Thursday, September 4, 2008

Flash designs to bring your website to life

The internet is now a domain full of intense competition. An individual or an organization looking to establish their web presence needs to put in a lot of effort into various promotion techniques on the internet. But all these efforts will be in vain if you don’t have an attractive website in the first place. One way of making sure you attract the attention of the public on the internet is to incorporate flash design into your web pages.

Flash is a multimedia tool belonging to the Macromedia family. Web designers can make use of this software to develop interactive movies, innovative innovations and different kinds of artistic images. These clips are designed in such a manner that they can be embedded on to the web page along with the other content.

It is but obvious that flash design can be used to enhance the impact of your website which is the dire need of the hour. Flash Web Design is extremely useful because of its amazing features. This is the reason why people are finding it the only logical means of creating a website that captures the imagination and attention of the visitors.

Flash can be used in a variety of different ways on a web page. You can make a flash animation presentation to display your company profile or product ranges on your webpage in a 30 second series. Another good thing about flash movies is that they do not have a compatibility issue with different web browsers. So you do not run the risk of not having your video played on a different website. Hence working with flash doesn’t mean you will have to get tangled up in XHTMAL and other programming languages.

Flash can be used for a variety of other purposes on your website. You can use the program to create innovative ads that will be sure to capture the attention of your visitors. The program can also be used to create animated games that can be played on your website or downloaded.

The use of flash has now become a common practice amongst web designers due to the impact that it generates. The difference between websites that make use of flash techniques and those that don’t comes out quite obviously. The plain old and simple websites that do not make use of the innovative techniques of flash do not stand in any comparison with the websites that have been enhanced with the use of flash.

Creating flash animations, ads and presentations is however a technical job that requires highly trained individuals. Most of the good web design agencies now have a full time dedicated team of flash animators who provide invaluable services to clients looking for something out of the box when it comes to website design.

It is however advised to take a look at the flash animation portfolio and the previous work of the agency that you will be choosing for your website designing. A good idea is to read customer review in order to get an idea of the level of satisfaction they are able to deliver.


Sourc:- promotionworld.com/

Web Design For Small Business

Any type of web development project is going to be an important, necessary, and pricey job. This is especially true for small businesses, who are dependent upon new clients to keep their services up and running. One way to “sink and reel” new clients in is to have a great online website design, along with a functional web development application.

Companies that specialize in web development and design are offering an invaluable service to small businesses. Small business owners won’t be able to create their own designs due to time constraints, and certainly won’t be able to sacrifice many weeks of learning just to get a website up and running. In this sense, the fees of a web designer are very well justified.

Branding is an aspect of web design that usually costs more money, but is worth every single penny spent. A logo and certain set of colors is what sets one business entity apart from another. Knowing that a golden set of arches is a McDonald’s logo, for instance, is one example of how society takes kindly to a branded company. This helps on return traffic and potential profits in the future.

Web development is part of the web design process, whether or not the web design company agrees with this or not. A web design company should be able to provide consulting for applications that may be able to offer an easier experience for the webmaster or his or her clients- such as a contact form.

As the industry goes, most small businesses will pay a lot more in the physical world for a web design job than they would if they purchased online services. Real world businesses know that customers that visit them are probably not too keen on web design elements, so they can charge extra where possible. Internet web design companies also face more competition, so they have to likewise stay competitive in pricing.

Web design and development is a big money-maker for those who take part in it, but don’t expect to cut too many costs in the process. A cheap web design service will give you exactly what you pay for, while the “big dogs” will have a service that is on par with big business designs. In the end, one can easily spend hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on what is requested by the small business owner.

Final Thoughts

A good thing to take from this is to simply shop around, especially over the Internet. Some services are more expensive than others, so try to find a median between prices and contact the web design company for a portfolio. Once all is said and done, marketing can be done to bring all sorts of new clients in.


source:- 3x24.com/

Tips on Creating Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Friendly Web Pages

If you design a search engine friendly or a site with search engine optimization in mind you are likely to rank higher in search engine results and grab more valuable free visitors for yourself.

What point is there in having a website that nobody sees? The largest source of free web traffic for most websites on the Internet comes from search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN etcetera. Therefore, if you design a search engine friendly or a site with search engine optimization in mind you are likely to rank higher in search engine results and grab more valuable free visitors for yourself.

The Big 3 search engines e.g. Google, Yahoo! and MSN use internet robots known as web crawlers or spiders to crawl and index websites which they then can list within their organic search result pages. Most spiders follow links to a page then read the text content of the page and make a record of it in their own database… this allows the search engines to pull up the listing at any time as people search for it.

In order to make it as easy as possible for the search engines to index and crawl and index your site, the use of frames on your website should be avoided. Frames can often confuse search engine robots and many spiders have difficulty indexing pages created with the use of frames. They could even leave your site without crawling it any further if it is not search engine friendly enough. In addition, frames can make it difficult for users to add a bookmark a particular page on your website without using certain long and complicated scripts.

Don’t put valuable text content inside flash movies or in images… remember search engine robots can only read the text on your website source code. Therefore if crucial text is presented in flash movies and or inside images rather than the readable textual form, your website’s search engine rankings could be affected dramatically.

Correct use of meta tags on each page is essential, especially correct use of titles and descriptions. This will allow search engine robots to understand straight away what your web pages are about and whether or not to index it. Correct use of meta tags helps to make the search engine robot's job easier so they may be encouraged to crawl your site more often.

Stop using old style HTML methods like tables and font tags to style your page. Instead use div tags and CSS or Cascading Style Sheets. This is because div tags and CSS are a more search engine friendly method and are also more efficient. With the use of div tags and CSS, you can eliminate old style HTML tags and your pages will be much lighter and faster to load.

Make sure that you always put the text you want to be found for on the body text of your page with your most important keywords near the top or beginning of your body text. For example, if your primary keyword is green widgets put the keyphrase green widgets in the first sentence of your body text and repeat the phrase a few more times throughout the page preferably also somewhere in bold or strong text. Always remember that if you don’t put your primary keywords on your body text and also in your titles and meta tags etc you make it much harder for your site to be found in search results.


source:- powerhomebiz.com/

Zend mixing PHP, AJAX for RIAs

Integration provided between the open-source framework and Dojo Toolkit

With an upgrade to its software development framework for PHP scheduled for release today, Zend Technologies is mixing in client-side AJAX capabilities with server-side PHP functionality.

Zend Framework 1.6, the company's open-source framework, integrates with the Dojo Toolkit for AJAX. Developers thus gain front-end rich Internet application capabilities via Dojo (version 1.1.1 of Dojo will ship with Zend's framework); integration between Zend and Dojo is accomplished via a piece of software called Zend_Dojo.

In this approach, developers would use Zend Framework to build JavaScript-enabled Web applications that Zend Framework renders, said Wil Sinclair, the Zend project lead for Zend Framework.

Although Zend worked with the Dojo Foundation on the Dojo integration, the Zend Framework still can be used with other AJAX technologies.

Also added in version 1.6 is full support for SOAP Web services. With that support, developers could build integration with an application based on Microsoft's .Net Framework. Jeffrey Hammond, a Forrester Research analyst, lauded the SOAP backing in version 1.6. "SOAP support is something many enterprise IT shops will find interesting. Many have made significant investments in SOAP-based SOA strategies but would still like to take advantage of lighter weight Web-based frameworks that use dynamic languages like PHP or Ruby. The updated version of Zend Framework should help them significantly," Hammond said.

Another capability highlighted in Model/View/Controller-enabled (MVC) Zend Framework 1.6 is unit testing for controllers on top of the existing object-level unit testing. This benefits agile and test-driven development, Zend's Sinclair said. Unit tests on controllers allow developers to test realistic user scenarios, such as log-ins or balance transfers, he said. The MVC support allows developers to separate applications into presentation and business logic, he added.

Version 1.6 features a preview implementation of the Zend_Tool project, for creating projects and project assets and managing them. This capability is important for rapid application development, Sinclair said. Zend Framework also features a "use at will" architecture, enabling developers to use separate components such as a forms creation component.

Source:- infoworld.com/