What? Use videos for marketing? Everyone knows about that. Yes, yes. I know. But here’s a great example that really made me want to gladly buy this company’s product….if I didn’t already have one, and provide what I think is great entertainment and a great marketing example for the rest of us to consider. Live, learn, enjoy.
Sublime, elegant, well written design blog of Jeff Starr. This most informative blog covers a wide range of technologies that pertain to digital design. Jeff reminds me how much I have to learn and I always learn something new. The Perishable Press challenges us all to be better designers. Remember the quote from the potato chip commercial, “I bet you can’t eat one”? Well, I be you can’t just read one Perishable post. They just make you want more and what may start out as a 10 minute visit will often turn into a 30 minute read and an hour of putting your new found knowledge into practice and then going back for more. Head over to Perishable Press and see for yourself.
If the search engines can’t find you, how can anyone else? Valik Rudd over at WebDesignIdeas.org gives a good overview of the benefits of making your websites accessible and some good tools to help you do it. Making an accessible website not only involves a good visual appearance, it also requires a usable organization of the site’s information, and the ability to view that content without the visual design aspects of the site. That’s why Rudd suggests using a text-only browser to look at and navigate your site. If you have problems doing so, so will most of the search engines and part of your audience. In a nutshell, good design must allow everyone, including the search engines, the ability to access your content. To do otherwise is like shooting yourself in the foot. Ouch!
Most of us know that pie are square, especially if you use a square pie pan. Oh! No, no….sorry, wrong pie. I know you’ve heard of Pi, the irrational number equal to the circumference of a circle to the diameter of the circle. Pi = 3.14159265358979323846… The trailing numbers go on forever.
That’s not the same as Phi, another irrational number equal to 1.61803399… What’s interesting about these numbers is how often they pop up in the universe and the world we humans perceive. Now, Pi is a little easier to get your head around because we all know what a circle is and its diameter. But Phi is a little phunnier. So rather that go into where Phi comes from mathematically, you can read all about in Wikipedia. One way to estimate Phi is the Fibonacci sequence. The easiest way to describe this sequence of numbers is this: the number following the number before it is the sum of the two preceding numbers. So it looks like this:
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, and so on forever.
If you move into the sequence past the first few numbers and divide any of these numbers by the one preceding it, guess what you get? Phi. It’s actually only a close approximation after all because Phi is irrational. But the further you go in the sequence the more accurate it gets. To wit, 6765 divided by 4181 = 1.618033963… That’s accurate to the 7th decimal.
“Big whoop”, you say. This is just a bunch of boring math stuff. But consider this, the curve of the human ear is the same as the as the Fibonacci spiral. The proportions of the body segments of ants, the body features of an angel fish, the human body, the arrangement of leaves on their stem. There are too many examples to mention here.
If you’ve never heard of the Golden Ratio, Phi, or the Fibonacci Sequence, you really should check them out. They are the basis of many great designs that have been created throughout history by architects, artists, and musicians, and the Creator of the Universe. There are as many ways to apply Phi to a design project as you can imagine and use it to produce just about anything pleasing to the human senses. Just don’t blog about it when you’re hungry.
Further reading and listening:
Debussy’s “Reflections in Water” performed by Yukino Kano
I don’t’ really know exactly when it began, my interest and desire to be creative. It probably started before I was aware of it. As a child, finger painting was always fun. Some of it showed up early on through the medium of photography. As early as elementary school I loved to take photos. I even learned how to develop black and white film in my darkroom which doubled as the hall bathroom when I wasn’t pretending to be a photographer. I always enjoyed art class in high school, especially projects in sculpting, drawing, and painting. In college I made models of dodecahedrons out of wooden dowels and rubber bands. When personal computers came along in the early 80’s and I bought my first computer, an Atari 400, I directed my creative energy into programming and graphics. The Atari went into the basement when IBM PCs came along. Then the Internet and the World Wide Web became accessible to the public. To their credit, AOL was among the first to offer web hosting as part of their membership and that’s where I really started learning about graphics and html. During the early 90’s, I decided I wanted to be a web designer. But having a family to support with my full time job that paid the bills took up most of my time. Please don’t mistake that statement for a complaint. It’s not. My hope and desire and decision to be a web designer was to one day provide for my family as a web designer. So I became a web designer.
This is the key point. See yourself as a web designer and be one. I suggest you use this approach to anything you desire in your life. Learn what a web designer does, get the tools, and practice being a web designer. Learn from any source you can find and can afford. Fortunately, you can learn to design web sites from any number of sites on the web at no cost. Tools are freely available and most internet service providers include personal web space for you to host your own site. What a great opportunity to learn and improve your knowledge, skills, and abilities.
I started to be a web designer just building my own website. Then I had the opportunity to build a site for a local nonprofit organization I belonged to. A friend found out I built the site and asked me to build a site for his new business and actually gave me some money to do it. I built another site for another nonprofit. That’s how it starts. Just be it. Let people know you are it. I’m sure you have your own story that brings you to web design. If that’s what floats your boat, let no one tell you it can’t be done. Once a strong desire rises inside you, make it your goal and do whatever it takes to make it come true.
Website infrastructure is just the physical stuff you need to make a website. I’m talking about a web server connected to the internet. Most of us don’t have the wherewithal to set up a web server so we use a web hosting service. As I’m sure you know there’s a big industry that now provides web hosting and finding a service that is suitable for your needs can be confusing. Here are a few things to look for in a web hosting account.
Care to guess what the most important part of a website is? I’ll give you a hint. It’s not the design. It’s the information. As has been said so often for so many years, content is king. You can have a website that’s an absolute work of art, but without quality content that’s well organized, easy to navigate, and of real value to the reader, you don’t have squat. It would be like having a picture frame without the picture. Many web designers will work with their clients to get the initial content for the site before they even start to design the site. The organization of the information, the information architecture, guides the design of the navigation and this all influences the visual design of the site. Content consists of the text, pictures, graphs, charts, audio, video, and another media that communicates the information of the site to the user. Gather as much as you can before you design and build your site.
For the business of creating a basic web page, you’ll need some kind of text editor. In the early days, the Notepad program installed on all PCs with Windows was all there was. Today there are many editors of all kinds for text, html, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as well as various scripting editors for the likes of JavaScript and PHP. Wikipedia has a great page that provides a comparison of these types of editors. Personally, I use the free and very capable Notepad++ that does everything I need to examine and edit various text based files. Although this paragraph addresses text editors in general, I have referred to several web related scripting languages. Each one is truly a new language to learn. Do not let any of this overwhelm you. No one knows everything about all the technologies that make up the web. At the very least you should learn to work with html and CSS. I dabble in just enough JavaScript to adapt and use scripts developed by people who really know what they are doing. Most of these scripts do seem to have some things in common in their syntax so once you start to get the feel of a couple of them, the others are not complete gibberish.
Most websites make use of digital images in their design, from backgrounds to borders; from diagrams and charts to photographs. There are two basic ways digital images are made. Most common on the web are raster graphics, also known as bitmaps. Images created this way consist of lots of little dots, each dot forming an element of the picture, or pixel (for picture element). Programs used for creating and editing raster graphics are the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) and Photoshop.
The other way to make graphics is to use points to create lines and shapes. Images made this way are called vector graphics. For example, to create a triangle using the vector graphics technique, you would 3 points on the canvas and connect them with straight lines. This is a very basic example. I suggest you take advantage of the list of further reading to gain a better understanding.
The usual practice is to design and build your website locally on your PC and then upload it to your web server. The method of transferring the files is called FTP, File Transfer Protocol. Today’s modern FTP programs make it as easy as drag and drop. Once you configure your program to log into your web server via FTP, you’ll see the files on your PC and the filing system of your web server. Just drag and drop from your computer to the server, being sure to maintain the same file structure. Once again you can buy an FTP program or use a free one. I’ve been very satisfied using the free, open source program FileZilla.
Well, that’s what I call them. There’s much more to designing an entire web site than creating one design for pages. Productivity becomes important. Once you start learning the basics of making web pages, filling them with content and organizing them in a meaningful way, you’ll really appreciate having software that not only edits text, html, CSS, and the rest, but also automates some of the coding and other tasks. MS FrontPage is an early example of such software. Adobe Dreamweaver is very popular for this purpose. Microsoft replaced FrontPage with their new program called Microsoft Expression. You’ll have to fork over a very pretty penny for these babies. As of this writing, Dreamweaver sells for $399 and Expression goes for $699.
But don’t be dismayed. There are some low cost or no cost alternatives to get you started. Take a look at the free Nvu, SeaMonkey, and KompoZer, all of which have WYSIWYG editors. I have not tried SeaMonkey or KompoZer, but I have tried Nvu and found it pretty darn good, especially for a free product. For just a little coin, you can buy CoffeeCup HTML Editor 2008 for $49.00. Try it free for 30 days.
Play. Yep. Play. Start by downloading and installing some of the programs mentioned here and play with them. In addition to articles in Wikipedia, the web is full of tutorials and videos that show you how to use them. How about this novel idea? Go to the library and find a book on Photoshop or any of the other technologies. Classes at community colleges are also good. Better yet, make computer science and web design your major and get a degree. However you decide to do it, get serious about satisfying your desire to be a web designer and play. It’s fun. By the way, I still have my full time job that pays the bills. But I also am a web designer, and pretty soon, it will be my next full time career that pays the bills.
CSS in Wikipedia and in the CSS WikiBook
JavaScript in Wikipedia and in the JavaScript WikiBook
PHP in Wikipedia and in the PHP WikiBook
Raster Graphics Editors in Wikipedia
Vector Graphics Editors in Wikipedia
How to Build a Website from About.com
FTP 101 – A Beginner’s Guide from FTPplanet.com
If you’re serious about having a successful website, the first step is choosing a domain name that will serve you well. After a thorough review of articles and blogs on the topic, here are the top 10 points that the “experts” all make about choosing your domain name.
I started with the intention to write a post about some great tutorials on using Illustrator. When I started looking at those tutorials, I really had to resist the temptation to watch them and try them out myself. But I stayed on track for about 5 minutes until I became so impressed with all the other great content for web designers and web developers at Smashing Magazine. They have so much such for web design and web application development it’s mind boggling. Tutorials, how-to articles, tools of all kinds, design principles, fonts, graphics, icons, wallpapers, and on and on. This site is such a great resource I’ve added it to my list of resources at the right side of this blog. Smash On!
Have you ever been to one of those time share sales tours? You know what I mean. You receive an invitation in the mail for the weekend at a beach or mountain resort. The offer includes free lodging, breakfast, and a great gift. All you have to do is take a tour of the property for a couple of hours and listen to a sales presentation. It sounds great…and then the shoe drops. The sales pitch is heavy handed, can be very intimidating, and in the worst cases may even be insulting and threatening.
I recently got an invitation in the mail to attend a “FREE Dinner Conference” in my town to learn how people make money on the Internet. The invitation included tickets for me and my guest. We would even receive a free gift, an MP3 player. Wow! I’m in. So I called a friend and we decided to satisfy our curiosity over a free lunch.
I have to say, it really was a well done presentation. They were very cordial, respectful and there were no high pressure tactics. Their pitch was good. They asked all the right questions of the audience.
Then the shoe dropped. Just give us some of your money and you can have our money making system. You’ll have the bucks rolling in while you sleep in no time. If you really want to be successful, you can upgrade for 20 times the intro price. You know, when something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The point is that internet marketing and selling is a complicated puzzle. Success doesn’t come easy and it doesn’t come quick. As Earl Nightingale said, you can’t get any heat from the stove until you put some wood in it.
Have you ever had an experience with this type of online sales product? Leave a comment and share your experience.
The Top 5 Reasons People Blog
Here are the top 5 reasons people blog:
5. Journaling: sharing the things important in your life with others.
4. Provide commentary and opinions: because you want to make the world a better place and inquiring minds want to know.
3. Get attention and feel important: because inquiring minds want to know.
2. Interact with other people online: for all kinds of reasons from staying connected with friends and family to networking with other bloggers.
1. To make money: because you can never have too much money.
Ok, I made this up. Although I did a little poking around to see why people blog. These five reasons are all legitimate even though some of the reasons are a little tongue-in-cheek.
Do you blog? If so tell us why?