From the category archives:
WEB 2.0 templates
Web Design Wisdom
If reading big thick books just isn’t your thing, see if you can master some of the idiosyncrasies of Flash with ready made website templates. By now most of you already know that website templates can save you a lot of time and effort, but did you know they can also be wonderful as a gentle introduction to the world of web design? Think about it, by having access to the website templates source files we’re actually being given the opportunity to be taught and inspired by the combine efforts of many very skilled developers.
This is perfect for designing reusable apps such as pre-loaders, image galleries and contact forms where’s with the website templates you don’t need to reinvent the wheel anymore. CSS templates can be used to study two to three column layouts and style rules, which you can later apply to any project. Another good example are scalable layouts templates, commonly knows as liquid templates or stretched templates, with one of these ready made liquid templates you’ll be able to master the art of getting around varied screen sizes and resolutions. My personal favorite templates are XML Flash templates because of their unique feature which allows the content to be loaded onto the Flash templates via any text file – a function to keep handy if your ever around Flash.
Yeah, you could spend hundreds of hour reading tutorials on all sorts of topics by rhetorical experts peddling everything from color schemes to grid design, however most of that is either to technical or just isn’t practical in the real world where clients demand more professionalism. The great thing about premium templates is that they are created by professional web designers using the latest technology. In other words these ready-made website templates are made by people that understand typography, layout things like that; skills one could only wish to achieve after years of practice as a graphics designer and or programmer.
Where were website templates 10 years ago, when I first got into Flash? Anyway, these are just some of the benefits of website templates, I’m sure there are many more so please feel free to leave me your thoughts, comments and or experiences you may have had using templates. Also, mustn’t forget to mention that most premium templates shops will even give you a website template free so you can evaluate the quality of the product and try your skill before you buy.
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Get a great looking website with templates!
Think of your Homepage as the front door of your brick and mortar store. When customers land on your front door you want to entice them to enter and look at all the wonderful merchandise you have on display. Your Homepage ought to accomplish the same result. It should display a presence and if you’re considering using Flash animation or even video, make sure it’s appropriate for your message.
If you’re starting your online business from scratch or if you’re interested in improving your online business, it’s important that your site be well designed. You can hire a designer to obtain that perfect website design. Another option you should consider is website templates. You can choose from a large selection of template designs for whatever fits your business category. Website templates can be the answer for a tight budget.
In today’s competitive internet world you need a well designed website. A good design creates attention that delivers clients. The typical web surfer will evaluate your site in approximately five to eight seconds. That’s why it’s important to give an immediate positive first impression, because the next website is only a click away.
Whether you’re selling digital products or you’re providing merchandise that is shipped direct to your customer’s door, it’s vital that your website flows. Website templates provide a ready made framework that can be customized to fit your needs.
A well designed Website Template is often a great solution, if you’re on a budget. Ask yourself, are you among the many that will know it when you see it, but have trouble visualizing it from scratch? A website template gives your online business a foundation to build upon. After you have found the perfect design, consider customizing your template to fit your business strategy. In order to start the process of customization, you will need some software. If you don’t already have website design software here’s a list of what you’ll need.
WinZip 9+ (Windows); Stuffit Expander 10+ (Mac); Adobe Photoshop CS+; Adobe Dreamweaver (or Microsoft Frontpage 2003, or Microsoft Expression Web); Adobe Flash 8;
Although a great looking website design is an important element, you also will need to consider a back-end support system. In deciding what system to select, consider how you will track Accounting, Customer Relationship Management and Document management. Be sure to give careful consideration to the functionality you will need for your business. Doing your research and making the right selection on a back end system will help you to achieve your business goals.
Whether you’re choosing a website template, or having a professional design the perfect site, make sure you are paying attention to what is best for your customers. Your website design ought to give you a strong web presence.
Make sure updating and revising is part of your website strategy. Your website should be updated regularly depending upon upcoming changes or event. Take advantage of new technology. It can help you to beat your competition and establish your name.
About the Author
Steven Keltsch is an Internet Consultant offering Search Engine Optimization and a member of The Society of Industry Leaders of Standard & Poor’s, Vista Research Inc. For more information go to http://www.templateartist.net
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How To Be A Successful Web 2.0 Puppetmaster
One of the key characteristics of Web 2.0 is participation, collaboration and moderation through the use of web applications. Web 2.0 sites derive their power from the human connections and network effects from this characteristic that is made possible, and grow in effectiveness the more people use them.
The idea of “participation, collaboration and moderation” can take many forms. If you look back history, bulletin boards are one form, online forums are another, online multiplayer games, content management systems (e.g. Wikis, Joomla), dating sites and classifieds as well. If not for features that enable multiple users to create their own space within a website via registering accounts or at least leave a message (like a comment in a blog), the communication culture would have been one-way (from the webmaster to the visitors) and remain stuck in 1.0.
Why would a webmaster want to go Web 2.0? We learned that social networkers want to expand their personal network of online friends. On the other hand, the webmaster desires to build up a core group of active participants who unconsciously help to sustain the ‘liveliness’ and therefore the longevity of the website and its agenda or interests while the overall database of users expand. In this manner, a lot of the effort that goes into building the database (or list) becomes very much hands-off for the webmaster. There’s leverage. This is also where moderation comes in.
The role of the webmaster naturally becomes that of the moderator, whose job is to maintain some semblance of order (but not to the point of creating a restrictive environment) and general site maintenance. It gets better when the webmaster can promote participants into moderators themselves, and more and more s/he becomes the “silent puppetmaster” behind the scene without doing much. It may not be easy, but the whole mindset of being a moderator is to gain confidence in just “letting it be” and letting his/her site runs by itself.
Now that the webmaster’s motivation is addressed, s/he must find ways to avoid competition by finding new twists to contribute to the Web 2.0 bandwagon. Much as new sites keep popping up in recent months, somehow no 2 sites are made the same and they certainly enjoy a good amount of traffic anyway. It would be better when you can boil down social networking to the context of a specific niche, like a site to exchange Mexican recipes or talk about Ferrari car accessories or business opportunities in Central Asia. You can better target the type of people you are looking for and it also gives them a sharper sense of purpose to engage with and within your site.
At the end of the day, social networking is all about sharing valuable content and making friends. The successful Web 2.0 webmaster is one who knows how to tap on this human desire to the fullest and consistently encourages such a desire to grow within the culture of the social network he has created by offering further privileges for more prominent members. Really, there’s no better way for them to build up credibility and make their personalities known than to be consistently ‘alive’ and ‘happening’ on the Net. From the SEO standpoint of view, you can also accumulate more backlinks and subsequently more traffic to your social networking site.
About the Author
Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at Internet Mastery Center.
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How to beat Internet explorer when it comes to CSS and stop its regime of terror when using the net!
I am guessing an article on this subject has been posted prior to this one, I should hope a few have! However I hope this will provide a refreshing angle on the subject and branch to some other interesting bits of stuff.
I am sure that anyone who has taken even only a few steps into web development has come across the gigantic force that is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Even for the most experienced coders, the most popular browser of this age has always been a prominent foot across the path of our websites technological progression and the possibilities of which the internet is yet to yield. Maybe not crushing ideas, but certainly making it a lot harder to bring these ideas from paper to browser.
However, although IE, wielding its scathing weapon the Microsoft corp. and therefore for-fronting the battle as the windows default has dominated the market; we have weapons which allow us the fight back! I think I’ll cut the metaphors here and get back to business… Well, how can we fight back? And more importantly, what can be done to keep our designs looking slick in the interim… Yeah before the proper browsers take over!
I’ll start with the fighting back. Personally my favorite method would be to utilize a conditional comment and tell people what they should be doing! Something like this…
Realistically I wouldn’t try this method though, probably not the most tactful way when it gets down to it. You could however place a banner showing your support of these less buggy browsers such as firefox. This websites great for this promoting firefox business, very nice banners right here: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=affiliates/homepage
Conditionals are pretty clever little buggers though, for general use they can become quite useful. And you’re not just limited to
. The comments understand other operators as well; you’ve got the NOT operator which is an ‘!’. So “if not IE” would be
.
In addition to this there are “greater than” = ‘gt’, “greater than or equal to” = ‘gte’, “less then” = ‘lt’ and “less than or equal to” = ‘lte’. These can be used when referring to browser versions, so
could be used to warn users about a feature unavailable to them when browsing your site with IE version 5.0 and below.
But we are not here to help out the Internet explorer users; we’re here to convert them! Doing your bit locally can make all the difference. If you are round at a friends and he/she happens to log on to the internet using IE (boooooo), make it your concern that the very first thing that is done is the downloading of firefox (sorry Opera etc I’m a bit biased to the mighty fox.) Of course if the loging on to the internet part does not occur in the general flow of things it must also be your concern to make sure it does!… “Umm, you mind if I check the train times?” Okay I’m getting a bit carried away here, although very important to the advancement of the human race, you need not devote your life to spreading firefox.
The great progression in the internet and its uses over the last few years has meant that the look and the feel of a site has come under a lot more scrutiny, especially with ever rising amounts of traffic as more and more people connect to the internet. Complicated uses of graphics and CSS mean that when it come to interpretation by different browsers, everything can go wrong. The Browser that is renowned for taking perfect code and screwing with the end results is of course Internet explorer. It is so tempting just to say screw it and ignore the IE users and their browser, but with over 58% still using a version of IE this really isn’t plausible solution.
So okay we’ve got to fix the problem. Where to start?
Well firstly it is a must to make sure your code is valid. Just from an incorrectly written Doctype or wrongly phrased line of css can through internet explorer into all sorts of funny modes where anything can happen. Make sure you get a green light here http://validator.w3.org/ and here http://htmlhelp.com .
Good stuff, that’s one step in the right direction if anything. Now if the problem still exists, what now?
Most of IE’s rendering blips are caused by bugs, which can be worked around with quick alterations or what are called hacks. Chances are your problem has been experienced by people before you and a fix has been fabricated already.
So what’s going wrong? I will list a few of the most common bugs, some which I myself have experienced and a link to some relevant articles explaining in depth the fixes.
My borders have gone crazy! - fix…
http://www.positioniseverything.net
Margins doubled, pushing my content down and generally mucking stuff up - fix…
http://www.positioniseverything.net
Contents there one minute gone the next, the peekaboo bug - fix…
http://www.positioniseverything.net
You may have noticed that all those fixes above are at one website. Basically “Big John” and co of Position is Everything .net have done a fantastic job among some other geniuses out there, so why don’t I just give you guys a link to his site, the chances are you’ll be able to find a fix there… http://www.positioniseverything.net
You’ve now with a bit of time and effort (it sucks doesn’t it, and it really is unnecessary effort!) probably been able to fixed up your site. But what if something still purists, what can you do!? Well here is what I do…
Firstly if you know something which could be causing the inconsistencies in your site when rendered by different browsers, try just experimenting with this particular element of the code. Say the content part of your page is being pushed below your side navigation and you recon that IE is playing with your margin values but it’s not the double margin bug. Just adjusting the values of margins can bring results. This is a good time to introduce an excellent piece of free software called CssVista. If you know css well it can also be an excellent tool when in depth analysing your code when looking for problems. Check it out here
http://litmusapp.com/cssvista/
If you can still find no joy using this experimentation method I’m afraid the best hope is now to do what I really find annoying especially since if browser bugs didn’t exist it probably wouldn’t be necessary. We’re going to have to start again. Now don’t panic we’re not going to redesign your site from scratch, we’re going to make a mock up page of your current design, testing for rendering problems all the way.
Okay, well your average website nowadays is divs inside divs inside divs. So first step is to create you’re outermost div and in your css give it all the position you want and a background-color so that you can see it. Now add the divs that are contained with-in this one and do the same thing, giving them all nice bright colours so you know exactly where they are. Now test it like crazy, anything going wrong so far? Basically keep going like this, until something starts to look weird, then think why it doing this? What have I just done to make it go weird? Google and other free recourses can be come very useful now. Yahoo answers is fantastic for everything so it is always worth a try at http://answers.yahoo.com.
That’s about it really; Give that a try and well, good luck!
So, we’ve had a quick look at how to rid the world of Internet Explorer and how to get by in the time being. I’m not a fan of Microsoft attempt at an internet browser but not really in the league of this guy http://toastytech.com/evil/index.html.
Basically guys have fun and make sure you’re not supporting the IE domination by using it!
Pete Taylour is co-owner of the fast growing ebook site http://www.liqiuidebooks.com the only place to go for your cheap and free ebooks. With strong interests in a huge amount of different music styles Pete and friend are soon to embark on some crazy mix submission site for upcoming DJs across the globe, be sure to keep your eyes peeled for that and make sure you check out Liquid Ebooks at http://www.liquidebooks.com
About the Author
Pete Taylour is co-owner of the fast growing ebook site http://www.liqiuidebooks.com the only place to go for your cheap and free ebooks. With strong interests in a huge amount of different music styles Pete and friend are soon to embark on some crazy mix submission site for upcoming DJs across the globe, be sure to keep your eyes peeled for that and make sure you check out Liquid Ebooks at http://www.liquidebooks.com
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