If you are using their domain name with their free account i.e. yourdomain.wix.com why not go with WordPress! You can sign up on wordpress.org and get a free template and use a much more powerful, robust platform for free to promote your website. Best part about wordpress, is it isn’t FLASH!  Yes Flash is DEAD, if you are still using flash as a major site functionality you are way behind on the times. Everyone hates the homepage screen that asks if you want to enter the flash site or the html. How about you get a functional site that works for all users. And Wix.com’s patch to offer a free html mirror site along with it’s flash driven main site falls way short.

Yes I know all you free website wanters are saying but its easy. Well wordpress is just as easy! And in the end you get better results and way better search engine visibility out of it. After all isn’t that the purpose of your site, to drive traffic?

To read more about why you should say no to flash read another post I wrote a while back.

Say no to Flash Sites

Once you have the code in place now just a little CSS to set the full width div.

.fullwidth {width:960px; margin: 0 auto;}

Create a new page in WordPress you now have the option to use Home Page as a template giving you a full width page with no sidebar.

When it comes to web design, there are tons of sites out there that have website samples. Lately I have been coming across these sites that have web design samples but once you dig a little deeper the live website of their so called design isn’t what is displayed on their website. For example if you click on the “sample” it just pulls up an image of the site design, there is no link to the actual live website. So you go to Google and you search the website name, and once you arrive at the live site the design isn’t like what this so call “web design” company shows in their portfolio. In the live, real site, well it usually looks really, really bad.

So what you have are these designers mocking up a website in Photoshop from a bad website that is out there on the web. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it shows off their creativity, but in no way is a Photoshop mockup a portfolio website sample. First off there is a difference between design and coding. So there was no coding put into the “sample”, therefore no functionality, not special touches or nuances you don’t get with a Photoshop mockup. Second off these companies haven’t actually worked with other companies or individuals and probably aren’t very experienced with real world web design production.

The good news is it is pretty easy to spot these types of misleading portfolio samples. Usually they won’t link the live site with their sample design, and once quick search will reveal that this isn’t a live website sample. And more than likely all their samples will be like this. After looking at about 2 of their sample sites you will know that every single portfolio sample is a fake. A little attention to detail and follow through you will be able to avoid these misleading Web Design Portfolio Examples .

There are tons of great inspiration out there on the web. And in an age of bloggers, you are bound to find great information, tutorials, and creative talent. Best part is they post regularly and you can keep going back to their blog site over and over again to get tips or inspiration. Below are 5 blogs/webiste that I visit frequently.

Web Designer Blogs

http://webdesignerwall.com

http://www.thefwa.com

Graphic Design Blogs

http://imjustcreative.com

http://www.logodesignlove.com

Other Industry Blogs

http://ilovetypography.com

At Dallas apartment finder they realize that a modern day, clean, professional website is how you attract customers and website viewers. Alicia contacted me explaining she wanted to update her out dated website. I took her old website, kept the same content but added a completely new modern, look and feel. I also cleaned up the code, it was a little out dated as well. Giving a clean, sleek, easy to navigate as well as clean coded website.

I get tons of phone calls for people looking for a web designer and then once we get into more detail of what they want out of their website, I find that they are looking for a web developer.

So I would like to point out the differences in this post today.

Web Designer
A designer is someone who focuses on the visual aesthetics of things. Usually a designer will actually use Photoshop as a layout/mockup tool. To land a good design and flowing layout. Then once they are happy with the design, they will dive into the coding part of the project.  The code part is usually based on HTML and CSS with a little javascript thrown in. There are no databases, or advanced functionality involved. Usually this is consider “front end” web design.

Web Developer
A Developer is someone that focuses on the “back end” of the website. This usually involves heavy coding, and programming.  The programming gives the website functionality, an “if this happens” do this action. There are different types of programming languages and the most common are PHP and ASP.net. On the development side you are dealing with databases, auto generation of web pages, programmed generation of images and HTML.

Still not sure what the difference is?

Post to facebook much? Well there is tons of code telling the back end of facebook to create a new post when someone types in a certain box, as well as post to your friends pages. Ever uploaded an image to flickr? That’s some heavy programming!   Bought anything online before? How do you think these sites know what you added to your shopping cart, programming language in the background. These are examples of web development.

With the expansion of technology and more and more people having access to some sophisticated programming via websites, it is creating this illusion that everything is so simple. And more and more business owners are wanting the same kind of functionality that they are finding on these major websites that took years to build and tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop.

If you have the budget you can develop a website with all the functionality you want or need. But keep in mind the more functionality, the more programming, and the more hours and production it will take to get what you want. The other thing to keep in mind is that you might need both a designer and a developer, because they don’t think the same and don’t produce the same results. It is usually best to find a company that has a designer and a developer so they can work hand and hand, and get you stunning websites that have alot of functionality integrated.

Visit Irina Werning’s official site for more.

Even though content is king, cramping nothing but text on your website isn’t a very good idea especially if you are trying to build a brand. You think coca cola got to where they are because they just bombarded people with information about how good coke is? NO! It is a visual, branding and reputation thing. Your website is no different. And even though it might be tempting to go with a company that has a good track record for landing you on the first page of Google, in the long run it isn’t worth a bad design.

Here is a website that heavily promotes SEO that offers web design services.

Now I count 3 graphic elements on the homepage(we aren’t counting the social media buttons). Two of the graphics are a logo, and picture of the website owner which are blurred out to protect the identity of the site. The third graphic? Google Adsense! Yup they have a big fat advertisement banner in the side bar that is pretty much the only graphical element on their website. So prime example of a web designer that is an SEO person that uses cramming as much text as possible into their website so they can rank for a keyword.  Wanna know how many times they repeat the word SEO on just one page? 51 times.  Trust me this isn’t what you want your website to look like.

Insurance company, Lone Star Family Insurance.

The client had signed up with Wix for their website needs, but the flash site just wasn’t giving them the exposure they wanted. If you don’t already know why flash is a dying breed for full website development checkout my article on web design for photographers.  Don’t fall into the flash website trap.

I came in and redesigned the site with a whole new look and feel with HTML and CSS. Giving them a fully customized web site design, along with better search engine optimization.

We will be using jewelry photography for this sample.

Photoshop High pass filter flaws

One of the biggest problems with the high pass filter is the halo effect. The second problem is color shifts at higher levels. The color shift is an easy fix. All you have to do is desaturate the layer that the high pass image is on. The quickest way to do this is to use keyboard shortcut Ctrl (or Apple) + U. This brings up Hue/Saturation, now dial back the Saturation to zero. Color shift fixed!

Now fixing the halo effect.

Most of the tutorials you will find on the internet or in books will tell you to use a small radius. This is good for sharpening and generally is a good sharpening technique and this method won’t create too much of an halo effect. But I have found that if you crank up the radius you can really get some better definition in certain areas. It does mean you have to do a little bit more clean up with killing the halo effect.

Take the radius up to about 30 or 40.

Now it is time to clean up that halo. There are two ways you can just sample the grey color and use a soft brush to paint on a smoother edge. Or the less destructive way is to use a layer mask.  Use a soft brush and just brush away the halo, it might make more since visually if you switch the blend mode to overlay, get a better real life effect.

Once you have the edges cleaned up switch the blend mode to soft light, overlay or hard light depending on the effect you want. And the final result is a sharp image, but more importantly we added more definition in the crystal, and hardware which using a small radius would not of done for us.