Web Design Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Domain Name?

Domain name is simply the name of the website that people will need to write in their browser to access your web page. As an example: www.yahoo.com , www.google.com , www.macromedia.com are domain names. The domain name is the unique identifier for your website.

To order your domain name you must give consideration to the following thoughts. First, the domain name must denote, refer, highlight the function, activity, services which you sell. As an example of good domain names are: www.copy.com, www.lightsunlimited.com, www.luigisrestaurantgalveston.com, www.golfturfs.com. These domain names are self explanatory, clearly stating the nature of the business. The importance of this is twofold: First, you want to be remembered by your customers in choosing an easy to remember domain name and second, you want to be quickly indexed by the search engines like Yahoo or Google enhancing chances of being found by customers searching for your services or products.

Registering a domain can be a simple process but you should be aware that you can get your domain stolen if you do not register it in the right place and with a well known vendor. We are affiliated with the biggest domain name provider in the internet. We are also proud to offer a secure domain registration. All domains registered through us are locked. This means that they cannot be transferred or stolen without your previous authorization. We can provide this service for you; click here to know more about domain registration.

What is hosting?

All web designs need hosting. Hosting is a service provided by a company who will store your web design in a folder in a server (which is a more sophisticated computer than personal computers). This server will share your webpage with the internet and their users. We also provide hosting service for your convenience. Click here to find out more about our specials and different packages that are available to meet your individual needs.

The type of hosting service will depend on your web design characteristics. An ecommerce or online store will need a different type of hosting service than a regular web design. Generally the online store will have to be written in asp or Unix language. This will affect the type of hosting you need. Moreover, the ecommerce store will require a database to store information concerning customers, products and payment gateways. Click here to find the different hosting services that we provide or call (713) 826 1149 to discuss your hosting needs with a representative.

How many pages does my web design needs?

In order to answer the question of how many web design pages will you need you must ask yourself in a clear and simple manner: “How do I want to categorize the information which I want to communicate through my web site? The most basic recommendation is one page per argument, line of thought, group of similar products or similar information that can be grouped under one page. For example: the typical basic web design should have five web pages; Home, About Us, Services/Products, Pictures and Contact Us. This can be expanded depending on the amount of information that you want to disclose to your clients. The more pages that you have the more professional your web design is going to look. As an example of a simple web design we have: www.luigisgalveston.com, as an example of one more elaborated and content rich page we have: www.golfturfs.com. Click here to see our portfolio

What do I need to start up the web design process?

You need to have information about your company ready, such as: pictures, text, reviews, testimonials and other useful information. The more text the better for your web design. Furthermore, having a rich content web design helps the search engines to find your web page accurately and quickly. We will help you to decide how many pages you need for your company. We will categorize the information for you and we will send you a proposal for your web design. Contact us or call (713) 826 – 1149 for a quote.

What is flash animation?

First, watch an example of flash animation:

Example 1, Example 2

Macromedia Flash, or simply Flash, refers to both the Macromedia Flash Player and to a multimedia authoring program used to create content for it. The Flash Player, developed and distributed by Adobe Systems (formerly by Macromedia), is a client application available in most web browsers. It features support for vector and raster graphics, a scripting language called ActionScript and bidirectional streaming of audio and video.

Strictly speaking, Macromedia Flash is the integrated development environment (IDE) and Flash Player is the virtual machine used to run the Flash files, but in colloquial language these have become mixed: "Flash" can mean either the authoring environment, the player, or the application files.

Since its introduction in 1996, Flash technology became a popular alternative to add animation and interactivity to web pages and several software products, systems and devices feature Flash content display or creation capabilities. Flash is commonly used to create animations, advertisements, design elements on a web page, add video to web sites and more recently, to develop Rich Internet Applications.

The Flash files, traditionally called "flash movies", usually have a .swf file extension and may appear as an element of a web page or to be "played" in the standalone Flash Player.

Source: Wikipedia.org

Issues in Flash design

Flash is not searching engine friendly. This means that the searching engines cannot understand the text that flash is offering. For this reason, the searching engine optimization becomes a more complex task if your web design is done entirely in flash.

Secondly, flash animations take longer to download and this makes difficult the process of web page design optimization. However, the latest flash software developers are using and understanding the code better permitting small flash files.

What is web design?

Web design is the design of web pages, websites and web applications. The term also refers to web-based graphical user interface (GUI) design using images, CSS, and one of the HTML standards.

Some people distinguish between "web design" (the graphics and user interface design) and web development, which includes "web design" as well as web server configuration, writing web applications, dealing with security issues, etc.

Issues

As in all professions, there are arguments on different ways of doing things. These are a few of the ongoing ones.

Liquid versus fixed layouts

Programmers were the original web page designers in the early 1990s. Currently most web designers come from a graphic artist background in print, where the artist has absolute control over the size and dimensions of all aspects of the design. On the web however, the Web designer has no control over several factors, including the size of the browser window and the size and characteristics of available fonts.

Many designers compensate for this by wrapping their entire webpage in a fixed width box, essentially limiting it to an exact pixel-perfect value, which is a fixed layout. Some create the illusion of liquidity by building the graphics for their webpage at a size larger than any current standard monitor size. Other designers say that this is bad because it ignores the preferences of the user, who might have their browser sized a specific way that they like best. These people propose a liquid layout, where the size of the Web page adjusts itself based on the size of the browser window.

There is a usability reason (rather than wanting control) for why a designer may choose a more fixed layout. Studies have shown that there is usually an optimal line width in terms of readability. One rule to appear from such studies is that lines should be between 40-60 characters long, or approximately 11 words per line. But users may choose their windows size and font selection to optimize other factors more important to them.

This decision of which style of layout to use is often made on a case by case basis, depending on the needs and audience of the website.

Flash

Macromedia Flash is a proprietary, robust graphics animation/application development program used to create and deliver dynamic content, media (such as sound and video), and interactive applications over the web via the browser. It is not a standard produced by a vendor-neutral standards organization like most of the core protocols and formats on the Internet.

Many graphic artists use Flash because it gives them exact control over every part of the design, and anything can be animated and generally "jazzed up." Some application designers enjoy flash because it lets them create applications that don't have to be refreshed or go to a new web page every time an action occurs. There are many sites which forego HTML entirely for Flash.

Flash detractors claim that Flash websites tend to be poorly designed, and often use confusing and non-standard user-interfaces. Up until recently, search engines have been unable to index Flash objects, which has prevented sites from having their contents easily found. It is possible to specify alternate content to be displayed for browsers that do not support Flash. Using alternate content also helps search engines to understand the page, and can result in much better visibility for the page.

The most recent incarnation of Flash's scripting language (called "actionscript", which is an ECMA language similar to JavaScript) incorporates long-awaited usability features, such as respecting the browser's font size and allowing blind users to use screen readers. Actionscript 2.0 is an Object-Oriented language, allowing the use of CSS, XML, and the design of class-based web applications.

The final consensus is that Flash is simply a tool, and like all tools it takes a skillful craftsperson to know when, and how, to use it properly. Macromedia's other two products, Fireworks and Dreamweaver, makes Flash integration with graphics and HTML a lot easier.

CSS versus tables

Back when Netscape Navigator 4 dominated the browser market, the popular (but now deprecated) solution available for designers to lay out a Web page was by using tables. Often even simple designs for a page would require dozens of tables nested in each other. Many web templates in Dreamweaver and other WYSIWYG editors still use this technique today. Navigator 4 didn't support CSS to a useful degree, so it simply wasn't used.

After the browser wars were over, and Internet Explorer dominated the market, designers started turning towards CSS as an alternate, better means of laying out their pages. CSS proponents say that tables should only be used for tabular data, not for layout. Using CSS instead of tables also returns HTML to a semantic markup, which helps bots and search engines understand what's going on in a web page. Today, all modern Web browsers now support CSS with different degrees of limitations.

However, one of the main points against CSS is that by relying on it exclusively, control is essentially relinquished as each browser has its own quirks which result in a slightly different page display. This is especially a problem as not every browser supports the same subset of CSS codes. For designers who are used to table-based layouts, developing Web sites in CSS often becomes a matter of replicating what can be done with tables, leading some to find CSS design rather cumbersome. For example, it is rather difficult to produce certain design elements, such as vertical positioning, and full-length footers in a design using absolute positions.

These days most modern browsers have solved most of these quirks in CSS rendering and this has made many different CSS layouts possible. However, people continue to use old browsers, and designers need to keep this in mind. Most notable among these old browsers are Internet Explorer 5 and 5.5 which, according to some web designers, are becoming the new Netscape Navigator 4 — a block that holds the internet back from converting to CSS design.

How it Looks vs. How it Works

Since so many web developers have a graphic arts background, they often pay more attention to how a page looks, without considering how visitors are going to find the page. On the other side of the issue, search engine optimization consultants (SEOs) obsess about how well a web site works: how much traffic it generates, and how many sales it makes. As a result, the designers and SEOs often end up in disputes where the designer wants more 'pretty' graphics, and the SEO wants lots of 'ugly' keyword-rich text, bullet lists, and text links.

Dynamic web design

The traditional method of laying out web pages, HTML is static. There are two ways of delivering content dynamically:

Server-side

A web server, running special software, constructs an HTML page 'on the fly', according to the user's request and possibly other variables, such as time or stock levels.

Suitable scripting languages include:

• ASP
• ColdFusion
• JSP
• Perl
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby

XSLT can be used translate data in XML format into HTML.

MySQL and PostgreSQL are popular free SQL databases, suitable for use with the above. They can be used to allow users, subject to password access if required, to update content.

Client-side

Client-side scripting works at the user's browser, and therefore should not be used for "mission critical' work, where the user's capabilities are not known – it is more suited to adding decoration and other ephemeral content. It is most often achieved through JavaScript.

Client side DHTML can pose major problems for computer accessibility and search engine optimization. Most software designed for assisting people with disabilities, and most search engine robots do not support client side DHTML.

If a web site's menus are built with JavaScript, it is usually impossible for search engines to find the pages listed in the menus, unless an alternative navigation scheme is provided elsewhere on the page.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) means that we will take care of your web design in a manner that will be easy to understand and read for the searching engines robots. The searching engines use robots that visit all the web pages in the world. They review the web pages and web design content. The robots use the information they gather from your web pages to categorize your web site, to place it in an appropriate group of websites based on content, and most importantly to index and rank your web site. Being viewed on the first pages is becoming exceedingly more difficult with each passing day due to the increasing number of web pages. Everyone is realizing the importance and the usefulness of a web page, thus increasing competition on the Internet. The submission of the website to those search engines is your first step. What’s more, there are other measures that need to be taken in order to increase the ranking of your webpage increasing your probabilities of being found in the first pages of the search engine results.

These search engine optimization (SEO) services include: optimization and insertion of keywords, insertion of accurate descriptions and titles for your web design, the elaboration of a site map, and the development of a site map in xml format to be submitted to Google.

The following actions are also required:

• A website with rich content. This includes having written articles about your company’s products, services or endeavors, etc. The searching engines look for only text in the web pages. They index the text you have and compare them with your keywords and the title of the web page. When a user types the same keywords as those to be found in your website your website will have a higher possibility to be in the first pages.
• You need a link page. This is a concept utilized by Google. Their search engine spiders look for links that point to your page and the links that point from your web page to others related to your business. The more links you have the better rank your website is going to have.
• The home page needs to be the page that has the most keyword density. This means that you need to have some text or paragraphs explaining your activities as a company. This is extremely important because the search engines look at the home page first and then they are redirected to the other web pages in your site.
• Google utilizes the use of sitemaps. The owner of a web page can submit their sitemap to Google for their revision and this will also increase the search engine ranking. The sitemap is written in a complex xml format that the spiders understand.