Everything related to web design.
This simple checklist will help you think about all the aspects of your website. This will help you to have a good understanding of what you are trying to achieve in your own head before beginning. It is very important to be prepared before you begin a website project and before you sit down with your web designer. It will save you both time and money.
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...There is a ton of questions that may have brought you to this page, and depending on who you ask, there can be a vastly different answer to this question. As I sit and ponder the question of, what is a website designer, I think that answer has changed vastly over time. Before I put my two cents down I want to cover three basic, very basic, definitions.
There is many time during the day when I need to alter an image, and for 99% of those edits I like to use Photoshop. However, what if you don't have Photoshop? Well, you can use a little tool that you most likely already have, Microsoft Photo Manager.
This tutorial is designed specifically for clients that have a slideshow on their website that takes a specific size of image. In this case a 960px x 260px image. That is a wide, short image, that spans the website, but does not take up a ton of North/South Real Estate.
...Over the past week we have been setting into place all the necessary pieces required to successfully design a new website. The goal of this week has not been to cover every single type of website, but to provide a solid base that will allow you to create a website quickly and affordably.
If you missed, the last three days catch up by reading these articles.
Let us get started.
We bought our current house from a number of floor plans that were available. We had the opportunity to go into a pre-built house and see what it was going to look like. It also gave us the opportunity to see where our existing furniture was going to fit and to see what was not going to fit.
This process allowed us to save a ton of time when we moved in. You are almost at that point with your website. You are ready to move in, but your website is not complete yet. Now I am going to help you look at all the stuff you have and decide what you should keep and what needs to go. It is a virtual episode of clean sweep J and believe me it is necessary.
...We have started this week by first looking at goals and then at framework. Today's topic is where you might expect to have started, however we are, once again, going to go at it with a twist.
If you missed the last two days catch up by reading How to build a website in a week - Day 1 & How to build a website in a week - Day 2.
...Yesterday we looked at the importance of goals. Without a purpose or goal for your website, all your efforts are pointless.
I know you want to get in and start designing, you want to start seeing something, however if you want to save money and make a website that is going to meet your goals you need to follow this post. If you missed yesterday's post, take a second and read How to build a website in a week - Day 1.
...Are you ready to build a website in a week. Anyone can do it. More importantly, you can do it and will do it by the end of this week.
The beauty is that we are not going to cover any particular type of website, but some overall steps and questions that I have found very useful as I have been designing websites.
...Nothing is more frustrating than forgetting your Joomla admin password. This can happen for a multitude of reasons and I am sure one of those reasons brought you here today. One of the simplest ways, that I have found, to reset your admin password is in phpmyadmin. So here is my simple step by step tutorial on how to go about making that change and getting back into your website.
Step 1 - Login to the C-Panel of your website.
...I remember when the idea of a website was a new concept. It was this misunderstood page that showed up after a www. on the apple computer in our elementary school library and was somehow connected to someone else on the other side of the country. At the time I remember that I was not that impressed. Perhaps it was because our only visit was to a school website that had little interesting content for a 8 year old. It’s been a couple years now and my feelings have changed, websites are an amazing tool and what can be created through them is even more amazing. I originally started out saying, in my first draft, that websites are a major part of the back bone of our economy, which I believe is true, but I would go farther now saying that they are also a major part of our society and culture. There are a ton of reasons why you need a website, but here are my top five reasons.
I remember my first websites. They were very time consuming, limited in scope, and hard to maintain. Coded in HTML they allowed very little flexibility and were a nightmare to upkeep and apply changes. If I let someone else update content I always ran the risk of the website being messed up, causing downtime and lost sales. Then I ran into something new to me, the content management system. Is it time for an upgrade? Here are 5 reasons why your business should be considering a content management system.
One of the easiest things to do for your website, which also improves the appearance and credibility of your website, is to add a favicon. A favicon is the little image that appears to the left of a pages address in the address bar above. A favicon must have an .ico extension in order for it to be recognized as a favicon, and although you may be able to rename your image as something other than favicon.ico, it is recommended that you leave it as that. Even if you do not have your favicon set up correctly a browser may still display a favicon.ico image if it is present in the default directory.
So here are some ways that I have found that you can create a favicon for your website.
In my previous post, How to create a favicon for your website, I discussed some of the ways that you can create a favicon, that beautiful little image that shows up on the left hand side of your address bar. Now that you have one we can now look at how we are going to insert that into your website?
After you register your domain name and set up your web space on the server you have to wait for the domain name to propagate. Now you find yourself with two questions, what is propagation and why do I have to wait for it?
Your ready to start a new website and the first question you have is, “How much is this website going to cost?”. We seem to put websites in the same category as software or products that are prepackaged, but really they are a custom service, and as a service the cost varies based on the work that is needed. However, by the end of this article I hope you have a good idea as to how much a website is going to cost you, or at least how to go about finding out.
It is a tough situation when you come to realize that your website has been hit by a series of comment spammers! This problem happened to me a while back where I had neglected to set the comments options to something other than auto publish. The result was almost 100,000 comments on everything that you don't want discussed on your website. So now your mind is swirling, how much damage has been done by these comments, who has seen them, how do I get rid of them, and what can I do so that this won't happen again?
No worries, here are some tips that will help you avoid content spammers.
...One of the first steps of any website design is to draw up a concept map. When I think about websites I like to compare them to building a house. When you start to build a house, other than choosing the location, you sit down and you drop the plans. In the same way when you start to build a website you have to sit down and decide what the website is going to look like, how many pages it's going to have, what is going to go on each of those pages, etc. Even a basic plan will save you hours of redesign later. So here are five steps that will save you money on your next website.
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