Even when the economic situation is shiny, cost reduction and efficiency improvement are important when designing web sites for a client. While it is not recommendable to make cost savings at the expense of quality, there are many ways in which you can achieve cost reduction and efficiency improvements and still design a top-notch site.

Get Shared Hosting for Your Client

One of the obvious ways to reduce costs and improve efficiency when web designing for a client is to get shared hosting for them. Web hosting costs are recurring costs and as a result they are one of the best candidates for optimization. Dedicated web hosting is great but only for enormous sites with a lot of traffic.

Since a new site will hardly have millions of visitors a month, the best you can do is get cheap website hosting. Later, if the site becomes a high traffic one, you can easily move to more expensive website hosting packages.

Pick a Reliable but Cheap Website Hosting

When we recommend to pick cheap website hosting, this doesn’t mean that you should pick the cheapest offer without paying attention to the quality of service this website hosting provider offers. Today there are many great cheap website hosting offers and if you don’t know how to pick one there are plenty of articles on that will help you. On the other hand, extremely cheap webhosting also comes at a price, so you need to find the balance between quality and cost.

Use Ready Templates

Many website hosting providers offer free web site builders or ready templates you can use in your designs. If you don’t see such goodies listed in the features list of your webhosting package, ask your webhosting provider if they offer them. If your webhosting provider doesn’t offer them, most likely you will be allowed to use third-party website builders or website templates. Search the web and see what you can find.

Use Open Source Software

Similarly to free web site builders and free templates, many web hosting companies run on open source software. Open source software is great not only because as a rule it is free (though you can make a donation to the development team, if you like) but because it is also very reliable.

Similarly to webhosting costs, software licensing costs tend to be recurring costs. This is why it is best if you select open source software – you will not pay initial fees and you will not pay subscription fees later. Anyway, Linux, PHP, MYSQL, Apache and the other similar open source technologies are what powers the Net, so if you have worries that these products are not of high quality because they are free, your worries are in vain.

As you see, there are ways in which you can design a high quality site and keep the costs under control. The most important steps in that direction are to get shared webhosting, to pick reliable but cheap webhosting, and to use ready templates/open source software your webhosting provider most likely offers. If you follow these steps, your clients will be happy.

[flashvideo file=videos/mario-and-the-princess.flv /]

PLEASE BEWARE OF LANGUAGE IN THIS VIDEO CLIP.

Mario saves the princess and after spending countless hours killing mushrooms and jumping over turtle shells what does he get in return ?

This small video clip is taken from the DVD Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy from comedy genius Seth Macfarlane, the creator of Family guy and American dad.

I often wondered what happened after Mario saved the princess, now we know

Webtwist Design have decided to lauch a Danish website since We mostly consist of Danish people  on the Webtwist team and most of Us speaks Danish

The site is already online and We have taken a different approach this time. A more colorful and vibrant site instead of the minimalistic style of Webtwist Design. I hope you all will like it.

Please visit it here flash-design.dk

Dansk Flash design og Dansk Web  design

FLASH DESIGN

Flash design is a niche in internet design that has exploded over the last few years. Connections have speeded up to tens of hundreds of times what they were five years ago, hence use of Flash has grown exponentially. Animations which would earlier take minutes to open, open almost simultaneously along with the site.

Flash is a relatively simple to use program that allows you to make simple as well as complex animations for use on the web. But before you start integrating these animations on your website, you need to actually learn how to make one. I can’t really teach you exactly how to create flash animations, right down to the technicalities of it, so I am assuming you have a decent knowledge of Flash and just need a few pushes and prods on your way to a better Flash design.

Watch Flash videos by the best in the business and see how they do it. There are thousands of free videos out there that teach you specific techniques in Flash which will really jazz up your application. Such videos can be found on sites like youtube literally by the tens of thousands and you’ll never run out of new stuff to learn. Read the rest of this entry »

Flash Web Design

Flash has become an integral part of web design these days. Flash can be found on most good sites, though it might not be very obvious. Interactive images, cool looking menus, and a beautiful logo – they are almost always made with Flash. Not only is Flash usable on almost all platforms, it is very versatile and can be modified exactly as per the persons
requirements. There are a few precautions you need to take while using Flash. You must keep file sizes small, and ensure your flash animations will play across all platforms and screen resolutions. Enough about the precautions, let me explain on some techniques you can use for a good flash web design.

1. Rollover effects

These are some very cool effects which will surely impress a visitor no end. It basically means that the content on the page will change when a person brings his mouse pointer over a particular picture. So you can have a picture saying “Home”, another saying “Contact us” and yet another saying “Games” and whenever the user moves his/her pointer over any of the images, the link would simultaneously change to that page. It’s a very cool effect which will make the browsing experience much easier for the visitor, as well as leave an imprint on his mind. Read the rest of this entry »

Google has finally added an elective “undo send” feature to GMail, which permits you to rapidly block an email from going to the wrong receiver, with lacking details or absent attachments. It’s part of Google Labs, which has lately added YouTube, Flickr and Picasa previews and other email fine-tunes.

The feature permits 5 secs for the GMail user to click “Undo” next to the standard “Your message has been sent” dialogue; this brings back the email to draft-status, and permits not only the receivers but text, attachments and formating to be fine-tuned. What it won’t do is hook back a mail that has already been sent out. To apply GMail Undo, go to Settings and then Labs tab, and the option is down close to the bottom of the list. We would like to experience a user-selectable longer time hold up choice in the time to come.

Gmailblogspot link

Why would a task manager or business analyst need to know how to make a storyboard for a Flash animation? You could debate that this is the territory of a graphic designer or animator, and you would be correct. But applying storyboards is an efficient method for finding out the price of an animation, and surely budgeting considerations are a duty of a task manager.
In the first place, we should have some sort of definition of what a storyboard is. At the most basic stage, a storyboard is a series of images which map out the chronological sequence of an movie or animation. It’s wide accepted that a working specification should be developed before any coding takes place, so why wouldn’t you use some kind of designing process prior to creating a Flash animation?
Before you say “but I can’t draw. Last time I drew a stick man, people guessed it was a spud”, you need not concern. Artistic skill isn’t as vital as you may think, sequence is of greater implication (e.g. first, many camera photoflashes goes off and then the limousine approaches, etc).
The formatting I use for a storyboard is really basic. This is intentional because it needs to be realized by both graphic designers and customers.
The construction is as follows:
Document Purpose – this is for the gain of anybody seeing the document for the first time. It’s a short instruction of what the document is about. For example; this document demonstrates a storyboard for the animation appearing on the Blue Widgets website. The thought is to show a series of illustrations in order to help see the sequence of the interactive animation. Read the rest of this entry »

Mozilla has declared the availableness of Firefox 3.1 beta 3. Firefox 3.1 brings out support for the HTML 5 video element, the fresh high-performance TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, and various other obligating features. This beta irons out some bugs and propels the browser a step nearer towards the final release. Firefox 3.1 was in the first place destined to be an additive update aimed for release in late 2008. Plans changed, nevertheless, and the feature set arose importantly. As a effect of the holds up and the large number of remarkable betterments that are now admitted in the code base, the coders are currently working on altering the version number from 3.1 to 3.5.The 3.1 release will bring a great deal of very impressive modifications, including performance enhancements and new features for users and developers. It includes Firefox’s new high-performance TraceMonkey JavaScript runtime which importantly hikes up the speed of script execution. In addition to quicker performance, the JavaScript engine has also acquired support for background processing with the new worker threads feature. Native JSON parsing support will also step-up performance for certain forms of dynamic Web applications. Firefox 3.1 delivers more plenteous multimedia with support for the new HTML5 canvas element which is powered by a built-in Ogg codec. There are also some fresh rendering effects like support for using SVG filters on HTML. New CSS3 features implemented in 3.1 include shadows and border images.

Again the Japanese are going crazy. You can only love ‘em. No one else has the guts to invent and produce such crazy items. This time it’s a piggy bank with a face. It might not sound like something new, but this one literally eats your money! It has sensor implanted in the eyes and they react as soon as an object gets close. The Face Bank / piggy bank then starts to open it’s mouth start chewing. Now this one I got to own.

Take a look at the creepy youtube video.

Buy the Face bank on yesasia click here

Fully Flared a skateboarding movie made possible by Ty Evans, Spike Jonze and Cory Weincheque and of course Lakai.
Fully Flared was delayed two years because of the important team additions.
It took app. 4 years to make this awesome skate video.
They shot a lot of footage which resulted in a lot of extra film, the extra footage is going to be used for other skate films.
They used Sony DCR-VX1000 cameras and Panasonic HVX200 mostly to shot the movie. Read the rest of this entry »