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Developer Spotlight - Boyd Design - Website Design Sydney
Small businesses face unique challenges when taking their business online.
Their web sites often need to be moderately complex but they can lack the financial resources that bigger companies have access to. So how do you put your small business online without compromising quality? You need a web design firm who understands your particular needs.
Boyd Design is an award winning web design firm located in Sydney, Australia who specialize in small business web design. They have the know how to get a business online complete with e-commerce, content management, web hosting, search engine optimization, forums and more.
Their web design packages as well as their Search engine optimisation packages are affordable, loaded with features, and come with many available options. Their portfolio pretty much speaks for itself though with some great examples of their work and capabilities.
So put your business web site into good hands and get it right the first time with Boyd Design. Don’t forget to visit their Blog which shows further examples of their work and some case studies.
Blog design inspiration
Thanks to the ease of starting and running a blog, many people are choosing to install blog software like Wordpress and to maintain their web sites using this rather then plain HTML web pages or a full content management system. Blogs are not only easier to maintain and update but are also a lot more interactive and make it easier to build an online community. Designing a blog can be less time consuming too then traditional web design from scratch, depending on how unique you would like your design to be. A well matched blog and design however creates the best impression, credibility and can take your site places.
While not everyone is of the same opinion obviously, personally I’m a huge fan of unusual, artistic blog designs. Two good examples of such designs that stand out to me are:
Sketchblog, the blog of an illustrator.
Krolikov.net, an artist and designer.
I love all the effort and attention to details that goes into designs like these. On the down side though designs like that can be a little slow to load and are not really suited to every type of site. For sites which are very content oriented and change all the time such as news sites for example, illustration will be kept to a minimum. This doesn’t mean they have to be boring however.
A good example here is the famous revolution wordpress theme:
Click here to view more details about the Revolution theme
While sites like the above are inspiring, it is also good to learn from the web design mistakes of others which are showcased at webpagesthatsuck.com . The current contender #2 on their site for the worst design for 2008 is quiet breathtaking (unfortunately not really for the right reasons though) and although is not a blog design as such, it’s certainly worth a visit.
Web designer spotlight - ClockTower Media
ClockTower Media is a Seattle web design company that offers a full range of services including Flash design, content management, e-commerce, custom programming, SEO, web hosting and much more. Their expertise ranges from dynamic web applications to web dashboard design. All web sites are built with online best practices, up to date trends and usability in mind.
Once your web site is built ClockTower Media is then able to get the word out about your business with marketing services which include: sponsored search, search engine optimization, email newsletters, landing pages and more. Continued maintenance is also offered as well as in depth analysis of you current performance including back link reports, conversion tracking and more.
To see their complete range of services please click here.
Template solutions: BuyTemplates.net
BuyTemplates.net is a web templates provider with many good options to choose from depending on the course you would like to take in the design of your web site. You can:
a) Buy a ready made 5 page template from $29
b) Buy a ready made template and have it customized to your liking
or
c) Have a template designed from scratch to your specifications for $499
There is also a membership option which for a fee allows you access to all the templates with unlimited downloads. This is great especially if you are a designer and you would like to offer your clients a wide choice of designs to choose from. All the templates are editable in Dreamweaver, Frontpage or your choice of HTML editor. As well as HTML templates, the site also offers Joomla templates.
You can order as many or as few services as you need from buytemplates. From simply ready made web templates to the full package of custom design, hosting and maintenance, buytemplates.net can do it all.
Xara Extreme
With Xara xtreme you can create web pages, vector illustration, edit photos and graphics, even animations. Basically it is software that is very very handy for creating web sites. You won’t need a separate graphics, vector and HTML editor and you certainly won’t need to pay the price for all three.
Xara Xtreme has been created with the beginner in mind so it’s easy to use while still being powerful.
Some extra useful features
- Create seamless panoramas by pressing a button. Simply take a series of photos and Xtreme will automatically figure out the joining points for you and put the images together.
- Create CSS based web pages with mousovers, even popups.
- Give text or photos a cool 3D effect with a click of a button.
Click Here to download the trial version and see for yourself.
Web Design Styles History
I’ve been seeing many articles pop up on the internet trying to define the web 2.0 style design, or current design trends (see here, here, here and there are lots more no doubt). This made me think about past web design trends, which these days seem rather outdated but were popular in their time. (This article is based around my own experience)
Around 13 years ago is when I first discovered the internet. My browser being text based I guess there wasn’t a whole lot to see, this is what things looked like in Lynx.
Navigation was with the arrow keys and space bar. Internet access was free at this time too through a local university.
By 1996 things were a bit more image intensive and along came the era of the animated gif, horizontal divider lines, frames and so much more. Under construction gifs were in high demand especially if they were animated. An average web site might have looked something along the lines of:
Other characteristics of this era were the single column LOOOOOOONG web page (content divided by the horizontal line - animated of course) There was usually a tiling background behind the text. There are still a few examples of this kind of design around today.
By 1998 the bright graphics were flashing a little less and pages had started to become a little more ordered especially for those who discovered the use of tables in formatting their pages. While the use of tables is frowned upon these days, back then it was kind of a step up from the flashing, animated “everything in one column” approach of earlier.
To me this year marks the beginning of the “metal buttons and interfaces” era. I looked up to graphic designers like Andy Evans from andyart.com (site bought by someone else since) who made the coolest (and animated!) navigation interfaces around.
Slicing graphics into many parts and putting them together with tables began with a vengeance around this time. Interfaces were almost always animated with a javascript mouseover script. Common themes tended to be metallic and futuristic, the more wires the better.
Some example “interfaces” can still be found on sites like eyeball-design.com although they have brought theirs up to date and it looks rather good.
Topaz designs one of the better designers of the era but unfortunately her site hasn’t been updated in years.
Other popular styles of the time were the “left side background pattern“, the “click here to enter my site” splash page and the precursor of the web template called “web sets” (which you can still find plenty of be searching for the term.)
Around 2002 web sites started to take on a more corporate kind of look. Possibly due to templatemonster’s popularity many template providers started appearing, offering this type of magazine-like look consisting of a large picture as the header and the information organized into smaller columns underneath.
This style is still fairly popular today however the trend seems to be towards less images used in the design and more focus on the content. Artwork also seems to replace photos often.
No doubt there’s plenty of change yet to come as more young people have a chance to study and profit from design, new software is invented and new talent enters the field each year.
