Freshh Media

The homepage (the front page of your website) is where you and your company get to make a first impression and we all know what they say about first impressions.. It’s the first place new visitors come and where old visitors come back. You must cater to both types of customers. There are a few things that are essential to your homepage and each is explained below.

Navigation

Navigation is the most important part of your homepage. It doesn’t matter what else is on your site, if the visitors can’t get there. On your homepage your visitors need to be able to reach every part of your site. Your links on your navigation bars should be the same on every page. Your visitor will then know how to get back to whatever page really interested him. When users cannot find what they want they simple look at another site. This is a fact. Your links on the navigation bars should also be simple (one or two words) but descriptive. Use text for navigation not buttons. Buttons look great but they take time to download and you don’t want your visitors to leave before they can see the whole page, do you?

Branding

Branding is another essential element for you homepage. I am sure that your small business has a logo and it’s pasted on everything you can find, to promote your business. Well, it should be posted in a predominate place on your website too. We all know that branding is words or a mark of a company (such as a logo) that shows the consumer the identity of the producer of the product/service. Showing your logo on your homepage reminds users exactly where they are.

Content

Last but not least is content. Content is also very important. You must remember to write your content like you are speaking to your visitor as it creates a better connection between your website and the visitor. Your homepage content must be fresh and interesting to make them want to read more of your site. You might create links to the inside of your site in the text. Also, you will want to include in layman’s terms exactly what you or your company does. You would be amazed how many websites you have to search to find out what their purpose is.

These things should get you started on building your homepage. There is one rule that I have learned. It is the KISS rule (Keep it Simple Student). Your homepage does not need to be flashy with all types of images, and flash design, or blinking. Most people like sites when they are simple and easy to understand. You must remember who your audience is. Therefore you need to speak in their language.

Style sheet is a progressive breakthrough for the advancement of web. Today, more and more browsers are implementing style sheets, opening authors’ eyes to unique features that allow influence over presentation while preserving platform independence. The advantages of style sheets have become – apparent — and the disadvantage of continually creating more HTML tags — galore — for presentation effects with the gradual development of CSS.

Let’s understand CSS in the right perspective.

Style sheets in retrospect

Style sheets have been around in one form or another since the beginnings of HTML in the early 1990s .

As the HTML language grew, however, it came to encompass a wider variety of stylistic capabilities to meet the demands of web developers . With such capabilities, style sheets became less important, and an external language for the purposes of defining style attributes was not widely accepted until the development of CSS.

Teething problems with implementation of CSS

Many implementations of CSS are fraught with inconsistencies, bugs and other quirks . Authors have commonly had to use hacks and workarounds in order to obtain consistent results across web browsers and platforms .

One of the most well-known CSS bugs is the Internet Explorer box model bug; box widths are interpreted incorrectly in several versions of the browser, resulting in blocks which appear as expected in most browsers, but are too narrow when viewed in Internet Explorer. The bug can be avoided, but not without some cost in terms of functionality.

This is just one of hundreds of CSS bugs that have been documented in various versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera many of which reduce the legibility of documents. The proliferation of such bugs in CSS implementations has made it difficult for designers to achieve a consistent appearance across platforms.

Currently there is strong competition between Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine, Opera’s Presto layout engine , and the KHTML engine used in both Apple’s Safari and the Linux Konqueror browsers – each of them is leading in different aspects of CSS. Internet Explorer remains the worst at rendering CSS by standards set down by World Wide Web Consortium as of 2005 .

Some breakthroughs …

These problems have preisely led the W3C to revise the CSS2 standard into CSS2.1, which may be regarded as something of a working snapshot of current CSS support. CSS2 properties which no browser had successfully implemented were dropped, and in a few cases, defined behaviours were changed to bring the standard into line with the predominant existing implementations..

What makes style sheets significant enough?

et representsStyle she an enormous step forward for the Web. With the separation of content and presentation between HTML and style sheets, the Web no longer needs to drift away from the strong ideal of platform independence that provided the medium with its initial push of popularity. Authors can finally influence the presentation of documents without leaving pages unreadable to users

A style sheet is made up of style rules that tell a browser how to present a document. There are various ways of linking these style rules to your HTML documents, but the simplest method for starting out is to use HTML’s STYLE element. This element is placed in the document HEAD, and it contains the style rules for the page.

Functionality and Usage of CSS

CSS is well-designed to allow the separation of presentation and structure. Prior to CSS, nearly all of the presentational attributes of an HTML document were contained within the HTML code; all font colors, background styles, element alignments, borders and sizes had to be explicitly described, often repeatedly, in the midst of the HTML code.

CSS allows authors to move much of that information to a stylesheet, resulting in considerably simpler HTML code. The HTML documents become much smaller and web browsers will usually cache sites’ CSS stylesheets. This leads to a reduction in network traffic and noticeably quicker page downloads.

For example, the HTML element h2 specifies that the text contained within it is a level two heading. It has a lower level of importance than h1 headings, but a higher level of importance than h3 headings. This aspect of the h2 element is structural .

Customarily, headings are rendered in decreasing order of size, with h1 as the largest, because larger headings are usually interpreted to have greater importance than smaller ones. Headings are also typically rendered in a bold font in order to give them additional emphasis. The h2 element may be rendered in bold face, and in a font larger than h3 but smaller than h1 . This aspect of the h2 element is presentational .

Prior to CSS, document authors who wanted to assign a specific color, font, size, or other characteristic to all h2 headings had to use the HTML font element for each occurrence of that heading type.

Moreover, CSS can be used with XML, to allow such structured documents to be rendered with full stylistic control over layout, typography, color, and so forth in any suitable user agent or web browser.

CSS has its share of inconsistencies as well

CSS may at times be misused, particularly by the author of web documents. Some developers who are accustomed to designing documents strictly in HTML may overlook or ignore the enabling features of CSS. For instance, a document author who is comfortable with HTML markup that mixes presentation with structure may opt to use strictly embedded CSS styles in all documents. While this may be an improvement over using deprecated HTML presentational markup, it suffers from some of the same problems that mixed-markup HTML does; specifically, it entails a similar amount of document maintenance.

Discrepancies compared: CSS vs programming languages

CSS also shares some pitfalls common with programming languages. In particular, the problem of choosing appropriate names for CSS classes and identifiers may afflict CSS authors. In the attempt to choose descriptive names for CSS classes, authors might associate the class name with desired presentational attributes; for example, a CSS class to be applied to emphasized text might be named “bigred,” implying that it is rendered in a large red font.

While such a choice of naming may be intuitive to the document author, it can cause problems if the author later decides that the emphasized text should instead be green; the author is left with a CSS class called “bigred” that describes something that is green. In this instance, a more appropriate class name might have been “emphasized,” to better describe the purpose or intent of the class, rather than the appearance of elements of that class.

In a programming language, such a misuse might be analogous to using a variable name “five” for a variable which contains the value 5; however, if the value of the variable changes to 7, the name is no longer appropriate.

CSS in a nutshell

CSS is used by both the authors and readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout and other aspects of document presentation. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document structure (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS).

This separation provides a number of benefits, including improved content accessibility, greater flexibility and control in the specification of presentational characteristics, and reduced complexity of the structural content. CSS is also capable of controlling the document’s style separately in alternative rendering methods, such as on-screen in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on braille-based, tactile devices.

CSS allows complete and total control over the style of a hypertext document. The only way this can be illustrated in a way that gets people excited is by demonstrating what it can truly be, once the reins are placed in the hands of those able to create beauty from structure.

To stay technologically ahead, one has to be innovative. To be innovative, one has to have passion, an enduring desire to improve that which others think to be good enough. With the growth of the Internet, more and more companies are taking their business online. The Internet offers an additional opportunity for income that requires little overhead costs. That is why it has become attractive for companies to put their business in the virtual market.

Although some companies opt to hire a full time graphic designer, there are times when their service is unnecessary. For this reason, you can always to choose to hire a designer only when you need them. That way they can give you the attention that you need when you need it and save money from not having to pay a regular employee. You only have to spend money in paying a graphic designer when you solicit their service.

You would probably ask yourself, why hire a graphic designer when you can do the job yourself? Good question, but if you are really thinking of making a good impression to your customers and you do not have so much artistic talent in yourself, a professional can help you come up with designs for you to choose from. Remember that it is not always about the money. Sometimes it is worth spending a little cash when you can expect bigger returns. And you will be amazed with the difference a graphic designer can make with the idea that you have.

Say for instance, you want to create a logo for your company and you want to make your logo look really attractive and catchy so you told your designer that you want different fonts and colors in your logo. But your designer said that what you are thinking can indeed make your business look catchy but at the same time give people bad signals. So he created different designs for you to choose from but keeping with the theme that you have in mind. You will be surprised to see that he has developed designs that made your idea look beautiful and impressive.

You see in these circumstances that a professional designer can help make your idea develop into a remarkable design. Remember that you are building a public image for your business so you would not want to sacrifice the quality of your logo for the price. After all, a well designed logo or any other promotional material can be your ticket to a successful business ahead of you.

Unlike many of the Xsitepro reviews that you might find on the Internet, this is a fully unbiased review that does not include a single affiliate link. You see, it is my opinion that you can not properly review a product if you are hoping to encourage people to click through via your affiliate link in order to earn you a commission. It’s fairly obvious, that if you’re looking for affiliate commission, your review is going to be good, this means that it is not a fair review.

First off, let me explain what Xsitepro actually is. It’s a product that is aimed at people without a technical background who would like to have the freedom and flexibility to launch multiple web sites. There are a number of reasons why people would like to do this, most notably to create a web site that can be used to launch or sell a product, earn affiliate revenue or make money from contextual advertising, such as Yahoo Publishing or Google Adsense.

The reason why Xsitepro is so powerful, is that someone without a technical background is able to launch a fully fledged web site within just a few hours. This means that you are only limited by your ambition and time.

To give you an idea of how easy it is to create a new web site, I have provided this walk through below. However, it is very much worth pointing out that the tutorials and documentation provided with this product are excellent. This is very important as it ensures that you’re able to realise your return on investment much quicker if you can leverage the full capabilities of the program.

Creating a website in Xsitepro.

Simply open your Xsitepro program and select “Add Project”. As you’d expect, this creates a new project, you can name this and add notes. You can also include your project description and add your keywords.

Highlight your new project and select “Add web site”, you will then be given a choice of 4 different web site layouts. These include, a blank web page, graphical sales letter, sales letter and affiliate templates. Upon selecting any of these choices, you will be presented with multiple choice of Xsitepro templates.

For this example, I will select a blank web page, once selected you will be asked to provide a name. Once you have decided upon a name, you have the option to provide the following web page details, title, description, keywords, author, copyright and other notes. You can complete this immediately, or come back to it at a later date.

Across the top of your console, you will see the following tabs, website information, page layout, web pages, other and publishing details. Our next step is to select web pages, this is the page that we can add new pages, product pages, article pages, external links or simply import multiple pages into the system. It is possible to create 1,000 page web site by simple importing your keyword list via the multiple page option, Xsitepro will even capitalise the words if you choose to include them on your navigation bar.

For each page that you create, you have the option of checking a box should you wish that page to appear on the navigation bar, page footer or site map. For the actual page content, you can choose a traditional HTML view, or you may prefer the Design view which is similar to a word processor. If you have content in other programs, you can simply cut and paste into your page.

A very unique feature with Xsitepro is that it helps you to create pages that are search engine friendly. Each page that you create is measured for SEO effectiveness, this means that your “On Page SEO” is always taken care of if you follow the suggestions made by the program.

Once you have created your pages, you might want to include your Adsense code or other affiliate links such as Amazon. In Xsitepro, this is as easy as right clicking. Once you have added your Adsense and affiliate link information to the program, you simply right click and “Add Adsense Code” or “Add Snippet”.

Now that your site has content and links, you might well be ready to upload your site. Again, in Xsitepro this is very easy. Before Xsitepro came along, I always had enormous difficulty uploading web sites, this all changed very quickly.

To upload a site, you need to do the following, enter your domain name, home directory, FTP Server, username and password, once entered, you select “Tools” and “Publish” . That’s it, your site begins to upload and you’ll be online shortly.

Obviously, this describes building a very simple web site and uploading it to the Internet. The objective of explaining how to create a web site in Xsitepro was to give you a sense of how easy it is. The real benefit of this product is taking advantage of all of the other features and functions. Don’t worry, you do not need to be a technical wizard to get the hand of these, you’ll pick them up quite quickly and before long you’ll be creating stunning web sites.

Once you start to gain a little bit of experience from using Xsitepro, you may identify what I consider to be the only real weakness of the product, that is the lack of templates that are available out of the box. It is possible to create original templates for yourself, however this requires a certain amount of artistic flair and knowledge of a program such as Photoshop. Unfortunately, these skills were not handed to everyone.

Fortunately, there are great companies out there that are starting to provide great Xsitepro templates. These are usually available via download and you can simply import these templates into your own Xsitepro program, this allows you to build your content around the new template.

One of the better companies offering these templates is Xsiteprotemplates4U.com, they already have a wide selection of templates available and are adding to their portfolio on a daily basis, so there should be something there for most people, best of all is that these fun and original designs will not break the bank.

I hope that you found this review helpful. I plan to follow this article up with some more detailed tips and tricks and how to really start to get the most of this great product.

Oh, in case you have not already guessed, I think that Xsitepro is a great product. Their sales page does not do it justice at all. Whether you’re technical or non technical and currently use Dreamweaver or Frontpage to create your web sites, I fully recommend that you look into Xsitepro. There’s a one year guarantee, so really there is nothing to lose!

Good luck.

Designing a business card online is not any different from designing one offline. There are a lot of factors to consider to ensure that your business card will serve the purpose that it is intended in the first place.

When designing a business card online you should:

1. Try to design the business card yourself. Nothing like avoiding the charges you have to pay when hiring designers to do the job. Besides, you are your own boss. Nobody will tell or criticize you on what you want attained.

2. Use shadows on texts so that when you use light texts, it will be easier to see even though the background is also light. You would not want your readers squinting their eyes out just to see what is written in your cards.

3. Go for bulks. Did you know that having more quantities printed can save you a lot in printing costs? Many people do not know that by cutting on the amount of printing materials, they are paying more than they think they are. If you compute the overall value, you will see that you actually save more by printing more copies.

4. Opt for UV coating. UV coats for cards give them longer protection and color life. Business cards do not just serve as one day cards. For sure, you will want them to last longer so people will be able to use them for quite sometime.

5. Try out different business card design and layout. The design you want may not go with the image you have chosen. Try experimenting with various designs so you will get to see which one will look best combined together.

6. Convert to gray scale. This will give your cards a unique look that will differentiate it from other typical looking business cards. Gray scale tends to look good with color texts too. The colors are more emphasized.

7. Leave blanks. This provides simplicity – white space. This factor is especially needed if your business card is full of graphic and designs. By leaving some space, you give readers a chance to breathe from all that is being shown to them.

If you do not get the design you want, you are probably better off hiring experts to do the job for you. They can do this online too. All you have to do is approve the final draft and get them from a printer near you.

Creating a business card is made easy nowadays. All you have to do is think of something that is eye-catching enough.