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
2. Combined FAQ (FAQ/General)
FAQ Section
Here is a brief list of common questions we often get from our clients. Of course they are not meant to be a substitute to our great customer service via phone, emai...
3. Controlling Users JCE (Joomla/JCE Editor)
How to control users and default editor options in MOS JCE
In MOS JCE different editors can be assigned to different users.
For example, you might need to have full access with all the bells and whistles as the administrator, however....
4. Creat Redirect after submit contact form Joomla (Joomla/Bug Fixes)
How to get rid of the annoying "Thank you" message users see after submiting information in the Joomla contact form. This trick supplied by Leo of Joomla sums it up perfectly. It even shows and lets you create a custom thank you form ...
5. Changing Joomla copyright notice (Joomla/Joomla)
Changing the footer copyright notice: A quick note about copyright and your site From the start let's make one thing clear - you own your site, the content of the site is yours and does not belong to anyone else. There is an obl...
6. Creating Thank you page facile form (Joomla/Joomla)
How To Creat Confirmation Thank You Page in Facile Form
I find it amazing that such a simple feature is not available by default on Facile Forms, anyways, I finally got my answer, it's very simple really. But first you must do these s...
7. Creating transparent gif Photoshop (Software Ressources/Photoshop)
There are lots of tutorials out there that try to explain how to deal with transparent gifs from Photoshop but none really explain properly and simply how to do it.
These settings work with white background perfectly, for a colore...
8. Cpanel (Glossary/Web Design)
cPanel
cPanel ("Control Panel") is a graphical web-based web-hosting control panel, designed to make administration of websites easy. cPanel handles all aspects of website administration in its interface. The software, which is pr...
9. Content (Glossary/Internet)
Content
Web content is the textual, visual or aural content that is encountered as part of the user experience on websites. It may include, among other things: text, images, sounds, videos and animations.
In "Information Archite...
10. 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...
Contact
Support
Login
Search
C
