Web Design Discussion

Most web sites these days use some type of rollover navigation structure. When the mouse is passed across the link it changes colors. This is usually achieved with a lot of javascript code which clutters your web pages making them slow loading and not very search engine friendly.

A great alternative is to use a css list for the vertical navigation or a css nested list if you require something more complex.
I use the css list if I have a number of categories that need to be divided into subcategories.

Benefits of a CSS Listed List

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What is the difference between goals and objectives?

Objectives are sub goals set only for the purpose to serve your goals. Goals tend to be broad whereas objectives are narrow,
precise, tangible, concrete and can be validated.

To achieve your goals, you should ask yourself which conditions, resources and skills should you provide? What do you need to
achieve before you can reach your goals?

Be sure to place all objectives in writing otherwise you will easily forget them.

Example.

Goal: I want my website to earn $6000 a year.

Objectives: I will work towards making $5000 a year from my website by creating a marketing plan that includes:

* writing and submitting an article each week for publication
* sending out a bi-weekly newsletter
* posting to my blog every other day

Breaking down your website goals into smaller objectives helps create actionable steps towards building a profitable website.

Be Specific

Your website goals should be detailed in what you wish to accomplish.

i.e. “I want to gain revenue of $6000 a year from my website.”

Break your larger goals into smaller ones.

i.e. “I will make $500 a month”.

Break this goal down even further by creating action steps to achieve it.

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One very significant aspect in the planning of your website is writing down your goals. Establishing clear website goals will
determine the success or failure of your website. You need to ask yourself…

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Once you have decided the reason for building a web site you can then define what type of website you wish to create. The type of web site you build will decide how to plan for its future success. The main website types are categorized below.

Website Types

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If you haven’t thought of a clear purpose for your web site it may be doomed to fail from the start. I’ve encountered many people that call me up to have a site designed for them only to realize later that they did not do enough research in the beginning.

Planning a web site begins with asking yourself

“Why do I need a web site?”

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If you want to resize your photos and are looking for free software to do this then look no further than:

Infranview

This free graphic viewer is a small file to download to your desktop that will rapidly allow you to view, resize and batch process your images. I often use it instead of Fireworks MX if I need to rescale some images quickly. For more complicated image manipulation I still use Fireworks MX.

Here are more of its features:

Many supported file formats (click here the list of formats)
Multi language support
Thumbnail/preview option
Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD)
Show EXIF/IPTC/Comment text in Slideshow/Fullscreen etc.
Support for Adobe Photoshop Filters
Fast directory view (moving through directory)
Batch conversion (with image processing)
Multipage TIF editing
Email option
Multimedia player
Print option
Change color depth
Scan (batch scan) support
Cut/crop
IPTC editing
Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.)
Capturing
Extract icons from EXE/DLL/ICLs
Lossless JPG rotation
Many hotkeys
Many command line options
Many Plugins
Only one EXE-File, no DLLs, no Shareware messages like “I Agree” or “Evaluation expired”
No registry changes without user action/permission!

If you are building a site that requires images of your products and don’t want to spend a lot of money, then here are a few sites which offer free stock photos.

1. SXC

This web site has a huge gallery of over 200.000 quality free stock photos by more than 15.000 photographers. It’s a friendly community of photography addicts who generously offer their works to the public free of charge. You also have the opportunity to share your own photos with others.

2. FreeFoto.com

To use the free stock photos on this site you must follow these rules:

- images on this site are only for private individuals and not for commercial use.
-you must credit the FreeFoto.com web site on your home page.
-if you use one of the full screen images you must place a hypertext link with the line Supplied by FreeFoto.com in a conspicuous place.
-add a (c) FreeFoto.com to the image alt tag.

3. Stockvault.net

The free stock images on this site may only be used for personal, educational and non-profit projects. You can’t use them commercially, claim authorship and/or sell them.

By carefully selecting free stock photos from any these sites, it will enhance your site’s appearance and nicely complement your content.

As a web designer I am always on the lookout for low cost stock photos to use for my clients’ web sites. I could just do a Google image search and locate nice photos from other sites but using them would be violating the copyright of the site owner who may have paid to have them created. If you use copyrighted material on your site you could be fined, so it’s best to avoid it.

Resources for low cost stock photos

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Recently a customer of mine wanted a redesign of her professional web site so she could attract more visitors and make more sales. Instead of tweaking her current design I started from scratch and rebuilt/redesigned the whole site so it contained clean code that would make the pages load faster and be more search engine friendly.

Here’s her testimonial:

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