The early Internet was text-based and, if you weren't using it back then, you don't remember the thrill of seeing the first images posted online. Today, images are basic parts of any web page. Web designers have gotten a lot more creative with images, using layers, transparency and other effects to create beautiful layouts for their clients. There is, however, one use of images that is sometimes a great choice and sometimes a very poor one: slideshows.

Slideshows are used on portfolio sites quite a lot. One of the best places to go see them in use for yourself is on professional photography sites. These sites, in some cases, show instances where the web designers went for flash instead of substance and where the results may not be what the site owner had in mind.

At its most basic level, a slideshow seems like a good idea. The visitors to a portfolio site want to see the artist's work and, therefore, giving them an automatic way to view it seems a natural choice. There's more to it, however, and you have to keep that in mind.

When designers put up a slideshow, they force the visitors to wait through images that they may not even be interested in seeing. If you're hiring a photographer for your business portrait, for instance, you probably have absolutely no interest in their bridal photography and may end up finding a different site if you're forced to sit through a selection of those images. Conversely, if you're getting married, you probably don't want to see the photographer's photos from a local football game. Choice is important in web design.

Make sure your builders emphasize visitor choice. When visitors look at a portfolio, many of them will like to have the option to either see a slideshow or to manually enlarge images from a thumbnail gallery. Very impatient people will likely be happier to dispense with the slideshow option than with the manual gallery.

Make sure your page doesn't make visitors sit through content they don't want to see. Your page designers should be able to find a good way to offer a good balance between fancy, automatic features and manual features that offer more choice to the site visitor. Some visitors will love sitting through your slideshow, but make sure you don't drive away others who won't appreciate it at all.

It is imperative that every small business in this day and age has a website. It is not only a web address for your business, if cleverly designed and properly managed, it is your 24/7 marketing department and sales department put together under one umbrella. Lets not go jumping straight into it however, lets go over a few points about small business web design and the benefits of choosing a custom website over a template based website design.

Custom website design is one of the favorite options for website designing. The reason why custom web site design is so popular these days with small businesses is; well there are several actually. One significant reason is that custom web site design allows you to choose not only the aesthetics aspects of the template but also the functionality of the website. Template of the website lets you determine the layout, color schemes and other visual aspects, whereas the functionality of the site deals with the user interface that determines how easy or difficult it is going to be for letting the customers to reach call to action. A website that is part of a larger corporate identity will require everything to be in sync with the greater picture and one which appears distinctly to be a part of the larger scheme of things.

There are several open source content management software that makes website building a breeze, however they are not 100% unique and the same template and layout is used by hundreds and depending upon the popularity of the theme, thousands of other websites. Web design companies that specialize which specialize in custom website design rather than template based web design allow you the choice and the freedom to design your own website and reduce the risk of your website looking much the same as someone else. This type of small business website design company will allow you to input designing suggestions which will be incorporate into the design. Usually, there are several amendments that are allowed until the perfect design is achieved.

Another benefit of a custom website for small business owners is the ability to select a flow of the website which is unique to your business needs. Ready made CMS based websites often does not allow the luxury to create a flow that is ideally suitable for your business needs. You will need design services such as that only a custom web designer can do to create that flow for you.

A custom website design for your small business enables you to set your standards separate from the competition and allows you to stand apart from the clutter. An industry where the websites are all designed in a clichéd manner would love a fresh perspective to content presentation. Small businesses now put a lot of effort on SEO tactics and a custom website allows the opportunity to tweak the SEO tactics which a ready made CMS system does not allow or need considerable effort to have.

Be sure to take a look around before you decide on a web design company and make sure that the web design company that you do choose provides high quality, custom web design and is able to meet all of the needs and requirements of your small business.

In this stormy economic scenario, it’s very difficult for a business to uphold and sustain its existence for long. Almost every business organization these days follow the latest trend for promoting the brand addressing their target audience. The Internet is a solitary medium connecting people across the globe. Due to its immense reach, business enterprises consider it as an excellent marketing tool. There is a continuous tough competition between business houses on the World Wide Web. So, It is highly important to stand out from others. There are millions of companies having similar products are available online, to abide your brand existence online, you need to be unique and attractive. The Website is your online address, where you showcase your information about products and services.

It’s a basic human nature that people often get hitched towards attractive and unique things. If you want your business to boost with high pace, an attractive website is the cutting-edge solution for you. The designing adds life to your imagination. The use of unique and tempting elements, like images, graphics and web content will make your website stand out from the rest. Having a unique, customized web design will facilitate your brand to get noticed by the people. Human interest is an important value for any kind of marketing or advertising campaign online or offline. We all know people these days are more engaged to the internet as a source of information, so it is more likely to grab the attention of a maximum number of people through customized website embedded with unique features. While shopping online, customers always look for attractive websites and automatically get pulled towards it.

If you want your brand to keep a hold on your present customers, and drive maximum traffic to your web address, you need to have a captivating web design. Online marketing is expanding on a large scale, people are now more hitched to online shopping because of its handy feature. The digital world is dynamic, where change is constant, nothing is stable, not even your online presence. When customers visit your online shop, they mainly make an impression of the overall look of your website, if it is attractive with superlative graphics, it can hold the attention of the visitors and leave a positive inking on their memory, which will later compel them to re-visit your website. It is not enough to provide the best service or brand with super quality to grab people’s attention, you need to be presentable while exhibiting your brand. Your website should be well- designed and attractive so that you can drive a maximum number of people to your website.

Both Joomla and WordPress are established web design applications used by millions of websites across the world. Web Design Companies and web designers have in general supported various open source software for developing websites. Joomla and WordPress are two of the most popular ones and have established communities on the internet. There are hundreds of quality forums and blogs dedicated specifically towards the use of Joomla and WordPress for designing websites. Other web design and content management systems including Drupal and Typo3 have also proved popular and effective. However WordPress and Joomla seem to have an edge over the others in terms of global popularity and use.

Many web design agencies and design professionals are proficient with Joomla and WordPress and are able to customize the software to meet the specific needs of a business. Both these platforms offer the flexibility to extend the core features to meet individual requirements. This article offers an insight into which software is more suitable for developing your website.

WordPress versus Joomla

Usability

WordPress probably scores higher in terms of usability, both from an end user as well as developer's point of view. Due to its simplicity WordPress is easy to learn and get acclimatised to. However this is also due to the fact that Joomla offers many more features than WordPress and offers more advanced functionality. The new version of Joomla, the 1.5x version has made significant improvements in usability.

SEOMOZ.org, a leading web design and technical blog recently published an article where the author stated that "if you are willing to trade some extra learning time for a more advanced site, go with Joomla."

Versatility

WordPress is better described as a blog software whereas Joomla is an advanced content management system. WordPress is excellent for publishing content. Joomla on the other hand offers many powerful features. There are Joomla components that target almost every industry and market.

If you have limited time to set up a website or if your requirements are simple then WordPress is probably the better choice. However if you would like to develop or design an advanced website with powerful features then Joomla is more suitable.

Search Engine Optimization

WordPress is known for its search engine optimization advantages. By default WordPress is search engine friendly and webpages tend to rank high on Google. On the Joomla needs some customization in order to target the full benefits from search engines. With the right customization however, Joomla websites are equally capable of ranking high on search engines like Google. Any expert Joomla developer will design a website to be SEO friendly.

A Joomla websites can be customized a accordingly to overcome any SEO shortcomings.

Scalability

Joomla is easily scalable. Joomla can be used to design small websites as well for developing complex functionality on websites. WordPress is great out of the box and will work excellent if the only purpose of the website was to publish informational content. WordPress is great out of the box but limited somewhat for developing complicated web applications.

Joomla can be scaled as required. Almost any custom feature or application can be developed in Joomla. Joomla has been designed for extending and modifying to meet specific needs. WordPress is fairly limited. There are add-on features available for WordPress as well in the form of WordPress plug-ins but they do not compare to the advanced features that can be developed as add on Joomla modules or components.

Integration

Joomla has clear advantages with regards to extending and integrating the website with other third party applications of software. Joomla has a well formed and powerful API that developers can use to extend the software or integrate with other systems as required. Joomla websites can be easily integrated with other sources or websites.

Development of bespoke features

Joomla is the clear winner here. Custom development can be done in WordPress as well as Joomla. However Joomla's development framework is more suitable for developing bespoke features for the website. There are many powerful add-on components that can be easily installed on a Joomla website.

Web designers and developers are able to develop additional customized features with ease using Joomla's powerful development API. WordPress can also be easily extended however development API is not as powerful as Joomla's.

Administration Features

WordPress has an easy to use, light weight administration panel. It is excellent if the main purpose of the website is solely to publish information. The administration panel is limited to updating or adding new content or media. Joomla has a powerful administration panel that offers a range of features such as e-commerce (Shopping cart), order management, inquiry inquiry, User management, document management, multi-lingual content, etc. Joomla offers endless possibilities are and the administration panel is fully customisable for specific requirements.

As the Internet expands the world of design, there are a few trends to be on the lookout for. Web design constantly undergoes changes in trends as the years pass. Certain aspects of design like HTML5 vs Flash, CSS, content management systems, and software development platforms are all changing how people create on the web.

HTML5

Specific trends like oversized logos and headers, huge images, typography, minimalism, and intro boxes have been popular in the past. For the future of web design, there will be more HTML5, CSS, content management systems, and software development platforms. The large debate between HTML5 and Flash will probably forever continue, but HTML5 has some great benefits. HTML5 is better supported on mobile devices and allows for more interactive design on the web. HTML5 is already compatible on most browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. It also gives developers more flexibility and allows them to do more things in-house and it allows for more powerful and interactive applications. HTML5 lets developers manage data, draw, and play video and audio (which developers had problems doing with HTML4). HTML5 has new canvas and also makes it easy to embed video elements. It also has a new geolocation APIs, client-side database, offline application cache, and thread-like operation.

Flash

Flash still has some great benefits. Flash has better support streaming secure and live video, is more ubiquitous and the 2D and 3D APIs are more usable than canvas (allegedly). The developer community is larger and more mature than HTML5 and the tools are strong and well-supported. Designers are also more comfortable using Flash. Flash also gives access to web cam and audio recording.

CSS3

New trends in CSS3 include change of text selection color, gradually changing links, 1px clicks, easier introduction paragraphs, and box shadow with RGBA on hover. With CSS3, designers can change the color of selected text to match the color scheme of the rest of the site. Also with CSS3, designers can change the opacity of a hover link. 1px click makes links that are clicked on move down 1px and return to their original place after the mouse is released. Introduction paragraphs are also easier and CSS3 allows designers to create a box shadow with RGBA on hover.

WCMS

A web content management system or WCMS lets users with little or lots of web programming language know-how create and manage a web site’s content with ease. A WCMS can use templates and the WCMS uses databases to store artifacts, content, and metadata. Most WCMSs use server side caching and most have automated templates, scalable expansion, easily editable content, scalable feature sets, web standards upgrades, workflow management, collaboration, delegation, document management, content virtualization, content syndication, multilingual capabilities, and versioning.

Software Development Platforms

Also known as HTML editors are software applications used to create web pages. Such applications, like Adobe Dreamweaver, allow users to create and preview web sites in locally installed web browsers, transfer features, synchronize features, find and replace lines of text, find and replace lines of code, and use templates. These software development platforms can also use third-party extensions to increase functionality. Most of them can also be used with HTML and are usually compatible with Mac or Windows operating systems. Software development platforms often support CSS, JavaScript, and other scripting languages and frameworks.

Checkout reviews & comparison of design courses.

Because the Internet is rapidly and constantly expanding the web design world, trends of web design are constantly upgrading to new software, languages, and editing platforms. By keeping up with these web design trends, designers and developers can make attractive and interactive web site designs that will increase in popularity and ease of use.

In an age when we’re talking about responsive web designs and wearables, it’s quite strange to see that developers and designers are still grappling with the blatant misconceptions surrounding web designing.

Today, in the course of this particular post, we’ll try to bring up and shatter these myths once and for all. Read on in order to be duly guided and make sure that the web designing company hired by you is not grappling with similar myths as well. So, let’s discover what these myths are.

Myth #1: Your Website Does not Need to Change

The need for upgrading your website is as significant as that of upgrading, developing and perhaps renovating your offline store. It is rather incorrect to assume that your web designing endeavors always have a start and an end. On the contrary, it is actually an ongoing process. You can keep on innovating, updating and growing your website just as you can do with your store. In fact, you should do all these in order to ensure that you’re duly keeping up with the ever-evolving trends associated with web browsers as well as devices.

Myth #2: The Splash Page Works Wonderfully Well for your Website

Ask the experts and they will tell you that Splash and those “entrance” pages have actually no value in the digital world today. In fact, not only is it useless but harmful. You perhaps cannot gauge initially, but let us tell you that Splash actually goes on to lead to an increase in the bounce rate of your site because users cannot find what they’re looking for – at the first instance, and eventually leave your website as a result. It is wiser to invest in a standard home page instead of a splash page, once again, as per expert opinion.

Myth #3: Your website has to exemplify exceptional web design

Your website should rather be the right combination of easy navigation and stylish designing features. Getting too ambitious with your designing exploits might as well drive a few users out of your website. We have already told you how Splash pages result in increased bounce rate. The use of too many graphics might as well go on to increase the loading time of your site as well – this, needless to say, remains one of the key reasons why users leave a site midway.

Once again, it’s better to invest in a stylishly designed but functional website.

Myth #4: I can be as experimental as I want to be

This is that one strain of thought which often leads us to go overboard with the way we use fonts and color palettes in our sites. The use of inconsistent font implies that you’re actually violating the typographical best practices (think about tracking, kerning and leading etc). Doing all this does not really go on to demonstrate the kind of professionalism that your clients are looking for!

So be on your guard against being too experimental with your choices as far as web designing is concerned.

It would not be wrong to compare web designing with an art, every form of art has its own target audience. The artists are very creative they blend their creativity and imagination beautifully to come up with unique artifacts that will surely catch the imagination of the audience; same goes with professional web designer they need to understand their client’s needs and objective, using their experience innovative ideas and imagination they come out with a unique concept that does wonders to the client business, and that is eventually what the client is looking for.

A piece of art only gets mass recognition if it’s a masterpiece. Now the question comes up – Is every designer capable of delivering a masterstroke? Well the answer is “no”, like every artist work is not a masterpiece same goes with designers too

Why are professional web designer needed?

When you are starting a business, you take lot of things into consideration first which business to start with, you find out its scope, once convinced you pool of resources, form a company, set up goals, hire the best team, get the latest equipment, and start the business. In short, you are putting so much effort and capital into it achieves goal eventually that is profit. In this competitive business scenario, having a very strong online presence is must for the success of the business. People today don’t have time to go visit shops, but they do have technology at their hand in the form of tablets, laptops, mobiles phones that help them to visit any online store at any time of the day to get things they want.

The customers have certain expectations when it comes to online site. It should be quick to load, attractive, give all the necessary information about the product/service. If they don’t get all these at once place within a fraction of second, they will navigate to the related website. Designing a website requires lots of things to be taken care of, and this is the only web designer can do. Choosing a professional designing company is a better option than going for individual designers because in companies, there is a pool of designers and other professionals.

When you approach a professional web designing company first they will understand what exactly you want – you have to give them complete information about your business it includes the nature of business, product, goals, target audience, age group. Based on the information the work is allotted to a specific project manager who has a team of web designers. They do extensive research & brainstorming to come up with a unique design.

The professional designing companies have access to the latest technology. They design the website taking into all the intricacies of designing. It includes writing the unique original content, putting right pictures/flashes, making sure the loading time is very quick, and most importantly it is crawlers friendly. The right mix of all these will lead to flow of traffic on your company’s website.

Whether you're a start-up or an established enterprise, your most important asset for marketing your products or services for little cost is your website – a web domain can be picked for just a few pounds.

Despite a new trend for "drag and drop" website builders, the best way to ensure your website is of a high-quality and, consequently, as attractive as it can be to potential customers is to employ the services of a professional web design agency . Web Specialist Answers will have extensive experience working with businesses like yours and will be able to ensure your website is as effective as it can be.

When consulting your web design agency, it's important to keep in mind the following:

REDUCE THE CLUTTER
No one wants to be bombarded with pop-ups, adverts, and buttons the minute they land on a website. When having your website designed or re-designed, be sure to keep everything clean and clear – content should be concise and to-the-point and you should aim to have plenty of white space, too. Years ago, it was considered essential to have hundreds of pages with in-depth information about every aspect of your businesses, however, times have changed. Potential customers landing on your website should be able to clearly identify the purpose of your website and what you're offering within just five seconds – any longer and you're at risk of losing the prospective customers' attention.

DO YOUR RESEARCH FOR A WEBSITES
Before consulting a web design agency, it's important you research, looking at your competitors, to get an idea of ​​what your website should look like. Your web designer will be able to advise on the aesthetics and usability of your site; however, the process can be made easier and, sometimes, cheaper if you have a thorough outline of what you would like before you get started. However, always try to keep your website unique, taking it to a new level above your competitors – getting inspired and taking small features is fine but you don't want to replicate your competitors' entire website.

KEEP YOUR WEBSITE FONT SIMPLE
It sounds juvenile; however, many business owners go wrong at the first hurdle with their website by choosing an unclear, stylised, or incorrectly colored font. When choosing the typeface used on your website, remember to keep everything readable – font size 10 is a good standard – and clear. Popular website fonts that are also contemporary looking include Open Sans, Arvo, PT Sans, and PT Serif. Generally, always choose black font for a white background and white font for a dark background.

REMEMBER THE "VISUAL HIERARCHY"
Here is a little technical information for you. Your web design agency will be experts in implementing the "visual hierarchy" properly, however, it's good measure for you to be aware of why your designer is laying your website out in a special way. The visual hierarchy is consumer research that proves, as customers, our eyes move from the top to bottom of a website before scanning left to right, which means you should position your call-to-actions effectively to ensure maximum conversion. For instance, to push customers to call you, display "call now" with your number top left of your site.

OPTIMISE A WEBSITE FOR MOBILES
More than ever, having an effective mobile website is essential to converting customers on the go. Plus, mobile optimization gives your website a green tick for SEO, too. A recent study suggests that 51% of online sales are made using a mobile phone or tablet so, especially if your business is in e-commerce, it will pay to optimize your website for mobiles – allowing your customers to shop on the go.

We often get requests in to assist people with building their websites – no surprises there; we are, after all, a web design company.

But these requests often need to be translated from some form of Klingon or other alien language since often it feels as if the potential client is just making a fleeting visit to planet earth.

Some examples:

"Hi, i would like to start an advertising business (sic) that allows me to generate money while people are surfing into my web. The problem is I just do not have enough info about Enzine."

"I require a website that I can use to have customers registering and bidding online, also need to have a feature where users can buy tokens."

"I want to have a web, graphic and search engine software. If you can't you can't design me the software, how about you give a search engine quote. I just want only 5 pages and the rest I will do. I am a web designer so I find it difficult to design search engine for my self. "

We also get requests from people who want to have Facebook clones, eBay type sites or a shopping cart 'like Amazon'.

One of the biggest problems seem to be that of unrealistic expectations of what a website can do or cannot do, and how much it will cost.

What people do not realize are some of the following factors:

1. It is a lot more difficult to 'make money on the Internet' than other people would want you to believe. It is in Internet Marketers and other 'gooroos' best interest to let you believe that making money with a website is as easy as pie. The hard truth is that turning a profit from a website is really, really difficult, especially one that is aiming high. Even wildly successful internet endeavors such as Facebook and Amazon took years and years before they started to show profit.
2. In a lot of cases, people just do not know enough about the Internet and how it works to start up such a venture successfully. That is not to say that we are belittling people who want to start ventures such as these. We all have to start somewhere, and even Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg at one stage knew nothing about the Internet or websites, but come on … there is a wealth of information available out there today as well as these sites that can be used as case studies. How much did Facebook cost to implement? It is reputed that angel investors poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the site. We then get requests for social networking types of sites with clear 'want to make millions' aspirations behind it and when we try and understand the client's budget it is in the region of about $ 1000 – if we are lucky.
3. People seem to really think that getting the site built is enough. They suffer from the classic 'build it and they will come' fallacy. There is no clear understanding of what it takes to get visitors to a site, or how to market the site either online or offline.

This leaves us, as the web design company, with an ethical dilemma. Do we implement the site and leave the client to his own devices? A version of 'take the money and run'? Or do we tell the client that his brilliant idea is just never going to fly. Unfortunately that means that we will probably go out of business too since about 50% of the websites we build are based on some crazy business idea. The other alternative is to act not only as a web design company but also as a consulting firm, dispensing advice, coaching and guiding the client. After all, that is really what customers expect from a web design company, not so?

The question is – how much is this advice worth and how does one work it into the business model of the web design company? This type of advice and consulting takes up an inordinate amount of time and effort and working that into the costing of a website tends to push the costs up even more – try and work those costs into the 'new cool social networking site that will merge Facebook , YouTube and Twitter, to be called YouTwitFace, site 'and see what happens to website costs!

You have to build a website that is tempting to your target audience or market. But, if you want to do Internet marketing for increasing your business brand and sales, create it with a professional look, which is extremely vital these days. The designs of the site must depend completely on your business objectives and your online goals. You can hire a custom web designing company to create a custom design.

What Is A Custom Web Design?

A customized website design is a definitive solution for the online presence to stay it for your business. When making a custom site, the choice of fonts, images, colors, videos and more are available, but the Web Designing Company of the sites to decide whether it is right for your business or not. A custom design enables you to concentrate on your business objectives and create the website based on a professional Internet strategy. This will not only provide you a unique and original look to your e-commerce site but also assist you in designing vital tools with features.

Flexibility is one of the major benefits of custom design, which provides exact solutions for your particular needs and assists you in making an eye-catching and user-friendly website for your business. Business owners who want to make their online brand stronger must make their customers and clients comfortable while browsing their business site. And, this is possible only through custom site designing that it uses easy to follow page navigation, an engaging, user-friendly design, a search engine friendly data structure and an appropriately optimized page layout.

Select An Innovative Web Design Company

When you are choosing a customized web designing service company, go through a firm that provided an innovative design with the advanced technology. In choosing the right company with the right design, you must do a little research over the Internet. Remember, if you have a site that is not easy to navigate, then no one is actually interested in visiting your site. Therefore, pick the one that is ready with the latest technology to create innovative websites quickly. Also, the company not only offers excellent custom design services but very cost-effective as well.

With a good e-commerce website, you will have a unique and attractive design that is specifically designed for your online business. Always make a site that is completely different from others, particularly your competitors so that visitors and customers can easily remember it. Your site represents your business so it should be a stunning, so more and more visitors will be attracted towards your site easily, as a result, boost your online business sale.