2009 Website Trends
Web and Graphic Designers such as ourselves are very creative and always looking for new and exciting ways to dazzle our viewers. This in turn creates many new trends as more and more designers pick up these techniques. We are going to show you some of the biggest of these trends for 2009 and explain the advantages to using these techniques in your own work.
To begin, typography and font trends are becoming more and more prevalent.
Embossing letterpress in order to give titles a “pressed” look has rarely been used until now. This technique adds a refined style to titles, and gives it a solid look that really looks nice.
Embossed Lettering
Embossed Lettering
Tips on what to Include in a Web Design Proposal
A website proposal contains many aspects different from other graphic design proposals, in that technical elements must be addressed along with creative ones. While print proposals do address items such as printing procedures, website proposals must specify web hosting, systems for maintaining content, programs or programming languages to be used and other technical specifications.
Outline of Content
A website proposal should clearly spell out what will be included on the site. This can be done in a standard outline format, or visually, to show what sections and features you intend to build for the client. An outline serves to both let the client know your ideas for the site (which should be based on meetings with them) and protect you from rounds of changes and additions not initially planned for. By including the outline in the proposal and eventually the contract, you are making it clear what is included for the price and therefore what additional services can be charged for.
Method of Building Site
It is important to decide at the start of a project what system or method will be used to build the website. Some sites are built in static HTML, meaning each page is created manually, and updates are done manually as well. Other sites are built in HTML but utilize a content management system (CMS) that stores the content in a database and allows for easier updating. Sites like WordPress and Blogger offer a simple CMS included for free with your site, while other CMS packages are installed on web servers and completely customized for the project, offering countless feature options. Another option for building the site is within Flash, allowing for a rich multimedia experience and a lot of development time. Regardless of the method chosen, it should be explained in the proposal so you and your client are in agreement as to the best way to build the website.
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Look at what Photoshop can do!
10 Amazing Graphic Art Pieces produced by Nik Ainley in Photoshop.
Mystic: Created for PSDTUTS
Stranger
How to design a attractive website
While designing a web site it is crucial that the site is attractive, fast-loading, user friendly, focuses on your content and has a high stickiness factor to it (that shows how long the visitor stays on your site). Instead of making very complex designs with less content or bare designs with cluttered content, we recommend that you find the right balance between both.
Give importance to Layout and Navigation
A clean layout and neat navigation that uses a lot of white space enhances your site’s look. Try to keep the focus on your content. That is why we recommend using dreamweaver templates for your site – all pages or a group of pages have one basic design and only the content varies – this way even if your site is a little distracting due to necessary effects, your design is noted once (hopefully with a appreciative eye 
and then the visitor focused on the content automatically.
If you have too many links then you should use drop-down menus or flyouts for your main topics. If you have Fireworks or Dreamweaver then adobe drop-down menus are one of their most popular in-built “Behaviors”. Otherwise you can use the copy-paste code for drop-down menus in the article SmartWebby Drop-down Menus.
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Guide to Success for Web Designers
If you are a free lance web designer or developer you will know just how difficult it can be to earn a dime in the world of web design. I have learned a lot of lessons, most of them the hard way. Being great at web design and being great with clients, are two very different requirements. By setting yourself these basic rules, and sticking to them you will save yourself becoming victim to a number of pitfalls. That’s why I have put together this guide to help maximize your projects success.
Price Projects Realistically
A classic mistake many freelancers make is to guesstimate a figure when costing a project. You need to be realistic when you work out the cost of a project, otherwise you are guaranteed to run at a loss, either in the time you spend, or the money you make. The best method is to work out a realistic hourly wage you want to be paid. Then take that number and multiply it by the number of hours you honestly believe it will take to complete the project. This will give you the magic number you should look to put forward in an invoice.
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