1 – Website Designers are Developers

It’s often assumed that if you are a web designer, you develop websites too. Even though web designers should have a working knowledge of code to do their job properly, many often do not. Developers think differently. Their strengths are the complete opposite is some cases.

2 – Website Designers Enjoy Their Job So Much, They’ll Want to Do it For Free

I for one love every second of what I do. Designing is a privilege as it often doesn’t seem like work to me. It’s the same way someone else who loves their job may feel. A teacher may love helping kids grow and become educated, but they don’t expect to do it for free. Designers need to make a living. And often what we do requires lots of knowledge to do it right. The same as any other profession.

3 – Web Designers are Copywriters

Sure, some web designers can write pretty well too. But these are two completely separate jobs. When hiring a designer, expect to provide them with copy. You don’t ask your doctor to clean your teeth. Same idea. Unless your designer specifically says they are providing you with content too. Assume you need to provide it.

4 – Website Designers Charge More Than They’re Worth

Let me explain how much learning, research & practice goes into web designing.

1. There are thousands of different industries, each with their own challenges, audiences & content. Web designers need to research every new industry & audience they work with.
2. Every year, just like other industries, designers attend workshops, conferences & seminars. Designers must constantly be learning, reading and practicing new techniques to keep up with technology. It changes faster than you can blink an eye. It’s very apparent when a designer puts learning on the back-burner and doesn’t keep up with technology. You’re paying for constant education and many additional hours of time above and beyond the normal 9-5.
3. Website Designers have to account for costs for: computers, mobile devices, licenses for: fonts, photography, content management systems, plugins, stock art (if required), software upgrades and licenses, and more. Just like other industries, we have expenses. Many of which aren’t cheap.
4. Design is very time consuming. Sure after years of working in Photoshop, a designer may be able to flip pixels around like nobody’s business. But there are still many of hours that go into research, planning, information architecture (this is another separate job in itself), phone calls & conferences with: the client, copywriter, developer, project manager, usability expert, the list goes on…
5. How much is the perception of your brand worth to your business? It’s just as important as the words that come out of your mouth when talking to a potential customer. It’s the window of your business or organization. It’s how the outside world will perceive your business when you are not there. It’s pretty important!

5 – Web Designers Fix Computer Problems

Honestly, designers have computer problems too! That’s a completely different profession. Designers can probably find their way around a computer better than the average person, but that doesn’t make them a computer technician.

6 – Web Designers are Illustrators

So if they don’t write copy and they don’t illustrate, what does a web designer do? The difference between a graphic designer/web designer & another other fine art profession is that they are experts with typography and layout. Typography is key to a successful design. Just like an illustration or photograph, type can evoke emotion. It can also be void of emotion. Many web designers can in fact illustrate and snap a killer photo. But that’s not their main focus generally. Also best to ask if you aren’t sure what to expect.

7 – Design Isn’t as Important as Content

It’s what you say, not how you say it right? Not exactly. Without great design, content is often irrelevant. Especially if the way the content is designed is unreadable or designed inappropriately. Your words may take on a completely different meaning when they are displayed in a bold, slab-serif font (very heavy and strong) vs. a light scripted font (think wedding invites).

8 – Anyone Who Uses Photoshop Can Design

Design is so much more than being able to use a software program. Originality comes from sketching, planning, brainstorming away from the computer. Web designers need to be able to ask the right questions to their clients to learn, research & understand their business’s audience. Great design speaks to the customers of the business. Not the client, not the designer. A design has failed when it’s not aimed at the right person. It can certainly still look great, but that doesn’t mean it’s successful. Photoshop can’t perform those skills. I don’t think there will ever be a button for that.

9 – Web Designers Just Make Things Pretty

Sure, web designers make things look good, but they also need to make information readable and functional. If there isn’t a rhyme or reason to why something is in a certain place than it’s not designed. Web designers have multiple things to take into consideration besides the brand itself. These include: SEO, page load time, content management system restrictions/requirements, third party applications and oh yeah… how the website might be used in the future. That’s a lot of things to take into consideration. There’s a lot under the hood of a website design. More than meets the eye.

10 – Design is Easy.

This one sums it all up. Design is anything but easy. There are often multiple people to please on top of trying to design for a particular audience.  Everything in #9, learning software programs, understand what can and cannot be done with CSS/HTML/Javascript. Working with UI folks, copywriters, developers, project managers, photographer, illustrators… the list goes on and on.

Design is slowly becoming more recognized throughout the world and will continue to grow and thrive. Design is a necessary component in business growth.

Where can one find the most experienced web designers? This is an excellent question that is normally asked by those that lack the skill of putting together a solid website. Let’s take a close look at a few sources that will help you find the most experienced website designers.

Telephone Book

Professional website designers list their business with the telephone books. They understand that the telephone book is probably the first source that businesses will use to enlist their help. You will find many designers listed within the yellow pages.

Internet Search Engines

We cannot discount the effectiveness of internet search engines. The search engines will list thousands of prospective designers. Google and Yahoo are two search engines that will provide you with acceptable results.

Freelance Sites

There are hundreds of freelance sites online. Many site creators bid for jobs on freelance sites. You can place a work order on any freelance site. The site creators will proceed to bid on your offer. This is a simple method of having site designers contacting you.

Forums

Forums are places where people with the same interest hang out. There are thousands of various forms online today. Visiting internet marketing forums will give you a chance to establish relationships with some of the best designers around.

Website designers are known for creating attractive sites for businesses that want to have an online presence. It is not difficult to find a designer that is capable of making a site to suit your online business. One can use any of the sources listed above to find talented website designers with ease.

In today’s business world, it is essential for businesses to have a website. More and more people do all of their searching for businesses exclusively online. For nearly all businesses there is no good reason not to have a website, and many reasons why they they should. However, it’s important to hire good web designers rather than trying to build the site on your own.

Why Using a Professional Designer is Important

It can be tempting to try to make you own site because the cost is very attractive if you use one of the many “build your own” services. However, without the services of a professional, your website is unlikely to be found by as many people as you want, and those that do find it may not stay there long. This is because the content of your website needs to be carefully constructed in such a way that it not only ranks high in the results when potential clients search for the products or services you provide, but it also is easy to understand and navigate through.

Search Engine Optimization and Ease of Use

Many people don’t realize that a visually striking website with a lot of fancy graphics will very often not rank as high in search results as a site that is mostly text. This is because the most important way to “optimize” a site so it scores high is to have the words that potential clients are likely to use in searches placed in the correct frequency and position in your site. However, if a web page reads as though it’s only purpose is to score well, readers will not linger on it. Professional website designers know how to balance readability and optimization. They also know how to construct navigation menus that make it clear where you are in a website and how to find the specific information you seek.

To find the best web designers, search online and use a search term that includes the word “optimization”. Look at a large number of sites, and check their portfolios. Do the websites they have designed score well in searches? Are they easy to understand and navigate through? Put yourself in the shoes of a customer, and if you are patient you will find the right designer for you.

This is a shame because without web designers and developers, even the best online business idea in the world wouldn’t be able to take off. This isn’t to say that web design is the most important facet of the internet; the reason the online world works so well is because of the collaborative nature of it and the fact that many different people have a part to play. Entrepreneurs need to have ideas before a great web design can be created, after all.

However, if Facebook or Twitter didn’t have a good web design, for instance, it’s highly unlikely that those websites would be as successful as they are, no matter how good the ideas were in the first place. Plus, almost every single new business that launches now has its own website. Having a high quality website for your business is now seen as something you have to do – it’s almost a mark of professionalism and authenticity. More people now search online for businesses than look in the Yellow Pages. A website can make or break a company’s reputation.

All of this helps to demonstrate just how important web design is to online innovation and even the wider operations of companies. Another good example is the world of ecommerce: we are frequently told that we are spending ever more money online, largely because it’s a convenient to shop. Without good, easy to use web design, the process would be much more complicated and would have been much less likely to take off in the way that it has.

Also, branding is arguably more important now than it has ever been before. In particular, we can thank companies such as Apple and Google – which have extremely distinctive brands and have changed the way we do much of our business – for the fact that brands are now so vital. A large part of branding is about design and creating an image to represent a particular company or service. The fact branding is so essential means that web design is not just a commodity or service for hire anymore; often, web designers are partners in creating an online brand.

Web design becomes more important still when we consider how much has changed in the world of technology over the past few years. It wasn’t that long ago when Internet Explorer dominated the internet, which had a significant impact on how things were designed. Now, the diversification of platforms has in a way forced designers to be more innovative about how sites are put together; no platform can be neglected but sites have to perform to high standards across all of them. We cannot deny that this requires a special type of skill and ability to innovate in order to adapt to this new state of affairs.

This means that the world of web design is constantly evolving, in effect making the internet look good as it continues its development. Web design has to be responsive and adaptive to new developments in ecommerce and entrepreneurship; often changes need to be made quickly and new processes need to be developed. Web design is not just about aesthetics; it’s about the layers underneath, too. Other developments, such as Google algorithm updates, also need to be responded to so that sites can continue to perform highly and do well in the rankings.

All of these changes have led to web design developments such as HTML5, mobile sites and responsive web design – and things are still evolving, as they should. Online innovation is, in effect, a team game. It requires all the players to work together in order to create a working website that can be utilised by web users to benefit both them and businesses. Web design is not the only part of that but it is an important part of that. Without the user-friendly interface created by web designers, the internet would largely be just a collection of ideas struggling to properly be born.

Here are 3 reasons why:
1) It makes managing your customers WAY easier.

When you finish work for a client, often times you point them in the direction of a hosting provider to host their website. Sometimes the client comes back to you and wants you to revise something and they painfully try to tell you where it is located and how their hosting is setup. Well, no more! As a Reseller you keep all your clients in one place, can log in to their accounts when instructed to fix something, and remove the headache of the hundreds of emails you would receive outside your reseller account.

2) You make a healthy profit.

As a Reseller, you determine the price for hosting that you want to charge your customers. Why? because you have the relationship with your customers and we put you in a position to own a hassle-free, hosting service.  Here is example of how you can be profitable:

If you buy in to the lowest price Reseller package (at $24.95/month) that we offer, you are granted 100 domains, certain bandwidth and memory, and a bunch of other features. If you decide to charge each of the domain holders/your clients our lowest shared hosting price, this would be your return:

So why does the web design industry rely so heavily on Lorem Ipsum? Lorem Ipsum is a unique style of writing and is used because it is nonsensical text which does not detract from the aesthetic presentation of a design. In addition, the variations of Lorem Ipsum that are put out by Lorem Ipsum generators do a good job of estimating a normal distribution of English words and spaces. Today, many web designers and web design companies who use this dummy text, obtain it from special online or software-based text generators.

You may think it odd using this Latin text, but it actually has no meaning. It looks like a sample of Latin words. However, in reality the Lorem Ipsum is just a sample of letters in words with many letters being omitted. So, in reality this made up Latin text consists of many words that do not exist in the actual Latin language.

For anyone who is involved with building a website, this style of text generation is very important. Why you may ask? It is important because it shows exactly what the live site will look like once text has been added. Without the Lorem Ipsum a web designer would have to spend huge amounts of time typing in irrelevant text which would be a waste of time and resource.

Hopefully, this blog has explained Lorem Ipsum in a nutshell. If you found this post useful, please leave a comment below. Why not subscribe to our great weekly blog which is full of great content, information and tips. Please also join in the conversation with us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook too.

The site consists of thousands of pages through which a presentation of information using different technologies that are linked together with hyperlinks.There are two basic aspects of any website on the Internet. The first is a presentation to the user interacts with, usually visually, while the second is a back-end that includes information for non-human browsers.

From a technical standpoint, the act of designing web pages can be very difficult.Unlike traditional print media, HTML has a number of variable factors. For starters, not all browsers interpret HTML according to standards established by the regulatory body. The World Wide Web Consortium, also known as W3.

This means that while a piece of web design as the designer wishes to appear in a browser, it may seem totally different in another. Take the example of someone who is in charge of web design hotels, the designer can make a very good graphics and textual presentation and test it in a browser like Firefox, but when the same website is opened in Internet Explorer, can have large differences in how to see their images and texts.

Another limiting factor of web design is the large number of formats in which a site can be seen. While graphic designers know exactly how big the piece of paper it is printed advertising piece, a web designer must take into account the different sizes of different monitors and display settings.

Continuing with the example of the hotels, it is possible that making a website of a hotel and insert an image of a specific room, two users with different size monitors, can see the presentation of information in a totally different . So in these cases when the manager of web design hotels should keep in mind that its establishment should be planned to look good on any computer.

Together, these concerns often make room for a web designer to incorporate dynamic accomplish enough to make a website attractive to a wide range of sizes.

Text effects are a great way to enhance your web designs, and with just one CSS property you can replicate effects that were only possible before by using images of text. Text-shadow is supported in all major browsers except IE, and along with RGBa colours, allows us to replicate some popular effects.

Text-shadow is easy to use and gives you a lot of control, letting you specify values for:

• The shadows colour (RGBa is great for subtle effects).
• The X position of the shadow, offset from the text.
• The Y position of the shadow, offset from the text.
• The blur radius or spread of the shadow.

And the syntax looks like this:

text-shadow: colour, x, y, radius;< /pre>

For example:
text-shadow: #FFF 0px 1px 0px;
And the best part? You can have multiple shadows!

text-shadow: #FFF 0px 1px 0px, #555 0px -1px 0px;

Here are some examples for uses of text-shadow.
The obvious use

Even a simple shadow is an easy way to add depth.
text-shadow: #999 1px 2px 3px;
Inset text

By using a sharp shadow (or two) with a tiny offset, you can give the impression of inset text.
text-shadow: #FFF 0px 1px 0px, #555 0px -1px 0px;
3D

Multiple shadows with incremental offsets can be used to give your text thickness.
text-shadow: #00417f 0px 1px 0px, #00417f 0px 2px 0px, #00417f 0px 3px 0px;
Blur

While blurry text is hard to read, it could be used in some cases for effect.
text-shadow: #095eae 0px 0px 3px, #095eae 0px 0px 6px;
3D anaglyphic

This one is a novelty effect, but shows just how flexible the text-shadow property is. The colour of the text needs to be set as well, and RGBa is used so the text and shadow blend where they overlap.
color: rgba(0,255,255,0.5);
text-shadow: rgba(255,0,0,0.5) -5px 0px 0px;
As you can see, text-shadow can be used in lots of interesting ways. Have you used the text-shadow property to enhance your web designs, and if so what effects did you use?
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		http://www.designdirectuk.com/blog/webdesign-blog/how-to-increase-facebook-fans/
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		Fri, 23 Dec 2011 12:09:20 +0000
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			As a Creative  Marketing  Company we pride ourselves on understanding how to make the most out of social media. So when one of our clients, a new forest spa came to us with the brief of helping their Facebook campaign and in particlular their Facebook fan numbers we were delighted to devise a strategy to improve their social media profile.

We made many changes to improve the presence and content on their social media profiles. Alongside installing plugins to publish all content over all social media platforms we devised a simple but effective push to increase Facebook fan numbers. The push involved changing the landing pages, Facebook branding, content published and engagement strategy. Below is a table showing the life time fans (the darker blue represents our involvement in their Facebook campaign)

As you can see from the above graph since our involvement their Facebook like rates have increased. After doing the math their likes have increased by an impressive 37.93%. Alongside this we’ve started an engagement strategy to make the most out of their increased fans whilst trying to achieve the long term brand goals.
So if you want to make the most out of Social Mediaor just need advice on Digital Marketing, give us a call as we’d love to hear from you.
 
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		http://www.designdirectuk.com/blog/webdesign-blog/free-seo-ipad-apps/
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		Thu, 05 May 2011 08:57:41 +0000
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			Now that Apple iPad’s consumer base has grown,  webmasters need to find a way to step up their game and adjust to new  SEO techniques in order to suit the iPad’s new design and features. They  can do so by employing a few types of SEO apps. However, before  tinkering with iPad SEO in particular, they must first learn about the  nature of mobile SEO.

Before choosing the right kinds of SEO apps to download to enhance  their iPad SEO, however, webmasters must first understand that mobile  search engines are designed differently from traditional search engines.  Both types of search engines employ different kinds of bots and  algorithms. Additionally, before webmasters delve into mobile SEO, they  should know that mobile search engines are not really as finely tuned as  compared to the traditional search engines.
After learning these basic things about mobile SEO, webmasters must  also understand the difference between traditional SEO and iPad SEO.

One of the most important things they need to know is  that flash is non-searchable using the iPad. Therefore, contents  embedded in flash can’t be properly indexed by Google.


Another thing they need to consider is that the iPad’s  new architecture is probably going to make an impact, or at least a few  changes, to the field of Advertising. As most people may have noticed  already, Apple and Google are both pushing towards mobile advertising.  So webmasters might want to look deeper into that aspect as well, if  they want to optimize their sites, especially among iPad or mobile phone  users.

Moving on to free SEO apps for iPads, here’s a review of the most efficient tools.

Google Analytics for iPad

This is one of the most widely used SEO apps, mainly because it’s  free and it provides a comprehensive report. Additionally, this free  application for iPad SEO also offers users with an impressive touch  interface dedicated to showing reports derived from Google Analytics  itself. This tool is ideal for webmasters who are planning to do a quick  presentation to various people, or perhaps to important clients, with  the use of their top keyboard. Apart from that, this tool can also be  used to simply run a thorough search engine report.

VNC

This particular application for better mobile SEO can efficiently  serve as an ideal back-up just in case a person forgets any important  file or data that’s stored in his/her home desktop while he/she is away.  The VNC Server Lite basically enables users to enjoy easy access to  their desktop files even when they are miles away from the computer.  However, that’s not all that VNC can do. This application can also  function as a workaround whenever the person finds the need to view a  Flash website using the iPad. So it’s not only beneficial to web  optimizers, but for the general base of consumers as well.
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