25 Hot female Web Designers

When it comes to the web industry (or computer industry for that matter) men generally rule the roost. In 2007 A List Apart published their web design survey results and found that out of nearly 33,000 professionals who participated, 82.8% were male while only 16.1% were female (1.1% gave no answer).

However, as I browse the web today I’m finding more and more inspirational and creative websites from females across the globe. Just because there are more men involved in the web community doesn’t mean that the best stuff comes from us. There’s a certain elegance, beauty and tone that the female touch can add to a design.

I’ve compiled a list of 25 26 female web designers who I believe are hot at web design and whose designs are an inspiration to the whole of the web design community.

Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey’s 37 questions, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide.

33,000 responses is a lot of data. To make sense of it, An Event Apart commissioned statisticians Alan Brickman and Larry Yu to translate raw data into meaningful findings. Here we present what they found.

Like many aspects of web design itself, our research process took the form of a dialog and included multiple stages of discovery. Preliminary findings answered some questions and raised others requiring additional study. The more we unearthed, the deeper we dug.

The attached report shares everything we learned. We offer it freely to this community that has given us so much. For the curious, we also provide an “anonymized” version of the raw data. It contains every answer to every question by every respondent, excluding only personal information—no names, just the facts. Crunch it yourself and tell us what you find.

We did not learn everything we hoped to. Ambiguities in some parts of the survey yielded ambiguities in some data. After an analysis of the survey itself, we now possess detailed recommendations for improving future surveys.

The findings we present here have never been seen before, because until now, no one has ever conducted public research to learn the facts of our profession. This report is not the last word on web work; it is only the beginning of a long conversation. Read, reflect, and let us hear from you.

By :- Chicago Website Design

Live Chat Software for the conversion to increase?

For many websites and websites is that sixty percent of the visitors off in the ordering process or to the contact. Too bad, because the visitor had apparently have interest. To ensure that this percentage is falling more and more shopping sites use Live Chat Software.

How does it work?

With Live Chat Software, for example CoBrowser.net add a chat button to your website. Visitors who have questions immediately start an IM conversation with you! Many visitors start an IM conversation rather than that they phone or e-mail address. Firstly, a chat start faster. Secondly, it gives visitors the opportunity to request information anonymously.

CoBrowser.net record returning visitors. Also read the instant messaging conversations can easily back you with these visitors have previously conducted.

View and driving

The chat software CoBrowser.net allows visitors to watch and to cooperate with visitors to surf. So you can easily answer questions from visitors by them to the appropriate page of your site to. This functionality is called cobrowsing.

By :- Professional Web Design

Gmail Themes

Today, I was like many other people awake with a new “theme” for Gmail. In the footsteps of Google’s personalized page (iGoogle) is now in Gmail also possible to select your own theme. Under the motto “spice up your inbox with colors and themes” said the official Gmail blog. On the “settings” page has now added an extra tab where you from a 30-many themes to choose from. “” We wanted to go beyond simple color customization, so out of the 30 odd themes we’re launching today, there’s a theme with shiny chrome styling, another one that turns your inbox into a retro notepad, natural scenery themes that change over time , Weather-driven themes that can rain on your mailbox, and fun characters to keep you in good company, “is also available on the same blog.

Like iGoogle are on the themes of Gmail too few to that depending on your location. As the day progresses will also change the Theme to day, night, etc. Because Google, as always, things slowly roll has not yet everyone the opportunity to use the themes, so a preview to this:

By :- Chicago Website Design

Gmail Themes

The Dark Side of Graphic Design: a Source of Disturbance

* Images not understand or misleading: a major error committed some web designers is to rely on icons to suggest surfing to certain parts of the site. Indeed, the significance of the icons leaves wide room for individual interpretations, and therefore there is significant risk that many users do not associate with an image that the user had planned for it. This is particularly true when a site tries to replace the “de facto standard” of the user interface (such as lifts in the scroll bars) by its own GUI elements (often on sites in flash): the how the site becomes difficult for the user, or worse, leads to misinterpretation: nothing is worse for a visitor to believe that his click will cause an action, and another occurs . Similarly, a visitor does not click a link and be on a different page than he expected: a study by J. Spool has shown that such sites increased among users the feeling of loss of time.

Broadly speaking, it seems that both in terms of ease of perception, in terms of efficiency, the hierarchy of the best ways to create links is as follows:

1. blue underlined text links (perfectly standard – effectiveness depends on the quality of text)
2. text links highlighted in a different color text, rather than blue
3. buttons or text links are not underlined blue text
4. underlined text links of the same color as the text (quite disturbing)
5. rather than blue text links are not underlined (to avoid)
6. links icons fixed with a reminder text (ranking varies depending on the quality of the text)
7. Fixed links icons without text (to avoid)
8. links by gifs (forbidden)

Conclusion: how to include elements of visual design in your site.

As with every element of your web project, you need to be rigorous about the integration of Graphic Design elements in your website. For each of them, you must ask the following questions:

This choice helps chart he strongly:

* Identify the sender of the site?
* A professional site?
* Clarify the different areas of content and functional pages of the site?
* Provide sufficient content?
* Cleverly illustrate the content?

For each item, you should also ask if it is not disruptive:

* By loading time it requires,
* By eye strain caused,
* By the multiplication of signals

and you must determine if its meaning is understandable in the same way by anyone, and will not mislead the user.

You should remember every time solutions that maximize the benefits and reduce the disadvantages. If a graphic element does not receive any positive response frankly the first five questions, then consider it as a disturbance and banned it from your design. From experience, the bias of the most sober and simple (but not simplistic) that give the best results. Here are two examples in my view successful: grenouille.com, service-public.fr

And do not forget that once these choices, only a test user (cf.veblog, why and how to test your site) you will know whether they were relevant. An excellent design on paper can be bad for the user, even if you think you have put all the methodological advantages on your side. Finding the right compromise between visual appearance and effectiveness of the design may be a need several trials before reaching the ideal balance.

Article Part -2

By:- Custom Web Design Chicago

The Dark Side of Graphic Design: a Source of Disturbance

Misused, Graphic Design of a site can destroy the good sides previously seen worse user experience:

* Deterioration of ease of use: Most Internet users access Internet via modem, and it will be so for another four years (40 to 60% of Internet users still use a telephone link to access the Net in 2004, according to several institutes forecast). Using too badly compressed image slows the loading of pages and led to increasing dropout rates pages being loaded. Customers are impatient and tend to be more and more sites too long to load some are condemned marginal unless their content is exclusive and essential (which is rare …).

Does this mean that in a few years, we can “to release and illuminated all the web pages into works of art, when the network capacity will make these issues secondary weight images? Unfortunately for aesthetes, it is not. The graphical overload leads other disturbances:

* Disruption by fatigue: the choice of colors too vivid contrasts too brutal (green characters on a red background) or too soft (brown clear characters on white background “broken”), or too many animations on pages will cause rapid eye of the Internet, which will not be encouraged and deepen its site navigation. Moreover, too many rich color eventually counter reading pages.
* The excessive proliferation of signs ( “visual noise”): Too many images, especially too many movies, not directly related to content, reduce the ability to collect information. Studies in which cameras follow the eye movement of the Internet have shown that searches the text primarily of interest when he arrived on a page. So if these are textual information embedded in the middle of other visual signals, the user could he not see the effect of saturation.

However, it should be noted that the Internet is developing fast enough reflexes to defend against these visual disturbances: the same study showed that it ignores everything that spontaneously akin to a banner advertising (even if it does is not …) in the pages visited. Nevertheless, the presence of moving images too closely intertwined in the content is a real barrier to the visibility of information.

The images outside content should be minimized: the identification, look professional pages and understanding between the areas described above should take place with minimal use of graphics. The simplicity is often a factor in determining the usability of a site, and therefore the quality of the experience of the user.

Article Part -1

By :- Professional Web Design

The browser War is over, Long Live The Browser Wars!

Sustainability

The bodies are open standards, ie the publication of all the specifications that make the Web Standards without licensing or copyright. They also responsible for changing these standards according to the needs of their users. The Web standards, like any standard computer, also foster the development of tools conforming to these standards. In this, they are fundamentally different proprietary formats that are closed, change at the whim of their publishers and are exploited by the use of proprietary tools whose availability in time is far from guaranteed.

The use of standards allows the company to be independent third party suppliers and ensure the sustainability of its content and applications that it remains free to evolve according to its own objectives.
Conclusion

Given the benefits they provide and the evolution of browsers, standards are the basis and future of the Web and all companies will sooner or later. The adoption of Web standards in a company can request changes more or less important depending upon their level of preparation, autonomy in technology, number of sites and the quantity and quality of existing content. The procedure should be studied and adapted to each case. Insofar as there is for most companies, except for urgent it is for each of the question, depending on successive revisions of its sites, whether to adopt the standards gradually. This may be a good way to train and make the most of these new methods, reducing the risk of errors and natural resistance to change by a good knowledge of the benefits it can expect to benefit.

To learn more, there are many free resources available on the Web. Open Web is a good starting point, depending on the profile of each. The W3C provides some tips for purchasing sites with Web standards agencies. The Web Standards Projects is also a good source of information. Finally, the site of DevEdge Netscape published its Strategy Central section of case studies, presentations and articles on the transition to Web standards.

Article Part -4

By :- Web Design Company

The browser War is over, Long Live The Browser Wars!

Languages conform to Web Standards improve the maintainability of the code through:

* Their standardization, which involves a single specification and a public documentation
* Validation of tools publicly available (and free for most)

The validation tools (such as the validator (X) HTML and CSS Validator W3C) is a valuable aid for developers who may use it to both learn faster standards but to improve the quality of their code – in addition to the possibility for a customer to check whether a site that is delivered by an internal or external provider. They really help to reduce development costs and maintenance of websites while improving their quality.
Conciseness

The sites based on the methods of design called the old school use many nested tables and images invisible whose code is mixed with the contents and thus transmitted with each page. On a standards compliant Web presentation can be transmitted only once, in the form of one or more style sheets that are kept in memory by the browser. The content, free of the presentation is encoded in a much more concise. The volume of data transmitted over the network is less what has two immediate benefits: the pages appear more quickly on browsers and bandwidth requirements (very expensive item) decrease. The brevity also has a positive impact on the quality of the code easier to maintain.

The real gain will be different in each case, but it depends, among others, the following factors:

* Optimizing the initial code. Under the original site will be optimized file size and the ratio of its useful content and code related to his presentation, the easier it is to reduce the weight with a coding standard.
* Type of traffic the site. On a site whose home page receives 80% of total traffic (the majority of cases for Internet sites and portals), gains will be lower than on a site that is consulted in more depth. This is that the presentation is charged only once with the first page.

A company that applies a graphic for all its intranet sites would see a very significant gain in traffic, thus reducing significantly the costs of network infrastructure. This directly concerns the management computer, still under pressure in terms of cost!

Taking the case of ESPN, which recently adopted the Web standards, gains were: reducing the page size of 50 KB or 50%, which at 40 million page views per day gives a gain of 2 TB / day, 61 To / To months and 730 per year. Take your ISP and telecom contracts, your web statistics and do the math for your own situation.
Modularity

The modular code is favored by both the possibility of using files included to store application code (JavaScript) or style sheets, and the place reserved for the semantic content once detached from notions of presentation. The code may have a logical and easily legible, which is not the case with the use of tables. Modularization allows for multi-disciplinary teams with a minimum of method to work better together, each seeing its field of intervention as defined with little or no danger of interference (side effects). Modularization, because it promotes code reuse, promotes the dissemination of good practice and enables teams to be formed soon.

A code more modular and more concise also has a direct benefit on search engines that n’indexent that the content and less work to identify when it is presented in a simple semantics. Search engines have paramount importance in a corporate intranet, this advantage will not go unnoticed. Combined with a good editorial content and hyperlinks, it is mostly the best way to improve the placement on Internet Search Engines.

Article Part -3

By :- Chicago Website Designers

The browser War is over, Long Live The Browser Wars!

In addition, those who believe that war is over browsers – meant that only Internet Explorer Windows account – are sadly mistaken. On the one hand the supremacy of a single browser is not absolute (as the extraordinary enthusiasm of Mac users for the new Apple browser, Safari), or assured (the standards put all editors on a equally and never seen so many alternative browsers nibbling market share to Microsoft now). On the other hand, observing the evolution of new smart phones embarking real Web Browsers (like Opera) and their sales figures (for a PC sold four mobile phones) will indicate where the next war browsers.

The Web standards are agnostic regarding browsers (or more precisely Web clients) and software can no longer ignore. Using these standards, site developers do more to worry about a particular browser to offer effortless sites that are accessible by the largest number of customers present or future. The direction of communication may create a charter based on a coherent common semantics and some style sheets to cover all Internet sites, intranet and extranet. The manager cannot continue to bear only one browser in the company to control its costs, and all – staff, customers or business partners – to use the browser of their choice, provided they are respectful standards.

The irony of history is that Web standards have not deleted the browser wars, quite the contrary, they protect us at least collateral damage.

Code quality

Maintainability

Maintenance Code Web sites of a company is a well known problem webmasters and IT managers. In a field much older and bordered as software development, the maintainability of the code – ie the degree of ease of maintenance over time – is a critical factor for success or failure. On the Web, where players are more numerous and more diverse than in software development, interference and toggling between the actors (graphic design, programming, integration, content) cause even more problems when their Work is mixed in the same HTML page. The renewal of natural actors also poses a problem when the previous owners used methods or personal and not documented. When the company must change its sites in depth it is often required to juggle between two extremes: the status quo by lack of resources (how many intranets are full of sites that are not updated because of that ?) Or return to square one again where it all for the umpteenth time (coyly avoided the concept of return on investment and over-budget projects intranet).

Article Part -2

By :- Chicago Web Design Firms

The browser War is over, Long Live The Browser Wars!

What is precisely among these channels, browsers? In the past, non respect standards has led to a multiplication of harmful codes owners including Microsoft and Netscape have caused during their famous “browser wars”. Long, these differences have generated substantial additional costs for companies forced to bear and is therefore more test environments owners or legitimate cause frustration on the part of users whose favorite browser was banned, if not the both!

The emergence of video editing tools such as Dreamweaver or Go Live have in part reduced the problem but have only hide. Businesses not using the Web standards continue to face these risks and have become schizophrenic supporting multiple browsers on their websites but by simplifying the problem on the Intranet by the exclusive support of a single browser. This schizophrenia is unfortunately widespread and its consequences are largely ignored by most companies.

First, the company is obliged to maintain several charters between the Internet, extranet and intranet. The need to maintain a consistent brand at all sites (internal and external) then leads to higher costs and longer delays particularly significant in the case of transformations (reorganizations, mergers or partnerships) where the Web is supposed to facilitate the contrary and speed things up.

Second, the services generally believe that the exclusive choice of one browser on the Intranet home to any problem. From the perspective of the manager it is imperative to have only one version of any such software to bear. But the choice of a single browser, when accompanying (or reinforces) a mono-culture among scientists, can lock a business owner in a particularly harmful.

It is indeed forget that the company extends far beyond its walls and intellectual comfort of the PC business and its “software package” home. Teleporting is increasingly practiced on your home, customers increasingly require access to knowledge stored on the intranet of their suppliers, staff nomads have increasingly need access to Intranet at any time and from anywhere, not just houses with the tools – two stories experienced by the author of the article illustrate this point: he was asked to demonstrate an Intranet site to one of the directors, but it did not work on the computer available at that moment (a Mac); Thereafter, called for help as a result of a problem on one of the servers’ company while he was in a conference abroad, it proved impossible to meet its urgent mail via the Web, since the nearest Internet cafe, equipped … for iMacs. The fault was not on the side of browsers available for Mac OS, but owner coding used on these two sites, just tested in a single browser in Windows.

Article Part -1

By :- Professional Web Design

Christmas shoppers go online

The economic slowdown is driving consumers online in search for affordable gifts, says Bidorbuy.

According to the local consumer-to-consumer online trading company, retail sales have decreased by 1.7% year-on-year in the first eight months of this year.

Bidorbuy expects the trading to ease off before Christmas, after having gained momentum in the January-September 2008 period, when the total turnover on the site recorded a 120% increase in comparison with the previous year

Traditionally, trading on Bidorbuy follows a fairly established pattern, trailing off in the pre-Christmas period, to pick up again only in January. Driven by the financial squeeze, South African consumers are coming to Bidorbuy’s site in search of bargain gifts. Among the most sought-after items are MP3 players, GPS units, jewellery, collectible toys and clothing and accessories.

While not all the Bidorbuy sellers have seen a notable increase, many of them report a positive effect of the Christmas season on their sales. According to Bidorbuy, these economically uncertain times will see many people spending their holidays in front of their computers rather than on the beach, and that trading will continue right through the traditional Christmas slowdown.

Boost in sales

Ryan Bacher, MD of NetFlorist, says his company had, surprisingly, an increase in revenue this season compared with last. “Netflorist’s total revenue growth has gone up by 45% from last year and revenue from our flowers has increased by 15%. We’ve got a larger range and the number of people visiting our site has increased considerably. We are surprised by the results as we didn’t forecast a 45% growth. There are more people now with access to the Internet this year from last and we are finding that more people are purchasing goods via the Internet, and we suspect that this has contributed to this growth.”

PushPlay, on online DVD rental company, saw its sales spike over the festive season with increased gift subscription purchases. When compared to the festive season 2007, PushPlay experienced a 10% growth in gift subscription purchases and a 100% growth in their subscriber base.

Debra Wynne, one of the founders of PushPlay, says: “Given that watching DVDs at home is far cheaper than other forms of entertainment and that people still need time out, our service is far more resilient than other businesses during economic downturns. When you have to cut back on luxury items such as going out for dinner and holidays for the family, staying in and watching DVDs is a great alternative for home entertainment.

“So at this stage the economic situation has not affected our subscriber growth negatively, and if we are to look at what has happened to similar services on a global scale, such as Netflix in the US and Lovefilm in the UK, they experience continued subscriber growth, albeit at a slower rate during economic downturns than during a more positive economic climate.

“Other factors, which possibly contribute to our being able to survive the downturn, are the convenience and choice that is bundled with the service, and paying a fixed monthly fee for unlimited DVDs delivered to your door also allows our customers to better manage their monthly budgets.”

The cocoon syndrome

Wynne says an increase in the number of online shoppers in SA as a result of increased broadband connections has increased PushPlay’s revenue. In addition, the tendency for people to cocoon during tough economic times, the desire for convenience, choice and value for money means consumers are moving from traditional DVD rental store to online DVD rental.

“Possibly the only factor which impacts negatively on our business at this stage is that some people would rather be on the beach than watching movies,” Wynne says.

According to ComScore, a digital marketing intelligence organisation, globally e-commerce sales have slowed down, however, the spending rate is still on pace with this time last year. A report by ComScore reveals that 9 December saw $887 million in online sales, the heaviest day on record.

December has experienced $19 438 million in online sales compared to last year at $19 487 million.

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