Web design is something between an art and a science. A web designer needs to be both objective and subjective in his objectives, strategies, methodology and evaluation. While the term webmaster is often used (most time inappropriately) web designer is more accurate although the world wide web cannot exactly be crafted by a designer, it really refers to an abbreviation of web site designer but for convenience has been shortened to simply web designer. Other terms used commonly are webmaster, website developer and web site designer.
It really is quite difficult to quantify the talent of web designer because it truly depends on what area of expertise is involved in their related fields. Some web designers specialize in HTML static design, some do multimedia and flash sites while others concentrate their talents on designing and developing CMS dynamic websites. Another problem clients will also have when trying to decide and who to choose to develop their website is the their level of experience. Unfortunately, more often than not clients will be confused and have very little knowledge of the design process. How can you tel if the web designer actually knows what he is talking about? How do you know if he will provide your project with the appropriate technology?
CMS web designers
CMS stands for content management systems. The most popular ones in existence are Joomla, WordPress and Drupal. All these software applications are free and what are referred to as web based. This means that the website can be managed online either by the web designer or the client. The site can be designed and developed both online and offline and as is the case with Joomla CMS most of the work offline. All these CMS have their advantages, Drupal and Wordpress are very user friendly but Joomla is a lot more powerfull and expandable and is the platform we will be concentrating on now. As with any other web designer skill that you need to investigate before choosing the webmaster service for your project, check references and portfolio. You Joomla web designer should have expertise and experience in HTML, CSS and PHP. He should be familiar with Dreamweaver, Photoshop (Joomla of course) and a multitude of other website designing applications and platforms. A Joomla site is particularly difficult to develop because the development process in non intuitive unlike a plain HTML site than can be built using WYISYG (what you see is what you get) editors. A Joomla site needs to be created with 3 basic tool sets. Dreamweaver with Joomla extensions, and Apache Joomla stand alone server, Photoshop (Gimp, Paint.net) and Firefox with the Firebug and Chris Pen web developer extensions. Could be an idea to ask you Joomla web designer if he is familiar with any of the applications mentioned above, if not, he might not be who are are looking for.
Basic HTML web designer knowledge and experience
Evaluating your web designer's basic HTML skills. HTML(hypertext markup language) is the basic language used to create websites. It never hurts to do some research on Wikipedia to get familiar with maybe about a dozen HTML basic terms to that you can actually understand the design process and "feel" through some properly asked questions if your web designer actually has some basic knowledge it his field, all web developers should have a minimum of basic HTML skills.
Flash Web designers
Flash animation is a multimedia technology conceptualized by Adobe systems to display animation and movies and sound on website. It is not recommended for most websites as alternative and original technology such as animated gif files or embedded MPEG files are usually more accessible for your audience. Flash animation requires the Adobe plugin and will often cause the website to loose visitors...however, in some cases like movie sites and entertainment websites, Flash can be used (but cautiously). So how do you know if your web designer can develop some nice flash movies for your site? This is even harder to quantify than HTML or CMS web designer skills, after all? Everyone has different taste in movies, book, food and music...the same goes with Flash website module development. So the best way to find out is to check out the portfolio and references, if you like what you see, your web designer probably shares your artistic values and everything should be fine. However, be careful about template work, some webmasters might use some flash templates to do your web site. While this might not be a problem in most cases, it could make you look like a copycat if your visitors recognize the flash template you web developer created for you from another website...
Basic Web Design Guidelines
Try to avoid excessive Flash animation if any Macromedia plugins
Use external style sheets for the .css
Try to have 3 color scheme for the website
A great large banner to give the site style without blotting the code and compromising between SEO and design
Use .CSS instead of regular HTML whenever possible to streamline the code
Use color picker to have a smooth color theme for all website elements
Here is a of basic terms relating to web design, online and offline promotion, world wide web and information technology. Click on the links below to access the categories of your choice, you will then be presented with a choice a articles to browse through.
This is a great resource for beginners to assist you in making the right choice for your web design needs or simply to familiarize yourself with the world wide web.
InformationTechnology
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1. Open Source (Glossary/InformationTechnology)
Open Source
Open source is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the design and production of goods and knowledge. The term was initially and is most commonly applied to the source code of software that is available to th...
2. Merchant Account (Glossary/InformationTechnology)
Merchant Accounts
A merchant account allows a business to accept credit cards, debit cards, gift cards and other forms of payment cards. This is also widely known as payment processing or credit card processing.
Merchants, or business...
3. Definition Macro Automation (Glossary/InformationTechnology)
Macro Automation
A macro in computer science is a rule or pattern that specifies how a certain input sequence (often a sequence of characters) should be mapped to an output sequence (also often a sequence of characters) according to a defin...
4. Localization (Glossary/InformationTechnology)
Internationalization and localization
Internationalization and localization[1] are means of adapting products such as publications, hardware or software for non-native environments, especially other nations and cultures.
...
5. Joomla CMS (Glossary/InformationTechnology)
Joomla CMS
Joomla! is a free, open source content management system written with PHP for publishing content on the world wide web and intranets, using the MySQL database. Joomla! includes features such as page caching to improve performance...
6. GNU (Glossary/InformationTechnology)
GNU Licence
GNU (pronounced /gnu/ (help·info)) is a computer operating system composed entirely of free software. Its name is a recursive acronym for GNU's Not Unix, which was chosen because its design is Unix-like, but differs from Un...
7. Content Management Systems (Glossary/InformationTechnology)
Content Management System (CMS)
A Content Management System (CMS) is a software system used for content management. This includes computer files, image media, audio files, electronic documents and web content. The idea behind a CMS is to ma...
8. CMS (Glossary/InformationTechnology)
A Content Management System (CMS)
A Content Management System (CMS) is a software system used for content management. This includes computer files, image media, audio files, electronic documents and web content. The idea behind a CMS is to ...
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