Affordable Web Design and Development

Affordable Graphic Design

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Finding affordable graphic design services can be quite helpful in redefining the creativity associated to your business.

As a matter of fact, affordable graphic design services prove value for money and enable a business to be expressive through quality graphics. Be it the business card of key professionals or the official company letter head, the graphic designing solutions play an important role. However, graphic designing has been also associated with online presence because businesses cannot do without creative logos and high resolution images.

With markets experiencing footfall of new competitors, affordable graphic design services have become crucial today. The dynamic entrepreneurs leave no stone unturned to embellish their business appearance. The creative workforce behind dexterous design solutions need to put a keen eye on the minutest of the details relate to their client. This in turn, helps them in developing and delivering creative marvels for them.

The entrepreneurs look out for some unique and creative thing associated to their name or brand in the market. This is done in order to stand distinguished among the competitors and create an affinity in the customer's mind. The creative excellence backing up with ingenious design solutions have a lot to do with your success. In such a scenario, indulging affordable graphic design services in your plan of action becomes inevitable.

Now, why is it necessary to find affordable graphic design services? It is all due to the need of imparting identity to every aspect of your business. Be it acquiring new clientele or retaining the older ones, it is essential to approach them with an experience that pulls them to your organization again and again. Moreover, with communication technology striding advanced levels, it has become easier to work in close coordination with a graphic design company of your choice, irrespective of its geographical location.

source: ezinearticles.com

HouseOfDesigners - is California Web Design team that offers graphic and website design services, seo services, web development, hosting and many more along Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, and also across the globe.

Posted by HOD at 9:07 AM 0 comments

Basic Elements Of Web Design

Saturday, July 18, 2009

The basic elements and principles involved in web design are true for all other types of design. These principles will show you the most effective way to put together the various design elements to come up with a effective and quality web design. A good company emphasizes the fact that web design is not simply about slapping all those HTML tags on the page, but it involves the use of principles to build a pleasing and useful design. Your company will need you to make the most aesthetically attractive and effective web design, so make sure you keep these elements in mind:

Emphasis: Web design emphasis involves the main points where the eye is drawn into in a design. One of the mistakes that your web design company may warn you not to make is to have everything in the design stand out. Keep in mind that if everything in the design has equal emphasis, the entire page will tend to appear too busy for comfort and may end up unappealing. What you should focus on instead is to create a visual hierarchy in the web design - to put emphasis only on the right elements. You can use semantic markup to provide emphasis even without the use of styles; change the font size of image size in order to emphasis or lessen emphasis on them; or you can use contrast in colors for added emphasis.

Unity: Web design unity, also regarded as a site's proximity, is the what keeps all the similar elements in the site alike and those diverse further apart, and pulls everything together into one integrated whole. Unity when it comes to web site design is mainly achieved through the proper placement in your layout. You can implement this in many ways. You can, for example, adjust the layout of your elements to put them close or far away from each other. In the body of your page, you can change the spacing around the text in your page contents. You can further achieve unity by playing around the box properties and change the margins and padding.

Rhythm: Web design rhythm, also known as repetition, brings the much needed internal consistency into your web site designs. Almost all elements in your design can be repeated in order to create pleasing rhythm into your design. For instance, you can repeat your headline a few times for more emphasis, repeat the same image across the page, create a background that is tiled and patterned with repetitive elements, or repeat a particular style to provide site design consistency. It is also a good idea to repeat the navigation elements in your site design across the pages of your web site.

Contrast: Web design contrast is more than just about colors and black or white, but also involves contrasting shapes, sizes and even textures. You can take full advantage of contrast by changing font size, weight and family to provide textual contrast and varying sizes of images and elements. However, be careful not to blast your readers or scare them off with contrasting colors which are way too loud. The links on your content should be contrasted well to draw most attention.

Balance: Website design Balance is the equal distribution of the heavy and light elements on a singly page. Balance in your web design is concentrated in your page layout. You must achieve visual balance in your web design all throughout the page, not only in the initial view. You web design company might commonly suggest you to center the text and all the other elements on your page. It is also very common to set your page on an invisible grid system to create the balance that you need. There are three types of balance that can be achieved when designing a page.

Symmetrical. This is achieved by placing all the elements in an even fashion - a heavy element on the left is matched with another on the right. Be careful with symmetrical balances as you do not want your site to look flat or plain boring.

Asymmetrical. These are more challenging to build, but there are strategies to achieve this which can include the varying texture, color and image positioning and size to arrive at a pleasant looking page.

Discordant. Symmetrical. Web sites that are off-balance suggest action or motion, so you can create a discordant design on purpose. This type of designs make viewers uncomfortable or uneasy, so they are best used for sites that are intended to make people think.

A good web design company keeps in mind all the basic design elements with each and every page they design and collaborate with. This way, you and your web design company will come up with web sites that are pleasant looking, effective and attractive. As the web designer, it is important that you keep these elements in mind and apply them appropriately to your page web design.

Posted by HOD at 7:50 PM 0 comments

How To Choose The Right Web Designer

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Wondering how to get your projects started without paying too much and having the right quality you need?

You are the one who decides to get your own website and hire a professional web designer. The question is, do you really need to hire or not? A simple Google search result for California Web Designer for example returns around 58 million search results, ranging from small individual freelancers to big time web design companies in and outside of California or maybe international. So how do you find the right web designer for your particular website needs?

Where to look for a good website designer?
Does the person or company creating your website have to be in your area? Not necessarily as almost everything these days can be done online. However, if you don't live in the middle of nowhere you will certainly have more than enough web professionals in your neighborhood, so why not use somebody locally?

By searching Google online can certainly be a good place to start. The first obvious thing to do would be to search for California Web Design Freelancer or make it more broad like San Diego Web Designer or Orange County Web Designer for instance. Of course you want to replace the 'keyword' with your own city, but unless you want to end up with hundreds of huge nationwide companies beyond your budget, you really want to narrow down your search to a local area.

Don't limit your search to the 'paid advertising' results on top and on the right side of Google's search result page! These companies are showing up there because they spend lots of money for advertising, not necessarily because they are so good that Google would put them on the front page. However, the first 'organic' search results in the middle of Google's front page do appear in the first positions because Google deems them to be valuable or popular websites. So look through the first or second or third page and click on a couple of web designers you find interesting.

So while you are browsing different web design websites, try to collect as much information you will need that would suit your requirements.

Here's some check list on how to select a web designer:

Do you see the designer's own professional background?
Do they list their portfolio so you can find out more about their work?
Is their site easy to navigate?
Do you like their style?
Do you like how their copy reads and is it to the point?
Are all pages accessible without broken links or missing pictures?
Does it have annoying features like slow loading flash movies?
Will they do the work in a reasonable time frame?
Have they developed websites for other businesses in your industry or area? If so, did they reflect the business properly?
Are they willing to give you a free detailed quote for a fixed price?
And, last by most importantly: Do they have experience in Search Engine Optimization and proven records of designed websites ranking on first positions on Google and Yahoo?
Does their site offer testimonials and can you contact these other website owners for a reference?

Keep in mind of the people you may encounter online. Be aware of companies and individuals who claim to be web designers or developers but don't show their background, references, portfolio or past work. Almost every one these days is able to use web design software, but this alone does not make him a good web designer.

What to choose? Freelancer or a Professional Web Design Company?
So when you finally decided what you want for your site after a deeper evaluation, you may need to choose between a Freelancer, or a Web Design company. With a freelancer, there are rarely any hidden fees or contracts to overcome before the project can begin. Freelancers may also be more readily available. If your website needs future support or maintenance however, make sure to contract with a company who is around for a while and will have enough manpower in the future.

When you have done your 'homework' as per the checklist above, you should be able to filter out the ones who best fit your needs, so finally all you have left is to find out what they charge and whether this is in your budget.

If you are looking to learn more about web design and how to get to make your website rank well on search engines, you can visit our website California Web Design and get some tips and quotes.

Posted by HOD at 8:19 AM 0 comments

Web Design And The Power It Brings

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Design plays a crucial role in today’s web sites’ success. Without adequate web design, all web pages are dull not to mention boring. It doesn’t matter if it is a personal web site or that of a company, web design is a must, especially now when the Internet is at its peak of evolution.

Nobody wants to browse a web page full of text, because let’s face it, it’s outright boring. When creating a web site, the developer has to implement in the web site components which will make the visitor come back and visit the page again. The perfect way to do this is by using web design thus making the site attractive and eventually, popular.

When it comes down to multimedia, take videos for example, flash movies can be stored in very small file sizes, so they can be downloaded rapidly which is a major advantage because nobody wants to wait minutes for a page to fully load. Of course, there is a downside to all of this, too much graphics, videos, sounds will slow down the loading time and we all know, although patience is a virtue, most of us don’t have it.

A major part in web design is represented by flash, without it, the Internet wouldn’t be as popular as it is today. Flash makes it all possible: attractive design, catchy animations, music, videos, games and the list could go on forever. Flash is considered the new wave, a reason for this is represented by the fact that with the help of flash, web sites are user interactive, making them a lot more interesting than regular web sites where everything is predefined without any real customizable options.

Of course, a web site, theoretically is about the content but let’s face it, without attractive design, fewer people will be curious about the content itself. Some of you may say, don’t judge a book by its covers but this is not applicable in the web site area because it all comes down to one simple question: Which web sites do you remember and come back to again? The answer is pretty obvious; the ones with elegant graphics, the ones with visual aura that draw your attention from the first click.

Web design companies offer professional services for business companies that really want to make an impression on the web. You can tell a great deal about a company only by visualizing their web site that is why more and more companies hire web designers to create a professional web site that stands out from all the other sites.

For companies looking for a fast growth a professionally designed web site is the key. There are numerous examples of companies which after they redesigned their web site enjoyed a large growth in their domain of activity, improving their success.

Web design plays an important role in marketing success. With an attractive web site, the success is guaranteed. Companies with professional web sites benefit from the advantages web design has to offer. Internet marketing is not all about getting as many visitors as possible but also to capture the interest of the visitor once he’s on that specific web site, so what better way to do this if not by web design ?

Therefore, web designing is about marketing, because making your web site look more attractive will give a big boost to your business; or if you have a personal web page you will enjoy looking at the traffic numbers which will certainly go up.

source: ezinearticles.com

Posted by HOD at 8:13 AM 0 comments

Does Color Really Matters?

Sunday, June 28, 2009

There are various IT companies that offers Web development services but how can you find a professional web site design company?

Usually, when potential clients look for information, they use search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN to help them find the sites that can cater to their needs. But since there are thousands of websites that offers affordable web design services, what is the probability that the site that was picked is the best?

Researching in the Internet can be a tedious job since there are several information available and not everything that can be read is a reliable source. But don't fret, this article may help you to find an offshore solutions partner that professionally delivers the web design service that you wanted.

There are several criteria for a website to be considered as a professional site. Of course, a potential client will foremost scrutinize the overall web design site before it consider it's service. The client will search for a site with a professional look and feel because the website is the main portfolio of what they can offer. If a site doesn't look good, potential clients won't even consider dealing business with this company. Below are some of the common factors that can help clients determine if a company's website is professionally done.

Content and Text. The site should contain all the information that is written well and was proofread by an editor. Typographical errors or misspellings won't increase the site's credibility.

Portfolio. A portfolio of past works can showcase the variety of designs that the web design company can offer and at the same time it can show how well they have satisfied each client's needs by highlighting their specific services and products through the web site.

Site navigation. The clients should see the important links, it must be consistent and located at a position most visible to them. It would also help if there's a sitemap available on the site.

Aesthetically pleasing web design. The first thing that potential clients will notice is the appearance of the web page. When he visits the site, his decision to explore or exit from the site will be based on the overall visual aspect. Since a web site is the medium for persuasion, it needs to designed with as much thought and effort considering the target audience and how it will appeal to the potential customers.

Includes Valuable Information. All valuable information should be readily available. Anything a customer might need should be included on the website, from phone numbers to directions or any other important information.

Organization. It is important to have an organized website so that potential clients will be able to find the necessary information that they are looking for quickly.

Functioning Site. Different clients are using various types and versions of hardware and software to view the site. It is a good practice if the site was checked as compatible with different browsers and screen resolutions

Using the guide discussed above will help potential clients to distinguish a professional web site design company to those who offer poorly created sites because choosing the right professional website designer can go a long way towards helping clients achieve their business goals.

Posted by HOD at 1:09 AM 0 comments

High Quality Web Design Services and It's Advantages

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Are you planning to get a website designed or re-designed? Professional help from an experienced web design firm can definitely bring positive outcomes. Many companies operate in California areas like San Diego, Los Angeles, and Orange County, as web design companies that can serve businesses in virtually any industry.

In order to build professionally proficient websites, specialized skills are essential. You might wonder how hiring a company for quality and affordable web design services helps your business. This can be clearly understood by the series of advantages professional web design services provide as follows:

Professional design services provide greater flexibility to an online business. After thoroughly analyzing your business, these professionals come up with solutions that satisfy your business needs using specific technologies.

Just having a good looking website does not ensure a guaranteed increase in web traffic and sales. The web designers incorporate marketing techniques in the web development process that suits your business' needs and requirements.

Getting help from web design companies leads to improvisation of existing plan and design of promotional materials. You'll receive customized marketing for newer websites as well as for existing ones.

California web design companies employ expert and skilled web designers who possess technical expertise in website designing. A technically sound website is a very strong marketing tool that has a tremendous effect on the buying behavior of the customers. These designers keep themselves equipped with the latest technical know-how in order to stay ahead of competition from other web design companies.

A website that is designed well, making use of white hat SEO techniques , stands greater chances of scoring high in major search engine results. They are most likely to get indexed in search engines, leading to better web traffic.

Web development is a very time consuming process. Devoting large amounts of time on it might prove to be a hurdle for smooth functioning of smaller organizations. Hiring a web design company would save time and resources for in-house software development.

Website maintenance is achieved through quality web design services. Well designed sites do not need maintenance in very short spans of time.
Websites that are easy on usability and navigation are preferred by visitors. Such sites give the required information to users in less time, and have better chances of generating a sale.

The above mentioned are some basic benefits of professional web design services on the user's part. Making use of professional services is undoubtedly better than employing regular employees.

source:ezinearticles.com

Posted by HOD at 8:42 PM 0 comments

Undertaking Web Design Practices

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Here are a few tips for creating a user friendly website. Remember that your website is where your business resides, therefore it is important to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible. Read on the articles below about website design practices.

Web Standards
Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Paragraph Size
Keep your paragraphs a reasonable size. If they are too long, split them into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Use of Images
Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are unnecessary. If you think images are essential, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size. If it takes too long to load your site, or move from page to page, visitors will become impatient and leave for a more user-friendly website.

Simple & Clear Navigation
If your visitors don't know how to navigate through your site, they won't stay there very long so it is vital that you have clear navigation directions. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so visitors can navigate around without confusion. If someone is deeply engrossed in browsing your website, you want to make sure that person knows which part of the site he or she is in at that moment, and you want your visitor to be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily.

Don't confuse your visitors, because confusion means "abandon ship"! Navigation should be so simple and easy to follow that a young child will know how to use it.

Do not use scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

source:goarticles.com

Posted by HOD at 8:36 AM 0 comments