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Web Design Tips for Graphic Designers New to Website Design |
| By Chris London |
For graphic designers who are new to web design this article will provide some very useful tips to optimize your websites and images to maintain a visually dynamic website without slow load times.
Everyone should want a website that is attractive, engaging, and easy to navigate. More often than not, you can spot websites that were created by graphic designers and sites that were created by programmers. Generally speaking a website created by a graphic designer will be visually engaging but is probably not Search Engine Friendly, while a programmer's site will be set up beautifully with CSS streamlined for Search Engines and quick load times. For obvious reasons the best websites are usually created by a team of professionals working in tandem.
It sure seems to me that most people designing websites have an "either or" attitude, either it looks good but loads slow or you focus on code and appear more generic. I've seen plenty of websites that contradict this thinking and I personally believe every website should be visually stunning and streamlined for search engines and download time. Every year less people are using dial up to connect, however there are too many to ignore. I really don't worry too much about dial up users anymore, because most of the websites I design are targeted at fairly web savvy searchers. However, just because I don't worry about dial up doesn't mean that I can neglect to streamline my websites for its users.
This article will provide some quick and useful tips on how graphic designers new to web design can optimize websites and images and still keep them looking hot. If you're just starting out then you're probably not going to know a lot about CSS. No worries! Just start designing your layout in Photoshop. A good document size to start with would be 950 pixels wide by 600 pixel high set to RGB at 300 dpi. When you've created the layout that you want you are ready to slice up your document and export it as an html document with an image folder.
1. In Photoshop you can use the slice tool and manually create slices organized in rows and columns for Dreamweaver or drag "guides" where you want to slice your page and just click the "slice from guides" button at the top of the Photoshop menu bar. Note: you can combine slices by shift clicking multiple slices then holding down the control key and clicking to select combine slices. (You can define your text and background colors easily in Dreamweaver). |
| Chris London is the Art Director for Pixel Productions Inc. Pixel Productions is an experienced and well established web design company specializing in custom website design and web development. Our web design team brings all aspects of graphic design, website development, Flash animation and e-commerce development, together in a way that allows you to be confident in the finished product no matter what your project demands. |
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