797_samp5 (click to view image)

The Number 1 Rule of Photoshop, and especially so in this tutorial, is to experiment and have fun! Enjoy!

Brian is a licensed professional private investigator and part-time Web designer in Houston, Texas. But to our Community members, he's better known as Steelsun. He can be contacted through his Website at Steel-Sun.com

Black and White to Colour

2009-06-08T15:12:00.000-07:00

Black and White to Colour

By Nick Mullen

Spruce up a standard black and white photo with a little color. Here's how it's done!

Step 1 - Create a Layer and Mask

In the layout pallet, drag "Layer 1" over the "create a new layer" button

This will replicate "layer 1" -- rename this layer "Girl Outline". Now you will need to add a mask

to this layer. If you have any colors selected in your color pallet, you'll notice that they are now black and white.

When using masks, black can't be seen through. This means that we can use black as an eraser, but we can also use white to un-erase a selection at any time.

The outline around the girl was created using the paintbrush at various brush sizes. If you're more comfortable using the pen tool, that will yield the same results.

Step 2 - Skin Tones

Now we have the main outline that we'll work with. Here are two methods by which you can accomplish the color on top -- I'll explain each of them on different layers.

The first thing to do is replicate the "girl outline" layer again, and re-name this layer "Skin". Go to image> adjust> hue/saturation> and select colorize.

Use the settings: Hue: 36 Saturation: 41 Lightness: 0 to get a nice peachy skin color. Notice in the Layer pallet below how the entire image has been colourised, yet in the full size image we can still see the grey background that's being masked.

Step Three - Hair

Now that the skin looks good, we need to fix the hair. Replicate the layer called "Skin" and rename it "Hair". For this step, we need to remove the face.

So click on the layer mask thumbnail for the hair layer, and fill the area of the face and arm with black. You'll be left with the beanie and the hair. Again go to image> adjust> hue/saturation> and select colorize.

Use the settings: Hue: 40 Saturation: 25 Lightness: 0 and cange the opacity to 80%.

Step 4 - Face

Next is to throw a little color on the face. Create a new layer, call it "Face", and select the paintbrush.

Now, using the color #CE0606, paint the lips. Then select white and paint the eyes.

Now, drop the opacity to 40% and change the layer blending to color. Click on "add mask", and just tidy the lips and eyes up a little. Why use a mask for this step? Good question -- it's really only a matter of preference. I personally try to use masks as much as I can so that I can change things later, and so I don't have to be as worried about precision on the actual layer.

I repeated this process for the cheeks using a light shade of pink (#FFC9C9) just under the eyes, lowered the opacity to 34%, and changed the layer blending to color. That's it!

Step 5 - Background

Select the "Girl Outline" layer and duplicate it. Rename this layer "Background" and move it to the top of the layer pallet.

Select the mask for this layer, and go to image> adjust> invert (CTRL+I). Due to the fact that the background in this image is so out of focus, I'll simply colourise the layer -- anything more and we might end up killing the image.

Select the "Background" layer thumbnail and go to image> adjust> hue/saturation> Then select colorize -- in this example I used Hue: 151 Saturation: 13 Lightness: 0. That's it! The effect is complete! Here's what you should have:

Nick Mullen has been researching affiliate programs for the last 6 months and is currently developing a resource for merchants and affiliates who want to maximise their affiliate space.

Back to School: The Elements of Design.

2009-06-08T15:10:00.000-07:00

Back to School: The Elements of Design.

author_itec (click to view image)

By Nick Mullen

The Elements of design truly affect everything we see -- and how we see it.

Comprised of:

Colour
Line
Mass
Movement
Space
Texture and
Value

the elements of design have been used by traditional artists as the basis for some of the most well respected and most admired artworks ever created. They're also common through out nature, as well as human design -- be it a logo, Website, brochure ...or anything else you can think of.

Colour

Colour is something you can't escape, and as it's something we all focus on day in, day out, it's fairly important that you understand at least this basic element.

Colour has 3 basic characteristics:

Hue - distinguishes one colour from another

Tone - affects the quality of brightness, lightness or darkness of colour

Chroma - affects the quality of saturation, or the intensity of the colour

Colours can affect what we think and feel: our moods. The reaction we have to a design -- anger, warmth, power, purity -- can all be bought into an image through the use of colour.

Black: The colour of authority and power.
White: Innocence and purity.
Red: Red is the most stimulating colour on the colour wheel. It can stimulate faster heart rate, influence rage and or anger, and can also stimulate appetite.
Blue: Blue invokes peace, tranquility and loyalty, but can also be cold and depressing.
Green: A difficult colour to master, yet it is one of the most relaxing (hence green rooms at TV stations). Dark green is masculine and conservative, and implies wealth.
Purple: is the colour of royalty, and gives the impression of luxury, wealth and sophistication.

797_colourwheel (click to view image)

The colour wheel was invented through the basic theory of bending the spectral range of light into a circle containing seven different colours.

Since the invention of the colour wheel, artists have agreed (no mean feat!) that it represents the easiest way to choose complimentary colours. Within the colour wheel there are three classes of colour:

Primary: These are believed to be the fundamental three colours. They cannot be created by combining any other colours on the wheel, and they form the basis for all other colours.

Secondary: Secondary colours are made with the following formula:

Primary+Primary=Secondary, for example:

Red + Blue = Violet
Purple, Red + Yellow = Orange
Blue + Yellow = Green

Secondary colours lie between the primary colours.

Tertiary: Tertiary colours are created with this formula: Primary+Secondary=Tertiary

Using Triads to Select Colour Schemes

Triads are colour schemes that are connected within the colour wheel by a triangle. Using the RGB hex value, you can easily create complementary colour schemes by shifting the values around in groups of two, like this: RRGGBB, BBRRGG, GGBBRR

Line

Lines are basically a combination of points packed in together to form a single object -- the line. Lines can be straight, curved or irregularly shaped.

The most common use of line is to control the flow, direction and speed of the viewer's eye. Vertical lines will stop the person's eye, and give a sensation of mass and volume. They can also convey power and strength.

Horizontal lines influence rest and relaxation, while diagonal lines are dynamic and active. Line has several variables that we as designers can use to cause different effects, including:

size
shape
position
direction
number
interval
density.

Mass

Any 2-dimensional object is called a shape, and any 3-dimensional object that has height, width, and depth is called a form. But don't be fooled! A design element that appears on-screen to have the 3 dimensions is only an illusion of form -- you have to be able to physically move an object around for it to truly be a form.

Most often mass is used for composition and to create patterns, though it can also be used to create an illusion of movement and rhythm through repetition. And by creating a smaller object next to a larger object, you can create the illusion of depth and perspective.

Movement

Movement is the element of design that defines direction and motion. When you want to lead a person to a specific area of a Website, artwork or design, you can use movement within the object to guide them there. Many designers overlook this element by using movement to lead the viewer's eye off the screen (as is quite frequently seen in Flash design). But if you want a person to focus on specific content, or a particular element, this isn't the way to go about it!

If you decide to use movement within your design (animation, and motion blur are 2 examples) then it is important not to use too much -- subtlety is the key here. A page full of movement becomes disorienting to the viewer as they try to follow the animation. Even flashing text, for example, has motion, so be very critical when you review pages that contain any moving elements at all.

Space

Space is any area between and around objects -- the space around any object is called negative space. Used together, space and negative space can also give an illusion of depth.

Negative space is just as important as space -- it will often give direction by leading the eye into positive space. So finding the balance between the use of negative space and positive space is what will make an image look "right".

Space can also be suggested by the use of tone, colour and the linear perspective of overlapping planes.

Texture

There are two types of texture: tactile texture (which is texture that you can physically touch), and visual texture.

I'm going to ignore texture as an element of art (sculpture, architecture and the like), and focus on visual texture as it has more relevance to us as Web designers. So when I say "texture", I'm referring to visual texture -- not tactile texture.

Visual texture relates to any 2-dimensional image, be it print, painting or on screen. It's texture that you can see, but not touch. It has the ability to look rough or smooth, wet or dry, hard or soft, shiny or matte, slick or sticky, slippery, abrasive, coarse or porous -- just to name a few!

Texture is used to enhance the realism of an image, which explains why most 3-d game designers focus a lot more on texture now than they did years ago, and why games seem more realistic. Texture has the advantage that it can trigger in our minds an association between what we see, and the resulting feeling generated by that image. We can then recall those same feelings when we see that texture again.

Texture also adds contrast and depth, along with direction and interest. Look at any object close up that has a rough texture, then put it down and move away from it. The texture will be less obvious, and less likely to arouse your sense of touch.

This same approach should be taken when using visual texture. If you want an image to appear to be close to the viewer, add more texture to it, and if you want the image to appear to be further away, reduce the texture.

Value

Value deals with colour -- more specifically, the lightness or darkness of colour. Like texture, value can be used to bring objects closer, or make them seem more distant -- add a higher value contrast to bring them closer, and a duller contrast to push them further away.

Value can also be used to give focus to certain areas and to make others seem less important.

Nick Mullen has been researching affiliate programs for the last 6 months and is currently developing a resource for merchants and affiliates who want to maximise their affiliate space.

Organic Vortex Effect

2009-06-08T15:07:00.000-07:00

Organic Vortex Effect

author_aharwood (click to view image)

By Andrew Harwood

This effect focuses on the use of filters and image adjustments in PhotoShop. It creates a fantastic, organic-looking vortex that can make a great background, wallpaper, or the basis for other effects.

Step 1 – Organic Shapes

Start with a new document that has a white background, and is around 640 x 480 pixels in size. On the background layer, with a brush of around 17 pixels, draw some lines like those shown below.

1390_step1o (click to view image)

Step 2 – A Radial Blur

Select Filter > Blur > Radial Blur and use it with the following specifications:

Amount 100%
Type - Zoom
Quality - Best.

1390_step2o (click to view image)

Step 3 – Repeat!

Now, apply Filter > Stlize > Find Edges, then repeat Step 2. You'll see something like this:

1390_step4o (click to view image)

Step 4 – X Marks the Spot

Now, select Image > Adjustments > Invert and draw a white star or an "X" in the middle of the image like so:

1390_step5o (click to view image)

Step 5- Balance that Colour

Now, repeat Step 2, then Step 3, and finally Step 2 again. When you've finished all that, go to Image > Adjustments > Color Balance and play around with the tool until you find a colour you like. This is what I decided to use:

1390_step6o (click to view image)

Step 6 – The Swirl

Now apply Filter > Distort > Twirl and set it to about 90 degrees.

It's done!

This technique can be used for anything from walls to headers for websites. Try experimenting with each stage, and your final outcome, to see different variations on this effect you can create. Here's an example:

1390_step8o (click to view image)

To create variation, I incorporated some pixel stretching -- another great technique that I expanded upon here

Andrew is a Web graphics and branding specialist based in the UK. He's also a mentor in the SitePoint Forums who loves Queen. Visit his online portfolio at frozentoast.com.

Using Vectors in Photoshop -- Tracing

2009-06-08T15:04:00.000-07:00

Using Vectors in Photoshop -- Tracing

By Andrew Harwood

This tutorial introduces the PenTool and uses paths to create a power-packed modern tracing effect.

Step 1- Choose your Image

First, we need to grab an image from either google or a stock image CD. You can use basically any image you like. To begin with, however, it's probably best to pick something such as a face or an animal's head so that the experiment doesn't get too complicated.

Here's the image I chose:

Of course, if the image you've chosen is large, scale it down to more workable proportions.

Step 2 – Choose your Palette

Move the picture into the centre of your canvas and zoom in about 200%-300% -- whatever you're happy to work with.

Now, pick out the darkest colour in the image and select it for your palette using the Eyedropper tool.

Step 3 – Trace the Shape

Next, make a new layer and use the Pen Tool to trace carefully around the outside of the shape. It doesn't matter if you use a lot of lines (or mouse clicks) to trace the shape -- this will give variation to the finished work.

Your tracing should look something like this:

Step 4 – A Colour Change

Now that you have your outline, select the Paths tab, right click the Work Path and select Make Selection:

With your shape designated a Selection, fill it with the colour you picked out with the Eyedropper Tool in Step 2.

Step 5 – Colouring In

You've coloured the main shape -- now, apply the technique from Step 4 to all the main shapes in your image. If you're using an image of a face or head, the best way to proceed often is to start with the eyes and work outwards: from eyes to nose, to mouth, to the ears and so on.

You should eventually finish with something quite 'vectorish'. Experiment a little with your presentation. I placed a background behind my image, which finished up as:

Enjoy!

Andrew is a Web graphics and branding specialist based in the UK. He's also a mentor in the SitePoint Forums who loves Queen. Visit his online portfolio at frozentoast.com.

A Grunge Experiment

2009-06-08T15:02:00.000-07:00

A Grunge Experiment

author_aharwood (click to view image)

By Andrew Harwood

This effect builds on the basic grunge technique, and focuses on Photoshop's Blending Modes and the Eraser Tool. Let's get started!

Step 1 -- Image Selection

To start your own grunge manipulation, I recommend that you select a picture that already has a dark feel about it. Here's the one I chose:

1390_start (click to view image)

Step 2 – Find Suitable Textures

One of the absolute necessities in creating successful grunge effects is texture. Take time to make sure the textures you choose will work well with the image and the effect you're creating.

Also, keep this in mind: the higher the quality of texture, the better the results.

For this example, I used imagery of cracks in the earth and walls.

1390_crackstock (click to view image)

1390_origcrack (click to view image)

Step 3

Concentrate more heavily on the face than the rest of the body for this step. Take the second texture image, resize it, and position it around the middle of the face.

Using a large soft brush with the Eraser Tool (at around 100 pixels), get rid of the main areas of brick that surround the crack. For the more intricate areas, zoom in with a magnification of about 400% and use a smaller soft brush (about 8 pixels).

Once you're satisfied with your work, change the Textures layer Blending Mode to Multiply.

1390_erase1 (click to view image)

Step 4 – The Second Texture

Now import the other texture into the workspace, again resize it to your liking, and then apply the Overlay blending option. It should look something like this:

1390_ufaces (click to view image)

Just like before, use the eraser tool to get rid of unwanted texture, zooming in and using smaller brush sizes as needed. I warn you, this may be quite time consuming if you're not used to working in this way.

Once you're done, duplicate the layer to enhance the texture.

1390_hand (click to view image)

1390_faces (click to view image)

Step 6 – Add Text

For a finishing touch, you might like to add some text with a script-style font, and play around with the blending options to see which complements the curves of the text best.

1390_final2 (click to view image)

This tutorial only covers a few aspects of the grunge style. If you want to go further than this, try sites like www.dubtastic.com for a more in depth look.

Andrew is a Web graphics and branding specialist based in the UK. He's also a mentor in the SitePoint Forums who loves Queen. Visit his online portfolio at frozentoast.com.

Making web pages extend to the bottom of the browser window

2009-06-08T13:47:00.000-07:00

Making web pages extend to the bottom of the browser window

__________________________________

Please visit original resource from the author:

Alberto Martinez Perez | Web design tips & tricks

__________________________________

Introduction

If you ever made a web site with the content in a center column and a different background for the body, or with a short lateral navigation bar, probably you experienced the problem of some elements not extending to the bottom of the browser window when the height of the content is lesser than the document area of the browser window.

For simple designs, like pages with a side navigation bar and the rest of the page for contents, faking the layout with a background image can be enough to fix the problem, but for more complex layouts real full height element usually are required. For that cases we can resort to JavaScript to perform some DOM manipulation magic.

The CSS layout

I'm going to use a layout with one fixed-width centered content area, a menu at the top of it and some decorations at the top and bottom of the content area. Let's take a look to the CSS code:

body {
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
background: White url(img/img_116.gif);
text-align: center; /* IE 5.x */
}

#menu {
width: 650px; /* IE 5.x */
width/**/:/**/ 610px;
margin: 0 auto;
padding: 10px 20px;
background: transparent url(img/sample-menu-border.gif) repeat-y left top;
text-align: left;
}

#contents {
position: relative;
width: 650px; /* IE 5.x */
width/**/:/**/ 500px;
margin: 0 auto;
padding: 50px 75px 30px;
background: transparent url(img/sample-contents-border.gif) repeat-y left top;
text-align: justify;
}

The layout in action:

If you are wondering about the "/**/:/**/", it's an alternative fancy method to the box model hack.

Fixing the layout

The JavaScript fix involves getting the size of the document element and the container we want to resize (in this case #contents), and the position of this element. There is no standard DOM attribute for this, but almost all browsers support the offsetHeight and offsetTop attributes (although Opera needs a bit of tweaking for getting the height of the document).

Then we compare the size of the target element (#contents) with the size of the document minus the top offset of that element. If it's smaller, then a style rule with the proper height is applied to #contents (making a difference for IE 5.x due to its broken box model). Also, the code is attached to the onresize event for readjusting the size if the user makes the browser window bigger.

The resulting JavaScript code would be something like this:

var isIE5=navigator.userAgent.toUpperCase().indexOf("MSIE 5")!=-1;

var targetElementID="contents", targetElementStyleOffset=80;

function adjustHeight() {
if (document.getElementById) {
  var targetElement=document.getElementById(targetElementID),
      documentHeight, totalOffset;

  if (targetElement) {
    documentHeight=document.documentElement.offsetHeight;
    if (targetElement.offsetHeight

Also, for making the script work in Opera 8 and Konqueror 3.4 we need to set the height of the html element to 100%:

html {
height: 100%;
}

For using the code you only need to modify two values and include a call to the function. First, you need to change the values that appear in bold in the script to reflect the following data:

The ID of the element that need to be extended (#contents in the previous example, so we'll use the string "contents").
The vertical offset generated by the styles applied to the element (margin, padding and border). In the example we have:
```
padding: 50px 75px 30px;
margin: 0 auto;
```
so we use 80 for the style offset. This offset is not applied to IE 5.x due to its broken box model. See the notes below for an explanation of this.

For activating the script, we can use the onload event, but the best method is including also a call to the adjustHeight() function just before closing the body tag, like:

This usually works fine since all the DOM objects are already defined at that point, and it's much faster that using the onload event, because this event doesn't trigger until all the page is loaded (images and ads included). Anyway, assigning the function to the event ensures that the function will be called.

Following the next link you can see an example of the page with the JS fix applied.

The script works in Firefox/Mozilla, Internet Explorer 5/6/7, Opera 7/8/9, Konqueror 3.x, Safari and Omniweb (thanks to Stephen Caudill for the Mac feedback), which adds a nice 99% of the current browser pool :-) .

Notes and limitations

If you need to apply any padding and/or margin to the container you want to resize, you have to express it in pixels, since the script needs that value for setting the proper height. Since the box model doesn't include padding and margin in the dimensions of the boxes, and I was unable to find a reliable way to get the margin and padding values from JS, this manual workaround is needed.
The script doesn't downsize the target container, only enlarges it. Take into account that the goal of the script is getting a page that extend at least to the bottom of the browser window, not a page that fits always in the browser document area.
The script doesn't work when the user changes the base font size in the browser after the page is loaded. Simply there is no JS event to catch this. Anyway, the next time the page is loaded with the new size, the script will work fine.

The nice tile background image used in the samples is provided by squidfingers / patterns.

__________________________________

Please visit original resource from the author:

Alberto Martinez Perez | Web design tips & tricks

__________________________________

Using relative font sizes in web pages

2009-06-08T13:43:00.000-07:00

Using relative font sizes in web pages

__________________________________

Please visit original resource from the author:

Alberto Martinez Perez | Web design tips & tricks

__________________________________

The two most common ways of setting font sizes with CSS are using points (pt) or pixels (px), but you can use also relative font sizes, either using ems (being an em the height of the element's font) or the predefined size keywords (xx-small, x-small, small, medium, large, x-large and xx-large). This has the advantage of allowing Internet Explorer users enlarge or shrink the font size of the page through the IE font size menus (other browsers allow font resizing also for points and pixels).

Despite the fact of being of "relative size", the fonts should look identical in any standards compliant browser (IE6, Firefox, Opera, Safari...) and also in IE 5.x (taking advantage of the CSS parsing bug described in the box model hack). See the CSS code of this page for details.

Anyway, you could find some problems with the way the browsers round some font size's written in em's. It seems that IE rounds up some values that other browsers rounds down. In the following example you will see that the second paragraph look identical as the third one in IE, but it will look like the first one in Firefox, Opera 7/8 and Safari 1.x:

1) Sample

with the style: font-size: 1.2em

2) Sample

with the style: font-size: 1.25em

3) Sample

with the style: font-size: 1.3em

Note: Firefox font rendering may vary in other O.S. like Linux.

Of course the solution is changing the font size a bit a until all browsers round it in the same way: in the previous example we should use either 1.2em or 1.3em (depending on the font size you prefer), which look the same in all browsers.

__________________________________

Please visit original resource from the author:

Alberto Martinez Perez | Web design tips & tricks

__________________________________

Optimization of JPEG (JPG) images: good quality and small size

2009-06-08T13:27:00.000-07:00

Optimization of JPEG (JPG) images: good quality and small size

__________________________________

Please visit original resource from the author:

Alberto Martinez Perez | Web design tips & tricks

__________________________________

Introduction

The image compression techniques have their origin in the necessity of reducing the size of the file used to store the image, which is huge when compared to storing text (a 800x600 24 bit color uncompressed image needs 1440000 bytes or 1.37 MB). One of the most popular formats is JPEG (which uses files with JPG or JPEG extensions), which can achieve compression ratios of 10:1 with almost no perceived loss of the image quality.

Depending of the program that you use for saving JPEG images, there are available some options for adjusting the compression of the image. In this article I'll try to explain how to adjust that options and optimize the ratio between image quality and file size. It's important take into account that some images are more suitable than others for JPEG compression (see flat images compression below).

Basic compression options

The two basic options that are almost always present in every "Save JPEG" dialog are the compression/quality of the image, and the standard/optimized/progressive formats.

Both compression and quality refers to the same parameter but one is the inverse of the other (e.g. in a percentage-based scale 35% compression is equal to 65% quality). Depending of your program of choice you'll find either, but the result is the same: the more compression, the lesser image quality. The proper setting for this parameter depends of the image quality or file size you need/want to obtain, getting the best ratios with 50%-85% of image quality (equivalent to 50%-15% compression).

The standard (baseline) and optimized (baseline optimized) settings provides the same image quality but the optimized format provides a 2%-8% reduction of the image file size, so there is no reason for not use always this setting when not using the progressive format. The progressive format also provides the same quality, but offers an alternate method of displaying the image while it is downloaded, at the cost of a slight increase in the file size (more details about progressive encoding).

Advanced options

Apart from that options, some programs like Corel PhotoPaint, Paint Shop Pro and IrfanView (this one is freeware) allow choosing the type of image subsampling, also called downsampling. The subsampling ratios according to the spec are 4:4:4 (no subsampling), 4:2:2 (standard subsampling) and 4:1:1 (worst quality, rarely used). Adobe Photoshop also contemplates this option but it's adjusted automatically depending on the quality level selected: it applies subsampling for Medium and Low levels and uses no subsampling for Maximum and High (more details about subsampling/downsampling).

While the standard subsampling is usually adequate for most images, providing an good ratio between image quality and file size, there are some situations in which using no subsampling (4:4:4) provides a noticeable increase in the image quality, even if you use a higher compression ratio in order to maintain the file size. The most notable cases are when the image contains some portions with fine details, like text over an uniform background, and images that contain almost-flat colors.

Examples

First we'll see an example of compression of images with fine detail:

JPEG image, 15% compression (85% quality), standard subsampling (4:2:2), 8822 bytes.

JPEG image, 25% compression (75% quality), no subsampling (4:4:4), 8096 bytes.

JPEG image, 15% compression (85% quality), standard subsampling (4:2:2), 5276 bytes.

JPEG image, 25% compression (75% quality), no subsampling (4:4:4), 5151 bytes.

You can see than even with more compression (in order to achieve a similar file size) using no subsampling (4:4:4 format) produces sharper images.

On the other hand, for landscapes, portraits and similar types of pictures with more "general" details, the standard subsampling gives you more compression with almost no perceived loss of quality:

JPEG image, 35% compression (65% quality), no subsampling (4:4:4), 22454 bytes.

JPEG image, 35% compression (65% quality), standard subsampling (4:2:2), 18461 bytes.

In this cases, adding some soft smoothing reduces the file size without increasing the perceived loss of detail:

JPEG image, 35% compression (65% quality), standard subsampling (4:2:2), 25% smoothing, 16481 bytes.

With high levels of compression the smoothing can improve a bit the image quality, reducing the JPEG compression artifacts. Of course, too much smooth will result in a blurry image with less detail.

Further optimizations

Almost all digital cameras store by default EXIF data in the pictures taken with them. This data include information about the camera configuration and conditions at the time of the photo shot. This information usually takes a lot of space, so make sure that saving this data is disabled in your graphical application when optimizing JPEG files (e.g.: in a test, an 800x600 JPEG picture saved at 75% quality was reduced from 114 KB to 51 KB after stripping the EXIF information).

IrfanView, a freeware graphic viewer/converter, has a plugin for JPEG lossless transformations that allows stripping this data (and other similar like IPTC information) from a JPEG file without recompressing the image itself. In this way you can remove the unnecessary information while maintaining the original image quality.

__________________________________

Please visit original resource from the author:

Alberto Martinez Perez | Web design tips & tricks

__________________________________

Flat images compression

Since the JPEG format was designed for photos, images that are composed mainly from solid colors achieve a better compression with formats like PNG and GIF (this one only supports up to 256 colors per image), and without any loss of quality (lossless compression):

JPEG image, 15% compression (85% quality), standard subsampling (4:2:2), 2193 bytes.

JPEG image, 35% compression (65% quality), no subsampling (4:4:4), 2224 bytes.

PNG Image, 24-bit color, best compression (level 9), 1108 bytes.

GIF image, 4-bit color (16 color palette), non-interlaced, 916 bytes.

But if we use the lossless image formats for the first samples, the non-flat portion of the images makes the final file size much bigger:

JPEG image, 25% compression (75% quality), no subsampling (4:4:4), 8096 bytes.

PNG Image, 24-bit color, best compression (level 9), 24649 bytes.

GIF image, 8-bit color (256 color palette), non-interlaced, 17783 bytes.

JPEG image, 25% compression (75% quality), no subsampling (4:4:4), 5151 bytes.

PNG Image, 24-bit color, best compression (level 9), 24287 bytes.

GIF image, 8-bit color (256 color palette), non-interlaced, 13031 bytes.

Recompression

Since the JPEG use lossy compression, saving the same JPEG image over and over will cause degradation in the image quality even if you use the same quality settings, specially if you have enabled subsampling. Due to this is recommended maintaining a "master" copy saved in a lossless format (PNG, TIFF or proprietary formats like PSD or CPT) in case you need to make some editing to the image or adjust the JPEG compression settings (a JPEG image previously saved at 40% compression will not improve quality for saving it again at 15% compression).

Below you can see how recompression affects the image, even at high quality levels. With no subsampling the loss is small but noticeable (you can see more noise around the text), but with subsampling the areas with fine details are totally distorted:

JPEG image, 5% compression (95% quality), standard subsampling (4:2:2), 14196 bytes. Saved directly from original PNG.

JPEG image, 5% compression (95% quality), standard subsampling (4:2:2), 13292 bytes. After recompressing the image five times.

JPEG image, 10% compression (90% quality), no subsampling (4:4:4), 13710 bytes. Saved directly from original PNG.

JPEG image, 10% compression (90% quality), no subsampling (4:4:4), 13700 bytes. After recompressing the image five times.

If for some reason you prefer (or need) to use JPEG for your master copies, use 0% compression (100% quality) with no subsampling, since this reduce the loss of quality near to zero.

Final notes

Image DPI is not relevant for screen images, since DPI is used only for setting the print sizes of the image: an image of 600x400 pixels with 200 DPI will have the same display and file size than a 600x400 100 DPI image, but the first one will be half the size when printed, although with higher definition (since you put 200 dots in an inch of paper for the first image and 100 for the second) .
JPEG doesn't support transparency (alpha channel), in that case you will need to use PNG or GIF formats.

__________________________________

Please visit original resource from the author:

Alberto Martinez Perez | Web design tips & tricks

__________________________________

home

2009-06-08T12:18:00.000-07:00

Web & Design

50 Beautiful Hand-Drawn Web Design

2009-06-05T00:16:00.000-07:00

50 Beautiful Hand-Drawn Web Design

(please visit original resource: www.hongkiat.com)

For you who need to refresh your inspiration. these pictures are full of energy to bring back your potential ability. We know sometimes Artist just got stuck in a point where they need tobe taken back by something... the unpredictable things, the new things... [dig]
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Most web designs starts off with a pen and paper before its taken over by Photoshop. However, we’ve noticed a new trend (probably not too new) where designers are bringing back sketches as a form of design. Without a doubt, hand-drawn art is one of the popular styles adopted into web designs. Nothing is better than using these sketchy designs to convey and reflect individual styles.

In this post, we’d like to show you 50 great examples of how hand drawing and web design can fit beautifully together. Full list after jump.

K4 Laboratory

Esteban Muñoz

Studio IMG

Espuma Restaurant

Agami Creative

Biola Undergrad

Kusoyama

XM Radio - Wild Ride

WeFail

Web Designer Wall

Dean Oakley Web Design

Fat Heads Creative Studio

Booma Web Design

Boompa

Casio Exilim Lab

Bootb

Richard Stelmach

Dax and Alice

We Are Not Freelancers

Von Dutch Originals

Toucouleur

Simon Reynolds

Teresa Walsh

Satsu Design

St. Francis is Happy in Greenville

Squidfingers

Flossy Yannik

Pointless Ramblings

Philippe Mignotte

QuakeQuizSF

Mplusz

New Art for a New Era

Christian Sparrow

Matt - Multi Account Twitter Tweeter

Mariska

Lucuma

Mikimottes

Mobious

Kutztown University

Kitty Attack

Look Designs

Idiotic Adventures of Philippe and Pierre

Lionite Internet Ventures

Get ready to rox

Elan Snowboards

ARS Media

It Looks Good

Jesus Rodriguez Velasco

Kinetic Singapore

Bearskinrug

Best web designs you must see [10]

2009-06-04T05:36:00.000-07:00

Best web designs you must see [10]

lightenupnow.com.au

nineliondesign.com

adamglenn.com

goglamping.net

kayintveen.com

jasonjulien.com

manndiblecafe.com

awpny.com

maxvoltar.com

candybouquet.com

madebysofa.com

skialpine.com

rocketclub.info

thehippohouse.com

designcommission.com

wanderinggoat.com

blackestate.co.nz

cpeople.ru

deletelondon.com

meandmommytobe.com

cognigencorp.com

__________________________________________________________
Best web designs you must see [1]
Best web designs you must see [2]
Best web designs you must see [3]
Best web designs you must see [4]
Best web designs you must see [5]
Best web designs you must see [6]
Best web designs you must see [7]
Best web designs you must see [8]
Best web designs you must see [9]
Best web designs you must see [10]

Best web designs you must see [9]

2009-06-04T05:27:00.000-07:00

Best web designs you must see [9]

sustainableparty.com

20jours.be

icondesigner.net

womantowomangyn.com

urbanrocksgym.com

sursly.com

oneshareinvestments.com

whitehouse.gov

invoicemachine.com

elcandor.com.ar

aperfolio.com

wordsarepictures.co.uk

kiluka.ch

rareformbranding.com

paramoreredd.com

gocountry.cmt.com

abbaspa.com

pseudoart.co.uk

redbrickhealth.com

61pixels.com

colazionedamichy.it

Best web designs you must see [8]

2009-06-04T05:24:00.000-07:00

Best web designs you must see [8]

rockatee.com

pixelcraft.ie

45royale.com

designbyhumans.com

tutorial9.net

mattzeilinger.com

agamicreative.com

sarahlongnecker.com

toby-powell.co.uk

triplux.com

noded.biz

ifistanbul.com

creativestate.com

tyrrellspotatochips.co.uk

madmadmad.com

legworkstudio.com

gardeningwithchildren.co.uk

couchcreative.com.au

gamesforherbyyou.com

operamage.com

hillwoodresidential.com

Best web designs you must see [7]

2009-06-04T05:21:00.000-07:00

Best web designs you must see [7]

multiways.com

matthamm.com

mediastroika.com

kissmetrics.com

myfavoritething.it

csharpdesign.co.uk

bradcolbow.com

vitsoe.com

form-function.ca

squaredeye.com

lepushmail.com

crushlovely.com

piraja.no

creativespaces.net.au

figurenschneider.de

nickfinck.com

rolfundbernd.de

stonecanyonliving.com

thomasprior.co.uk

aaronshapiro.de

sofasurfer.eu

Best web designs you must see [6]

2009-06-04T05:17:00.000-07:00

Best web designs you must see [6]

togetherlondon.com

thegreatbeardedreef.com

theclassroomreform.com

footballmadeinafrica.com

jackherbert.com

mattdempsey.com

stopdesign.com

ecoki.com

anderbose.com

97bottles.com

empivot.com

nitobi.com

adrianpelletier.com

rednoseday.com

designbyfront.com

glocalventures.org

corvusart.com

moose.as

ishotsapp.com

redaktion-lerch.de

liveatsandstone.com

Best web designs you must see [5]

2009-06-04T05:14:00.000-07:00

Best web designs you must see [5]

guifx.com

decodesigninterior.com

espiratecnologias.com

efinterns.com

stonelab.osu.edu

kuhboom.com

klippoglim.no

squarespace.com

campaignmonitor/designers

pastaharvest.com

thisisbrandnew.com

cabedge.com

centralsnowsports.com.au

netdreams.co.uk

thirststudios.com

visualelixir.com

theholeinourgospel.com

ideafoundry.info

mediaflex.com.au

bamboojuice.co.uk

pallygiraffe.com

Best web designs you must see [4]

2009-06-04T05:11:00.000-07:00

Best web designs you must see [4]

hintcreative.com

atebits.com

outlawdesignblog.com

braintraffic.com

tuitivegroup.com

clearleft.com

janasbakerypa.com

tearoundapp.com

vsplash.com

1stnature.nl

nicolaswill.com

campcreativegroup.com

ditley.com

bigomaha.com

odopod.com

mplusz.com

forabeautifulweb.com

howarths.nl

themeshaper.com

reviveafrica.com

hardscapesetc.com

Best web designs you must see [1]

2009-06-04T04:56:00.000-07:00

Best web designs you must see [1]

brianmhansen.com

clickfarminteractive.com

hangardoor.com

youlove.us

gavincastleton.com

brooklynfare.com

designjunction.com.au

jaqkcellars.com

studiobennett.net

bulletpr.co.uk

webgrapes.it

simpleflame.com

serialcut.com

alexarts.ru

orangelabel.com

marcsdesign.com

lakernoise.com

scottpollack.com

maquinastudio.com

ifancyasnog.com

douglasmenezes.com

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Best web designs you must see [1]
Best web designs you must see [2]
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Best web designs you must see [4]
Best web designs you must see [5]
Best web designs you must see [6]
Best web designs you must see [7]
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Best web designs you must see [9]
Best web designs you must see [10]

Best web designs you must see [3]

2009-06-04T04:39:00.000-07:00

Best web designs you must see [3]

mountaincityclub.org

chattanoogahistory.com

getmiro.com

inkd.com

reinvigorate.net

myenergyprofile.com

showandtellsale.com

leihu.com

feedstitch.com

theserved.com

creativedepart.com

digimurai.com

asimplemeasure.com

getfinch.com

yalo.fi

foehn.co.uk

tirato.nl

allsaints.org.nz

pagecxvi.com

innermetrogreen.com

hintcreative.com

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Best web designs you must see [1]
Best web designs you must see [2]
Best web designs you must see [3]
Best web designs you must see [4]
Best web designs you must see [5]
Best web designs you must see [6]
Best web designs you must see [7]
Best web designs you must see [8]
Best web designs you must see [9]
Best web designs you must see [10]

Best web designs you must see [2]

2009-06-04T04:21:00.000-07:00

Best web designs you must see [2]

commongoodradio.org

graphik.fi

blog.squarespace.com

afflecks.com

edenspiekermann.com/en

area17.com

ectomachine.com

convergesc.org

owltastic.com

sproutbox.com

razorbraille.com

camberwellgraphics09.com

hotelarcaluinoe.ro

duchyoriginals.com

lionite.com

juliusmattsson.com

enviramedia.com

gofreelance.org

aisleone.net

silnt.com

socialsnack.com

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Best web designs you must see [1]
Best web designs you must see [2]
Best web designs you must see [3]
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Best web designs you must see [5]
Best web designs you must see [6]
Best web designs you must see [7]
Best web designs you must see [8]
Best web designs you must see [9]
Best web designs you must see [10]

Creating A Website That Will Work

2009-06-04T01:42:00.001-07:00

Creating A Website That Will Work!

Author: Joshua Elliot

One of the major factors to your winning is you. What you do today, will set your future, be it success or failure.It really goes down to consistency. It is the day-to-day things you do that will bring you the outcomes. Not being focus in your efforts will not bring you success in the long term.

Your first goal is to think of ideas what you are getting to establish around your site.Write down the subjects that are related to the subject you are interested in. Once finished, initiate to do searching.

Focus is the essential to effective search. Through understanding your aims are and those that can help to attain the aims, then will you be capable to focus. Traffic to your internet site is equal to bringing in money, so your focus should constantly be in pushing traffic.

When you are exploring online, watch out for markets that have a high level of action on the cyberspace. The dream of most internet marketers is to find keywords that have very high search mass with little challenger. But you will still want to be careful.

Rivalry in reality is good, as there are successful business to be created in that market. There are means to go around to enter a very aggressive keyword market, by using less aggressive keywords or long tail keywords, you are still able to generate income.

For example with weight loss there are numerous paths to enter that market without working after the main keyword. Example; lose belly fat, or lose weight by eating healthy foods and so on. I think you get the idea.

Once you determine to use the long tail keywords to enter the market, write message that are related to the long tail keywords and build webpages with the content you composed around the long tail keyword. A detailed structure project must be in place for your web pages to attain the right keyword density.

Whatever site builders or software you are using, you can attain bringing in traffic to your website by doing the above right things. Go out there and do research now.

About the Author:

Joshua Elliot was an HTML idiot, now a successful Internet Marketer, who teaches how to build websites and Internet Marketing.

Go to http://www.WebsiteMakerNovice.com if you want to learn to build website or Internet Marketing.

The author grants full reprint rights to this article. You may reprint and electronically distribute this article so long as its content remains unchanged and the author's byline remains in place.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Creating A Website That Will Work!

Build Free Website: Step By Step

2009-06-04T01:42:00.000-07:00

Build Free Website: Step By Step

Author: Joshua Elliot

Not a lot of people acknowledge that making your website can be really easy if you are using the proper tools and have the good knowledge.

In the past where you have to pay thousands of bucks to the web designers to get your website up, but it's no longer like this.

With the new technologies and software currently, a web site software need only to point and click, and you are ready to make a new Internet site.

Even better, there are some of free software programs that you can utilize to make your own Internet site. WordPress is one of the most popular open source Internet site making software.

The benefits of using WordPress to create your web site are:

* it is free
* the open source community of interests is huge and friendly. There will constantly people open to assist you in the forums
* the open source community of interests is always producing new features in the form of plugins and themes for free use by the WordPress community
* it is accomplished - you can create a web log, an ecommerce site, a membership site - just to list a few. In fact, I think that there is not a lot that you cannot do with WordPress.

All you require to make your own web site with WordPress is:

* buy a domain name
* get some web hosting
* change your domain name servers to the servers of your web host
* If your web server has cpanel you can install WordPress straight away using Fantastico
* If your web host does not have cpanel you can download the software from WordPress, unzip the files and use an FTP client to upload the software to your domain name.

After you are done with the uploading, choose yourself a theme for your website and add in plugins to help you in functionality.

You are finished now, your internet site is ready to go.

Now all you require to do is supply your content. The good news is that you don't need to know any fancy code to do this. In fact, if you can produce a word document you can use WordPress.

About the Author:

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Build Free Website: Step By Step

Generate Income Website: How To Create

2009-06-04T01:41:00.000-07:00

Generate Income Website: How To Create

Author: Joshua Elliot

As you know there is mountains of data outside there on this matter. These days we are blissful being that we have the world of data at our finger tips. This of course can be assistive but it can also be overcoming.

If you are essential with this internet business, then you will require to have a contrary mind set, one that is detailed and specific. A few forums online which I imposed, I found some practice with the people there.

Those who succeed appear to be far more particular in how they succeeded. Those who fail seem to be only particular in faulting the reasons why they failed. They do not supply specifics as to what they did.

The reason perhaps because they would have to support their actions. They would be discovered and vulnerable to criticism.

Most of the time, people out there will be true to you in criticism, so this is a positive ones as they will single out what you did wrong, and providing you a solution of rectification.

You see those who succeed are not afraid of this. They realise that they may have weakness and receive constructive analysis set to move themselves nearer to their goal.

The main matter I want to share; everyone can have ideas from anywhere, but in order to succeed you MUST be detailed in your executing.

You can go to any banks and require for a bank loan for your business, but if you do not have a written business plan for the bank manager to be won over, most properly you will not succeed in getting the bank loan. Be as specific and leave actual actions to take to reach your goal.

The same should support true before you buy into any business chance online or build any website. Before you commit anything you need to give a detailed draft as to what you are ready to do and how you are getting to do it - set upon the reality of your given set of accomplishments and conditions.

If you do this accordingly, you will be able to establish a real business that can bring forth real income, as your execution are specific detailed and grounded in true.

About the Author:

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Generate Income Website: How To Create

Flash Web Design Inducing Vibrant Visibility

2009-06-04T01:40:00.000-07:00

Flash Web Design Inducing Vibrant Visibility

Author: Ruby Harrison

It is hard to do a count of all the websites present on the virtual world. Our eyes are the observatory organs which can identify which websites are glittering and which are not. On the Internet one can find different types of websites but asking a frequent visitor to the Internet would instantly tell that websites which are made in the backdrop of flash design catch the attention of eyes.

A simple and lifeless website does not cater to the need of competitive business. Most of the websites into the field of business in the present market focus on gathering the support of visitors. Whenever a single visitor comes to a particular site then he initially checks out whether it has a unique feature or not. Now being the owner of flash website one can instantly grab the attention of visitors.

Websites are created to pass on information to visitors and flash based websites present information in a successful mode. Flash design endows entrepreneurs complete freedom for delivering information on products and services in a convincing way.

Does designing a website with flash feature cost lots of money? Those days are no more when designing a website used to cost a heap of money. Even the high end websites can be created at the least amount of money. So, perceptions about flash web design being costly should be avoided.

Now web designing companies are no more blame for charging more fees. Even the slowdown in the global economy has force many web designing companies to revise their fees. If anybody is looking for making flash web design based website then it can be well done at the present market condition. Hence flash web design is casting a new way for modern businesses.

About the Author:

Ruby Harrison is expert in web design and development, writing articles on flash web design and website development for leading web designing companies

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Flash Web Design Inducing Vibrant Visibility

Make Good Money with A Personalised Website

2009-06-04T01:39:00.000-07:00

Make Good Money with A Personalised Website

Author: Joshua Elliot

Making money online is to fulfill the wants or resolve the trouble for your website visitors, will they then purchase from you. This will be the time that they will be returning to you for more. This is the best method acting as most online marketers are selling their product or associated ones, all you need to do is to personalised your approach, that will help you in making money online.

1. Set Yourself Unique And Make Money From Home.

Nearly of the time, your associate merchandiser will pass you the regular sales letter web site, where other associates are also using, making your chances of succeeding the minimal. To earn money from your home, your singularity of your advance must come from the design of your internet site. Your visitors will be able to picture, how your selling is unique from the others.

How to make money on the internet is simple, you require merely two things. To be personal and to offer useful things. Of course you want new things into your online store, so that visitors will picture that you will follow, what is happening on the marketplace. But the primary success elements are those 2. Could you learn 2 matters from the internet marketing?

2. How Can I Get Money Applying My Uniqueness?

Branding yourself will land you into the route of making money online. that is to say; establish a brand out of your website. You you are looking which components to use for trademarking your web site, I must say it's your personality that will set yourself aside from other vendors.

You storefront, your bsuiness card is like your own internet site. It pictures your face to the online world about you, it is through the style which you show. There are so many tips, mysteries that instruct how you to be prosperous, but it's your taste that you have to trust.

3. How To Search A Personal Content For Your Website?

There is no shortcut, you just have to surf the Net utilizing your own keywords and begin looking what kind of web sites there is, and credit the subject to yours.

You can consider engage a free lance to help you in the content, make a point you cater particulars and instruction on what you want in the subject. It is better to hire the free-lance that has go through in your niche, and the style of his/ her composing.

When the initial edition of your internet site is done, you have to maintain the same style all the time, when you do the varieties. If you do not write the transcript by yourself, make a point to maintain the same free-lance through the years. The website is very delicate to the copy style alterations, because the copy is so fundamental part of the strategy and of the visiting experience.

Some of the readers may think, whether their personality is so interesting, that they should bring it visible. This is a healthy thinking, but believe me, every online marketer is an extremely interesting person, who has a lot to give to other marketers. Just do it, put yourself visible and you will be among winners sooner than you think! Share your experiences and your style, other people will like it!

About the Author:

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Make Good Money with A Personalised Website

Website Creation: Making It Yourself

2009-06-04T01:36:00.002-07:00

Website Creation: Making It Yourself

Author: Joshua Elliot

There are many available internet site suppliers on the internet. All you require to do is to sign up and stick with a a couple of easy stages.

Stage 1:

Choose a name for your free web site this will be your internet sites name and your domain name, so it can be anything you want to claim it.

Stage 2:

Now, you will need to add in message. Finding content will be the simple part, but you will be to rescript it to your manner. Content can be found in any search results in Google, Yahoo or MSN. Or you can get more info from the library, just remember to rewrite it.

Stage 3:

Adding pictures and videos can help to make the website more interesting and pleasing to the visitors. Insert the photo icon on where you want your image to be, then browse through your computer and upload the image to the web site.

Contributing a video, you will need to have an account with the video directories websites. My good word is to use YouTube, because it is the most frequent video website in the whole world and it's free to use. What you will need is to produce your video in any size, depending on the type of equipment or software system you use. Then upload the video to YouTube, after that get the embeded code for the uploaded video and paste it onto the area where you want you wish the video to appear in the web page. Check your web page after it's done.

Stage 4 is to Monetize

The simplest way to generate money is to use Google Adsense. The measures are very simple to sign up, after that you are to copy the Adsense code onto your website (note that you may want to make a table for the Adsense code). You are ready to generate money from the traffic.

Getting a web site can be very easy, after that you will need to campaign traffic to your new website and bring in more content.

About the Author:

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Website Creation: Making It Yourself

Improving Procedures In Ecommerce Website Design

2009-06-04T01:36:00.001-07:00

Improving Procedures In Ecommerce Website Design

Author: Ronaldo Rick

Function-wise, eCommerce website design is very similar to planning and designing a brick and mortar store. It's ultimate goal is to make buying as easy and simple as possible so as to encourage people buy, and the best designs and layouts are those that make visitors buy even more than they intended. In eCommerce web design, that usually means streamlining your procedures and improving the way people shop on your site.

Data Gathering

A lot of data is involved in the functions of any eCommerce site. But customers always look for (and come back to) the most convenient shopping experience. That means as close to a buy-click-deliver system as possible. Since you obviously need to collect things like addresses and credit card numbers, you should at least minimize the number of steps necessary with an efficient eCommerce website design.

Certain methods are available such that you're able to collect and store every single bit of data inputted by your customers. Use this to your advantage by grouping similar fields together so that a single input of data can fill up multiple fields. For example, if you ask for a customer's zip code at the start of a certain procedure, you can already use that data to fill in the zip code and state fields of the delivery address.

Navigability

Even if the ideal online shopping process is linear, that's not really what happens in real life. A lot of customers will want to navigate away, look at another page or verify some piece of information 2013 all in the middle of your planned procedure. Your eCommerce website design should be able to accommodate such events instead of being absolutely straight and clean-cut.

At the same time, customers will also want to be able to pick up where they left off after they've finished with the other pages. Adding links to finished steps in the ordering process or immediately storing inputted information, for example, could help you do this. Some shopping cart software packages also come with the feature built in.

Customer Awareness

It's never good for customers to be unaware of where exactly they are in the ordering procedure. Have they just started, are they around the middle or are they almost done? This is something that customers usually like to know 2013 and is up to you to provide.

Part of good eCommerce web design is making your procedure as simple and clear as possible from the get-go. Some of the biggest retail websites, for example, place a static image on every ordering-related page that shows customers where they are in the order process. It's small details like that which usually go unnoticed, yet are appreciated hugely.

Just because your eCommerce web design package looks like it has everything doesn't mean that your customers will immediately take to it. Take measures like beta testing and process timing to see if there are flaws in your design, as well as to determine possible areas for improvement. Remember, the smallest details and flaws could very well drive customers away 2013 straight into your competition's pages.

About the Author:

Creating a streamlined yet easy-to-use procedure is a task you'll want to entrust only to experts in eCommerce web development. Jelecos.com is an established company with a team of specialists in varied fields that can make sure your site is as efficient, friendly and 2013 most importantly 2013 profitable as possible.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Improving Procedures In Ecommerce Website Design

8 Things Every Successful Website Needs

2009-06-04T01:36:00.000-07:00

8 Things Every Successful Website Needs

Author: veena

So you've put together a fantastic website, and you're ready to go live on the Internet for the whole world to see. Not so fast there Bucky. In case you didn't know, there are a few important requirements that every site needs to include in order to be successful.

Let's review, shall we:

1) Privacy Policy/Disclaimer: Now, I'm not a lawyer and don't claim to be one, but these two documents must be standard issue for every site you have. People want to know how you're going to use their personal information, and a "privacy policy" does just that.

In today's debatable society you'll also require to comprise of disclaimer/terms of use page. This protects you and spells out to your visitors what they're agreeing to by using your website. If you don't know where to start in generating these documents, you'll find plenty of help online.

2022 DMA Privacy Policy Generator
2022 OECD Privacy Statement Generator
2022 Google Ad sense & other Ad Networks Privacy Policy Generator
2022 Privacy Policy Generator
2022 Free Site Disclaimer

This is not legal advice, and if you require help in this department, consult with a local attorney.

2) Contact Us Information: I can't tell you how many sites I've been to that fail to comprise a way to contact the owner. If you can't comprise a phone number, at the very least have an email address or a "contact us" form. By giving this information, you'll create your visitors feel more comfortable knowing there's a way to reach you should the need arise.

If you require a form and don't know how to make one, try these free form services.

2022 Bravenet
2022 Feedback
2022 Email Me

3) Search Box/Site Map: If your site is rather large, you'll also want to comprise a way to search, or have what is called a "site map". There are several ways to add a search function to your site, the easiest being to use Google's free service or try Pico Search a site map sounds technical, but it's just one web page that contains links to every page of your site, generally broken down by category. Some resources to help can be found at Free Find.

4) Google Analytics/Tracking System: Once your site is up and running you'll want to keep your eye on traffic. Who's visiting your website, what pages are the most famous, where is the traffic coming from. All of these questions and more can be answered by using a good analytics program.

There are numerous ways to add a thorough tracking system to your site, but the easiest and one that won't cost you a dime is Google Analytics Once registered, you can add as several sites as you like all under one user ID and password. You'll be given some code to copy and paste on your pages. Simple, easy, and you're done.

5) Newsletter Sign Up/RSS Feed: There's an old saying that people won't buy from you the very first time they come to your website, so you want a way to stay in touch with them to bring them back again and again. By offering a newsletter, also known as an ezine, you'll be building a list of possible forecast which is invaluable to any site owner.

You'll find a multitude of free and low cost newsletter services online. It's up to you, depending on your requirements and what you can pay for. If you don't want to pay anything, my favorite free services are:

2022 FreeAutoBot
2022 Yahoo Groups

You can also give an RSS feed for your newsletter, or updates to your blog or site. This makes it easy for others to keep up with your most recent posts. The best service for this is Feed Burner.

6) Consistent Navigation: This might sound like a no brainer, but several folks get it wrong. No matter what kind of menu system you decide upon, make sure it stays the same across the board on all pages of your site.

Your job is to guide your visitors through your website, making sure they always know where they are and how to get to where they need to go.

For more see:

2022 Eye on Web
2022 Web Page Mistakes

7) Search Engine Optimized Copy: At first look you might not think this is so significant, but trust me it is. You want your pages to rank well with the search engines and there are a few steps you can take to make sure this happens.
Each page of your website must be optimized for 2, or at the most 3 keywords/phrases. Weave the keywords into your titles and into the body of each page. You can also comprise them in your image titles, alt tags; even in the names you give your pages. Look at each page individually and decide what it's about, then optimize accordingly.

For help see:

2022 Market Leap
2022 Copy Blogger

8) Social Media Share Button: With the popularity of social media sites such as Twitter, Face book, and MySpace, you'd be foolish not to comprise an easy way for your content to be shared with others.

You'll find several free services that will give you the code you need to instantly add a "share button" to your web pages so that visitors can instantly share them with their friends.

For more articles & information please visit : http://www.creativewebmall.com/news.htm

About the Author:

Currently author is working at creative web mall India pvt ltd as a content writer.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - 8 Things Every Successful Website Needs

Spot the Best web design company in just 5 minutes

2009-06-04T01:35:00.000-07:00

Spot the Best web design company in just 5 minutes!

Author: Mitchel John

If you are trying hard in this bottle-neck competition to sustain and make your web presence a unique presence in the crowd, you need to empower your website with professional services. When we say professional we mean really and genuinely proficient in this web design services industry catering to numerous companies with apt designing solutions. Therefore, the first step to take in order to create site which is armed with arsenal of tools and features to meet visitors2019 expectations, you have to understand how distant an actually best web design company is from hyped 2018best2019 website design company? What? Did you get into the fix? Do not because you are just five questions away from that efficient web design services provider. Probe the company you come into contact with these questions to simplify the selection process.

Question # 1: Can it create the kind of website you want? 2013 This should be prodded at first to get a better idea of the kind of web designing services they are providing. In this regard, the portfolio section of the company2019s site will show you instances of the site they have created so far and their technical and creative excellence or expertise in order to match the requirement of skill in your web designing project. You will understand how they handle designing websites intended for your kind of businesses.

Question # 2: Does the web design company show you case studies or testimonials to prove its techniques to be effective enough for you? Check out if the company is capable of proving its technical adequacy through the case studies made by them for designing websites akin to yours. Another important element you may take account of is the testimonial section which reveals its clients2019 opinions and feedbacks on its designing services. Case studies will give you adequate clues in whether the company is really good in optimizing texts in making any site search engine friendly, creating email marketing contents and newsletters, designing banners and PPC campaigns etc. which are vital in online propaganda of your site.

Question # 3: Does the web design company offer additional services other than designing like website hosting or multimedia design or internet marketing? Especially if you are running a small size online venture you need to keep a check in your expenses in pursuit of online presence. Therefore, if the web design company is expert in providing extensive designing services to cover all that you need from designing or redesigning the site, host it and promote it through various marketing campaigning.

Other than these questions, you should also check out the time period the company requires to complete and launch it on the web. Some companies charge as per the duration required in designing a website, therefore, to take a prior estimation of your expenses that you are going to spend in web site deigning and decide whether the company you are hiring is worth it or not.

About the Author:

Katie Wilson is expert in online marketing and writing articles on ecommerce web development and search engine marketing for leading low cost web design company

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Spot the Best web design company in just 5 minutes!

Selling More With Good Ecommerce Web Design

2009-06-04T01:31:00.000-07:00

Selling More With Good Ecommerce Web Design

Author: Ronaldo Rick

Some online retailers mistake eCommerce web design as just for the sake of looking pretty, hence the lack of attention that they give to it. What those e-tailers don't know is that a good design can quickly and concretely improve your business by increasing sales and encouraging repeat business. So what exactly makes a design 'good'? Here are a few things you'll want to consider.

Quick Searching

One of the things you have to deal with in eCommerce web development is the sheer amount of items and stocks that the system has to handle. This is one problem that, unfortunately, grows with your website and can quickly become a hassle for customers.

Naturally, customers will want to find what they're looking for as quickly as possible. If you're new to the world of eCommerce web design, you'd think that a search box would be enough to solve the problem. But you also have to consider that there are various types of search boxes, and that not every customer knows exactly what they're looking for.

Most of the big online retailers use an eCommerce solution that combines the specificity of a search box and the structure of a site map. By giving customers the option to browse your site by category or department, you let them find what they want on their own. And should they know the precise item they want, they can just go use the search box.

A Little Something Extra

Supermarkets and department stores usually put little trinkets and knickknacks near their checkout counters as one last temptation for you to buy something else from them. While not directly usable online, the model can be very effective when you're doing eCommerce web development and page design.

While you're obviously required to display information about your items, showing just that leaves a lot of blank space on your pages. Most established online retailers tend to fill up that extra space with promotions, other offers and similar products. Even if a customer is looking at just one product page, he or she ends up seeing several other products and offers besides.

Look into other options for employing a similar strategy. Remember, the whole point of your putting so much effort into your eCommerce website design is to generate more sales. This nifty on-page advertising trick does just that.

View, Don't Read

An error that many a new eCommerce company makes is going heavy on the text. Your customers are on your site to look for items, not read. Avoid taking the all-text route and pump up your site with images and photos instead. No matter how eloquently your copy writer might describe something, nothing beats a photo of the item itself.

In the same vein, photos and images appeal to the subconscious and emotional sides of a person. Text and words, on the other hand, stimulate reason and logic. Marketing wisdom dictates that you work with the former 2013 the less logical side 2013 because that's the one that usually results in a sale for you.

As you may have noticed, much of what was discussed above was little details that you probably wouldn't notice at first glance. When it comes to eCommerce web development and creating the optimum customer experience, you should think and rethink about all the aspects of your site several times over to ensure that you've got everything covered.

About the Author:

Sometimes it's the little details that have the biggest impact on the performance of your site. Jelecos.com offers comprehensive eCommerce web design services with our team of resident experts. We look at every detail, big or small, to create the best possible experience for your customers.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Selling More With Good Ecommerce Web Design

3 Common Mistakes Of The Ecommerce Company

2009-06-04T01:30:00.000-07:00

3 Common Mistakes Of The Ecommerce Company

Author: Ronaldo Rick

For one reason or another, it's very likely that the operations of your eCommerce company is still some ways away from perfect. There's almost always those one or two things that you overlooked or didn't know about that could be hampering more efficient operations and better profits for your company. Check the three usual suspects below and see if there's anything that needs to be done for your business.

Low Marketing Investment

The Internet is an immeasurably big place, and trying to sell in it is like opening a small stall in outer space. Unless you have sufficient marketing, it's likely that your business will just languish in obscurity and die a quick death.

Yet many businesses, especially those that are just starting out, choose to direct more of their capital to the technical side of the business 2013 the software, the hosting and so on. While doing that might seem like a harmless move, you're leaving yourself with a company that's well-equipped, yes, but without customers. No matter how fancy your eCommerce solutions are, your business will fail without marketing.

A new eCommerce company should prioritize marketing, or at least apportion similar amounts for things like shopping cart software and link building. That way, you're sure of a certain measure of success, which you can then use to propel your business' expansion.

Little Focus on Targeting

In terms of size and scope, selling on the Internet can be daunting at first. There are very few limits to how big your business can be and what your business can sell. But that doesn't mean you should turn into a trading post and just sell whatever strikes your fancy.

Targeting a particular niche or market is widely regarded as one of the most important things that an eCommerce company has to do before starting full-scale operation. You have to know what you're selling and to whom you're doing the selling. Without it, your efforts and investments will be too spread out all over the place, none of it effective.

From the very day that you draft your business plan, make sure that you identify your niche and your target market. Everything about eCommerce web development will pick up from that idea, generally making your growth much easier and smoother.

Lacking Support

Remember that customers are wont to distrust you, especially if you're a relatively new and fairly unknown eCommerce company. With all the hanky-panky that goes on over the Internet, you could be a scam or a con artist, for all they knew about your company.

That's where customer support comes in, and where many companies fail. Romantic couples are usually advised that open communication builds trust, and the same thing goes for a seller-customer interaction. If you fail to assure your customers that you'll respond to their queries, it suggests that you don't care about your welfare. And while that's just an abstract message, it can make a very real dent in your sales.

Although a 24/7 live support system is obviously the best eCommerce solution, that could be too much for a new company like yours. As long as you have open communication avenues like phone and email, you should do fine with the customers. That's the most important thing in the end because they, after all, are the ones who pay you.

About the Author:

No matter what size or specialty your eCommerce company might have, Jelecos.com has your back. We work with you on every aspect of web development from business plan to after-sales support so that you'll have everything covered.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - 3 Common Mistakes Of The Ecommerce Company

3 Ways To Boost Sales For Your Ecommerce Company

2009-06-04T01:29:00.000-07:00

3 Ways To Boost Sales For Your Ecommerce Company

Author: Ronaldo Patric

No eCommerce company in existence would ever set any volume of sales as 'enough.' There will always be another deal to close and another deal to make, so long as you know how to work with your market in the right way. Here are four techniques used by some of the biggest and most successful web retailers in the business. Employed properly, these tricks can get you into their ranks soon enough.

Create Customer Communication

Methods for customer service like helplines and customer assistance emails are often seen as open floodgates for customers to complain. But putting those systems in place can be for more than just irate customers, and can concretely improve your site's sales.

It's highly unlikely that your product descriptions and information pages cover everything that a customer might want to know. So if customers wonder about something but aren't able to ask the proper party 2013 you 2013 they'll almost always take the safe route and navigate away from your site without buying.

By incorporating customer communication methods in your eComerce web development, you end up making your business look much friendlier and more trustworthy. And it's that image that gives your eCommerce company a sales boost at the end of the day.

Invite with Incentives

Psychology is a huge part of effective marketing, and few concepts are as fundamental as rewards and punishments. By rewarding your customers for transacting with you, they're motivated to come back and give you return business. This might seem too much like dangling the proverbial carrot in front of the customer horse, but countless companies will attest to its effectiveness.

A moderately full-featured shopping cart software package is all you'll need to efficiently provide customer incentives for return business. Electronic coupons and promotional codes are some of the most effective and most widely used in the business, but things like loyalty cards and exclusive client clubs have also been proven to work.

The Opt-In Objective

Mailed fliers, catalogs and newsletters have been part of the traditional marketer's arsenal since time immemorial. With the right eCommerce web development strategy, you could also make use of these tried-and-tested methods to attract even more sales.

Opt-in newsletters have been a part of the Internet since the web's early days, and they remain as effective as they were a decade ago. These digital fliers and newsletters not only inform your market of new products and promotions, but also give you a good idea of how many people have great interest in what you have to sell. Combined with an incentive like an attached promo code, this method can be very effective indeed.

At the same time, you get to bring your eCommerce company to a more prominent seat in your customers' consciousness. When they see your logo, read your name and think about your products on a regular basis, you become one of those trusted establishments that they automatically visit whenever they need anything.

Increasing your sales is never easy. As you may have noticed, all three techniques above require quite a bit of involvement on your part. But employing them goes beyond just attracting buyers; you get to cultivate a client base as well. And it's that kind of result that usually guarantees the success of any eCommerce company.

About the Author:

You've got tough competition, and we at Jelecos.com know about it. That's why we'll help you formulate strategies and plan approaches to help bring your eCommerce company to the head of the pack 2013 even in the most crowded of markets.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - 3 Ways To Boost Sales For Your Ecommerce Company

Web Design - Your New Website

2009-06-04T01:27:00.000-07:00

Web Design - Your New Website

Author: Lisa

If you are looking to get a foot on the Internet ladder then having your own web site is the best way forward, however for some it can initially be a bit daunting and you may have numerous questions. Therefore I hope you will find the information below to be useful.

The hints and tips below are based on your hiring a web designer to design your new site.

The Designer: Obviously you can search the Internet to find a web designer, however it is also well worth asking friends, family and work colleagues if they have any recommendations, if they do not they may know of someone who has had a web site professionally designed. Once you have found a designer whose work appeals to you, the next step is to see how approachable and friendly they are (this is an important factor for most people), remember that you need to be able to work "together" as a team, therefore if you find the designer difficult to talk to, this could make it hard work. Of course everyone is different and some people are more chatty than others, so you will need to go with your own instincts on this, however if you find the designer sounds passionate about your project, and the prospect of working with you, then that is a step in the right direction. I used the word "passion" above, because for some designer it is more than just a job, it truly is their passion.

Your Project: You may not know at this stage exactly what you require (i.e. number of pages, features and facilities), do not worry it is normal, however do try to give the designer as much information as you possibly can, to enable them to at least provide you with an initial quote,

Pricing & Contract: Bare in mind that unless you initially go to the designer with an exact brief of your requirements, it is impossible for them to provide you with an exact quote, the initial quote is normally intended as a guide only, the designer will then quote you for any additional work required at a later stage. Also expect to be asked to sign a contract and pay a deposit up front, as this tends to be standard practice with most professional designers. A contract is there not only to protect the designer but also the client, so do not be put off by this at all, if anything if you are not presented with a contract, it's maybe worth asking why? Also it is never wise to choose a designer based solely on how "cheap" they are, going for the cheapest option can quickly turn out to be very expensive, especially if you are unhappy with the end result and therefore need to employ another designer. The main factors should be the quality of their work and their service.

Your Ideas: If you know exactly how you want your site to look and function, then great, however just remember that a professional designer may potentially see some flaws in your initially ideas i.e. certain aspects may not be user or search engine friendly, therefore always be willing to at least listen to their advise, at the end of the day you are paying them to provide you with the best service possible. If after listening to them you decide that you want to stick to your original plan, of course that will be fine, at the end of the day it is your web site and your money, but at least the designer has the peace of mind knowing that they advised you of any potential problems.

Hosting & Domain Name: Additional to the design of your web site, you will also need to purchase a domain name (if you have not done so already) and set up web hosting, some designers will offer the full package, meaning that they also provide domain name registration and web hosting, so it is worth checking up front. If the designer does not provide these additional services, they will normally be able to point you in the right direction. Regarding domain names, once you have decided on a domain and checked that it is still available it is best to register it as soon as possible, domains can be available one day and gone the next.

Summary: If you want the experience of gaining your first web site to be a pleasant one then taking your time and finding the right web designer is key, keep in mind not all web designers are "professional"

About the Author:

Caravans For Hire

Flamingoland Caravans

LM Lakeland Design - Professional Web Design Services

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Web Design - Your New Website

Ajax technology

2009-06-04T01:26:00.000-07:00

Ajax technology

Author: susen

Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology is being increasingly popular in website design. This technique is used to submit data to the server without refreshing an HTML form. Suppose you are filling an online registration form. You write your user name, email, address etc. and submit that form. At the server end server detects that the user name has already been taken by another user. So it will generate an error message and request you to choose different user name. Now you have to fill the entire form again unless the server brings your data back to you through query string. Moreover it is not very safe to send your personal information through query string. In such case AJAX data submit is the best solution. Another useful feature of Ajax data submit is that you can send custom data (like user IP) which is not in the form field.

Like conventional data submission Ajax data submit also of two types, GET and POST. There relative merits demerits are same as conventional data submission.

How data is submitted using Ajax:

1. When user submits data by pressing submit button or by clicking submit link a JavaScript function is called.

2. This function establishes connection with the server by XML HTTP REQUEST object. When connection is established data from the form fields are transmitted to the server.

3. Whenever the server response is received another JavaScript function is fired. This function then takes the necessary steps according to the response text from the server end.

Advantages and disadvantages:

1. As whole page is not reloaded Ajax submission is faster than conventional form submission process.

2. Use of Ajax is not limited to form data submission. It is widely used in dynamic menu design, collecting data for web stat analysis, etc.

3. Not all browser support JavaScript. In such cases Ajax fails to work.

4. As data are dynamically loaded web history is not available, i.e. you can2019t reload page by using back button of your browser.

About the Author:

For example and practical application of Ajax please visit our site at http://free-websites.co.cc. You may reprint this article with all links intact only.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Ajax technology

Marketing When You're Down

2009-06-04T01:25:00.000-07:00

Marketing When You're Down

Author: Scott C. Margenau

The battle of marketing in a down economy: Flee for the hills, or charge the hill?
In uncertain economic times, you can choose to retreat or you can choose to prepare for what's ahead. When the economy turns around, those who are prepared and ready their Web design company marketing arsenal will leap from competitors and gobble up market share abandoned by the feeble. The others? Well, better polish up your resume. The time is now to invest in your brand. In our experience, it takes time and a lot of creative insight to perform the work necessary to revitalize and position a brand for increased success.
Take a hard look at your brand identity, website design, online and offline media, current marketing strategies. Are they working like a well-oiled machine? Is your brand highly visible to your marketplace? Does it intrigue prospects and build value while guiding them to a conversion goal? This is an excellent time to build your Custom web design business and increase your aretshare2026while the competitors run for the hills or wave the white flag of surrender. Most companies expect sales to decline in a down economy and while that may be true for the short run, if you continue to market your brand as your competitors die off, the long term prospects are good. Are you going to wait until the economy turns around? Oops, better not. It'll be too late. Forward-thinking companies 2013 which may include your competitors 2013 are not waiting around. They are investing in their brands and positioning themselves for the future. Don't wait until it's too late. Start the work now that will be necessary to position your company to thrive in any economy.

About the Author:

Scott C. Margenau is president of ImageWorks Studio, an award-winning Custom web design, Professional web design specializing in online and off-line media in advertising, web development, brand development and promotion.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Marketing When You're Down

Outsourcing Advanced Interactive Database Driven Web Site Development to the Philippines

2009-06-04T01:24:00.000-07:00

Outsourcing Advanced Interactive Database Driven Web Site Development to the Philippines

Author: Business Local Listings

It does sound intimidating at first when you hear the words 201Cdatabase driven web site.201D It is, however, a more completely descriptive label than just a 201Cdynamic web site.201D

To best define a database driven web site or a dynamic web site, let us compare it with the older models of web sites which are mostly static web sites. Those static web sites are just like printed pages viewed online. The exact page initially uploaded by the programmer is what anyone sees every time the page is loaded. The page stays the same until you click a hyperlink which then loads a new page. The page you left still stays the same. To make any changes in that page would entail redoing the entire page through programming and uploading it again.

A database driven web site is very different from a static web site because, once you load the page, its content can change even without having to reload it. Depending on the user2019s identity, ascertained through some user registration authentication, different contents may be displayed on the same landing pages. Likewise, the user may click on some text or image and the page content may change further without having to reload. This is because the dynamic web site is linked to a database and is programmed to retrieve certain information from it to be inserted on the page as needed. To change the content on a database driven web site page, you change the content of the database. The programmer can set this up so that even a layman can upload and update information in the database, much like having a wizard.

The database driven web site is practically the norm these days. It meets the requirements of institutions such as banks. Bank clients can register and access their accounts, with the details of such accounts changing continuously with use. The client2019s every action online 2013 withdrawing or moving funds, for example 2013 automatically updates the accounts online and the database is likewise updated. For over-the-counter transactions, bank employees update the account online and the database is also updated.

Advanced heavy programming skills are required, using php, mysql and JavaScript, among others, in database driven web site development. You don2019t have to hire a whole team of programmers to have your own database driven web site, though. It is actually better to find a good web site developer who can do it for you at a much lower cost.

The Philippines has been a recognized country of choice of many companies from around the world for business process outsourcing for several years now. Not only is there a large group of highly skilled and experienced professionals to serve the various BPO needs, but these professionals are employed by outstanding companies in the field of business process outsourcing.

One such company is Web Dot Com Website Development Philippines, Inc. Based in Manila, it has been trusted for ten years now by international clients from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, Korea, and the British Virgin Islands.

Web Dot Com Website Development Philippines, Inc. offers a full array of low cost advanced web site development packages and services such as advanced interactive database driven web site development, heavy web based programming, web application development, content management systems, advanced portal development, website design, graphic design and multimedia components including flash animation development, e-commerce site solutions including a shopping cart using osCommerce, website maintenance and support, search engine optimization, search engine marketing and social media marketing. It is a web hosting provider, as well, offering domain name registration.

Outsource your advanced interactive database driven web site development to Web Dot Com and you will be in expert and caring hands.

Web Dot Com Website Development Philippines, Inc. is your One Stop Shop Internet and Contact Center Solutions Vendor for the Global Market.

Web Dot Com Website Development Philippines, Inc.
Address:
2nd Floor, BT&T Center
#20 E. Rodriguez Jr. Ave., Libis (C-5),
Quezon City, 1110 Philippines
E-mail: info@webdc.com.ph
Telephone numbers: (632) 634-4625; (632) 635-6104

About the Author:

Web Dot Com Website Development Phils., Inc.

Address: 2nd Floor, BT&T Center

#20 E. Rodriguez Jr. Ave., Libis (C-5),

Quezon City, 1110 Philippines

Phone: (632) 634-4625

Telefax No.: (632) 635-6104

In Australia (612) 800-61238

Email: info@webdc.com.ph

Website: www.webdc.com.ph

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Outsourcing Advanced Interactive Database Driven Web Site Development to the Philippines

The Role of Integrated Development Environment in Web Development

2009-06-04T01:23:00.000-07:00

The Role of Integrated Development Environment in Web Development

Author: Manish Shrivastava

An integrated development environment or IDE, as it is commonly known, is best defined as a software application used by programmers for the purpose of software development. Integrated development environment has even variously been called as integrated design environment or integrated debugging environment. Offering a host of facilities to programmers in the field of software development, IDE is a compilation of components like source code editor, compiler/interpreter, build automation tools and debugger. Since an IDE enhances programmer productivity owing to its design, it has found particular recognition in the field of web design and development in recent times. Comprising many closely combined user interfaces with similar structures, IDEs minimise the task of mode switching for programmers.

Website development is today a much patronised area owing entirely to the single handed rush of dominance that the internet has displayed over the whole world. The kind of benefits that the internet has laid out for everybody has been the major contributor to the popularity of website development. It is here that an IDE offers great benefits to programmers during the development of website. In website development programmers constantly look out for more convenient ways to build the web pages. Modern IDEs like Eclipse, ActiveState Komodo and Microsoft Visual Studio support multiple languages to cater to programmers who are engaged in different web design and development projects using different programming languages.

The development of website is a pretty arduous task encompassing many stages of tests and modifications to reach the final result. Since programmers need to go through all the stages of authoring, modifying and compiling, they seek features that facilitate all these stages seamlessly. IDEs are equipped with a single program that makes this possible, thus enhancing developer productivity and negating any risks involved. This simultaneous operation of all the tasks saves time and ensures better results, for now a programmer can write and compile the code at the same time checking on possible syntax errors immediately.

About the Author:

I am the webmaster at www.synapsewebsolutions.co.uk 2013 a web design and development offering quality and cost-efficient offshore website design and development solutions.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - The Role of Integrated Development Environment in Web Development

Eyedropper Tool in Photoshop: Helping You Pick Up a Color Easily

2009-06-04T01:21:00.000-07:00

Eyedropper Tool in Photoshop: Helping You Pick Up a Color Easily

Author: Manish Shrivastava

The world of adult web design needs to be in sync with advanced technology to provide the best to the clients thus helping them get more clicks on their sites. Therefore adult website designers today use all types of sophisticated graphic design tools and programs in their projects 2013 Adobe2019s Photoshop is one among them.

Photoshop is endowed with a number of user-friendly tools. One such tool of Photoshop is the Eyedropper Tool. In any adult website design project or simply any web design activity, the tool is used for sampling individual pixels in a pre-determined area. By taking a color value from the canvas, one can easily facilitate color selection for the skin or the sky. By simply clicking on the Eyedropper Tool in the Toolbox and then again clicking on the color you want, you can switch colors while painting to a color already on the canvas. If you do not want to go all the way through the color chooser dialog, then using this tool is a complete fun.

In adult design the Eyedropper Tool comes handy when a designer retouches a certain area with the Paint Brush Tool. By using the Eyedropper Tool he can easily sample a color from the surrounding area. If the designer wants to retouch a large gradated area, he needs to set the brush value to lower opacity besides re-sampling the lighter and darker areas of the total gradation. If the image the designer is working on has a high noise level, he may want to set the Eyedropper's "Sample Size" from the default setting of 'Point Sample' to a higher value, say '3 by 3 Average,' or '5 by 5 Average.' This will help in selecting the average color value over a wide pixel area thus avoiding the odd results from sampling a noise pixel which does not reflect the overall area color. If the designer uses the sampled color over a long period of time, he can save the color to his "Swatches" pallet window.

About the Author:

I am the webmaster at www.adultwebdesignersite.com 2013 a web design company providing adult website design and offering high quality adult website designs.quality adult website designs.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Eyedropper Tool in Photoshop: Helping You Pick Up a Color Easily

Outsourcing Low Cost Advanced Web Portal Development and Website Design

2009-06-04T01:19:00.000-07:00

Outsourcing Low Cost Advanced Web Portal Development and Website Design

Author: Business Local Listings

With the massive amount of information available online, the need for portal development arose. A portal is a means of systematizing the users2019 access to information, focusing on user friendliness to avoid confusion and information overload. The portal provides a means by which a user can register and be identified and authenticated. Based on this identification, the user is automatically served with the appropriate menu in the landing page, summarizing all options, functions and features available to him. This enables the user to customize his use of the website.

Having a portal also serves the needs of the website owner because it enables the systematic organization and cataloguing of huge amounts of information and services, even from many different sources, and their appropriate assignment to various users on demand. The portal filters for authorized use and preferences, and does the necessary trafficking, as well.

In effect, a portal makes possible the dissemination of information from many sources to many users. A good portal allows various information and service-providing sources, such as organizational departments, to set up and update their particular information and services for dissemination. They should also be able to specify which information or services should be made available to which group of users.

As mentioned earlier, a portal is set up to address the needs of users. The focus should, therefore, be on having an easy intuitive interface to facilitate user friendliness rather than the convenience of the information provider or service provider.

Ideally, there should be a 201Csingle sign on201D feature where the user only has to register once to have full access to the site. All information and services that user is authorized to access should then be automatically presented in a menu, awaiting his choices.

Appropriate website design is necessary for effective portal development since this is crucial to a site2019s user friendliness. Aside from good aesthetic design, a portal should be designed to enhance smooth navigation. Functions, features and options should be presented in an organized manner.

Coming up with a portal with excellent functionality and design that is very easy to use requires the expertise of a highly skilled portal development and website design team. Advanced web portal development and website design can be expensive, though, especially if you do it in house. That means you have to find and hire all the experts who will do every step of the process. You will have to invest in all the equipment they will need, too. A much more viable alternative is outsourcing all your web development needs to a good website developer.

Web Dot Com Website Development Philippines, Inc. is a Manila-based company that offers low cost advanced website development packages including not only advanced portal development but also advanced interactive database driven website development, heavy web based programming, web application development, content management systems, website design, graphic design and multimedia components including flash animation development, e-commerce site solutions including a shopping cart using osCommerce, website maintenance and support, search engine optimization, search engine marketing and social media marketing. Aside from being a web developer, it is also a web hosting provider that offers domain name registration.

It makes good sense to outsource your web development needs to a company that also does other business process outsourcing, as well, because then you can be sure that proper systems are in place for all BPO related requirements. Web Dot Com Website Development Philippines, for example, has been serving the BPO needs of clients from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, Korea, the British Virgin Islands and the Philippines for ten years.

Web Dot Com Website Development Philippines, Inc. is your One Stop Shop Internet and Contact Center Solutions Vendor for the Global Market.

Web Dot Com Website Development Philippines, Inc.
Address:
2nd Floor, BT&T Center
#20 E. Rodriguez Jr. Ave., Libis (C-5),
Quezon City, 1110 Philippines
E-mail: info@webdc.com.ph
Telephone numbers: (632) 634-4625; (632) 635-6104

About the Author:

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Outsourcing Low Cost Advanced Web Portal Development and Website Design