Usability

Remembering Your Reader in Web Design

1 Comment 19 August 2008

Technology advancements have allowed for many improvements and enhancements in web design. Drastic changes have been made concerning programming, development, and available features. From flash animations, to blog pages, forums, and live chat, website designers have a multitude of design elements that can be added to their websites. Multimedia products such as audio, video, and podcasts are some of the other advancements in web design. One thing that has not changed, however, is the website readers. Successful website developers know and understand this concept, and apply it to every website that they design. Continue Reading

CSS

12 Great CSS Resources: From Inspiration to Implementation.

10 Comments 18 August 2008

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, which is a style sheet language used to present a document written in a markup language. CSS is often used to update and change web sites written in HTML or XHTML. These are a few sites that have a excellent start up information to help someone use CSS.

W3 Schools- W3 Schools is a very helpful web site for the novice user up to the experienced user on information to program CSS sheets along with other questions for other coding for web sites.

WDG Guide – This is another tutorial on how to use CSS along with base sheets and galleries to help the user learn more about how to style CSS.
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Web Design for Beginners

Advice for the Inexperienced Web Designer

2 Comments 17 August 2008

Website software and templates have made it easier for inexperienced website designers to create and maintain their own websites. Prior to the development of such items, if you wanted a website for your company you had to retain a reputable website design firm to create a website for you. Website development is not an easy procedure, but if you decide to undertake the process yourself, there are a few simple strategies that can make the process of creating a high-quality website a little bit easier.

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Increasing Traffic

Guide to Buying Traffic

0 Comments 14 August 2008

While many niches depend on PPC search traffic, there’s a wide group of sites that benifit from bought traffic from individual sites. Often times you can get very high quality traffic that converts very well from niches that tend to deal in a more direct site to site type traffic deal, rather than 3rd party ad networks.

This guide is mostly to be used when buying traffic from forums, from individual websites, and from “plug” type packages, yet there are many things that transfer over to more traditional PPC outlets. Without further ado, on to the guide:

1. Know what they are sending. Get 3rd party tracking software and use it. I use LinkFacts.com. I’m sure there’s TONS more. The great thing is, this tracks in real time and tracks BEFORE ANYTHING LOADS… It also tells me uniques vs. raw and countries that traffic is from.

I use this to track links FROM my sites for most larger campaigns (mostly just to check my system numbers and give a 3rd party view of what happened if there’s problems). Often times you will find that it’s not the traffic, rather it’s the way you track it. Continue Reading

Aesthetics, Graphics, Tutorials, Web Design

Make Your Designs ‘POP’

2 Comments 14 August 2008

Admit it, effects are cool. Drop shadows, gradients, glows, bevels and the like can be a lot of fun and are ridiculously easy to apply to your designs. However, once you discover the powerful effects waiting inside today’s graphics suites, it’s easy to get carried away. Take a look at the sample logo below:

It’s a pretty simple, text-based (font: Segoe IE) logo with only 2 colors. In some cases, this logo may be exactly what the client is looking for, but for most applications (especially the increasingly bold and bright internet) you need something that pops off the page a bit. The answer? Effects. Continue Reading