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CSS or Cascading Style Sheet is a growing trend in web design. By using CSS, you can do away with more traditional web design techniques (eg use of tables) and create a website which is cleaner in coding and purer in content.
Common elements that are usually included in CSS files include:

• Navigation bar look & feel
• Dimensions and margins of the various sections of a web page
• Background and text colors
• Headers and footers

CSS techniques have developed rapidly over the years, nowadays it is quite common for web designers to minimize graphic files and use CSS to create things such as rounded corners, lines, shades and image transparencies. Image bubbles such as the one below is an example.

CSS and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
CSS allows you to place code-heavy elements in a single file. To include those elements in your web pages, you can simply reference to the CSS file with a single line of code.

By doing this, your web content is cleaner and this helps search engines crawl your site more easily.

WordPress (the world’s most popular blogging application) uses CSS substantially. This is probably one of the reasons why it is very search engine friendly.

More Reading…
CSS Galleries: a showcase of beautiful CSS driven websites….nice place to see what CSS can do.

Noupe.com: a showcase of CSS techniques.

CSS Menu Tab Designer: lets you produce CSS menu tabs and buttons easily.

Web design sometimes involves thinking out-of-the-box.

Last year we were involved in an ecommerce website where our client sought to introduce a horizontal scrolling concept to its product range.

Truly something different! Just think about it….out of fifty websites you visit, how many horizontal scrolling websites do you come across?

We were at a loss as to why we had to do this, apart from the novelty factor of course!

Anyway just a couple of days ago, we came across The Horizontal Way – a collection of websites which use the horizontal scrolling concept.

Eminence Suit is what we would call a partially Horizontal Scrolling site. In comparison, the sites featured in The Horizontal Way are more hard-core and take horizontal scrolling to a new level. If you ever wanted to design such a site, it’s a good reference point.

Ever wondered how you can download an entire website and run it locally on your PC?

Well, you can save it page by page (using File – Save As in your browser) and then rebuild it by changing the navigation links so that all the web pages are correctly linked. Those of you who have tried this will know how hard it is!

Or you can make life easy for yourself and use HT Track, a really cool software which has been around for a couple of years now.

HTTrack works on most websites and can even download Flash SWF files. It is able to follow web links and hence create a correct path for navigating the site after downloading it to your PC.

Read more »

For almost as long as there’s been a World Wide Web, there’s been Yahoo.com.

And for those of you who have been surfing the web long enough, you might remember that the first generation Yahoo looked like a website with lots of links and cartoon icons at the top.

Of course today the website has since evolved into something more serious.

Read more »

If you are signed up with our Bronze, Silver or Gold Web Hosting package, then CONGRATULATIONS!

Your SmarterMail web mail system has one of the most advanced anti-spam control features on the market.

SmarterMail allows you to be as aggressive as you want when combating spam. This article is rather technical but we hope it helps you fine-tune your spam settings to minimize spam.

HOW IT WORKS
When an email comes in, several spam checks are run based on preset criteria. The checks that fail add points to the email. A final score is calculated after which the system assigns a “spam probability” to the email.

Spam checks include the following:

Bayesian Filtering
Bayesian Filtering applies statistical analysis to determine whether or not an email appears to be spam. Together with blacklists and SPF (Sender Policy Framework), this allows you to be quite sure whether or not an email is spam. Bayesian Filtering can be memory intensive so SmarterMail allows you to set the maximum resources that will be dedicated to this. Read more »

To engage your users, you will first need to know how users think and behave when surfing a website.

SCAN & CLICK

Basically user habits on the web are akin to customer habits in a shop.

Most people will glance at each new page, scan some of the text then click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles what they are looking for.

In fact, large parts of a web page often go unnoticed.

Most users search for something interesting, useful or clickable. As soon as some promising candidates are found, they click. That is why Google Adsense has worked so well over the years!

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To make a website look nice, one of our favourite approach is to maintain a simple and minimalist style while using lines, shades and icons to give it some graphic impact.

Look at Blogger.com for example.

No we did not design this website unfortunately :) It was actually done by Douglas Bowman and his team at StopDesign – notice how graphical icons can be used to give impact to the design?

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So after being in the web development business for so many years, what are some of the core values that we have developed?

We figure that if we document this carefully and if every team member subscribes to it, then we would have a good foundation to build our business. So here they are: Read more »

A good design starts with a good concept.

Our clients come from a wide range of industries and our challenge for each and every job is to understand your ideas and convert them into something tangible, meaningful, user-friendly, functional and attractive.

Some of the design dynamics that we look at during the Concept Design stage include: Read more »

To us, Web Design involves a balance between form, substance and functionality.

Good design plays a vital role for your business, as a visual language that can be used to communicate your message in a powerful way to your target audience.

A website that is well designed should create curiosity and engage your audience…. so that they will take that second look. You would want to: Read more »