Web design through the eyes of the reader

Let’s look at web design through the eyes of the reader the immortal works of travel Gulliver. The fourth trip, where Gulliver goes to the country horses, which are subordinated to people, shows that the human person is able not only to the endless development, but also to the infinite degree. That laughter is turned to the Enlightenment, with its boundless faith in human rights in the possibility, in its comprehensive sense.

Today, faith in humanity shaken, but appeal to it is still possible to use when a web site design. Satire is not just to travel. He is famous pamphlet, also based on an allegorical satire. In his famous book, The Tale barrels (the English idiom, which means farrago) he wrote about three brothers, the Duchess charam can be misguided, ambition mistress, the Countess of pride. The brothers are the names of Peter (the symbol of papacy, for the first Pope, the apostle Peter), Jack (Jean Calvin) and Martin (Martin Luther). In doing so, Swift ridiculed the negative features of the church, using the allegory. This is the same style, and other pamphlets. Generally, a pamphlet, acquired popularity in the Enlightenment, different socio-political orientation and the unprecedented severity of satire, often hides under the mask of allegory.

Allegorichnost like color manner, can be used when a web site design. In the literature of other European countries allegorical satire is also gaining momentum. In France, the best-known satirist of the Enlightenment was Voltaire. His books were banned French censorship, for the fact that the allegory is easy to learn the characters of modern times, including quite influential. Published in 1762 poem virgin Orleans was immediately added to the list of banned books. Such actions, as well as web design usually have to produce themselves, but this small detail and not too serious. As I already gave you to understand in the beginning of the list of products – this is the frame of your web design.

Therefore, I ask, and to focus its attention on its constitution, because to some extent it is to affect the constitution and the establishment of web design. It follows that special attention should be primarily in the production of a list of products: the main emphasis on the well-known brand classifiers. And just give your attention to that one list for the excellent work created by online stores will маловато.

Pay special attention to items of information about creating web design, various assistance to navigate the site to potential buyers. Well, that’s like, all of the most important thing when creating a web design. Note that in our country do not yet have a certain degree, in which we can choose from the lists of finished products with the correct description, images, and structure. And this lack of web design. And now, at this writing should be appropriate content. Such work is called

How to create cartoon effect in Adobe Photoshop.

Do you have a picture and want to easily convert it to cartoon? Photoshop has nice function which allow you combine your steps in “action”, then use that action file for many other graphics. Sue created nice action file which allow you to convert static picture into cartoon styled graphic. The result is below, I� created the second picture� with just 3-4 clicks.

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Download Cartoon Effect� action. Open archive and copy Sues_Cartoon_Actions.atn file in your Photoshop’s “C:\\ Program FIles\Adbobe\Adobe Photoshop\Presets\Photoshop Actions\”� folder. Then open Photoshop, from top menu select “Window” then “Action”

You will see this window:

� Click Load Actions, in opened window select “Sues_Cartoon_Actions.atn”.
The action file will immidiatly appear in the actions window.

Now, open picture you want to transform to cartoon, select the area with CTRL+A, and start inserting actions on the picture.
You need select each of those 6 effect and click arrow button, see highlights on the screenshot below:

That’s all.

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Interview with William Mathis (President, at-websolutions.com)

Our blog welcomes William Mathis of president at-websolutions.com. This is our first interview with developer on this blog.

Mr.Mathis, how and when you become web designer?
First, I started out as a graphic designer and graduated from a design school (Platt College) in 1993. I was working as a corporate regional graphic designer for a large brokerage firm here in San Diego, creating high-end media presentations and marketing materials. This is around 1997. At the time, I had a broker that came to me and was interested in starting and online website for a professor that can teach online to his students. It would also be linked and embedded with the San Diego State University website. I had a friend, which also graduated from Platt, which I knew he was doing web design. After assisting him with obtaining the project, he explained that I should consider adding web design to my skills, which would open other opportunities. My friend suggested that I study a book, Peachpit’s best seller “HTML for the World Wide Web” to learn html. Then from there I purchased a domain and and created my website (while creating the website I was learning more and more…), launched it, and the rest is history.

What is web design for you? Web design is an extension of your graphic design skills and creative ability, but utilized on a different medium. You also have to think three-dimension instead of two (creative, graphic usage know how, limited color control, content placement and format, and html, javascript or other scripting control and abilities). As a graphic designer your output is to film then print, in web design your output is to the World Wide Web. Your audience is more broad and seeking information, instead of condense and targeted, and visual presentation and representation is highly important to capture the reader or search audience. Web design pushes your creative ability and forces you to work in a non-tradition environment or medium. In other words, web design is universal and sometimes unpredictable. That’s the challenge of web design and the designer. It can be a rewarding experience for any web designer that can see their hard work put together and the site is well-rounded, represented and everything is working properly, and your client is satisfied and happy.

What is advantages of freelancers vs web studios? That’s a very good question. I believe freelancers or a different kind of “animal”, if you don’t me saying. Freelancers are independed and self-reliant on not just their design and knowledge of their trade skills, but on several skills. I believe that to be a successful freelancer it will require you to be more aggressive, assertive, flexible, multi-tasked, resourceful and know how to network. As a freelancer, you can be sure to expect that you will be working longer hours, 12-14 our days are not uncommon. Good people and communication skills is a must, the ability to sell your services, and making sure you meet client deadlines and expectations. There is more pressure on the Freelancer, because everything you do is a reflection of you as a person, designer, consultant, your ethics and more. You will need to have or develop discipline. Freelancers take on the responsibility of several personnel as if it were a business environment. As far as advantages, I believe the rewards are not just profit or the amount of money your can make, but the opportunity to gain personal recognition, client retention, referral rewards, and finally the feeling of being successfully in depended and working what you enjoy doing the most.

Web studios: I don’t believe that there is much to say about or compare about web studios and freelancers. From my experience everything is the same with the exception that projects are in-house with designers or outsource to freelancers, you may also have personnel conducting direct sales, cold calls, account management or having an outside sales team (independent sales contractors) selling web site development, website upgrades, SEO (search engine optimization), content and database management, including web hosting. The advantages of web studios and their business services is about doing the numbers and having enough flexibility of service offering. The advantages are the more websites that you can build, contract, manage or offer additional services as mentioned, the more lucrative the business is. The target is dollars and residual income. Some web studios are being more diverse and at which can be run by a two to three team member. Everything else is outsourced and contracted. But, as a business or web studio in this comparison, the more at risk. It’s a very competitive industry and very reliant on others to assist in driving the business, and the industry is always changing, there are going to be high’s and low’s, it’s the challenge of finding a good balance as a web studio.

What technologies and tools do you like and use?
That’s very large question: Dual Xeon servers, featuring firewalls and load balancing, with independent servers for individual resources such as web, ftp, databases, email, etc. for enterprise level web hosting. Rather than using the traditional hosting architecture where you operate all resources on the same shared server, we split each service out to its own cluster of security hardened servers. “How is that for starting out to answer the question?”. To be more down to earth, I utilize different technologies all the time, it all depends on what is evolved. As far as web design goes, I’m usually on a high performance Dell PC 3.4 GHZ (Ok, stop throwing the things at me you MAC lover’s. Because I do, use a MAC also.) with 3 GB of RAM, 1GB bus system and every hardware candy you can think of. Software application are: Dreamweaver 8, Photopshop and ImageReady, Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw (if necessary, never know what application clients utilize to create their original graphics.), Macromedia Flash, Fireworks, SwishMax, and others. To long to list them.

How do you improve your skills, how do you update?
I’m always keeping on eye out on the industry changes. There is plenty of sites out on the net can provide you with upcoming new generation of things to come and what is the hottest technology or software usage for web design. Everyday is a new learning experience, and if I find out about something new, I’m usually on it and attempting to learn as much as I can about it. Most of the time it’s hands on and lots of research and studying during down time.

What do you consider good and bad in web design?
A� good design not only makes visual sense, but every link is working properly and is uniform and simple to navigate to specific content or pages for information. One of the biggest mistakes when I started out as a web designer is that I had this habit of putting all the effort in graphics and making it look “real cool”. Which made the site load too long and once it was loaded fully on the page, all you saw was graphics and animations. To begin a good designer needs to keep in mind on graphic images and file size. Having an excellent graphic file compression software for your graphics is very important, effective loading time is one of many priorities, if not the first. You want to test the website under different connection speeds and browsers. One of the other most important thing to remember is that a web page may not display the same in different browsers. Not all browers react the same or display web pages in a consistant manner from one to another, (ie, Netscape, Explorer, or Mozilla Firefox) you will need to know how to “tweek your code” to establish some kind of consistency.

A bad web design is not taking the time to do your “home work” on effectively building a web page. “Think out-of-the-box mentality”. There is plenty of books and reading material on the internet to assist you as a web designer. A bad design is….well, a bad design. Today, you really don’t have to be a master and knowing how to code html or other forms of html versions, there are WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) web applications that can do it for you. But, I suggest you learn the html and learn the basics. Then learn javascript and other important scripting that you may need one day to use.

Do you prefer open sources or custom made softwares?
Funny about the question regarding Open Source software. I was a Marketing Communications Manager for a company that marketed a heterogeneous data enterprise backup software application. It is marketed to the Linux and Unix industry. I do prefer to custom made software or in this case industry software applications, but I do support the Open Source software community that are behind it and it’s movement. At the current moment I utilize or seek out Open Source software if I need to find an application that I need immediately.

Can you always satisfy your customers, if not what are reasons?
As a rule, I always keep an open mind regarding new prospects and current customer clientele. You can keep a customer satisfied by being responsive in a timely manner to their needs and providing up most customer service. Sometimes just calling a customer “out of the blue” or sending an email and checking that everything is OK, and if they have any questions your available. Being honest about “what you can do for your customer” vs “what you can probably could do” is being honest about yourself, your abilities, and to show respect to your customer. If anything, you will gain respect from a customer for your honesty. You don’t always have to “take on” or “win their confidence” to every customer that comes to you so that you can retain an account or make money. It’s OK not to know the answer, but have a follow-up with good information. Best to be honest about your ability to satisfy a customer than to fail of not living up to your word and capabilities.

How do you see the future of the web design?
I see that in the future that more and more people without design and code experience will be able to build websites on their own. The industry is already being effected by it. What use to be a specialized service, will evolve to where clients have the capability to design their website from an online server-side graphical and content management application, and they have been around for at least the last 4-5 years. In most cases a customer can build a website from a control panel through their web hosting service. It may not look custom, but is effective for practically $0 with no out-of pocket expense. This will drive quotes and pricing down from what was five years ago. Five years ago, I was making $7,000 to $10,000 a month on web design and I was very busy. Now when conducting a bid on the net for projects, I see designers that are bidding on a website project that require needs for e-commerce, special scripting, database requirements, customized graphics / photos, and content management capabilities on the fly that are being bid at $500 or less’s, and can be promised on certain number of days. Are these web designers starving or what? There is no way that I can be dishonest and tell a client that for $500 that I can have their site done in 7 days to 14 days with that kind of need.

For web designer to stay competitive, we will probably need to expand or become knowledgeable in all areas of the web design industry. It’s already very competitive, there are hundreds if not, thousands of web designers. SEO is the probably the next thing to do and have under your hat as a web designer. Diversifying yourself as a web designer to include traditional graphic design service in addition to web design can be very effective. At this moment, I’m working on my creative skills for Flash web page design. I’m also using SwishMax. I see that websites will be more a high-end look, feel, and content driven in a multimedia format. Much like a very cool commercial. Website branding will come into play in the future. Time to prepare.

What do you advice beginners?
Hmm, my advice to beginners is to first learn about how a web page is made and how it works in a very basic format. Go to the nearest book store to seek web design books that provide the know how, but also provide visual examples. Study and practice creating graphics and producing low file sizes. Utilize a industry graphic software like Photoshop or Illustrator and learn to convert images to jpeg or gif. Remember photos are utilized in jpeg, vector graphics are converted to gifs, if you don’t have the funds to purchase these high-end software applications, then go to site like Zdnet.com, Downloads.com, Freeware.com and you should find low cost software applications that you can download, try for free or purchase. Practice and practice your skills. Master the application.

From there use a WYSIWYG web design application like Dreamweaver or InDesign (there are others). Learn how to place content and importing graphics on to the web page. You should be able to view the page in html format, study the code, try to use a blank web page and type the code in html format setup and see if it comes out the same. I also suggest that you will need to learn how tables and cells are utilized to hold text content and graphics and practice with them. Learn how to publish sites, using ftp programs and other web file management software. Create links and study the code. Learn how to create a basic form page, code it correctly and test it to see if you can retrieve it throught email. One program you can use is “formmail”, you can google it on the net to download the code and it’s instructions.

The other thing I would like to leave as advice is to keep it “Simple”, and keep learning as much as you can and have fun. Remember, web designing is fun and is an extension of your creative ability and know how, and has financial rewards. So have some fun! Wishing all the beginners success!

New Oscommerce Release

Released new version of the popular ecommerce solution – oscommerce 3.0 Alpha. As soon as I found this news, I have visited their site, and downloaded the contribution, then installed on my localhost, to study “new born” oscom.� Sure it is much more improved, mostly in design, new template system, which allow you to manage the layout of the site form one file, besides it is CSS3! automatic thumbnails for products pictures, seo firendly urls work fine, improvement in code, definetly seen..

Look and feel of admin area changed totally, however is some non usual for me. But the major problem is you can not use that Oscommerce for a commercial site though. It is not upgradeable, and who knows how long it would take while old contributions would adjusted to this new oscommerce version, maybe months, or years

more details here http://www.oscommerce.com/about/news

What Is XSL

Remember the good old days, when the internet consisted of nothing more than a few simple websites formatted in basic HTML? Web design was so easy.You could just slap some graphics and text into a file, insert some HTML tags into the document to tell the web browser how the text should appear and what the structure of the page should be, and presto, the job was finished.

You could just slap some graphics and text into a file, insert some HTML tags into the document to tell the web browser how the text should appear and what the structure of the page should be, and presto, the job was finished.As time went on, web design became more arduous. Businesses, especially ecommerce businesses that depended upon their internet storefronts to make a living, began to present web designers with near impossible projects that were too difficult to complete with basic HTML. The data being used and the designs that were being implemented for websites required more versatile programming specifications.

What resulted was the evolution of new specifications and languages for creating web sites. Languages and sub-languages such as XML, XHTML, style sheets, and a host of other more refined and yet more flexible specifications were spliced together to take web design to a new level.

One of the most important languages that came to be in recent years is called XSL. What is XSL, you ask? Well, to totally understand what XSL is and why it is so important, you must first understand XML.

XML is a markup language just like HTML. XML was created to deal with the fact that HTML was limited in that all of its tags were predefined and it displayed data a certain way. XML has no predefined tags, and does not tell a computer how data should appear, it merely defines the data. So, using XML, a web designer can define all sorts of data and more effectively transmit this data to web browsers installed on different platforms that run on a variety of electronic gadgets such as cell phones and other handheld devices that now come equipped with internet access. In a nutshell, XML was created to deal with the fact that so many different electronic products now come equipped with access to the internet and email. These new devices run on platforms that do not always display data properly if it is coded using HTML. XML fixed this situation by simply defining data and not forcing the web browser to display it a certain way, because an XML file is merely a simple text file.

So, again you ask, what is XSL and why is it important? XSL stands for Extensible Stylesheet Language. You have probably heard of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS is a style sheet language that evolved to make it easier for web designers to create a style for an HTML web page. Because XML is now so important, and because XML tags, as explained in the previous paragraph, do not tell the web browser how data should appear, a stylesheet language that was XML-based became a necessity.

XSL consists of 3 components. The first and most important component is XSLT. XSLT transforms an XML document into another XML document that can actually be understood and displayed by a computer. It accomplishes this by transforming most of the document into XHTML, which is a more versatile, cross-platform, XML-based version of HTML.

The second part of XSL is XPath. XPath is used as the navigator for XSL. XSL uses XPath to find parts of the source document that should match a certain predefined template. When XPath finds what it is looking for, then XSLT takes over and performs a transformation, turning the source document into what is called the result document.

The final part of XSL is known as XSL-FO. This component is for the final formatting. Once XPath has searched through the source document and used XSLT to transform the source document into the result document, the document then needs to be formatted so that the web browser will be able to present the document with the proper layout and structure. Simply put, XSL-FO is the part of XSL that produces the final output.

There are all sorts of helpful online tutorials for programmers and web designers to begin to learn how to use and implement XSL, but it would probably be best take a course in XSL at a local institute, college, or wherever you can find one. If web design is your career, learning it is not an option, it is a necessity, as most web browsers are now capable of understanding XSL. Since the advent of wireless internet access, everything from cell phones, to palm tops, to computer screens in automobiles can be used to connect to the internet. These different devices run on different platforms and have different web browsers that cannot properly display many elements of the HTML programming language. As a result, it is critical for all web designers to be able to create web pages using cross-platform specifications with the adaptability provided by XSL.

Oscommerce multi languages problem with charset

I got an order to create ecommerce website with 3 languages – english, japanese, korean.
Since there are already japanese and korean language addons for oscommerce I decided to use oscommerce for this project. I have installed those language packages succesfully, however, when try to add category names in japanese and korean, the characters were demaged, and reflected worng. I spent few hours to sort out the problemm, and at the end found the solution. So how you can do:

1. Open admin/includes/languages/english.php

replace: define(‘CHARSET’, ‘iso-8859-1′);

to: define(‘CHARSET’, ‘charset=utf-8′);
in around line 45

2. Execute the following� sql command� in your mysql database
ALTER DATABASE `os17` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci

3. Change varchar to 255, in product name, and category name fields. Because when you use utf-8 you have 4 times more characters than usual.

Hope this will help someone too.

Web Designers Help You Become a Star

Accompanying the sudden change of direction at Yahoo, many other high traffic Web sites are embracing do-it-yourself entertainment. Some are even offering their users incentives like cash prizes or a trip to New York.

For a while it seemed web designers were quickly evolving into TV “designers.” But then major portals began dropping plans to provide entertainment. Instead, sites are offering to merely provide tools for their visitors to make and propagate original content themselves.

Ifilm.com is a good indicator of where major media companies are seeing Web-based entertainment right now. The Web site, owned by media conglomerate Viacom, features short videos contributed by amateurs. Visitors to Ifilm can vote on their favorite clips and provide their own competing ones.

Web Design Jobs Make It to TV

In fact, (proving that synergy isn’t quite dead) Ifilm has teamed up with Viacom’s VH1 network in a cash prize competition, called “Show Us Your Junk.” The cross media partnership (with reward) has increased clip submissions to Ifilm considerably.

This is good news for Web designers who were probably wondering if their jobs were slowly being colonized by Hollywood content providers. With competitions like “Show Us your Junk,” it’s Web designers making an encroachment on TV.

Web Design Enables Home Entertainment

Ifilm is hardly the only Web designed, do-it-yourself entertainment exchange. Youtube.com operates similarly; inviting visitors to vote on posted content and contribute home made entertainment of their own.

This trend is encouraged even further by Hollywood content providers who are growing protective of their material. Increasingly, captured snippets of favorite TV moments are no longer free to roam on Ifilm and Youtube.

Web Design Career

The growth of Youtube or Ifilm shows that a Web design career can be more than just designing a site index or home page. Web design jobs are growing increasingly complex, and having a Web design degree or training in the field will help you to take advantage of the new trends on the Internet. Plus, it also helps to have some creativity to help you image the next best Web technology. Who knows what you may create in your Web design career.

Simple Email form + 2checkout

I� was given the� task to create an online form, after� the form submission details to be emailed to website owner, additionally, as soon as the email form submitted visitor directed to 2checkout payment page.

After several endeavours I modeled simple php code what processes this deal.
Just basic php email function and header redirect to 2checkout at the end. see the code:

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@extract($_POST);
$name = stripslashes($first_name);
$email = stripslashes($email);
$subject = “Application from Spinnaker College”;
$text .=� “Course Name: $coursename\n”;
$text .=� “Weeks: $courseweeks\n”;
$text .=� “Fisrts name: $first_name\n”;
$text .=� “Last Name: $last_name\n”;
$text .=� “Day_Phone_Code: $Day_Phone_Code\n”;
$text .=� “Day_Phone_Number: $Day_Phone_Number\n”;
$text .=� “Evening_Phone_Code:$Evening_Phone_Code\n”;
$text .=� “Evening_Phone_Number:$Evening_Phone_Number\n”;
$text .=� “Fax_Code:$Fax_Code\n”;
$text .=� “Fax_Number:$Fax_Number\n”;
$text .=� “Birthdate:$Birthdate\n”;
$text .=� “Male_or_female:$Male_or_female\n”;
$text .=� “Nationality:$Nationality\n”;
// you can add multiple lines with the same $text. = ….
mail(‘zaur@pdesigner.net’,$subject,$text,”From: $name <$email>“);
$location = ‘https://www.2checkout.com/2co/buyer/purchase?sid=471203&cart_order_id=1234592&total=’.$total;
header(“location:$location”);
?>

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Easy product attributes for oscommerce

Are you tired to add options� for each product manually in Oscommerce?� So� did I, before found� great addon for oscommerce, called “Attribute Sets Plus” http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,3610/category,all/search,product+attributes+plus

Whether you have hundreds or thousands of products needed to enable different select options, this contribution come in help.� It� would� make your life easier, because you can set any appropriate options/attributes before you inserting all new products, and pointed options will be granted to all products automatically, and there will still remain capability to edit any product option if there is necessity.

Thanks to Chris for this addon.

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Macromedia DreamWeaver8 and CSS3

New version of DreamWeaver 8 come to help� to designers who had� difficulties to edit� style in new way(css3).� Advanced visual aids and� additional tools are pointed to� design DIV tags and classes without hand writing in css file directly.

� If you still not passed to CSS3 design yet, I advice you to go for it, give up any doubts, just try it with Dreamweaver8, after few hours ir maximum 1-2 days you would accustomes to design sites with CSS3, with DW8.