Quality Web Design – Website Design

Archive for January, 2010

I saw an adobe class to train on web design. Do you think that would be enough?
I am looking to do this as more of a supplemental income not a full fledge career.

I go to a design school. There’s a course called Graphic Design and Interactive Media. It’s a Bachelor of Design course for 3 years.

I can see why my friends from those courses laugh at people who go through 6 months of so-called IT training in whatever programme and think they’re ready to be the real deal.

No, my friend, it’s not enough. I’m not saying you absolutely need a degree for it. You need numerous training. Not just one. And more importantly, you need experience. I’m a web designer myself. I’ve been fooling around web designing for 8 years now. And I don’t take media courses.

Good luck. I suggest you ask that adobe class organizer what kinds of qualifications they can provide you with and if there are any follow-up classes after that.

Hello everyone, I wanna be a web designer but its difficult to choose between science and commerce;
which stream i should go in?

hmmm, this question kind of goes in many different ways but I will try to answer what I think you’re asking.

To be a web designer you need to be a creative person that is smart enough to be able to work with technical tools and produce visually appealing websites. If you are not working with a company you should have some entreprenuerial skills and be able to negotiate costs and not undersell your services. It helps if you are a child of web 2.0 as this is the way the world is going. So really you have to be skilled in both science (the art of manipulating technical code to output a desired result) and commerce (the ability to create solutions good enough to make money for you or your company) I think if you are mostly creative, you should go the creative route. If you are more business minded, you should go the commerce route. If you are both and driven you should be very successful in about 10 years.

My dad recently bought a heating and airconditioning business and I want to make a website for him and my question is what would you like to see on a company’s website in order to make you consider doing business with them? History, certifications, mission statement, pictures ect. The nature of the business doesn’t really allow for pricing so that is out. Any ideas would be great.

Some Advice:

1) Your website should be Professional with simple Navigation. Keep it simple. Homepage, About, Services, Contact (should have a form), and Testimonials (post some good feedback from past/current customers).

2) Pictures. Should be Company logos, high quality pictures of staff or building location, and/or work-related images. I always suggest using Free stock images from Microsoft’s Clipart/Photo section. Use a photo, no cartoon images. Stay away from celebration photos, etc. Keep it professional.

Since your website will be new, keep it simple and easy to navigate. Once you gain trust and "website" customer loyalty, then you can elaborate your site.

http://www.toydeluxe.com

I just launched a new holiday toys site (I’m quite new at this) and want to know what everyone thinks?

Does it Look Search engine friendly? How is the design and content? Thanks!

The easiest thing you can do right away to make your website more search engine friendly is to use Alt tags on all your images. You should be using more text instead of all the images.

I’m confused when it comes down to the whole Graphic Design thing. What was the industry standard before Adobe CS package? Were there every one?

I would love to know how they designed there stuff before they even made Adobe Creative Suite reality.

In essence as the eighties started the industry standard was photostat machines and rubber cement — most design was being done on paste-ups — boards with columns of text and photos of images — hand drawn or photographic — pasted together on blue guidelines the photostat machines didn’t pick up. As the eighties ended you had Adobe Photoshop and Pagemaker, Quark Xpress and a couple of Macromedia products for graphics. Autodesk was already out there but they have always been for a slightly more specialized audience than designers.

Quark Xpress has not been updated as regularly as adobe products — but it’s still out there. Otherwise Adobe pretty much has the field to itself — Flash uses a lot of technology they BOUGHT from Macromedia. While this is not always a good thing — I despise Illustrator, always have, and since the purchase of Macromedia brought them Freehand which they’ve let languish and which I preferred I’ve fallen in love with the Open Source Inkscape which is quite good — they are profoundly different from what happens in Redmond, because there were proprietary standards in the printing and graphics industry when they started, which they have always (unlike a certain OS-maker which likes to complain about theft of its intellectual property) been quite good about licensing.

Economics, in other words, has given Adobe a virtual monopoly, and access to ALL the technology of ALMOST all the players when the use of computers on graphics desktops began. It has been a player from the very beginning, it is also a successor firm to many of the other players, and the Creative Suite is simply an assemblage of what were already industry standards (mostly).

I don’t know much about web design and I don’t have the budget to pay expensive web designer fees.. so…

Experts, please help!

Hi, I am a professional SEO. You can do very pretty well on your own if you respected sources of SEO news. Here are the biggest names in our industry that are respected for using ethical techniques and give truly useful bits of information. SEOMoz has a monthly pro subscription that gives you a lot of tools and guides for beginners.

http://www.searchenginewatch.com (take a look at their "search illustrated" column – very useful for understanding concepts)
http://www.seomoz.org
http://www.seobook.com
http://www.searchengineland.com
http://www.outofmygord.com
http://www.searchenginejournal.com
http://www.seroundtable.com
http://sethgodin.typepad.com

I would also recommed reading the blog of Matt Cutts, the guy in charge of search quality and webspam at Google for the last several years: http://www.mattcutts.com

And if you are not into reading then get an account at http://www.lynda.com – they have a lot of instructional videos on various web-related subjects including SEO.

What would be the best epayment solution for an international ecommerce website?
An international Visa, Mastercard, AmEx card would be great, but most US or European customers they only have credit/debit cards issued by local banks only.
Also, I have heard about "draconian" monopolist practices taken by PayPal towards international sellers, including freezing of funds for several months, very bad customer services, etc.
Please tell us about your genuine experience. Many Thanks

I looked into lots of solutions but opted for Paypal in the end. Their fees are most reasonable and there is no upfront payment required. I did technically have my account frozen as I had reached their designated limit for receiving money but I was still able to send & receive money and then received an e-mail saying that the limit had been lifted so it didn’t cause me any inconvenience. I would recommend them. Their customer service also works well as you get a personal contact who keeps in touch with you throught the setup process.