The Art of Good Web Design

The impact of a good web design is not about being fancy but how efficient and workable the whole website is. The innovative and effective elements compose the alluring yet valuable case of bringing a quality website to the target market to compliment the services offered as well as the products that are presented.

CG Design can bring you the innovative web design, corporate branding solutions, as well as promote the important factors in bringing a good quality website that constitutes the customer’s needs. The web design and overall planning are the processes that will spearhead the total impact of providing communication and efficient use for the customers—and potential customers.

Establishing Communication:

What would become of a relationship without the communication? Fact is all of us communicate in a manner of ways that bring critical approach to several aspects in any business or relationship. With thorough planning and up-to-date execution as well as the proper understanding of what communication has in store for a website, the results could be mesmerizing. Meeting deadlines is not just the case here, but also the ability to contribute on the matter with immediate yet excellent way of providing the needed tools in the effectiveness of a website to the customers.

The Ideal Factors for Web Designing:
There are ideal factors that are considered in developing a profound and effective website.
First off, your idea of an effective website should be able to provide the guidelines on what to do with the planning and then setting the tables for construction of an improved approach. But normally, the undertaking and responsibility of the job could be in our hands, and if you give us your confidence and trust to fully get the job very well done, then it would be more than just a pleasure. The concept will materialize a newly innovative website that poses the art of web design along with the importance of usability and not just the fancy attitude.

Second, the logo and background are one of the most important aspects of web designing. Whether the logo is reflective of the business or positions itself a personal site then the thorough and in-depth planning should be able to provide you the most satisfying results. Backgrounds have the same impact, whether static or automated; the impression of giving the appropriate colours should provide the best possible element that will give appeal to the visitors and turning them into customers.

Thirdly, the colour coordination, sizes, and shape harmony will introduce a better aspect along the course of website development. The colours will enhance the capability of the site to provide attractive yet effective way of delivering the right message to the customer. The sizes and shapes have the also the ability to contribute for the website to along the right path.
CG Design provides the most appropriate and right tools to make your business one of the most coveted and desired services online. Additionally, we deliver the best concluded website that gives not just attraction to the customers but also the usability and communication that they are all hungry for.

Creating Web Graphics with Adobe FireWorks

Adobe FireWorks - Just how good is it for web designers?

Accelerate web design and development with Adobe® Fireworks® software, the ideal tool for creating and optimizing images for the web and rapidly prototyping websites. Like it’s new step-brother, PhotoShop, FireWorks is a superb piece of graphics software that no web designer should be without. Similar to PhotoShop, in that it has the same intuitive workspace and a huge support network through online forums and support sites, FireWorks is specifically optimised for web graphics and for web design. Fireworks offers the flexibility to edit both vector and bitmap images, a common library of prebuilt assets, and timesaving integration with Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Flash software.

Designers can mock up designs quickly in Fireworks, or leverage other assets from Illustrator, Photoshop, and Flash. Then move directly into Dreamweaver for easy development and deployment. The interface includes a comprehensive set of design tools, including styles, blend modes, filters and auto shapes. Web designers can choose from dozens of styles to quickly change the aesthetics of any object. Options include chrome, stone, ice, reflective, glass, plastic, and more. There are also dozens of lend modes to customize the appearance of your objects and interface elements; a plethora of lighting effects, shadow effects, styles, and blend modes (including seven new blend modes from Photoshop), to add depth and character to text and symbols. Optimize graphics for virtually any delivery scenario with preview, cross-platform gamma preview, selective JPEG compression, and a wide range of export controls, and then cleverly splice them for the web or CSS with the 9-slice scaling function. A great new feature in the CS3 version of Fireworks is the ability to create multiple web pages at once. Designers can use the new Pages panel to create multiple pages in a single document (PNG file), and share layers across multiple pages.

Each page can contain its own slices, layers, frames, animations, and canvas settings, making it easy to simulate website flow in a prototype. Added to that, the new multi-layer support allows users to include multiple web layers within a single Fireworks (PNG) file, share a common web layer across all pages, or be selective about which pages include the web layer. Designers can also edit a single layer and then apply the change globally – saving loads of time. There’s better integration with Illustrator in CS3, as well as enhanced integration between other Adobe products, including PhotoShop and DreamWeaver. This helps to make the whole web design, development and graphic construction as seamless as possible. In all, FireWorks is a fantastic design tool for all web developers and designers. Anyone even thinking of web design should download the free trial and have a play.
I guarantee you won’t be disappointed! You can check out some of the graphics that can be created with Adobe FireWorks for web design at the DataMouse site.

Contact DataMouse.biz for all your web design, database design or graphic design needs.

Creating Web Graphics with Adobe PhotoShop

USing Adobe PhotoShop from a web designer point of view.


Adobe® Photoshop® software helps to improve the workflow path from imagination to imagery. Ideal for photographers, graphic designers, and web designers, software delivers features such as automatic layer alignment and blending that enable advanced compositing. Although we shall cover some other graphics packages, such as FireWorks, in other articles, when creating images for the web, there are few tools that compare with PhotoShop and its diverse range of web design-specific tools.

Web designers can create or modify images with a wide assortment of professional, fully customizable paint settings, artistic brushes, and drawing tools. When this is combined with an intuitive workspace and the ability to import and export a wide range of file formats, including PSD, BMP, Cineon, JPEG, JPEG2000, OpenEXR, PNG, Targa, and TIFF, PhotoShop is one tool that today’s web graphic designers should not be without. The colour palette, for example, can be optimised specifically for web-safe colours. Web designers can also undo and redo any set of editing steps in an open image with the History palette, and automatically track all editing steps within your files with the Edit History log.

Export steps to a text file or save them as part of image metadata for easier documentation of your work, file audits, and more. This makes managing specific icon palettes much, much easier in PhotoShop. Being able to create an image across multiple layers and then splice that image into specific segments ready for use with Cascading Style Sheets makes it easier for web developers to become web designers. Cutting a base image into segments and using CSS can create superbly styled and visually impressive websites very easily. Combined with DreamWeaver and the new integration tools available between the two software packages, both web design and web development just became even more seamless.

If you create custom icons and web graphics – as opposed to web banners et al – you will usually have a common theme across your icons. For example, orientation, palette colour or sizes. With PhotoShop, you can automate common production tasks in a variety of ways. Set up event-based scripts, record a series of steps as an Action for efficient batch processing, and design repetitive graphics faster with Variables. Being long established as the software of choice for web designers, PhotoShop has a massive on-line following. Forums and support sites are in abundance, with over 113 million web pages available when searching for PhotoShop information! Whether you’re creating fun web graphics with comic styling and bright colours, realistic images for printed portfolios or vector graphics for scaling, PhotoShop is the perfect software. You can check out some of the graphics that can be created with Adobe PhotoShop for web design at the DataMouse site.

Contact DataMouse.biz for all your web design, database design or graphic design needs.

Web 2.0 Making a Difference on the Internet

Blogs, wiki's, ease of use, participation, usability, recommendation, social software, simplicity, audio ,video, IM, design, AJAX, convergence, CSS, mobility, open API's, RSS, web standards,search engine optimization, XHTML, micro formats, standardisation & many more new technologies.

If you use all or some of these features in a website, you will find yourself in second generation of World Wide Web. Yes, Web 2.0 is making a difference by adding various advanced functionality. The term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, however it does not refer to an update to Web technical specifications, but to changes in the way system developers are using the web platform. We can say that Web 2.0 is an improved form of World Wide Web.
Before RSS which is one of the most widely used feature of Web 2.0, several similar formats already existed for syndication, but none achieved widespread popularity or are still in common use today, as most were envisioned to work only with a single service. These originated from push and pull technologies.

The specifications & features of Web 2.0 include server-software, content-syndication, messaging-protocols, standards-based browsers with plug-ins and extensions and various client-applications. Innovations of Web 2.0 are web based applications and desktops, rich Internet applications, client side software, XML & RSS, specialized protocols & web protocols. All these new features, specification & innovations are taking the Internet and web design to next generation.

There is undoubtedly a significant degree of hype around Web 2.0 at the moment, but behind the hyperbole lie some important principles, and some powerful potential. We are seeing the emergence of Web-based services that pull data from a wide range of back-end systems to deliver value to users, when, where and in the form that they require it. We are seeing adhoc relationships being formed by and for these services at the point of need, rather than the costly and time-consuming human creation of contracts or service level agreements. Previously passive recipients of content are beginning to engage, combine and recombine data that they are given in new and interesting ways.

The Web 2.0 has also made easy for website design & use but the world is all about change & its pretty acceptable question. If Web 2.0 supports that many new features, what’s next after Web 2.0? May be Web 3.0? Yes Web 3.0 is on its way and will arrive with many more features & functionality.

Planning Your Website

If you built a bridge without a blueprint, it would probably fall down. A website that hasn't been planned is just as likely to fail. Ensuring a successful website means successful planning, explore some of our top tips that that will take you through some of the steps you need to take in order to ensure your site is a success.

Most websites fail. For every Google or Amazon there are thousands of sites that don't make it, so what can you do to make your website a success? The first thing you need to do to avoid failure is to define exactly what you mean by success. What do you want your website to achieve?

Before you do anything you should decide on a short, clear goal for your site and then write it down. You can just have one goal, but it sometimes helps to have a handful to help you develop your site. Possible goals may include:

• To make enough money selling your line of hand-made jewelry to give up your day job
• To tell everyone how great your pet hamster is
• To sell your range of skateboards to people outside California
• To get more parents to send their children to your school
• To fill more rooms in your hotel during the off-season
• To educate divers about the dangers they pose to coral reefs
• To raise money for cancer research
• To help people understand trigonometry

It's important that you only set a small number of goals for your site. If you try to do too many things at once, you'll fail.

Focusing On Achieving Your Goal

Your goal can help you make the right decisions when designing your website - but only if you can keep focused on it. Whenever you need to make a decision, ask yourself which of the options is most likely to help you achieve your goal.

One decision you must take for any site is how large to make the text. Small text often looks nicer, but larger text is more readable. Imagine you were designing a site for a financial advisor whose goal was to "get new customers". Would large or small text help you to achieve the goal better? Larger text would be better in this instance, as most investors are older people and many wear glasses.

But what if their goal was "to get more young customers"? Smaller text might be more likely to appeal to younger investors, although you still need to make sure they can read it.

Hot Tip: Be careful when choosing your web designer. Some designers may be more interested in creating an attractive website for their portfolio than a site that makes money for you. Having a goal written down helps make sure everyone is pulling in the same direction. Understanding Your Visitors

A website without visitors is as pointless as a pencil without lead. To make sure the people who visit your site don't leave straight away you'll need to identify your target audience, the people you want to visit your site, so you can ensure the design and content will appeal to them.

You need to know as much about your target audience as possible. Ask yourself lots of questions about them:

• How old are they?
• What kind of jobs do they have?
• Where do they live?
• What computer do they own?
• How much do they use the Web?
• What other sites do they visit?
• Why have they come to your site?

The Call to Action

Once you've got a clear idea of who your target audience is, you'll need to think about how you are going to use this knowledge to achieve the goal you've set for your site. If you're planning a business site then you probably want the visitor to buy something from you, either now or in the future. If your site is non-commercial, you probably still want your visitor to do something specific, like donate money to a charity or improve their knitting.

So, how do you get your visitors to do what you want? Well, you need to ask them - and it needs to be obvious. There's no point in having a "buy now" button if your visitor doesn't notice it. Your whole site, from the design to the writing, should be focused on getting your visitors to take up your call to action. For some sites, like Amazon, the action they want the visitor to perform might be to make an online purchase, but for others it could simply be tempting the visitor to make a phone call or send an email.

Whatever your call to action is, you'll need to understand your target audience in order to get them to perform it.

Check Out the Competition

There's no such thing as an original idea any more, at least not on the Web. If you're designing a new site it's almost certain that somebody somewhere will have done something similar before.

You might not welcome this competition but try to think of it as free market research. Your competitors may have spent a lot of time and money coming up with ideas for their site and there's nothing to stop you using those ideas for free. Take a look at your competitor's websites to see what they've done well and what they've done badly.

Learn From Other People's Mistakes

If you're able to offer visitors something your competitors don't, there's a good chance they'll start using your site instead. Visit other people's sites and think like an awkward customer. What's wrong with their site? What could they do better? What are they missing?

Here are some of the things you might find:

• Their site looks cheap so I don't trust them. A site that looks professional would make me much more likely to buy online
• I don't have Flash, so I can't use their site
• It takes me too long to find the books I want
• There are lots of spelling mistakes on the site and I found the articles boring, even though it's about my favourite singer
• The site takes a long time to load, I can't wait that long so I'll probably go to another site instead
• I found the order forms really confusing. I'd rather call them up than buy from their website

Credit Where Credit's Due

It's probably easy to pick holes in your competition's website, but also remember to focus on the things they've done well. Imagine you're a potential customer coming to the site. Try to perform one of the "tasks" you'd want them to carry out, such as finding the company's phone number and address or buying something online.

How easy it is to carry out the task? How long did it take? What impression of the company did you get? Remember, looking at other people's websites for inspiration is a great idea. However, copying them isn't. It may be tempting to cut corners by copying the terms and conditions from another site, but it's also against the law.