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.

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/52-worst-photoshop-mistakes-in-magazines/

Let’s not forget about Google!
Yes Google. Google gives brownie points to websites that have fast load times. This means they will favor your website over another in the search results if you are faster than your competitor.

Optimizing your images for your website is still a big part of web design. By comparing image quality side by side you can push the limits of getting the smallest file size possible on each image. Sure it is a little more time consuming since you have to do it manually for each image, but in the end your website will be lightening fast and optimized for the fastest loading time without the loss of quality of any image.

Have a cookie cutter website like Wix or a flash based site? Or maybe you had someone program out an admin section where you can upload images yourself to your website. Even more the reason to optimize your images before you upload them. Sure a lot of these cookie cutter websites will re-size your image after you upload it, but most of them do it in the code and the file size doesn’t change! Think about it, if you upload a 1 megabyte image, that gets scaled from the code but not in file size and add that to a gallery of images you are talking about 12 megabytes for a dozen images. That is HUGE!

Resizing your image is pretty easy. Most image software will let you re size the image and let you set the pixels to 72ppi, as well as set your pixel width and height dimensions. Yes this will cut down on your file size but it isn’t the best or most effective way to optimize your images.

Photoshop Save for Web Feature

Photoshop has a handy feature called save for web. It has many controls and lets you compare the original to the optimized version. It also lets you switch between file formats and gives you the output size for your optimized image. Even if you keep the 100% saving for web feature in Photoshop is going to cut the file size down tremendously. But you can go even further and dial it back to a quality of 50-60 percent, and in rare cased as low as 40 percent. Also compare in 2 up mode this will show you the original verses your optimized version. If you start to get some funky jpeg artifacts push it back up about 10 percent. With this nifty little feature you can get super small file sizes and not compromise image quality.  Once you get a good idea of what percentage is optimal, you can just run a batch command with those settings and this will save you time if you have a lot of images to re-size.

Wedding photographers, looking to get a good back link to your website? Check out Dallas Wedding Photographers Directory site. Or if you have stumbled on this page because you are looking for a wedding photographer in or around the Dallas area, browse Dallas Wedding Photographers today.

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