Affordable Web Design and Development: July 2009

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

Affordable Web Design and Development