Key Features of a Professional Web Design and Development Company

Key Features of a Professional Web Design and Development Company

Today, if you have a business, you must have a website for it. Your website sells your products and services to the whole world. In today's fast-paced, technology-driven business world, it is simply a fact of life that if your business doesn't have an online presence, you're going to have a much harder time succeeding.

Next thing, you don't need only a website but a quality and good looking attractive website. These days your website is your storefront. Just as a run-down storefront can send customers to your competitor across the street, a poorly-designed website can send them to the next Google search result. In other words, you don't just need a website. You need a high-quality website. You need an attractive design with an intuitive layout and well-written content.

So, for having your own business website, you should consult a good website designing and development company. Before giving contract of your business website to any web designing and development company, you must ensure following points:

1. Web Design and Development company must have a recognized name in the web design and development industry.

2. Web Design and Development company must have good experience and knowledge in web design domain. Ask for the previous project samples on which they have worked upon.

3. Always get to know about their clients and customers with which they are dealing. Go through the testimonials their clients have written for them. Always check the track record of the company.

4. Not only web design, also ask for different kind of facilities your web designing and development company should provide you like content management, blog posting, email services, web hosting, social media (twitter, facebook, linkedin) connection tools etc.

5. While giving contract to any web designing and development company, must ensure that you require not only web version of your website but also the mobile version.Today, internet is accessible from mobile also. Don't let your website look obsolete and unstructured on mobile. So, while designing your website, you must ensure that your website should look nice both in web browser and mobile browsers. Also check you website design on various browsers like Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera, Safari etc.

6. If your website involves some money transaction features, you must get ensured from your web design and development company that they use security certificates and third party certified tools for transactions like amazon and ebay. Instead of http, https should be used in the url of your website.

7. You must have knowledge about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Always ask your web design and development company that what measure they are taking for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is very important for any website. Always get ensured that the content of your website is targeting the keywords which are searched on search engines like google, yahoo, msn, ask etc.  People these days don't go to their telephone directory to look for local businesses anymore. They go to their computers and search for them. And if your business doesn't come up in your search results, they don't even consider looking for you anywhere else.

8. Internet Marketing is a key concept today in web designing and development market. Your web design and development company should take responsibility for that. Social media marketing on facebook and twitter is very vital for your website.

9. Logo design, PDF creation, Brand promotion, Brochure designing are the plus points of a web designing and development company.

10. Always ask for post maintenance charges of the website from your web designing company.

11. Free online and customer care support should be provided by your web design and development company.

Basic Tips for Professional Webpage Designers

Basic Tips for Professional Webpage Designers

Are you a professional webpage designer? or
Are you new to webpage design and going to learn it?

Does not matter!!

Following are some basic tips which each webpage designer must follow. Webpage designing is very easy and interesting. You can learn webpage designing in no time if you take interest in it. You don't have to learn any complex algorithm or diagrams for this. Learning web design online is very easy. There are a lot of websites which will teach you web design from the scratch.

You will have to learn HTML, CSS and Javascript for web design. Flash, Photoshop will be a plus. Today, HTML5 has eliminated the need of Flash. CSS3 has now lot of advanced features which are provided by Photoshop like gradient effects, animations, rounding the corners of images etc.

You can get a lot of web design templates online. There are a lot of free editors available for HTML, CSS and Javascript which will help you in learning web designing.

For now, I have listed some basic points which each web designer must have in mind before designing any webpage.

1. Include Doctype in your webpages

The DOCTYPE defines which version of HTML you are using, and gives important information to your browser so it can render your page faster and more consistently.

The DOCTYPE declaration also allows validating software to check the syntax of your page.

<!DOCTYPE html>

2. Include Title in your webpages

The <title> element is one of the most important HTML elements. Its main function is to describe the content of a web page. It is important to the quality of your web site because it will be visible in search engine lists, the browser's title bar and user's bookmark.

The title should be as short and descriptive as possible.

 

When a user searches for a web site, most search engines will display the title of your web site in the search result. Make sure the title matches the content the user is looking for. Then it is more likely the user will click on the link to visit your web site.

3. Use Headers in your webpages

The <h1> element is used to describe the main heading of a web page. You can use <h2>, <h3>, <h4> etc to arrange your content in your webpage. This will be great approach for search engine optimization.

4. Follow CSS standards

With CSS, you can store all style information for your web site in one single document. Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the preferred way of separating content from style in quality web pages.

Using CSS will improve the quality of your web site and increases the readability for many different browsers. It will also greatly reduce your web site development costs.

5. Use Web Validators

A validator is a software program that can check your web pages against the web standards.

When using a validator to check HTML, XHTML or CSS documents, the validator returns a list of errors found, according to your chosen standard.

6. Do not use fixed sizes

Never use fixed size values. Always use relative size values.

The most important reason for this advice is that fixed sizes can not be resized by the browser.

Your visitors will have different monitors, different viewing conditions (light), and possible disabilities (poor eyesight).

Setting your default text size to 100% (or medium), your main headers to 140% (or x-large), your sub headers to 120% (or large), as an example, will make it possible for your reader to resize your pages to their best fit.

7. Take care of different date formats

Don't use dates like "04-03-02". This is confusing.

The date above could mean the 2nd of March, 2004. It could also mean the 4th of March, 2002. Or even the 3rd of April, 2002.

The International Standard Organization (ISO) has defined an international format for dates as "yyyy-mm-dd", where yyyy is the year, mm is the month, and dd is the day.

When you use this ISO format, you can expect most visitors to understand your dates.

8. Always take care of font-family, line spacing, letter spacing, color contrasts, foreground and background colors.

Why to use Free Professional Joomla Templates to build your own website?

Why to use Free Professional Joomla Templates to build your own website?

If you are thinking of designing your professional website, joomla professional templates are the best solutions for you. With Joomla Templates, you don't need to know other designing languages like HTML, Javascript, CSS, AJAX, jQuery etc. Joomla development reduces your development time a lot. Joomla Templates have thousands of extensions, functionalities and plugins. You can easily change the design of your website when you want using Joomla Templates. We are listing some benefits and advantages of Joomla Professional Templates.

1. Fast and Easy Update

Traditional development techniques require a site owner to be knowledgeable of HTML. There are some hassles if you follow traditional development techniques. You have to contact your developers to make some alterations. Therefore, the owner has to wait sometime for the programmer so that it can be incorporated in the development schedule. Much time is thus wasted.

However, with the knowledge of Joomla and MS Word, the site owner himself can update the content much faster. It is also easy and simple.

2. Sites can be Developed Much Faster

A site can be built much faster using it than using HTML. Say for instance, your website has 30 pages in all, including content and images. If you create it in HTML, it will take double the time of building it than using Joomla.

3. More Features with Zero Costs

Joomla has more than five thousand extensions, thus adding more functionality. If one wishes to use these codes to develop HTML pages, then it would cost several thousand dollars. However, with Joomla, almost eighty five percent of these codes are absolutely free. The 15 percent that is remaining will cost a site owner only a nominal amount of $45.

4. Renovation is Simple

Most of the large corporations alter the look and feel of their corporate website every two years. This is important to keep up with the changing trends in web designing and development. For such purpose, it is used to renovate websites, making use of templates.

Templates have made a designer’s life more easy as he will only have to click to add a new look to a site. There are no intricate processes such as copying of web pages.

How to build and design your own website for free?

How to build and design your own website for free?

If you have a business, you should own a website. Creating and designing a website is very easy today. You can build your own website for free. Creating your own website isn’t as difficult as you might imagine. You could soon have it up and running – and the process doesn’t have to involve learning mind-boggling computer code.

There are many facilities for building and designing your own website for free on your computer. If you have an Apple Macintosh, it might well have come with iWeb (software for building websites) built in.

Several companies will give you some web space and host your site for nothing. Moonfruit, Google Sites and Mr Site are some of the most popular.

This tutorial shows you how to make or create your own website for free. It is intended for the beginner and layperson, taking you step by step through the whole process from the very beginning.

1. Get Your Domain Name

The first thing you need to do before anything else is to get yourself a domain name. A domain name is the name you want to give to your website.

To get a domain name, you have to pay an annual fee to a registrar for the right to use that name. Getting a name does not get you a website or anything like that. It's just a name. It's sort of like registering a business name in the brick-and-mortar world; having that business name does not mean that you also have the shop premises to go with the name.

You will need to know the steps to registering a domain name and the things you need to look out for when registering.

It may also be wise to take a look at some of the Important Precautions to Take When Buying a Domain Name, just so that you don't commit the same mistakes that some newcomers make when buying a domain name.

2. Choose a Web Host and Sign Up for an Account

A web host is basically a company that has many computers connected to the Internet. When you place your web pages on their computers, everyone in the world will be able to connect to it and view them. You will need to sign up for an account with a web host so that your website has a home. If getting a domain name is analogous to getting a business name in the brick-and-mortar world, getting a web hosting account is analogous to renting office or shop premises for your business.

After you sign up for a web hosting account, you will need to point your domain to that account on your web host.

3. Designing and Creating your Web Pages

Once you have settled your domain name and web host, the next step is to design the web site itself. In this article, I will assume that you will be doing this yourself. If you are hiring a web designer to do it for you, you can probably skip this step, since that person will handle it on your behalf.

Although there are many considerations in web design, as a beginner, your first step is to actually get something out onto the web. The fine-tuning can come after you've figured out how to get a basic web page onto your site. One way is to use a WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") web editor to do it. Such editors allow you to design your site visually, without having to muck around with the technical details. They work just like a normal wordprocessor.

There are many commercial and free web editors around. For those who don't mind spending money on a good commercial web editor, one of the most highly-regarded WYSIWYG web editors is Dreamweaver. 

If you prefer to use free software, you can find a complete tutorial on using KompoZer, a free WYSIWYG web editor.

There are many other web design software around. If you prefer not to use either of the above, you can find some others.

After this you might want to read something about  Appearance, Usability and Search Engine Visibility in Web Design as well.

An integral part of web design is search engine readiness. Search engine promotion does not start after the web site is made. It starts at the web design stage.

There are many other issues regarding the design of web pages. The above will get you started. However, if you have the time after you get something out onto the web.

4. Testing Your Website

Although I list this step separately, this should be done throughout your web design cycle. I list it separately to give it a little more prominence, since too few new webmasters actually perform this step adequately.

You will need to test your web pages as you design them in the major browsers: the latest versions of Internet Explorer (version 9 at the time of this writing), Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. All these browsers can be obtained free of charge, so it should be no hardship to get them. Unfortunately, directly testing your site in all these browsers is the only way you can really be sure that it works the way you want it to on your visitors' machines.

If you want to improve the chances that your website will work in future versions of all web browsers, consider validating the code for your web pages. In layman's language, this means that you should check that the underlying code of your web page, called "HTML" and "CSS", have no syntax errors. You don't actually need technical knowledge of HTML and CSS to validate the page, since you can use one of the numerous free web page validators around to do the hard work. On the other hand, if the validator tells you that your page has errors, it may sometimes be hard to figure out what's wrong (and whether the error is actually a serious one) if you don't have the requisite knowledge. Having said that, some validators actually give concrete suggestions on how to fix your code, and one of them, called "HTML Tidy", is even supposed to be able to fix your code for you.

5. Collecting Credit Card Information, Making Money

If you are selling products or services, you will need some way to collect credit card information.

If you need advertisers for your website, a list of advertisers and affiliate programs can be found from internet. Those companies are on the constant lookout for new web publishers to display their advertisements.

6. Getting Your Site Noticed

When your site is ready, you will need to submit it to search engines like Google and Bing.

In general, if your site is already linked to by other websites, you may not even need to submit it to these search engines. They will probably find it themselves by following the links on those websites.

Apart from submitting your site to the search engine, you may also want to consider promoting it in other ways, such as the usual way people did things before the creation of the Internet: advertisements in the newspapers, word-of-mouth, etc. There are even companies on the Internet, like PRWeb, that can help you create press releases, which may get your site noticed by news sites and blogs. You can also advertise in the various search engines.

Conclusion

Naturally the above guide is not exhaustive. It is a distillation of some of the essential steps in getting started with your site. However, the above tutorial should be enough to help you put your website on the Internet.

Free and Most Popular HTML and Flash Website Design Templates and Layouts

Free and Most Popular HTML and Flash Website Design Templates and Layouts

This article provides a comprehensive information of free and best website design templates and layouts. We will discuss top, free and most popular HTML and Flash website design templates and layouts.

Website design templates can be categorized as:

1. HTML Website Design Templates (Non Flash Website Design Templates)
2. Flash Website Design Templates

Website Design Templates can be further categorized as:

1. Simple Website Design Templates and Layouts
2. Business Website Design Templates and Layouts
3. Corporate Website Design Templates and Layouts
4. Ecommerce Website Design Templates and Layouts
5. Organization Website Design Templates and Layouts
6. Personal Website Design Templates and Layouts
7. Art and Photography Website Design Templates and Layouts
8. Construction Website Design Templates and Layouts
9. Wedding Website Design Templates and Layouts
10. Portal Design Templates and Layouts
11. Mobile Website Design Templates and Layouts
12. Frame Templates and Layouts
13. Joomla Templates
14. Drupal Templates
15. Facebook Templates

What is an HTML Website Design Template and Layout?

An HTML website template is basically a prebuilt website, where you, the developer, can modify as required. All the HTML/CSS code and images are included in the template, and a good template will be compatible with most modern browsers. Some website templates come with a flash version and a non-flash version (i.e. HTML version).

Many professional web developers, who have perfectly good design skills, choose not to create their own websites from scratch. Instead, they select a pre-built website template that they can use to base their website on.

Advantages of HTML and Flash Website Design Templates and Layouts

1. Speeds up development time - you don't need to spend hours designing your website, then converting that into code, then checking for browser compatibility etc.

2. More professional looking website - unless you're a very good designer, it will be difficult to achieve a great looking website every time. And, if you're not a good designer, your websites will reflect this.

3. Learning - using an HTML website template is a great way to learn from other developers. Once you've downloaded the template, you have full access to the code, so you can learn the tricks the developers used in achieving an effect.

4. Cheaper & easier than hiring a professional designer.

Why to use HTML5 to create website design templates?

HTML5 is the cornerstone for modern website development, and websites built with HTML5 are the things of the future. That's the reason for the choice of HTML5 for creating an extremely powerful and at the same time light-weight flexible website. HTML5 templates don't need Flash support and can be easily rendered on any device, these feature improved SEO-friendliness and are better digested by search engine's crawlers. They form better experience for your visitors: HTML5 allows implement various functionalities (like drag and drop) that improve overall UX. These HTML 5 templates also have a bunch of new and exciting HTML5 multimedia tools for streaming audio and video.

There are static and animated HTML5 Templates. You can choose among Completely Flash, Completely JS, HTML Plus Edge, HTML Plus Flash, HTML Plus JS animated themes.

12 Websites With Beautiful And Attractive Backgrounds

1. The Pixel Blog

  

2. Abduction Lamp

3. Make Photoshop Faster

4. Duirwaigh Studios

5. Le Blog de Gruny

6. Electric Current

7. Oliver Kavanagh

8. Productive Dreams

9. Absolute Bica

10. Paul Smith

11. Inner Metro Green

12. Yodda