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Hi readers we found this article which we hope you will enjoy as much as we did, if you would like more information on the topics discussed in the article do not hesitate to contact Cre8 and we will be happy to discuss how the subject might be applied to your business.

Upon reading this article you can learn how to ask the right questions from your web designer and what you should think about when asking the questions. It is easy to get lost in the maze and spend money without knowing what you are paying for. This is why cre8 want to inform their clients with expert advice from expert people who can help educate us all.

Enjoy: the Cre8 team

Excerption: http://www.noupe.com/design/ten-most-common-design-mistakes.html

The 10 Most Common Mistakes Web Designers Make

There are plenty of mistakes web designers (especially new ones) make when designing websites. Everything from poor design to simple oversight happens every day. But with a little diligence, they can easily be avoided.

Below are ten of the most common mistakes web designers make, along with examples of sites who do things right. Some of these are easy to correct if you’re aware of, others might take a bit more time. But all are fixable and worth the time and effort to correct. While this is by no means a comprehensive list of common errors, it is a good starting point.

1. Busy, crowded pages.

“White space” or “negative space”, space that is empty of elements other than your background design, is an incredibly important design element. It’s an important design element that affects how your visitors perceive the importance of different elements. Sufficient white space should be used between your columns, different page elements, and even between individual characters, lines, and paragraphs. Consider both the “macro” white space, the negative space around columns, page elements, and even the whole design; and micro white space, the negative space between individual lines, paragraphs, and sub-elements.

In addition to white space, don’t try to put too much on a single page. Visitors will likely visit pages looking for something specific. Including only related information and necessary navigation and site-wide elements on each page. It’s better in many cases to have multiple short pages than only a handful of very long ones, especially if those long ones include a ton of unrelated content.

2. Hard-to-Find New Content

Unless the sites you’re designing are completely static, somehow showcasing new information and content is vital to good design. Returning visitors are likely going to be interested in what’s changed since they last visited. Generally, this is done automatically on blogs, with posts appearing in descending order based on date. But what about on other types of websites?

There are a few ways to approach this. You can devote an entire section to new content. This could be a page linking to the newest content (say, the ten most recent updates). Or this could be a section within the home page or another page that links to the newest updates. Making this prominent is important, whether it’s directly within the home page or on its own page. The goal is to make it easy for returning visitors to find it.

3. Hard-to-Find Links

Links are one of the most important parts of a website. Arguably, they could be the most important element. In any case, you need to make sure your links are easy to distinguish from other text elements.

There are two things to keep in mind here. First, make sure your links are distinguished in some way from the rest of your text. This can be done with a different colour, an underline, or some other text attribute (anything but blinking text). The second thing to keep in mind is not to make text that isn’t linked look like a link. This means that under no circumstances should any text on your site be underlined if it isn’t a link. It also means that if you use other elements to style your links, don’t apply them to non-linked text.

4. Incorrect Image Formats

Using the correct image format for the different images on your site is vital. Using the wrong image file format can either make your image files larger than they need to be or affect the quality of the final image. The three image formats to concern you with for online graphics are JPEG, GIF, and PNG.

JPEG format is great for photos or images with a lot of different colours and shades because it’s capable of 24 bit colour. The downside to using JPEG is that it uses lousy compression. In other words, the smaller you make the file size, the more quality loss you get. Using lower compression minimizes this but it can still be an issue, especially in larger images or images where the original was very sharp. You can’t use transparency in JPEGs either.

GIF format is great for images that use a limited colour palette. GIF is only capable of 8 bit colour (256 colours total). That means it’s not appropriate for photographs or most gradient images. GIF uses lossless compression, though, which means if you have an image that uses only a limited colour palette it can result in really small file sizes with no quality loss. GIF is also capable of transparency for a single colour within the palette.

PNG format is suitable for photos and other graphics. PNG images are capable of alpha transparency (in browsers that support it), which gives them an advantage of GIFs. They also use lossless compression, which gives them an advantage over JPEGs. And they’re capable of 8 or 24 bit colour, so are suitable for images that previously would have been saved as GIFs or JPEGs. PNG images aren’t quite as good at JPEGs for photos, but are considerably better than GIFs.

5. Leaving the Default Page Title

The default page title in Dreamweaver is “Untitled Document”. If you search for it in Google, you’ll come up with almost 30 million results. There’s really no excuse for this. It’s literally a two-second fix. Make sure before you upload that you’ve changed the default page title to something other than the default.

Really, though, you should take it a step beyond that. Many CMSs use the website or blog name as the default page title for every page within the site. Some will add on the title of the particular page, but some don’t. You should make sure that not only is the page title for each page unique, but that the specific page title shows up before the site title. It’s a big help with SEO, both in terms of showing up higher in results and in having those results look more relevant to potential visitors.

6. Hard-to-Use or Hard-to-Find Navigation

Navigation should be immediately apparent to visitors, both in terms of locating it and using it. There was a trend in web design for a while to hide navigation, to integrate it seamlessly into an image or other content on the home page. And while artistically this is interesting, functionally it’s very user-unfriendly.

Even using things like drop down menus for navigation can make your pages less user-friendly. You want users to be able to find exactly what they’re looking for with the least amount of effort. Always keep that in mind when you’re designing.

7. Fixed Font Size

This is a very important one. Make sure users can resize the fonts on your pages based on their own preferences. This is done using EM sizing for fonts rather than pixel-based sizes. Again, it’s a relatively simple thing to implement but greatly improves the usability and accessibility of your site.

8. An Unclear Site Purpose

Visitors should immediately know what a site is about, no matter what page they land on. This can be done through the use of tag lines or similar indications, through page titles, or through headings on individual pages. However you choose to do it, make sure that it’s apparent within the first few seconds after a visitor lands on a given page.

9. Using Harsh Colours

Harsh colours, and especially the use of harsh contrasting colours, can quickly make your sites a chore to view. You don’t want to do anything that makes a visitor want to leave your site. Eye strain is one thing that will get most visitors to leave post haste. Your site should showcase your content and avoid anything that detracts from the goal of the site.

10. Advertising Blended Into Content

Advertising should be set apart from the content of your site. With banner ads this is relatively easy; most Internet users know what a banner ad looks like. It’s a bit trickier with text links, though. Labeling your advertising for what it is make sense to your visitors and sets your site up to be considered more trustworthy. This is especially important with in-text advertising, where hovering over a linke will bring up a modal window with an ad. Make sure these links are differentiated from your normal links.

Author: Cameron Chapman

Cameron Chapman is a writer, blogger, copyeditor, and social media addict.

Color Shorthand

Once you’ve started using CSS layouts for your Web designs, you may notice something odd about the way the colors are defined. Rather than the standard 6-character long code after the pound sign (#cc99ff), instead you see just three characters (#c9f). This is called color shorthand and it takes advantage of the fact that the browser-safe Web palette uses triplets that are always doubled. In other words, each color triplet is made of 3 pairs of characters 0-f (base 16), and with browser-safe colors they are doubled. So, to write color shorthand, you simply remove the duplicate character.

For example:
White is written #fff in shorthand
Black is written #000
Red is #f00
Green is #0f0
Blue is #00f
and so on…

Color Tips for the Web

Finding Color Triads

If you’ve read my article on color harmony you will know that color triads are color groups that work well together and bring a lot of life to a design. Using hexadecimal color codes, it’s easy to create color triads from any color set you might have.

A very basic color triad might be orange, purple, and sea-gren. Written #fc0, #c0f, and #0fc. In this color triad the three characters are f, c, and 0. By changing the combination of the triplets, you can create different colors that are harmonious with one another. Here’s how to do it.

1. Pick your primary color.
   For the above color scheme, I used orange: #fc0.
2. Rotate the characters so that the three characters are in completely different positions.
   I put f last, c first, and 0 in the middle. This gave me a light purple color: #c0f
3. Rotate the characters one final time so that they are all in different positions.
   There is only one combination left where the characters have not been in those positions, a sea-green: #0fc

You can do this with non-browser-safe colors as well, just treat each double character as you did the single characters. For example, in my iris layout I used: blue #859CFE, pink #FE859C, and green #9CFE85. The three double character groups are 85, 9c, and fe.

Enjoy : The team Cre8

Excerption : http://webdesign.about.com/cs/color/a/aacolortips.htm

Bland Design picture

What’s to like: The positioning in this page is pretty good. The logo is cleanly positioned, and so is the search box area. The header and footer visually sit outside the main content area. Navigation is clearly designated. Ads are neatly tucked near the bottom of the page.

What’s not to like: The design is okay, but it is fixed-width and left-aligned. It’s only 750 pixels wide. This would be okay if the design was centered, but as-is, there’s a lot of leftover white space on modern monitors at (usually much) higher resolutions than 800×600.

How to improve: The site just a bit bland and needs to be brought up-to-date. Move away from table-based layout to clean up the HTML. Increase the font size a bit to help the customer better read through the site. This design could be made wider or even have a liquid layout.

Enjoy : The Cre8 team

Excerption : http://www.wpdfd.com/issues/87/bland_and_grand_web_designs/bland_furniture

Hello again readers we found this article which we hope you will enjoy as much as we did, if you would like more information on the topics discussed in the article do not hesitate to contact Cre8 and we will be happy to discuss how the subject might be applied to your business.

Enjoy: the Cre8 team
Excerption: http://articles.webdesigners123.com/web_page_optimization.php

Let’s look at what efficient slicing means:

1.Do not make large slices that contain lots of different colors. Use a small number of slices where each slice contains a limited number of colors.
2.Do not make a large slice that contains the same graphic structure. Slice a small portion of it and duplicate it in your code. This is a very common mistake that webmasters/programmers make when dealing with gradient color background.
3.Do not use JPEG file format all the time. In some cases a GIF format will be much smaller in size. A rule of thumb – a slice with high number of colors will be smaller in size using the JPEG format rather than the GIF format, and the opposite is also true. Check each option separately. Every 1KB that you reduce from the image file size will eventually add up to a significant reduction in page size.
4.If you have text on a solid color background, do not slice it at all. Use code to create the background instead. Remember that you can define both the font style and background color of the area using CSS.

Web Page Optimisation Picture

Advanced Techniques :

Graphically optimizing a website is more than just knowing how to do image optimizations. There are some advanced techniques that required a high level of programming. CSS2 has much more to offer then CSS does. Although not all browsers have adopted this standard yet you should be ready for when they do. JavaScript also gives you a set of options to create some cool effects without needing to overload the page with Flash. Using limited tools like JavaScript compared to an advanced application like Flash to create the desired effects can be difficult. However think about the outcome. For a onetime effort you can differentiate your website from others. You will have an attractive professional looking website that loads quickly.

Back to the Future :

As PDAs, smart mobile phones and mini laptops are used with wireless internet connections for internet browsing, publishing fast loading web pages will enhance the browsing experience not only for those using wide bandwidth connections but also will make the browsing experience user friendly (or may I say, bandwidth friendly) to the wireless clients.

For those who insist that web design optimization is not necessary because everyone will have high bandwidth connections eventually, I agree up to a point. However, the software companies are creating applications that use more bandwidth because they know it is available for them to use. Get used to writing well optimized web pages because this cat and mouse game will never end, and it is better to learn the rules of the game then it is to be bitten.

Investing in a good design is more important than some people seem to think. With a beautiful design, you will grow in trust among your readers/visitors. An important fact to remember is not over-designing the Website. It doesn’t matter how many hours you’ve put into designing the site if no one understands how to use it. Let some non-Internet-savvy friends navigate through your Website before launching it at a full scale. If they find it easy, so will the rest of your visitors.
It is difficult to say exactly what makes a beautiful and functional design. What looks good to one person might seem terrible for another. However, there are basic trends in Web design, and if you follow these, you can be sure to please most of your visitors. A few popular Web design trends for 2009 are multi-column layouts, large illustrations, and lots of white space.

Emphasize Usability in Your Design picture

If you wish to stay on the safe side, then it is a good call to make the layout and design features on the page easily accessible and simple to understand. Try to use standard coding and avoid over-the-top Flash animations. Some people may have browser settings that prevent them from viewing Flash, which means you might lose valuable visitors. Try to think how the visitor thinks, and your Website will grow more popular and respected day after day.

Enjoy : Cre8 team
Excerption :http://www.wpdfd.com/issues/87/top-five-ways/

Hello again readers we found this article which we hope you will enjoy as much as we did, if you would like more information on the topics discussed in the article do not hesitate to contact Cre8 and we will be happy to discuss how the subject might be applied to your business.

Enjoy: the Cre8 team
Excerption: http://www.sooperarticles.com/internet-articles/web-design-articles/why-s-important-have-good-website-design-25904.html

It’s important that your website layout is logical and easy to navigate. Internet users who land on your website can get easily frustrated if it is difficult to find information they need, and with fast internet speeds and search engines offering many alternatives, it can be easier for them to simply close your site and go somewhere else.

One of the easiest ways to organize your website is to look at your menus. Having clearly defined menu choices will make finding pages much easier. It’s also best to have links to all pages, and not lead users into a maze, clicking through to find the right link to their ultimate destination. Have a specific purpose for each page that you add, rather than flooding the site with many pages that could have been condensed into one or that are irrelevant to what you’re selling, or your business overall.

It’s also important that you name your pages clearly and accurately so that people can visit a page and see within seconds exactly what information is located there. This saves users wasting time reading through information only to discover that what they are looking for is not on the page. They are much less likely to keep searching if they feel that other pages are going to be designed the same way.

It is also important to tag your pages correctly. This will lead users to the page they need more often, rather than to homepages or unrelated information. They can easily land on your website on exactly the page they were looking for.

Finally, keep all of your content easily recognizable. Clearly mark changes in content or topic and where it makes sense, use bullet points instead of full sentences. This allows a quick glance at each point when looking for relevant details rather than a potential customer being turned away by having to read an essay to find a single sentence of detail applicable to them.

One of the Cre8 team found this informative article and consider it a must read for anyone interested in web design or web development. For more information on any of the issues portrayed in this article or to discover how web development can be adapted to suit your company simply contact Cre8

Regards the Cre8 team

Excerption:  http://articlesingerman.blogspot.com/2010/03/web-design-articles.html

When it comes to graphics, most Internet marketers shy away from using graphic templates whether it’s ebook covers, website layouts or promotional banners because they firmly believe that by using graphic templates, they are tarnishing their own business. They want to own a unique identity and hence will always find a professional graphic designer to do the job. Well, you’re in for a big surprise!

When you purchase a graphic template, you will be able to customize it to an extent or even build a totally new design based on it! What’s the point of using the template then, you say? Well, it serves as a source of inspiration and ideas for a totally new design. You can’t derive anything from a blank canvas, right?

On top of that, you are actually saving a lot of precious time that you can otherwise spend on more important matters like developing new products or market your products. When you buy a pre-made template, you only need to edit a thing or two to give it an identity of your own, and that gives you more time and flexibility to work on other stuff.

Okay, let’s say you argue that hiring a designer to do the job is equally fast. That may be true but don’t forget, hiring a professional designer to do a custom design for you will cost you a lot of money. Unless you need a totally unique identity that you are aiming to establish firmly in your niche market, you don’t need to get a designer to design it for you.

Not all graphic templates are suitable, so you have to be careful when choosing one. Consider quality over the price, and you’re on your way to creating a positive image for your business while saving more time for more productive chores!

Is It Easy to Create our own Website? What is HTML?

Creating a website is not so much a feat, if we compare it to the education of other technical skills. Most people tend to give up and pack their bags as soon as they hear the word “programming” and “technical”. They think it`s too much of a hassle to actually learn a whole computer “language”. HTML, the most basic computer language in building websites, is actually pretty simple to understand, as long as we have the interest in learning new things.

What is HTML?

HTML is the acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. For learning purposes, just think of it as a language that the computer understands. For example, as humans, we were taught different languages; i.e. HTML as a language, is mostly and specifically used to create a website. The web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, will then decipher and interpret the code or rather, language(HTML), and display it in a way we can understand it, just like in a basic webpage.

Coding.

Coding the HTML language might be a bit tough for some people, so we can actually purchase programmes, such as Macromedia Dreamweaver, or even Microsoft Frontpage. These programmes are solely created to help individuals in designing professional webpages/websites.

Furthermore, one could also gain access to online web-builders, website builders that are inbuilt and can be directly controlled from the net. There are many different and specific builders online.

Books and magazines contain guides that can help in offering tutorials and ways to put up our own websites. Even online tutorials are credible, as in the modern world, information technology is the best and most cost efficient way in retaining knowledge, especially in this particular field.

So, you could start and build one right away. If you enjoy coding, it might even become a favourable past-time.

Reducing Load Time Through Image Optimization

Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web’s population is still running on good old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you’re designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website.

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.

You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.

If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the “quality” of the JPEG image — normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image’s file size.

On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format — the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!

Hello again readers we found this article which we hope you will enjoy as much as we did, if you would like more information on the topics discussed in the article do not hesitate to contact Cre8 and we will be happy to discuss how the subject might be applied to your business.

Enjoy: the Cre8 team
Excerption:  http://www.getmyarticles.com/articles/Web_Design/SEO_Makes_Your_Business_Increases_174123.html

Internet marketing is very popular today and is tend to be one of the widest markets in the whole advertising system. A great tool that can help you get the most possible number of visitors to your web site is a tool named SEO or search engine optimization. SEO tool enable the web site to be positioned on the high level of display ranking. The main purpose of search engine optimization is to catch the highest level of internet traffic through the most relevant keywords that it matches. The simplest to say, search engine optimization is the process of proving the load range and the quality of internet traffic to a web site through the natural, organic or algorithmic search results.

SEO is the program who tends to find the information from web sites and then to get the web pages that are relevant with the costumer’s search query. It is a big success and a real miracle if your web site appears on the top of the page whatever the keyword is. There is a countless number of web sites with the similar content to yours and if your web site is on the top on the display you can be very satisfied, because your web site has made a beautiful success for you and your business.

Any company that uses the search engine optimization program has proved an increasing profit from online sales and considers this as the right investment in their business. Search engine optimization allows you to do and to manipulate with in a way you want. The premium of the optimization process is to make your visitors have the feeling like they are targeting your web site. There are a lot search engine optimization services to fit your business’s size and the budget. Search engine optimization makes your viewers feel very powerful and the next thing is that the costumers end up with the prospect of sale in their hands.

There are some elements of search engine optimization and that are on and off elements of search engine optimization.

The on-page elements of search engine optimization are the physical changes on the web site in order to make the web site compatible with the search engine program and the web site that more affects your targeting audience. With search engine optimization keywords are selected before starting to build the site. Keywords are determined for every page and having a high density on every page is the culmination of the search optimization.

The off-page elements of search engine optimization are not physically connected with the web site, than those are things that promote it and make the web site popular. The main goal is to enable search engine optimization robot to find links of your web site in as many potential internet places.

Hello again readers we found this article which we hope you will enjoy as much as we did, if you would like more information on the topics discussed in the article do not hesitate to contact Cre8 and we will be happy to discuss how the subject might be applied to your business.

Enjoy: the Cre8 team
Excerption: http://www.sooperarticles.com/internet-articles/web-design-articles/how-web-development-important-online-marketing-world-31207.html

Today there are so many website that have started incorporating news technology and ecommerce in their websites. Well this one of the latest feature of the advancing technology online. The competition among different online business firms is very high and in order to stay on the top and attract more amount of traffic towards their website these companies make every effort and employ all new technologies in their websites. Ecommerce is one of the latest developments in the web site design industry. Many websites today need this feature because it makes it easier for their customers to purchase products and for the companies to sell it.

E commerce allows people to shop for all the things they want online, it helps them save their time and effort both.

There are several web application development companies out there that are providing ecommerce feature to various organizations. E commerce has become very important in the online marketing world. Today every company requires a Website Design not just to sell and promote its services and products but to communicate with its target audience as well.

Existence online is must even if you have a well established company. The flexibility that internet has provided to its people is amazing so if your company does not has a website then you customer may think of you as a backward or old fashioned.

Approach a Web Development Company today and get your web site design created by experts. Electronic marketing carries great opportunities for both sellers and buyers. Sellers get to attract with a large amount of audience without spending much for it whereas the buyers enjoy things at a cheaper rate because of the high competition among online marketers.

With such great benefits and added flexibility many people today prefer online shopping to offline shopping. So the need of the hour is to have a unique and different website that can help you educate your audience in a convincing way and make them purchase products that you sell. Software Development Companies hold great experience and knowledge of software that would make the work of your company easy and will let you earn more profit through it.

Easy to handle and operate software technology lets your customer enjoy more feature on your website and hence wins their trust and gives them more reason to choose your services and products than your rivals.

When developing your website you should ensure that all essential features are integrated in your website. Also installation of such features must be carried in a right manner. If you want a shopping carts and online payment methods on your website then you should definitely seek the help of a web development company so that they can set everything right for you. This will save you from all the trouble and will let your buyers shop easily and quickly on your website.

A web development company will also help you regularly update your website and provide your audience with latest and new information relating to your company and products.