Web Design Business and Marketing

In talking to several people whether it be on the phone or in passing I get to hear a lot of web ideas. I tend to hear comments like, “when a visitor comes on I want to be able to swipe their email” or “I will make this visitor go to the certain page”.

Please remember that visitors are not criminals and until we stop treating them as such our websites will not get much respect. Your site is there for the visitor and not vice versa.

Let’s together as the web design community try to encourage and teach our friends and clients that a site is built ultimately for the visitor.

We recently launched Window Tinting San Antonio (Premier Window Tinting) with Echo Design Solutions (Web Design San Antonio). Below is a quote from the website:

Premier Window Tinting provides sales and installation for a wide variety of high quality window film products for both residential and commercial markets in the San Antonio Area. With over 20 years experience in the window film industry, partners Susan Machado & Joey Machado take great pride in offering the finest quality glass coating and window tinting products available.

This was a fun project to work on and the end result turned out very professional.

Visit Window Tinting San Antonio now!

I came across this from Boagworld forum. I love web design, marketing and SEO. Some of my other loves are family time, photography and rap. This video is too awesome.

When I was on my way home I heard a commercial about trading college books with other students. Great Idea and where was this in my first years of college. Anyways something I always advise my clients to do is register all possible domains that have the same sound as other words. The website advertised was 2dollartextbooks.com and right away I wondered if they purchased twodollartextbooks.com. Sure enough this company did register both. My suggestion to you is when you are picking a domain name just sound it out and see if others will spell it differently when typing it in. If there is any inclination that they will by all means register it, domains are so cheap. My other suggestion is if there is anyway your domain can be plural, register both it’s singular form and plural form. One other example is hearing an advertisement for a company called 4 Over. Now this company does a lot of print ads so that does make up for it. But for some reason if they did tv or radio they would really have to spell their domain in the advertisement so user will not go to fourover.com which is owned by someone else.

I was doing some research on internet statistics to plug into my proposal and came across this great website. It gives approximate numbers to the top visited websites on the internet. Below is a screenshot of the top ten visited websites on the internet.

Blurb from Quantcast website

Quantcast is a new media measurement service that lets advertisers view audience reports on millions of websites and services. Only Quantcast combines directly measured audience data with panel-based estimates to deliver accurate third-party metrics and easy-to-read profiles on digital media properties.

Visit the website: Quantcast - Open Internet Ratings

Looks like a great resource!

This past holidays meant having a lot of family over, eating till we fell over, then doing it all over again. I also had some downtime and I used it to clean up my office. I went through a lot of old junk. I also went through out dated backup CDs that I created every time I decided to reformat my Windows 98, 500 Mghz, 128 mb ram computer. It was my first love (sorry babe) and I always liked reinstalling windows just because it always seemed to run smoother with a fresh operating system. Anyways back to the story. I found a ton of old files and pictures that were awesome to go through and reminisce. In my findings I found the Tri-Omni website (this website) in it’s earlier stages. I found version 2, 3 and 4 making this current design and purpose version 5.0. I was so ecstatic about them that I decided to republish each version here on my blog. What about version 1.0 you ask? It is missing in action and I am still going through CDs to see if I can catch a glimpse of it. I found resources that indicated its start but did not find any end results of it. If I can not find it I will conclude that it never really launched as my memory does not serve me well. Nonetheless here are the other versions:

Tri-Omni Version 2.0

Tri-Omni Version 3.0

Tri-Omni Version 4.0

Please do not laugh as these were my pre-css days and all designs were constructed by tables. LOL!!!

Smashing magazine did a great article on date pickers and calendar scripts.

Online Calendars and Date Pickers

We created a content management system for a client that required a date picker be added and one addition I would like to add to the Smashing Magazine article is Clean Calendar by Marc Grabanski. It is a great and easy resource to install.

I follow several blogs that always have interesting stuff to say about web and design (you can view the list on the right). One post I just read was by Rich Quick over at Web Design Book. The blog was whether or not we as web designers should still develop for 800 x 600 screen resolutions. You can read the blog here: Is it time to stop supporting 800 x 600?

I follow Cameron Moll’s website as well and a while back he had a few good articles talking about the support for 800 x 600.

Optimal width for 1024px resolution? and Gridding the 960

Here are some Browser Display Statistics, which is note worthy information.

These other blogs also prove a point about the grid system and how many sections the actual dimension can be divided up into. Quote taken from Cameron’s blog below:

I’ve been using 960 for some time now, as it’s slightly smaller than full width, and it’s divisible by 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, and 16 (imagine the grid possibilities).

I made the decision to stop supporting 800 x 600 design about the beginning of the year (I guess I did accomplish one of my new year resolutions). Even designing at this resolution I have clients asking me to design something outside of this area that is pleasing to the eye. One of my clients had a 24 inch monitor and when I went over to his office to view my design it looked empty, but it also didn’t help that he was running his resolution at 100000000 x 10000000 j/k.

A List Apart conducted a survey for web design professionals. According to A List Apart the findings they presented on the survey have never been seen before, because until now, no one has ever conducted public research to learn the facts of our profession. Visit Findings From the Web Design Survey to download their survey. I myself took this survey and was curious about their findings. Over 33,000 responses were collected for this survey.

Resizing images can be daunting. We provide a content management system for mostly every website we do. The content management system completed now is just version 1.0 and we are starting the works on version 2.0.

One of the things we train our clients is the resizing of photos. When you upload a 2000px wide photo and only mess with the dimensions, it still loads as a 2000px wide photo. The picture needs to be resized at the dimension that it will be used at. Most of the time we suggested using a program called IfranView. Sometimes after coaching a client over at their office or on the phone it was still a difficult program to grasp. I usually use Photoshop to resize my images but I don’t expect the client to have such a program. IfranView is free but can be difficult to understand if you are not use to resizing images.

After talking with a client on the phone I did a quick google search and found about the easiest image resizer I have seen. After showing this to the client she thanked me for the find and I thought I should post it here for others to use as well. The name of the program is called Web Resizer. You upload the photo you want to resize, enter the dimensions you want it to be and it will even crop it for you.

The reason I like the crop function is because it is hard to explain to clients that you can’t just enter the exact dimensions on every photo because it will distort the image. A 10 px by 10 px photo can not be resized to 5px by 2px without looking funky. After uploading the image and processing the new size it will give you a link to download the new image. This is a great free easy to use image resizer and is worth bookmarking or noting.