Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Add a little more to your web design business

If you are one of those people who have outstanding abilities in web designing and web developing, you can now give businesses a more growing income by including web hosting in your web development services.

Web hosting empowers anyone with a computer and internet connection to own a piece of cyberspace. In your space, you can have news, bulletins, documents, data, files and your own mail server to accept mail, all in the context of you or your business. Through this service, you can make up to $50/month per site, hosting your client sites.

If ever you offered hosting services to your clients, you'll be assured that they will come back to you to make changes and updates. Take a look at this scenario: for example you get paid $500 – $1000+ for a site design. If you charge your client for hosting you could have $50 extra/site per month. You could make up to $1100 to $1600/site per year instead of just $500 or $1000 per site. Therefore, assuming you have 100 clients, this could lead up to $110,000 or $160,000 per year instead of $50,000 – $100,000 per year. Also remember that your client might come back to you to update and maintain the site which means more money for you.

In web hosting, you can also maximize your profit by getting a shared hosting account such as a reseller hosting account. Reseller hosting is a form of web hosting where the account owner splits up the allotted disk space and bandwidth to host multiple domains or resell web hosting. There are two ways to benefit with this kind of account. Webmasters with multiple sites can host their websites under one account for one low monthly fee. On the other hand, web developers can resell hosting as a value added service and make more income. A good reseller account will give you far more room to move and even greater cost effectiveness which means even more profit and less effort.


2 accounts that offer hosting reseller packages:

Windows hosting resellers –
this one will give you the freedom and choice to run ASP, ASP.Net as well as PHP sites with MySQL or SQL Server databases. With Windows hosting you can use all your favorite web design tools and you’ll have the vast resources of Microsoft development products like Visual Studio at your disposal.

Linux hosting -
This offers the cheapest hosting solution available but does not support ASP or ASP.Net.Net applications.

Start hosting your clients now and be surprised at how much extra money you can earn for very little effort.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Tools for managing your website's content

Web masters use different tools in order to maintain a quality website. Some of the tools they've been utilizing is the Content Management Tools.

CMS tools are software systems that allow companies to take control of their Web pages through managing the content as distinct from the web design. These tools keep track of every piece of content on a site, just like a local public library keeps track of books and stores them. A major advantage of using a CMS tool is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage. The days of writing HTML for large Web sites are losing its number as content management tools takes in.


Content Management Tools:

Joomla
a free, open source content management system.

Joomla is designed to publish content on the world wide web and intranets.
It allows web designers to construct sites by combining modules, and requires no knowledge of programming to use.

The system includes features such as page caching to improve performance, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, website searching, and language internationalization.

It is used by MTV, Harvard University and IHOP to manage websites.


WordPress

Is used to build and maintain a website or blog. It was originally intended as an easy way to set up a blog.

a software application powered by PHP and MySQL.

WordPress is suitable for just about anybody - from the absolute novice to the advanced programmer.

This tool has a rich text editor with advanced multimedia support.

WordPress's community distributes a large number of modules for almost any popular website feature

It is free and open source CMS tool.

MediaWiki

A content management system tool that allows users and webmasters to easily add or edit content.

The most popular wiki platform, the software that runs Wikipedia and thousands of other websites.
is a free application, registered under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Plone
An open-source content management system that allows content experts to publish web pages without using HTML or relying on a technical expert.

This tool can be used for in principle any kind of website, including blogs, internet sites, webshops and internal websites.

It can be used as a document publishing system and groupware collaboration tool.

Plone has flexible and adaptable workflow, very good security, extensibility, high usability and flexibility.



LightNEasy
A lightweight CMS aimed at the normal user, not requiring any programming skills.

It includes a built in gallery and a versatile news module. Templates can be made from any HTML/CSS design.

This tool is not only a CMS, it actually creates plain, pure web pages for your whole website, making it SEO friendly and fast loading.

The system uses a modular structure and allows plug-ins for adding features.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Working Closely With Your Website Designer

Having a website is one of the most important things if one engaging in online business. And even if  his work is mostly done in the real world, you will still get a lot of help from the site. Thus, in order to make the most from the site, a lot of effort must be first put into developing it.

However, it is not uncommon for business heads to leave all the site design work, from conceptualization to actual development, to their programmers. After all, they often argue, it's their work. But as it turns out, this one is actually going to be a bad mindset when working on your site.

The truth is, even if you are not a designer or a programmer yourself, you will still need to contribute greatly in order for your site to come out good. After all, you and your business will be the one to benefit directly from its performance. Thus, it is important for you to know a thing or two about the whole design process.

One of the things that you need to know in order to assist in the design process is HTML programming. Though this one might intimidated a lot of business heads, learning HTML is actually very easy and you need not to be an expert on this one, all that you need to know are the basics. This way, you will still be able to catch up with and understand the work being done by your designer. This also has an added advantage in that you will be able to work on the site even if the designer is not available.

Aside from the basic programming knowledge, you might also want to learn more about the other aspects of the the design process, such as photo editing and content writing. Again, you do not need to be highly proficient in these, but you should have a fairly good amount of know-how. This way, you will be able to contribute greatly in the development of the sight.

And speaking of contributions, it is important for you to work closely with your designer in coming up with the site. Remember that you will be the one who will have a final say on the outcome of the designer's work, so you need to closely monitor him to ensure that everything goes the right way. On the other hand, you also need to be a bit more open to other ideas and take in cues from your designer for good site layouts.

Visit WickedInnovations for more details about web site design services, http://www.wickedinnovations.com

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

DESIGNING A WEBSITE FOR YOUR BUSINESS: THE BASICS

There are many ways of promoting your business, but there's this one idea that is said to be really efficient: have a website! If you have a business, you should also have a website in order to create awareness among your costumers.

There is no case whether a business is big or small, as long as you achieve its main intent, and that is to make money. Entrepreneurs grab every opportunities just to make this goal possible.
   
Having an online presence is vital for it builds relationships with clients and prospects. Also, through this, future costumers, potential employees, and business partners can easily find out more about your business and the services you are offering. Well, it's really not enough to just have a web-site, you must have a site that looks professional so clients will take you seriously.

For sure the question “how will I create my own web site?” was already running inside your mind. Well, first you must fully understand the cornerstone of web designing. We've provided some basic things than can quench your thirst for information. Plus, we also gave some additional sources for more data.

DESIGNING A WEB PAGE
. When designing a web page, you should think first about the design itself. Even if you choose to become a programmer, you should also be knowledgeable in the basic of designing. Having an intellectual design can make your site look professional.

Here are some info that might help you understand web design:

Grid Design- The process of aligning page elements to an evenly spaced (invisible) grid, which makes for an aesthetically pleasing design.

Web Typography- refers to the use of fonts and spacing in the web.

Usability–
This is the process of designing a user experience that promotes interaction and eases the user through the site navigation and action flows.

Design Inspiration-  of course any designer should have inspiration. To gain this, one can browse different website designs for ideas.


 WHAT IS HTML & CSS?
HTML and CSS are the building blocks of every web page you see. HTML is a language used for describing web pages.
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
HTML is not a programming language, it is a markup language
A markup language is a set of markup tags
HTML uses markup tags to describe web pages

HTML markup tags are usually called HTML tags:
HTML tags are keywords surrounded by angle brackets like
HTML tags normally come in pairs like and
The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag
Start and end tags are also called opening tags and closing tags
HTML documents describe web pages:
HTML documents contain HTML tags and plain text
HTML documents are also called web pages

 While CSS, on the other hand, is short for Cascading Style Sheet, this is used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets
Styles define how to display HTML elements
Styles were added to HTML 4.0 to solve a problem
External Style Sheets can save a lot of work
External Style Sheets are stored in CSS files

To simplify it, HTML is the foundation of your house (beams, bricks), while CSS is the looks (paint, decor, and furniture). In short, you can't learn CSS without fully understanding HTML. And you can't build an HTML page without using CSS.

Additional resources:

W3Schools – An excellent reference and learning resource for HTML and CSS.
W3C Validator – A tool for checking your HTML and CSS to ensure it complies with professional standards for programming — otherwise known as “valid code.”
A List Apart – A fantastic website about all things web design, with a focus on web standards.
Net Tuts – An excellent resource for web development tutorials.
Designing With Web Standards – One of the must-read books on web design, written by “The Godfather” of web standards, Jeffrey Zeldman.
CSS Zen Garden – Both fun and amazing at the same time. See what types of design possibilities are possible just using CSS.

For web design services, visit http://www.wickedinnovations.com