Critique of 3 Photoshop Web Design Tutorials- Web Design Blog

One of the tutorials I did was Create a Sleek, high-End Web Design from Scratch. I thought that it was a good tutorial. It was pretty easy to follow. A couple of times it seemed like the author left out a step but it wasn't anything major that most people couldn't figure out. The tutorials that I did weren't that complicated but were really cool to look at visually. Another tutorial I did was the Portfolio Web Layout. It was really ways to follow. It was all step by step with really good directions as how to get the same look that they were showing. I really liked the fact that the author of the tutorial had screen shots of what each pop up window would look like on your screen. It really helped to make sure that there wasn't any confusion with the directions. The third tutorial I did because I really liked the look of the page. As with the last one I liked the fact that the author used the screen shots of pop up windows. On the other hand the author didn't clearly specify where to locate some things like where he found the shapes he used all he said was "all the icons I used are from the custom shapes library." Not everyone would know exactly where or what that means. That could be written out more clearly. Overall I thought the tutorials were pretty simple and easy to follow along with if you have a general knowledge of Photoshop.

What is design, usability, and accessibility in web design? Web Design Blog

Web design is the process of planning and creating a web page. Web designers use a combination of pictures, text, color, and digital media to create a webpage.  When creating a webpage you should always keep in mind how you display your content, how you display your page should be user friendly, and make sure you stay on target with whatever your sole purpose is for creating the page.Usability is making the website easy to use and making things happen. When a person goes to a webpage and sees a link the expect to go somewhere. Never link to the same page, it disappoints people to click a link and go nowhere. Accessibility is making your website friendly to all types of users. That can range from color blind people to people that are fully blind. If you have a picture on a site and you don't have a text description to go along with it a blind person would have no idea it was there. Another thing to think about is someone with a physical disability might not be able to use a mouse; if you can't navigate through a page without one that site would be completely worthless them.

Web Design Jobs- Web Design Blog

I found a bunch of jobs that were available to web designers.There are a few websites out there that are aimed towards just web designers. One of the sites I found was a site for freelance web designers. Careerbuilder.com had a few jobs and another website I found was webdesigners-directory.com. The latter of the two had a bunch of jobs and seemed like they always have a buunch. A lot of the jobs I found though didn't give very much information as to what qualifications you had to have for each job. Of the jobs that I saw some paid as little as $100 but others paid as much as $4999. Almost all of the jobs that I saw were for freelancers so they weren't location specific. Freelancing is a great way to get jobs but it also might not always pay as much as you want. I wasn't really interested in any of the jobs that I found but that probably has a lot to do with the fact that I don't plan on making a career of being a web designer. A few of the listings that I found caught my eye because they were for companies that I had heard of but I did not get any further information.

Web Design Blog: What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a process that helps search engines find and rank your website. What rank you are determines where your website shows up when someone searches for a topic.  The more traffic that your site gets the higher your ranking will be.  Search engines  use things called spiders that crawl over the internet and record things like how many times a  link on a page is clicked, the quality of the links, the content of the site, and if the site is trustworthy. Google said that they have over 200 things that they use to calculate your rank. Once all these things are calculated it is put into an algorithm. This algorithm determines how high your rank is and where it will it be placed in the list with all of the other pages.

Web Design Blog- Website Design and Development Process

There are six main steps in the website design and development process. The first step in the process is information gathering. You need to know the purpose of your site, what goals you have for the site, who your target audience is, and what information you want displayed on your page. The second step in the process is planning. You need to develop a site map. The site map should including a listing of all the main topics and sub-topics. By making a list of your topics it will help to guide what content makes it to the site. The third step is design. It is important to determine who your target audience is because once you start designing a page aimed at a teenager is going to look a lot different than a page aimed at senior citizens. You should also keep in mind the colors of your business and incorporate those into the design. The fourth step in the process is development. This is the point in the process where the web site itself is actually created. This is where you put all the information that you have been gathering. The fifth step in the process is testing and delivery. During this part of the process you will be testing your website and making sure everything is working properly. The sixth and final step in the process is maintenance. You need to keep your content current and up to date, by doing so you will get repeat visitors.

Web Design: Brief History of the Internet!

    This is a brief history of the internet. In 1957, the USSR launches the first artificial satellite, Sputnik. President Dwight  D. Eisenhower responds to this by setting up ARPA(Advanced Research Projects Agency). About 18 months later they had their first successful satellite and had put the US on the map. In 1962, Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation did a study to try and figure out how it could control missles and bombers after a nuclear attack, if one were to occur.  Baran came up with an idea call packet-switching. It broke down datagrams into origin and destination so the computer could send them from computer to computer until they got to where they needed to be. In 1968, ARPA awarded the ARPANET to BBN. BBN decided to use a Honeywell microcomputer to use as the base for the switch. The actual structural link was built in 1969 and connected University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah.  In 1972, the first email program was created by Ray Tomlinson. 1976, Dr. Robert M. Metcalfe develops Ethernet, which allows for data to move really fast from place to place. 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and CERN in Geneva implements a hypertext system to provide efficient information access to members of an international physics community. In 1995, NSF reports that they will no longer allow direct access to the NSF backbone.  They contracted out to four companies to sell connections to groups, organizations, and companies. In 1999, Wi-fi is invented and changes the world.

Web Design Goals!

My goals for this class are to successfully learn how to code a website and get a good grade doing it. I’m looking forward to learning how to hand code a website instead of just using Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver might be simpler to use but it’s good to know how to hand code if you ever really need to do it. It’s a lot cheaper than the Dreamweaver software… When I first learned that I had to take a web design class I was not excited. I thought it was going to be really boring. I’m starting to think that it’s not going to be as bad as I thought. I’ve only been to one class but I think it might actually be fun. I’m not scared to learn how to code, I think that it will be very beneficial for me to learn and will help me further my career as a photographer and graphic designer. It never hurts to learn the basics of something before you move on to new, easier ways of doing things. It’s kind of similar to when I started going to school for photography, you take a basic photography class and you use film cameras. Not very many people use film anymore but it is always a good to learn the basic fundamentals before moving forward.