Web Design

With the recent release of Internet Explorer 8, web designers and developers have a bit of a dilema on their hands. Do we carry on supporting this browser when developing new websites, or do we draw a line in the sand and move on? continue

Recently we took over the management of a clients website. Somehow, somewhere along the way multiple line breaks had found their way into the html on the pages.

There seemed to be an extra one after every line of code. An easy way to fix this is to hit Ctrl F in DW to bring up the “find” box. continue

A year or so ago, it was “all the rage” to have diagonal line backgrounds on headers and buttons etc. but when you look through the various CSS galleries now, that diagonal line background style seems to be fading out if not already gone. continue

You’ll see by performing a simple search for “website design” in your favourite search engine that there are a lot of web design “companies” out there. continue

Website design companies sometimes have to write a website design proposal. This can be for a client that has put a request in to more than one web design company. To stand more of a chance of getting the work, your website design proposal needs to be well written.

What should be included in your website design proposal

Your company information such as:

• Your background
• Qualifications
• Technical skills
• Past achievements
• Contact details

Project overview, including:

• The business you are submitting for
• Your understanding of their services and products
• Target market
• Goals of the website, and how you will achieve them

Project theme:

• Style of the website or application
• Elements of client’s branding that you will use (logo, colours etc)

Considerations:

• Language
• Security issues of the target market etc

Website diagram:

• Flow chart depicting structure of the website

Flow chart description:

• Detailed description of each page and how it fits into the overall website

Time line:

• How long the project will take broken down into stages or sections
• Estimated completion date

Costing:

• Breakdown of all costs
• Domain name cost
• Website hosting costs

Terms & Conditions:

• Expectations for both parties
• Agreement for client to provide images and copy

Maintenance:

• Website maintenance after project completion
• Search engine optimisation
• Reciprocal link building
• PPC campaign management

Overall, try to make your website design proposal as complete as you can make it, but on the other hand, don’t spend days putting it together.

Bear in mind that some clients may not be 100% serious in going forward at this stage. You could always produce more of a draft type proposal, until the client gives their go-ahead for a more serious proposal.

With some larger clients with big projects you can sometimes bill them for a couple of hours work for your time in putting the proposal together. This is unusual though for small to medium sized companies.

How to Start a Home-based Web Design Business

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It would be great if we all had photographic memories, but sadly, not a lot of us do. With that in mind, I find myself looking back at past projects or quickly searching the internet when I have forgotten a certain function in ASP, or CSS code or whatever.

This is where cheatsheets come to the rescue. It’s always handy to have them printed out so you can quickly glance at them during a project instead of searching the internet or wherever.

I also have a .chm (windows help file) that I use all the time on my desktop called Microsoft Windows Script Technologies. It covers JScript and VbScript so is really useful if you program in either of those.

Download it here.

Enjoy!

When it comes to building websites in PHP, I’ll have to admit I know next to nothing about it. All my web designing career has been using classic ASP.

So, I though it was about time I started to learn the web’s most common programming language, but where to start?

Can anyone suggest a decent book that I should read? I know there are loads of tutorials out there on the ‘net, but I’d like to be able to take a book away with me etc.

We all need nice icons and buttons for our web designs, but here’s a nice resource to look through to save you from creating your own.

There are various icon sets including:

• Brushes
• “Web 2.0″ icons (I hate that phrase!)
• Vector buttons
• Badges
• Micro-formats

Have a look, there’s bound to be something you can use, or at least get inspiration from!

In late 2004, sIFR, the Flash-powered text image replacement technique was introduced. This technique allowed you to be able to have flash based headings on your website to move away from standard heading tags.

Well its just had an update to version 3. Check out all the new features on this Sitepoint post.