Archive for the 'Web Design' Category

My Pet Peeves with Bad Web-Designers

When coming up with new blog topics there are a few ways I think of ideas. Sometimes educating, thinking of things that my clients or other web designers may want to know, or educating people on something I wish they knew that would make my life easier, or also sharing some things that drive me CRAZY that I wish people would not do – this is one of those types of posts. I wanted to share with you my top 5 things that drive me crazy that other, likely BAD, web designers do.

Adobe Creative Cloud – Design Programs Now Affordable!

While thinking about what to write this week I was thinking about what sort of things have made my life easier as a designer, and the software that I use came to mind. I have been using Adobe products for over 15 years, and Macromedia as well before Adobe bought them, and the different they make for my final products designed for clients are huge. I don’t think that I could function as a designer without Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver. So when my version from a couple years ago started to get very dated I was not looking forward to having to pay the huge amount for an upgrade – but then Adobe introduced Creative Cloud.

Google Takes Doodle to the Next Level

Well Google has done it again, another great and unique “Doodle”. They’ve altered their home page graphic for their search engine in homage to Robert Moog

Using Custom Fonts on Websites

As a graphic designer AND web designer one thing that I often find frustrating is making a site look really cool and making sure it’s as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly as possible. One of the biggest ways that I’ve felt constrained often is by what fonts that I can use. I mean, sure, I could use whatever font I want really and I’m sure it would look good to my eyes, but what if a potential customer of one of my clients goes to their site and they don’t have that same really cool font on their computer? Then the font gets substituted and likely does not look as cool and perhaps some alignment may also be off. So a no-go generally for cool fonts.

New Website Live Now!

Hello everyone! We are happy to announce our new website! We’ve officially joined the WordPress community now with more than just our blog – our whole site is now WordPress. We’ve talked before about the many advantages to using Content Management Systems, and now we’re doing it too.

Useful Resources for Web Designers

I’m always trying to think of useful things to share for those designing their websites – be that a do-it-yourself-er small business owner or an experienced web designer, and I thought I would share 7 of the tools that I find useful for web design…

Content Management Systems – How and When to Get Out of a Bad CMS

There are many more benefits to a good CMS, the ones mentioned in my previous post about Why Use a CMS are just a few of the ones that I generally highlight to my clients or contacts. A very important thing to keep in mind though is that not all CMS’ were created equal! Some are very easy to use, some are near impossible to use and negate many of the points mentioned above.

Content Management Systems – Why Use One?

There are a few reasons why using a Content Management System (CMS) can be a good fit for your company. Many of the most popular CMS’ were designed for blogging, such as WordPress for example, but have since become much more versatile and able to do far more than just blogging.

Content Management Systems – What’s the difference from straight HTML & CSS?

When I started out on my own in ARK Squared just over a year ago and doing my networking one of the things I would constantly be hearing from other designers was how they use WordPress or other Content Management Systems (CMS) for making client’s websites – and I didn’t understand why you want to use one. Now, after having implemented WordPress for many of my own client’s projects I understand! It did take me a while to really understand the difference and why one can be better than the other.

Colors – Importance and Choosing

We’ve mentioned before the importance of your logo, images, etc, and a major part of that are the color choices you make. If you are a massage therapist for example, you’re not going to want to stress someone out by having bright red be one of your colors. It needs to be something you devote some serious thought to…