What Is The Difference Between Web Design And Graphic Design?
Although web design and graphic design both use images, text, and typeface to create a desired method of communicating ideas, designing for web and print are two different practices. Graphic designers have been around since print media was created, while web design came into being when the Internet was developed. Before choosing a print designer or web designer, it is important to understand the differences between web design and graphic design.
Graphic Design
Graphic Design includes any type of design that has been created and printed. Graphic design uses the blending of technology and art to communicate messages and ideas. The graphic designer utilizes a number of communication tools to deliver a message from a client/company to a specific audience. Graphic design illustrations can be found in magazines, newspaper arrangements, newspaper ads, billboards, logos, brochures, books, labels on a variety of product packages, and much more. Graphic designers create the layout design for a variety of types of print advertisements. The print design is normally 2-dimensional. Each design component is created for a fixed size display. The main tools used are image and typography. Images are used to communicate a mood or emotion.
The audience reacts to the images and the advertising messages that they receive. Typography is a type-based design where words are used to convey a message. The designer will focus on the appearance of the words such as lettering size, location, shape, and color. They are designed to catch the attention of the consumer, enhance the ad display, identify the product, and help convey the advertisers message to the targeted audience. Graphic designers work with market analysts, illustrators, and photographers as well as with typesetters and printers and other production experts to in order complete the entire ad design project.
Web Design
Web Design is task of creating a web page on the internet. Web designers work for businesses creating and implementing their websites. They work exclusively on web sites. A Web designer designs a graphical display of content and images that is displayed on the Internet in the form of a web page. They employ a number of web applications such as HTML, CSS, XHTML, JavaScript, PHP, Photoshop, and images such as JPG. The function of Web designer includes all of the technical aspects of creating a website, such as the coding and writing of web pages.
Both graphic designers and professional web designers are specialized to use such applications as color to create a mood or set a tone. They know how to communicate ideas and messages through such technical expressions as using the meaning of symbols to convey an idea. As well, they know how to use shapes, objects, and colors to provide balance and equilibrium to communicate to a targeted demographic and inform and encourage them to take a certain action such as buying a product.
Both web design and graphic design play an important role in the advertising, promotion, and sales of products and services. Choosing a professional web designer or graphic designer will depend on ones particular area of business.
Five Crucial Rules in Website Design
Talking about your website, more attention should be paid to every minute detail to insure it performs excellently to serve its purpose. Here are seven needed rules of thumb to observe to ensure your website performs well.
1) Do not utilise splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They commonly have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they’re just that — pretty vases with no actual purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.
2) Do not utilize excessive banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy persons have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you’ll be wasting valuable website actual estate. Instead, offer more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they wish to purchase instead of being pushed to purchase.
3) Have an easy and clear navigation
You have to endow a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered drop-down menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.
4) Have a clear indication of where the employr is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to insure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant info or navigate to any section of the site simply. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!
5) Avoid using audio on your site
If your visitor is embarking to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you’ll wish to insure they are not annoyed by a good number of audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make certain they have a good number of control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.
The Five Ways Getting And Keeping Visistors Returning to Your Blog And Website
Many successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are simpler to convert into paying customers because the more frequently they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Thus, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:
One) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox
When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, youre providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will likewise follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.
Two) Start a web log (blog)
Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it modified with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they’ll keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news predominantly. You will similarly build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is likewise a actual life person behind the website.
Three) Implement Polls And Surveys
Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should surely think of adding to your site. They endow a rapid way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target marketplace of your website to keep them concerned to find out as regards the results.
4) Carry Out Puzzles, Quizzes And Games
Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you supply a very noteworthy or addicting way of entertainment. You may likewise hold competitions to award the extreme score winner to keep persons trying continuously to earn the prize.
5) Update frequently with fresh content
Update your site constantly with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have a good number of thing to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will wish to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site altered with fresh bites!
Making Your Website Look Professional
Far too often, people put up a website, sit back and wait for offers and money to start rolling in. Others invest a ton of money into advertising before truly learning the ins and outs of website development.
What many of these internet entrepreneurs fail to understand is that cultivating a web presence is only half of the battle. First and foremost is to make the website appeal to the audience you are seeking. This means you will have to create something that works as intended, namely, draws in potential customers.
A Website is a Marketing Tool
A professional website is one of many items in an advertising arsenal that can help plead your case to a buying public. In many ways, it is the first impression that many people will have of your business.
Make that first impression count by making sure your site aligns with your business objective and goals.
A couple of ways to do this is by observing few simple rules, namely:
1. Check for grammatical errors and typos – how can you instill confidence in a consumer if your own website if full of errors. While you could argue that the average person may be unaware of these mistakes, many are and they have money to spend too. Besides, it simply looks sloppy and makes potential customers feel as if you don’t care. If you don’t care, why should they?
2. Make sure pictures, inserts and query boxes are properly aligned – sometimes an error in coding can offset photos, images, inserts and things like comment boxes. The offence is forgivable if this happens on a rare occasion, but too often and it looks extremely unprofessional. One aspect of web development is to make sure that the page loads up the right way every time. Check your site periodically to ensure it is working properly.
3. Forgo or minimize the flash – While flash animation can look cool, it may not have a place on a truly professional website. One reason why is the fact that not every potential customer is going to have a computer that has the ability to handle a ton of animated graphics. Some computers could even crash because of it. This could put off customers who may have wanted to utilize your services or purchase your products.
4. Keep it plain and simple – the language as well as the graphics should be straightforward, clean and free of frills. When at all possible try not to use ALL CAPS as it can appears if you are screaming at people. Keep info in small, bite sized paragraphs and when possible, make sure the site is free of pop up ads and other forms of advertising.
Another hallmark of a professional website is that it is easy to navigate. Sites that get too fancy with graphics and colors may be visually appealing on one level, but it does visitors no good if they can’t easily locate the about us, contact us or services button.
Keep Your Objective in Focus
In the end, your goal is to try to reach out to a buying public that wants what you have to sell. Your ability to achieve that goal will depend on how well you present yourself on the web. This makes maintaining and developing a professional website extremely important, as it can make all the difference between e-commerce success or failure.
Bear this in mind as you create your website and, if feasible, utilize the services of an established website developer to produce a quality, user friendly webpage.
PhpBB For Your Forum
What are the reasons for having a forum?
Forums give your clients and possible future clients the chance to talk with each other. They are able to ask questions or opinions and read answers from other people. That might ease some of the load off of your support/customer service divisions, and is quite handy for the users.
It’s an excellent way to get more links for your Search Engine Ranking.
Why select phpBB?
There is no charge. Licenses do not need to be purchased. phpBB is free to the public. Besides the program (source code) being unencrypted, the license allows you to alter it or add new code as desired. To make more major alterations, you will need to possess some PHP expertise.
Installing PHPbb
The forum software can be installed as soon as you download it. You will need some knowledge to perform the initial install — that is, unless you are lucky enough to have a website host that has Fantastico installed on its server already. It takes only a few seconds for Fantastico to automatically install phpBB. After that, just a bit of configuration is needed before you can activate your forum. If you’d prefer to install it yourself, you must be or become knowledgeable about such things as setting file and folder permissions, FTP, and setting up a MySQL database.
Personalizing, Altering the appearance.
You have the option of altering or selecting a new theme for your phpBB forum. The majority of the authors do not charge a fee or request donations. If you are feeling confident, you can make your own or alter your current theme.
There is a good amount of assistance to be found on the phpBB user forums. Or you can contract a programmer to program changes on a single task basis. It’s surprisingly inexpensive and easy to locate good PHP programmers.
