Webtwist Design blog

How to Reduce Costs and Improve Efficiency While Web Designing for a Client

admin — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:49:15 +0000

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.

Mario saves the princess but what does he get in return….

admin — Sat, 16 May 2009 20:10:38 +0000

[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 launches Danish Web and Flash design company

admin — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:59:56 +0000

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

The Scope on Flash Design

admin — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:56:56 +0000

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.

You should also ensure that the flash content you make must run on all kinds of platforms. This means your flash content should not require a high end PC to be displayed properly. It should run on old, low memory PC’s without any hiccups. The basic reasoning behind this is that a lot of traffic these days is from third world countries like India and China where the hardware may not be the best. You should have a sufficiently high frame rate, but nothing so fast so as to increase the file size dramatically an/or take a lot of processing power. Nobody likes to wait for 5 minutes for the site to load completely.

Lastly, make sure what you create is pleasing to look at. Avoid excessive use of graphics and use graphics to supplement your content, don’t make it the main focus. Be original in your layout and use of colour schemes. People should remember your site even after they leave it, your design shouldn’t be a carbon copy of another good looking site you found on the net. Use subtle colours that don’t hurt the eye and keep it simple. Most importantly, put yourself in the visitors shoes, would you like to see what is on the site? If the answer is yes, you’re well on your way!

Take a moment to see our flash design portfolio

Flash Web Design

admin — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:45:05 +0000

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.

2. Use unique and stand out fonts

Sometimes, you don’t even need to do hocus pocus with images to make your site look cool. There are hundreds of free fonts available on the internet which are professionally made and are usable by the general public. These fonts will help you achieve the effect you see in the banners of big companies….totally free of cost! A good font logo negates the need to have a flash logo made, which might cost a lot of time, effort and money.

3. Use plenty of white spaces

This might not seem terribly important to you, but white spaces play a major role in moulding user perceptions about your site. Simply said, white spaces are empty spaces on your site. They help create a feeling of space on your site. You can create more white spaces by reducing images/flash animations on your site and increasing the space between various objects. This of course, should not be at the cost of maintaining a comfortable page length.

4. Put image effects to good use

Use effects like fading and transparency to make good flash designs on your site. Techniques like sepia, watermark and grayscale help images on your site stand out to the eye. Fading and transparency can be used to good effect in making collages of various pictures, which when done correctly give a fabulous effect.

Apart from this, you can follow the standard guidelines like making a sitemap, ensuring there are no broken links on the site to ensure you have a good design. Remember, one can have a good flash web design only when you get the basics right. You start thinking of the finer aspects after that only.

See our flash web design portfolio

Undo your gmail before it’s too late

admin — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:15:22 +0000

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

Storyboards for Adobe flash

admin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 15:59:18 +0000

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.
The Animation – this is where you say well occur in the animation, and in what order. It’s also where the ‘illustration panels’ appear, nothing fancy is needed, its adequate to put in named squares or circles (e.g. a circle with ‘client logo’ in it, the text ‘tag-line’, a box with ‘button 1′ in it, etc).
Beneath the illustration panel will be a series of bullet points. These explains what is going on in this specific part of the animation. This is why you label the figures in the panel, so you have something to relate back to, for example; ‘the client logo will fade-in step by step’, or ‘the bouncy ball will go across the screen from left to right’.
The bullet points are where the factual detail goes, thus why artistic skills aren’t such a big requirement for this style of storyboard (leave the artistic stuff to the experts). The more detail that goes into here the better. You wish to make instructions about what goes on when the user acts with special elements of the animation (e.g. if the user directs their mouse above the client logo, a yellow glowing comes out around it and a nice bell audio plays one time). Timing, or stating how long things will go for is crucial here (e.g. the motto text will fade-in over a time period of 1.5 secs). This is as well a good place to determine what pictures, URLs or text will be utilized on the panel (e.g. if the user clicks the customer logo, they will be taken to index.html).
Bullet points are handy, they assist as an crucial instrument for clearing up what the animation is actually intended to be. The bullet points are planned to give discussion (e.g. client: “we don’t need a male poser in our banner, our target area is female, they’re the ones that lean to purchase our lip rouge”).
Don’t forget to say what the state of the animation will be when it for the first time loads up, will there be a progress meter as the animation is anticipated to be big? What will the initial banner picture be? Will any buttons be spotlit by default?
Appendix – this is the final part of the storyboard document. It can hold anything else which you believe wants to be documented (e.g. screenshots, mockups, JPEGs to be applied for reference purposes, etc). The 2 standard parts I put in the Appendix are: Support Files, and Technical Remarks / Non-essentials. The Support Files part is really a ZIP archive embedded inside the MS Word document. The ZIP file holds any applicable artwork files meant to be utilized with the animation. The benefit of packaging these files together is that the most up-to-date artwork move with the storyboard document itself. This is particularly useful as the document requires to be emailed to off-site contractors. Naturally, this just works if the ZIP archive is under 2-3 MB in size.
The Technical Notes / Non-essentials part is where you state what you’re not going to do. For example; there will be no sound-effects or music utilized with the animation, no effects will be applied inside the animation other then fade-in/fade-out, the animation will run no more then thirty seconds. In addition, you might wish to give particular directions which are applicable only to the Flash programmer, such as: the finished animation should be no more then 1 MB in size, all text appearing in the animation ought to be retrieved from a XML file, etc.
A large portion of producing a storyboard is assisting a client understand what’s in their head into something more touchable. Failing to do so could lead in an iterative cycle which is not simply costly, but unnecessary time consuming.

The Launch of Firefox 3.1 beta 3

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:10:58 +0000

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.

Face bank – scary, yet appealing!

admin — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 18:01:18 +0000

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 – Lakai

admin — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 11:20:24 +0000

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.

The intro :

The directors was playing with other ideas, all of them would have been a lot more dangerous than the original intro. Which is already very dangerous as it is.
They didn’t shoot the intro before 3 weeks before the film was going to premiere.

Brandon Biebel said the craziest part about the intro was when Mike Capaldi did his “switch flip” down the stairs and it was exploded using napalm. They had an expert team setting up the explosion so Mike wasn’t in any danger, only in danger from falling debris.

Fully Flared

Directors : Ty Evans, Spike Jonze and Cory Weincheque
Starring : Mike Mo Capaldi, Anthony Pappalardo, Nick Jensen, Danny Brady, Lucas Puig, JJ Rousseau, JB Gillet, Jesus Fernandez, Mike Carroll, Cairo Foster, Alex Olson, Jeff Lenoce, Rob Welsh, Scott Johnston, Brandon Beibel, Rick Howard, Marc Johnson (skateboarder) Eric Koston, Guy Mariano.
Editing: Ty Evans
Distributed by Lakai
Release date(s) 16/11/2007
Running time 01:28:00
Country U.S.A
Language English

IMDB LINK