How user-friendly should an ecommerce website be?
Your ecommerce website won’t be successful if it looks good, but lacks usability. Your web design should ensure that visitors on your site can find what they are looking for with ease, whether it’s information or products. If your website doesn’t draw attention and facilitate easy shopping, people will buy the products elsewhere. Five tips for designing easy-to-use ecommerce websites Keep it simple: Your web design layout should be simple and self-explanatory
read moreContent management systems make web design easy
Creating a website from scratch using HTML and CSS coding is all good and well for the experts or those people that have time, but for newbies to the web design world or people without a lot of time, a content management system (CMS) can make a huge difference. A CMS is a programme that helps you create, organise, store and link all the elements (pictures, pages, sounds, etc) of a website – without having to fiddle with any actual coding. Free CMS are available on
read moreUsing an online form creator
Having Google Analytics on a website can give your client valuable information about who’s clicking on which pages, but Wufoo can help you gather more in-depth and personal information about website users. Wufoo is an online form creator that lets you set up any type of poll or forms on websites. The great part of this program is that it has full CSS and XHTML integration, meaning that you don’t need to understand any of the programming behind it (this is probab
read moreCreate a web gallery – part 2
This is the second part of a two-part blog post about creating a web gallery for your website. Be sure to read part 1 before continuing with these steps to create your own web gallery: In the last post, we ended by choosing a destination folder for the website gallery photos and deciding which extension (htm or html) we are going to use. Now that these options have been clarified, you will now have a Banner option, which will require you to provide the name of your
read moreSlicing images in Photoshop
Image slicing can be used for website design, graphic user interfaces or just getting one big image and splitting it into a bunch of smaller images. This technique will work for Photoshop CS1, CS2, CS3 and CS4. For this example, we are going to be splitting a menu bar (which is usually found at the top of the website) into separate image files: Go to File, New or pres Control + N Select 700 width and 40 Height Add a gradient overlay for a background. This is your b
read moreAnnoying Features of Web Pages – The No No’s!
Your primary goal as a web designer is to hook users and keep them, so reading the following points below should assist you in not losing them by annoying them! These irritations are enough to have them move on and keep browsing. Link after link after link If a user has to click more than 3 times to find what they are looking for, maybe your site is not set up efficiently. Misleading Links It’s both annoying and frustrating for a user to click a link to a web pag
read moreHow to centre your CSS layout inside a web browser
This article is part of a series about website design and the basics of creating a CSS (cascading style sheet) layout in Dreamweaver. In the previous articles we discussed how to create Div’s, change the sizes and how to create “nested Div’s” (a Div inside a Div). This article will focus on how to centre your CSS layout inside a web browser. If you’ve worked with table-based layouts before, you’ll know that centering your layout is relatively easy. CSS,
read moreGiving a cost estimate for website and graphic design jobs
Drawing up costs and proposals are time-consuming. If you are a website designer or a graphic designer, you need to know how to accurately bill for your work (even if you are working for a salary, it’s a good idea to make a mental note of how this gets done). Although you won’t get every job you bid on, you need to make sure you are providing clients with a fair, realistic and profitable cost estimate for design jobs. What are your competitors charging? You prob
read moreChanging sizes and positioning of a Div layout
In our last post, we discussed the basics of creating a CSS layout in Dreamweaver. For website designers, the basics of a good website designs starts with creating your website’s layout (before any images, text or design elements are incorporated). Now that you have your three layout boxes (Header, Content and Footer), we are going to start changing the positioning so that the layout is fit for an internet browser. Step 1: As mentioned in our previous post, you ca
read moreRefining your CSS layout with nested Div’s
This post is part of a series about the basics of creating a CSS layout in Dreamweaver. In the previous post we discussed how to create Div’s and change the sizes. When designing a website, one needs to create “nested Div’s” (which basically refers to a Div inside a Div) so that you have the layout you need for menu buttons, advertisement spaces and so forth. Once you’ve got the basics of CSS layouts, you can start to refine your site with nested Div’s.
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