1. Select a colour scheme and stick to it.

If your company has a logo or preferred colours on its stationery that’s a good start. For those of you starting from scratch, choose two or three complementary colours and stick with them – don’t change colours on every page.

The most common colour schemes include:

- Red, yellow and white
- Blue and white
- Red, grey and white
- Blue, orange and white
- Yellow, grey and white.

If you’re not sure what colour scheme to choose, surf the internet and find a website that you like. You can then model your colour scheme on what already exists.

2. Use templates.

Can’t find a website you really like? Another option is to choose a template. There are many templates or pre-set designs. These come as part of your web design software (such as FrontPage) or you can check out some websites that specialise in designing templates.

Visit:

www.web4business.com.au emplates1.htm
www.newtemps.com
www.website-templates-resale-rights.com
www.123webtemplatesandmore.com

3. Provide an easy to use navigation system.

This is one of the most important issues to consider when designing a website. You need to ensure your visitors can find what they are looking for easily. Most websites either display their navigation bar on the left or at the top. And since most people are used to this type of navigation, it’s best to stick with it.

It also helps to include your navigation bar at the bottom of each page to save your visitors from having to scroll back to the top.

4. Don’t go overboard on special effects

Whilst it is ok to have one or two special effects to jazz up your website, spinning graphics and logos often distract your visitor from the content, not to mention they can take too long to download. Your visitors may click away even before your spinning logo finishes loading.
5. Backgrounds

Ensure your visitors can read the text on the background, ie. no black writing on dark blue background or yellow on white. Also be careful that your links are visible before and after being visited. The default for links in most programs is blue (before being visited) and burgundy (after being visited), so if you have a dark background, ensure your links are light.

6. External Links

It is a good idea to open links to other websites in a new window. That way your visitors can easily return to your site when they are finished browsing the external link

7. Site Map & Search Feature

If you website is more than 15 pages, it is useful to have a site map or a “Search” feature to ensure your visitors can easily find what they’re looking for.

8. Content is King

While it is important that your website looks clean and professional, it is far more important that you concentrate your efforts on the content and promotion.

If you want a professional website, things to stay away from include:

1. Flash intros, revolving globes, bevelled line separators, animated mail boxes
2. Loads of pop up or pop under boxes
3. Autoplay music. Allow your customer to play music only if they choose.
4. Hit counters of the free variety, which say “you are 27th visitor”
5. Date and time stamps, unless your website is updated daily or weekly
6. Busy backgrounds.

Take a look at a variety of ready-made website templates to get some great web design ideas!

Here are some cool web design ideas you can use while designing your next web site. These are some ideas that we’ve used for our clients. Hope you find them useful!

Swap Images

Swap images look fantastic and are also great fun to design, so try and use them if possible. Visitors find this interactive and interesting. Illy Collection Cups and Business Template 3 are example of a site we have designed using swap images. Fireworks makes it very easy to design web sites with swap images. Click here to learn just how easy it is!

Rollover images

Rollovers are another favorite. We try to use rollovers whenever possible – they are extremely simple and add a bit of class to a web site. If you don’t want to use too many images that will result in a slower load time make sure you use text rollovers (Our menu on the right is an example of simple text rollovers). Examples of rollover images we have designed can be seen in Business Template 1.

DHTML

If you have sub menus or complex navigation systems, use DHTML. They look neat and are again very simple to use. Many sites offer free DHTML scripts for menus, navigation systems, tip boxes and more. They give you detailed instructions on how to use these scripts so it is really very easy to install.

Flash

Though we don’t recommend designing an entire site in Flash it may be a good idea to make an interesting Flash intro or insert small Flash animations in important pages of your site. Always take care to optimize your our Flash animations.

Eye catching  graphics

Design eye-catching graphics to make your site stand out from the ordinary web sites. Try out some cool graphic effects – collages, feathering, bevels etc. and design attractive headers for a web site.

Use table creatively

Design simple but smart web sites by just using tables in different ways. We recommend using tables because they are plain html and therefore don’t take much time to load. As you know time is of essence on the Internet so it really is no use designing a fantastic graphic intensive web site that will take ages to load. On the other hand with cable and high modem speeds we can afford to design sites that are a combination of all the above ideas

Photoshop is a heck of an amazing software. You can do all kinds of things with images and go as far as your imagination can take you. Once you are past the beginner level and understand what the various options are for and how they work, then you are ready for Photoshop tips and tricks like the ones that are the topic of this 2 part article.

They will help you in getting things done quickly, save you a lot of headache and steps and overall inflate your Photoshop-fu! So here we go:

Change Brush Size On The Fly

If you are even the slightest bit serious about Photoshop or you have used the Brush tool a couple of times, this single tip is worth at least a dozen alone. While you are using the brush tool you do not have to go back to the options palette to change the brush size or softness. Left bracket key ‘[' decreases the brush size and Right bracket key ']‘ increases the brush size. Similarly Shift + [ decrease hardness (makes the brush soft) and Shift + ] increases the hardness of the brush.

Create Guides Easily

Guides can help you align objects in your composition. You can quickly create guides using rulers that appear at the top and the side of the document window. Click on the ruler and drag to create a guide. Release the mouse button where you want to create the guide. Once created you can quickly show/hide guides using Ctrl + ;

Don’t Cancel Just Reset

Photoshop can be pretty tough to get and even harder to master. Moreover, the nature of work dictates that you must experiment and things don’t always go the way you anticipate while experimentation. So if you are inside curves, or hue saturation or perhaps levels and you make a series of adjustments that didn’t turn out the way you wanted, you would want to start over again.

But wait don’t hit cancel just yet. Instead hold down the Alt key and see how the cancel button changes to Reset. Now click reset and the adjustments you made will be undone while sparing you the round trip to open the same dialog again.

Scrub The Input Boxes

There are a lot of controls in Photoshop that let you enter a value using the keyboard. Font size, brush size, opacity and who knows how many others. Well a peculiar thing about these input boxes is that you can increase or decrease the value that’s in them by just scrubbing with the mouse pointer. As you move close to any such control the mouse pointer changes to something like the one shown above. Now just click and drag in the direction you want to change the value. Generally dragging towards the right side increases the value and towards left side decreases the value.

An emoticon is a textual expression representing the face of a writer’s mood or facial expression. Emoticons are often used to alert a responder to the tenor or temper of a statement, and can change and improve interpretation of plain text. The word is a portmanteau of the English words emotion (or emote) and icon. In web forums, instant messengers and online games, text emoticons are often automatically replaced with small corresponding images, which came to be called emoticons as well.

The use of emoticons can be traced back to the nineteenth century and were commonly used in casual/humorous writing.Digital forms of emoticons on the Internet were included in a proposal by Scott Fahlman in a message on 19 September 1982.

In 2000 Despair, Inc. obtained a U.S. trademark registration for the “frowny” emoticon when used on “greeting cards, posters and art prints.” In 2001, they issued a satirical press release, announcing that they would sue Internet users who typed the frowny; the joke backfired and the company received a storm of protest when its mock release was posted at technology news website Slashdot.They subsequently issued another press release a month later in response to the reaction their claim had generated.

A number of patent applications have been filed on inventions that assist in communicating with emoticons. A few of these have issued as US patents. US patent 6987991, for example, discloses a method developed in 2001 to send emoticons over a cell phone using a drop down menu. The stated advantage over the prior art was that the user saved on the number of keystrokes though this may not address the obviousness criteria.

In Finland, the emoticons :-), =), =(, :) and :( were trademarked in 2006 for use with various products and services.

In 2008, Russian entrepreneur Oleg Teterin claimed to have been granted the trademark on the ;-) emoticon. A license would not “cost that much – tens of thousands of dollars” for companies, but would be free of charge for individuals.

WordPress is an open source blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL which can also be used for basic content management. It has many features including a workflow[clarification needed], a plugin architecture, and an templating system. Used by over 2% of the 10,000 biggest websites, Wordpress is the most popular blog software in use today.It was first released in May 2003 by Matt Mullenweg as a fork of b2/cafelog. As of September 2009, it is being used by 202 million websites worldwide.

b2/cafelog, more commonly known as simply b2 or cafelog, was the precursor to WordPress. b2/cafelog was estimated to have been employed on approximately 2,000 blogs as of May 2003. It was written in PHP for use with MySQL by Michel Valdrighi, who is now a contributing developer to WordPress. Although WordPress is the official successor, another project, b2evolution, is also in active development.

WordPress first appeared in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little to create a fork of b2. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of Mullenweg.

In 2004 the licensing terms for the competing Movable Type package were changed by Six Apart, and many of its users migrated to WordPress – causing a marked and continuing growth in WordPress’s popularity.[citation needed] By October, 2009, the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report reached the conclusion that WordPress enjoys the greatest brand strength of any open source content management systems. That conclusion was based on an extensive analysis of rate of adoption patterns and brand strength and was backed by a survey of users.

WordPress supports one weblog per installation, although multiple concurrent copies may be run from different directories if configured to use separate database tables.

WordPress Multi-User (WordPress MU, or just WPMU) is a fork of WordPress created to allow simultaneous blogs to exist within one installation. WordPress MU makes it possible for anyone with a website to host their own blogging community, control, and moderate all the blogs from a single dashboard. WordPress MU adds eight new data tables for each blog.

Matt Mullenweg announced that WordPress MU would be merged with WordPress as part of a future release (version 3.0).

Lyceum is another enterprise-edition of WordPress. Unlike WordPress MU, Lyceum stores all of its information in a set number of database tables. Notable communities that use Lyceum are TeachFor.Us (Teach For America teachers’ blogs), BodyBlogs and the Hopkins Blogs.

In 2008 Andy Peatling joined Automattic to continue his work on BuddyPress – a plug-in extension of WPMU that is adding additional community features to WordPress.