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Nice Web Design – Affordable WordPress

September 1, 2010 By admin

Here is a really nice design I stumbled on today. It’s based on a Studio Press Mocha and it’s got a really nice color palette. It’s currently at http://bigfishclient.com/ but that looks like either a temporary placeholder domain or maybe it’s a permanent demo for a portfolio. There is also a nice use of the sidebar – content – sidebar layout. It creates a busy appearance but it leaves a nice little space to add a vertical menu or an unordered list of some type. Again with the color palette, this designer made great use of the tools available and added a 1px dotted bottom border for his unordered list… perfect match.

I’m bringing this one to my website because I’m working on a Mocha Theme myself and I was looking around for inspiration. The theme is so new there are not a tremendous number of them in the wild yet.

My favorite design element on this site is the use of colors and background images in the horizontal menu bar. There is a 1 px gold outline on all the drop down menu selections. And the orange and grey color combination with the textured background is very artistic. It fits the theme perfectly.

If I could suggest one change it would be that on the left sidebar, I might make that unordered list into a vertical menu and then link to each selection. The selections could be individual posts or pages.

Filed Under: Learn About WordPress, Web Designer's Corner Tagged With: ,

What Are Website Validation Errors?

August 18, 2010 By admin

Website validation errors are like building code violations. Would you move into a house that the building inspector said had 78 building code violations? No way. Well look at the annotated screen print below. There is a website homepage with 78 validation errors. That means the official website inspector (which is called the W3C Markup Validation Service) said there were 78 violations of the rules that all websites are supposed to adhere to.

Can Website Validation Errors Cause You Problems?

You better believe it – the answer is yes. Absolutely. Here is a list of reasons why validation errors can cause you and your business problems…

  • First of all the errors are an indication that the web design team was “less than professional”. If they made this many mistakes here where else did they make mistakes?
  • This many errors is almost a guarantee that the site is not “cross-browser compliant” meaning it’s going to look different or broken on different browsers.
  • There is a good chance the search engine spiders will get confused and not be able to crawl your site completely. When they hit lots and lots of errors they just give up trying to crawl your site and they put you on the back burner in terms of crawling it again.
  • Forget about Google PageRank. The site might actually rank for some of it’s key phrases, but it most likely will have a PageRank of zero. If Google can’t crawl the site they are not going to give it a lot of PageRank credit.
  • Security problems? You bet. A site with this many problems also probably has left big opportunities for hackers to do malicious damage using your website.
  • If your web designer tells you the ton of validation errors in the website they build for you are normal or they aren’t doing any harm… pack up and leave (politely). They are lying or they know so little about building websites they actually believe the errors are a joke.
  • SEO problems. Use the validator errors as a Red Flag. Look for a complete lack of Search Engine Optimization and you will probably find your misgivings were correct. Having no clue when building a website usually means they have no clue when charging you for SEO as well.

Now that is a bit horrifying to programmers that know what they’re doing. A lot of what we do at Web Design Workplace is to save companies from code that looks like that. But this is a good time for a “before and after” look at website validation.

Here is a picture of the Web Design Workplace homepage after running it through the official W3C Validator… Perfect with no errors. Just the way we deliver websites to you.

Filed Under: Learn About SEO, Web Designer's Corner Tagged With: ,

Chris Brogan Endorses Studio Press

August 5, 2010 By admin

I use Studio Press Themes and I’ve purchased 3 Developer Licenses for Studio Press since 2008. And now in 2010 there are a lot of celebrity social media pundits like Chris Brogan that are going with Studio Press and for very good reasons. It’s the best supported Premium WordPress Theme in the world. Bar none. There is a team of brilliant and above technical people involved with Studio Press and I know 5 on the team personally. Great bunch. For a person that builds out websites all day and half the night, Studio Press is like getting car racing parts directly from the Ferrari Factory.

Well here is a video from a presentation Chris gave last year:

Now if you are a DIY “Do It Yourselfer” go ahead and give Studio Press and WordPress a try. If you don’t want to get involved with HTML, and graphics, and hosting, and domains, and SEO, and PHP, then call Mal Milligan at 201-696-5375 and talk about your web design options. Web Design Workplace is a group of long time web design professionals that can give you a complete website in a week or two at a fraction of the cost most of the big design companies charge.

Web Design Workplace uses only top shelf components like WordPress and Studio Press and Host Nexus and Adobe. We are world class experts in every phase of web design and roll out. This is where affordable web design lives now. It’s here at Web Design Workplace.

Filed Under: Learn About WordPress, Web Designer's Corner Tagged With:

Free Web Design Tools – Gimp

August 4, 2010 By admin

Another Open Source and Free to use web design tool – this time we look at GIMP. Graphical Image Manipulation Program. If you can’t afford Photoshop CS5 I would normally recommend Photoshop Elements which is around 70 dollars. If you want to go into the free zone, GIMP is one of the top choices. I had it installed on my laptop right now. Gimp takes a while to learn how to use. Its got almost all the same tools that PS has, but they work a little differently. The time spent learning how to use GIMP is all on the interface.

One of the places I got stuck was during the “save as” phase. The default save will make a huge file like Photoshop does with the .psd files. To save an optimized .jpg you have to go through the steps for “save as” then you manually tag the .jpg at the end of the filename. Whoa. OK well it works so once you know how to do it there is no problem really. It took me about 20 minutes to get that one.

Here is the GIMP Download page:

I found a couple resources to help cut that learning curve down to – say about 1 hour. Check out this video tutorial site for GIMP:

http://www.designyourownweb.com/gimp-tutorial.htm

There are also a couple good ones on YouTube:

This tutorial has almost 500,000 views… check it out.

Filed Under: Web Designer's Corner Tagged With: ,

Affordable Web Design Tools – Filezilla FTP

August 1, 2010 By admin

Web Design Workplace loves affordable web design tools and this post features the new King of FTP – Filezilla. There have been free FTP clients since the 1980′s. And every year as the technology has advanced, free tools have frequently become proprietary and expensive. I used WS_FTP for many years – when it was affordable (this is when it was free). Now they want $35 for each copy of the “home” version of WS_FTP and compared to the free cost of FileZilla – forget about it. Go with Filezilla.

Regular FTP has some major security flaws although it is used millions of times per hour all over the world and has been for decades. Now Encrypted FTP is another matter. Encrypted FTP hides the login credentials that can easily been recorded by a sniffer (protocol analyzer). But it’s proprietary – there are lots of different companies making one. And it requires a server component and a client component. That usually makes it expensive. There is nothing in the freeware arena yet that handles the FTP encryption and also the data encryption for the actual file transfers.

So if you’re a regular Joe and don’t usually need to go Top Secret with your FTP activities – Filezilla is a great work horse for daily use. If you need encryption talk with your hosting service first to see if they offer any recommendations. In most cases with a regular hosting account you just can’t use encrypted FTP yet.

Filed Under: Web Designer's Corner Tagged With: , ,

Can You Trust A Big Web Design Company?

July 26, 2010 By admin

Mal Milligan is a trusted web designer and webmaster with 25 years of professional IT experience. A former Senior Technical Officer at World Headquarters of 3 different Fortune 100 Financial Companies. He’s the founder and owner of Web Design Workplace… a small company that believes in affordable web solutions. Almost every single web design client he has ever had has renewed their contract every year since 2004.

When You Hire a Big Web Design Company (Our Competition), This is What You Get

  • Big Companies doing web design can have hundreds of employees and thousands of clients. Doesn’t that make you feel small and insignificant?
  • If they loose your business they think “So what? We lost a faceless name in a crowd of strangers.  Business as usual.”
  • With hundreds of people to pay the whole team feels it’s OK to charge clients huge sums of money if they can “get away with it”.
  • Big Box web design companies  justify charging 10 times the price that a smaller company charges because: “the client charges a lot too so they deserve to be charged even more”.
  • Since it’s hard enough trying to deliver on the items they sold in the first place, the big box web design companies just can’t afford to be flexible… so they can’t possibly base their offerings on the clients needs and desires the way a small design company can adapt and custom configure.
  • When the big box company looses your business they don’t even blink. Loosing customer is so common they get used to it pretty fast. The big company feels their individual clients really are not important. They have thousands more if you leave. The smaller company feels each client is important.
  • The big companies frequently use salespeople who get paid on commission. They try to sell clients more and more so they make more and more. The small company wants you to have the right sized package for your needs and budget.

Filed Under: Web Designer's Corner Tagged With: ,

Website Affordability Questions

July 22, 2010 By admin

Does the big web design company sales rep look like this when you ask how they can make their websites more affordable?

Perplexed. Unable to give an answer. Shocked – unable to speak. Utterly devoid of any reasonable answer.

Yes – that’s fairly common with the big companies that charge 10 times as much as they should for web design. When you ask them questions like that it catches them off-guard for a second. They don’t have a canned response that will work. They know a hundred true answers but they have to scramble for the best lie to tell you and if you’re lucky, you can catch them like this before the gears in their head click and they come up with an appropriate fabrication.

At Web Design Workplace we answer all your website affordability questions.

No matter what you ask, we have an immediate answer because we stick to the truth. It’s easier that way. And we’re here to help you. We take pride in our work. And if you need honest answers we can chat your ear off. No matter how much you want to know we could write the book on website affordability – ask us anything.

Website affordability is a non-issue here. We frequently charge up to 90% less than the big box competitors for a better product with better support. You know the old phrase “If it seems to good to be true than it’s probably not true.” Well Web Design Workplace is from the “Show Me” State in spirit. We build a live mockup of your website so you can check it out and kick the tires before we go live with it. We build the read deal. Affordable Web Design and straight answers every time you have a question.

Want to see for yourself? Call the Boss – Mal Milligan at 201-696-5375

Filed Under: Web Designer's Corner Tagged With: ,

Affordable Web Design Philosophy

July 22, 2010 By admin

The last company I worked for charged between $10,000 and $32,000 for custom websites. Wow!! Those websites had no e-commerce or special features of any kind. They were made with the old style HTML language. The sites themselves were hosted on a complex proprietary hosting scheme that was not perfectly search engine friendly like Web Design WorkPlace sites are. Because they were a big company, they used their reputation and a sales force of thousands of full time people on commission. Naturally the sales people did not get paid if they did not sell. So they were motivated to sell even if there was little or no benefit to the customer. And on top of that, the more they sold, the more money they made in commissions. So their main focus was to sell as much as possible no matter what was best for the client. Their goals were totally inappropriate in my opinion.

Web Design Workplace has an affordable web design philosophy.

We can take that same 10 page website that the big box company made for $10,000 and we can sell it for as little as $1,000 depending on your content requirements. That’s a 90% savings… and that’s just the up front savings in the purchase price. There are more savings we can talk about later. Our site will probably rank faster on Google and Yahoo and Bing / MSN too because we use WordPress. Our sites have a structure that lends itself to good SEO (search engine optimization). And we make sure every page we put up is fully optimized. Every page we go live with has the “under the hood” features Search Engine spiders are looking for.

So our affordable web design philosophy is:

To provide the customer with a beautiful hand made product at a great price. Simple. Elegant. Perfect in every functional detail.

Web design Workplace for all your affordable web design needs. We are also world class experts at SEO and we can provide search engine optimization services whether you need to rank on Page One for Google, or you need to get your listing in the Google Local Maps directory. We work with Bing and Yahoo Local as well. Our SEO philosophy is also to provide the best service at an affordable price.

Call 201-696-5375 to talk with the Boss – Mal Milligan.

Filed Under: Learn About WordPress, Web Designer's Corner

Web Designer’s Idea Book – Review

July 6, 2010 By admin

I bought 2 copies because I liked the Web Designer’s Idea Book so much. For a person who has sold web designs for a living for 10 years… and a guy who is also a book buying addict, the minute I found it on the shelf at Borders I bought one. I lent it to a friend of mine who is an HTML designer and never got it back. So I bought another copy for myself and I have about 50 pages ear tagged.

The book is organized into coherent sections. Images of the homepages of the websites in the book are grouped by:

  1. type of website
  2. design style
  3. design theme
  4. color
  5. element
  6. structure

My favorite part of the book is that it gives dozens of matching color palettes. I am always trying to learn more about colors and everything I can get my hands on goes into my shopping cart. In most books that offer color palettes, I might use 2 in the entire book. That is the case so far with the Web Designer’s Idea Book. I liked a lot of the palettes but in my work I found places to use 2 of the palettes on new sites.  So that is good really.

For most designers, they will find the best part of the book is being able to thumb through it and see hundreds of websites to generate ideas. There are several book series out now that offer the same convenience, and I give this book a Thumbs Up rating for executing the main theme beautifully in comparison to the others. Except for a couple of the initial homepages being standard fare (in everybody’s list of top 100 sites), I found a lot of new sites I have not seen before and I got a lot of great new ideas I can use without doing a straight rip-off copy.

I just saw there is a newer version of this book hitting the Bookstores soon and I cant wait. I’ll buy it the minute I see it.

Filed Under: Web Designer's Corner

Affordable Web Designs – Comps

July 2, 2010 By admin

Whether it’s affordable web design or high priced web design, the initial artwork presentation sent to a client for approval is usually the comp. Or the Photoshop Composition as it is otherwise known. The comp is a starting place where the web designer can get approval of his or her artistic concept. And in legal regards, once the comp has been agreed to in writing, both the client and the designer have a concrete example of what has been offered and what should be delivered. For graphic artists, their project IS the comp. In terms of building a website, the artwork and the comp are about 10% to 20% of the total project work initially. As the number of pages in a site go up, then the artwork becomes a smaller and smaller part of the hours invested into a project. But the impact of the comp and the artwork is obviously huge and it forever sets the tone and many factors for the site.

Here are a couple comps I was given by WordPress Designer Lauren Billings. She is one of the best WordPress Designers in the world today and certainly the best I’ve ever worked with. There are literally tens of thousands of HTML designers in the world and there are only hundreds of true WordPress Artists. The WordPress artist can fit a beautiful design onto an existing website framework. That makes it better than HTML because it takes advantage of the dozens of features that make WordPress a superior platform for most business and personal websites.

Filed Under: Web Designer's Corner
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