Category Archives: Web Design
Spring Cleaning – 3 Quick Tips to Clean Up or Freshen Your Blog Design
When spring rolls in , across the nation, there usually is a mad rush to get household cleaning out of the way, you know the kind of household cleaning that gets into a little more detail like scrubbing floors, washing windows, etc. the work that goes beyond the daily household chores. In the same vein, have you considered that you should be doing the same thing for your blog or website’s design?
1. Analyze Your Website or Blog Statistics
By the time spring rolls around, usually the first three months of the year have gone by and you should be taking some time to analyze your quarterly web stats . The three month average can give you some good insight into daily traffic, average visitors per day, overall monthly visits etc., and all the data you need to develop plans for the coming year. Of course it will depend on your website’s peak business time or objective, but having these numbers to compare can give you good information for developing plans or make adjustments to your website’s content or design for the next following months.
2. Observe new trends in Graphic Design
Without that much internet research, you can get a handle on what design styles or graphics are trending or popular that you might want to incorporate into your blog or website. No, it doesn’t mean you are going to make drastic changes in order to follow a design trend or fad but you might want to consider new design styles or graphics to freshen up your blog or website’s look and still maintain your particular branding or style. Keep in mind that you draw traffic from your website’s images as well as other graphics. Make sure that all your images are SEO optimized.
3. Replace or Upgrade images or pics that do not generate web activity on Online Portfolios or other Social Media sites
With so many other stats to follow or consider, most blog or website owners ( especially graphic designers) don’t actively consider checking the statistics that the images on their blog or other web assets generate. Graphic designers are often too busy upgrading other website owners blog or websites and fail to consider their own. Remember this tip includes picture and image collections, online portfolios and other pics and images on social media accounts. Just a few tweaks and changes can refresh your site and boost traffic and generate more interest in your blog or website. The engagement you develop will improve how people find you and provide more sources for potential clients to review your work.
5 Tips to Make Your Online Banner Ad Design More Attractive and Effective
Online banner ads have varied in their popularity over the years, but in spite of that erratic popularity, static online banner ads are still the workhorse of online web advertising. It’s a good idea to keep these general rules in mind when designing your banner ad or ads in order to gain effective results for your banner ad campaign.
Three Top Sites for Free and Open Source Fonts for Designers
Most graphic designers are aware that fonts (or typography) add personality and customization to their print media and web designs, so when they find high quality fonts for free in one or two locations this makes his job easier. With a variety of fonts at his or her fingertips, a designer has the ability to personalize his or her designs to accommodate his clients’ taste and budget. However, building a font library with a variety of design styles can get expensive. The good news is that several website owners have joined with professional font designers to make open source and free fonts available for personal and commercial use.
WordPress Mobile: Making Sure Your Blog Can Be Viewed by Mobile Devices
While most small business marketers are aware that they need to build traffic to their website or blog, not many are aware that they should also set up their WordPress.com or WordPress.org self-hosted blog to be viewed by mobile devices like the Iiphone, Android smartphone, Ipad and other mobile devices.
According to Comscore datamine, a service that tracks this type of industry information, …”More than 76.8 million Americans owned smartphones during the three months ending in May 2011, up 57 percent from the previous year. A look at the top smartphone app categories revealed that Weather apps had the largest audience reaching 31 million smartphone owners, or 40.4% of the total U.S. smartphone audience. Social Networking apps closely followed with a smartphone audience of 29.4 million (38.2% reach), followed by Maps with 25.8 million users accessing this category via apps.
Great Site for Free Vector Social Media Icons and Other Business Icons
As I am always on the lookout for a great website with high quality vector social media and other business icons, I thought I might mention this site (Iconarchive) as a great resource for you because it’s like a warehouse of vector icons made available in .png and .ico format. Furthermore, the designers have made the downloads available in standard sizes ( 32 x 32, 64, 64, 128 x 128, and even 512 for some single images ) for web and print design that any graphic designer would be able to use.
What New Functionality is Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Offering?
Small businesses are always changing in some way but it’s the positive changes that are a pleasure to broadcast. I have been selected as an Adobe Creative Suite Ambassador and am really proud of the designation. Why? Aren’t I just another product evangelist? That would be true if Adobe products weren’t the graphic design industry standard and in effect, has dictated the quality tools and software most serious graphic designers have to master. And with the recent changes they have made with Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 they have developed ways to take one’s graphic and creative designs to mobile platforms and HTML 5, all great things for graphic designers who want to keep their skills sharp for their prospective clients.
What are the main changes that Creative Suite CS5.5 provides that Cs5 doesn’t?
- Create standards-based websites and rich digital experiences for desktops, smartphones, tablets, and TVs. Author with HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery Mobile. Target multiple platforms including Android™, BlackBerry®, and iOS.
- Enables you to simplify the creation of web and mobile experiences for display across screens of all sizes.
- Create rich applications for multiple platforms, including Android, Blackberry, iOS, and Adobe AIR®.
In essence, Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 enables you to take your designs to mobile platforms.
I have included the Adobe video that covers some of this functionality.
How to Extract An Image Using Adobe Photoshop CS5
If you know your way around Photoshop, I have developed a short tutorial on photoshop image extraction. The tutorial relays a few tips to show you how to use Photoshop image extraction to improve images from a stock library or other resource.
Santa has Gone Mobile:Old Christmas Traditions With a Hi-Tech Digital Twist
Letter to Santa
Santa never had it so good or is his workshop suddenly inundated with digital requests from all over the world? Just how does he keep up?! Well you know times have changed when people discuss the Secret Santa exchange you used to have at the workplace when they are forgoing the old lists and using Twitter, according to this article “Play Secret Santa With Your Twitter Network” that is what this Twitter app is encouraging.
What is Rich Media?
Not just a rhetorical design question anymore —rich media is another term for the word that most people are familiar with interactive “multi-media”. And rich media development and techniques are rapidly being used and developed in order to deliver interactive banner ads and other media that enables the user to interact with the media provided whether it is a video, website or other form of advertising. One stellar example is Youtube mentioned in Mashable’s article “Youtube Launches Skippable Ads” which recently developed the option for end users to choose what advertising they want to watch!
