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

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Tags: 2009 web deisgn, alex buga, attractive websites, delete, design success, dragon interactive, I am second, logo design, mobileme, rustin jessen, trends, Typography, web advertising, Web Design, web design companies, web sites

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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Tags: adobe flash, attractive websites, drop-down menus, enhance your site, roll over buttons, rollover swap images, site interactivity, Web Design

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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Tags: design success, guide to succcess, Web Design