How your site looks matters. Even subtle improvements—like using fonts or colors that compliment your theme—can have a positive effect on how consumers rate the trustworthiness of your store.

According to a 2003 Stanford University study of 2,440 people, 46.2 percent of online shoppers gauge the credibility of an ecommerce site by how professional and eye-pleasing the site looks. In fact, rightly or wrongly, appearance is even more important to shoppers than the presence of a security banner promoting hacker or credit card safety.

In this edition of Web Design Tips, a recurring Practical Ecommerce feature, I will show you the ins and outs of basic header formatting using a cascading style sheet (CSS) and HTML. This feature is aimed at HTML and CSS novices who have very little design experience.

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Check out my new tutorials page. Just click on any of the video tutorials and you’ll be on your way to designing websites.

New Delhi, India, January 04, 2009

Cranberry Communications Pvt. Ltd. (http://www.cranberryindia.com) has come up with specialized web design services for web design companies based in USA, Canada and European Union countries.

Cranberry is presently providing web design and web development services to big web design agencies in USA and UK. Presently cranberry is providing Graphic design, Web Design, PSD to XHTML, PSD to CSS, search engine optimization and content management system development based on PHP and asp.net

Cranberry has launched fixed project based pricing, per man-hour based pricing and staffing augmentation services for long term projects.

Cranberry is now expanding its market for non English speaking market specially Norway, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland for various web services.

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The big issue here is that the most prevalent browser is Internet Explorer (IE), and that prior to version 8 IE did not support CSS tables. The authors show you a way to deal with this problem and use CSS tables, although their position is controversial.

Check out these CSS tutorials. These tutorials are awesome whether you’re a web designer in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Sydney, Australia or anywhere in the world.

CSS TUTORIALS

by Joe Turner

“Many of us learn by seeing. That’s how we all learned how to talk and even read. Many programming books do this nowadays: they show you example code, and you can usually understand what is going on. This was the idea Cultured Code had when creating Xyle scope, because this is exactly what it does: it allows you to learn CSS by seeing it.

For those of you who don’t know about CSS, I will quickly explain it. A while ago, all Web programmers had to program all of their styles (fonts, colors, positioning) in HTML, which was really annoying. So, CSS was created to address this problem. Instead of having to individually add styles, you create styles that you can apply to certain parts of your Web page, or even the whole thing. It gets better with every update, which is a reason that the quality of Websites has gone up over time.”

From MacApper.com

By Rajesh V. Tavakari

When promoting your e-commerce site you want to make sure visitors will want to return again. By ‘visitors’ we mean both humans, who are your potential customers, as well as search engines and directories.

Check Your Links
Web site promotion starts with a search engine spider indexing or cataloging your site by following the links from one page to another. Just as human visitors dislike a broken link, so do the spiders. If a link doesn’t work they’ll simply move onto the next page. No matter how sophisticated the search engine software is, it can’t index what it can’t find. Also remember that a spider won’t be able to follow a link that requires a form submission or JavaScript.

While considering the subject of links, if you’re using HTML and CSS on your site, make sure that both work properly. A certain minimum level of requirements must be met so that your pages will display correctly. It’s only if these are met that a spider can do its work. There are free facilities online that can check both of these for you.

Keep Your Pages Small
Most of us have heard the expression that size isn’t everything. This is also true when it comes to Web pages. People don’t like having to wait for a Web page to load. Search engine spiders may not fully index a page bigger than 150k in size. Remember that the size of a page doesn’t simply depend on the actual HTML file itself, but includes everything on the page such as images, banners etc.

If you have a lot of images on your pages, then either reduce the number of them, or use a program such as Macromedia Fireworks to optimize them for the Web. If the page has a big file size due to a massive amount of text, you should consider splitting the text into smaller, more manageable pieces and putting them on several pages. SEO Chat has a tool called “Page Size Lookup” which can tell you the size of your Web page.

What’s the Difference Between a Search Engine and a Directory?
People frequently use the term ‘search engine’ as a catch-all expression for anything they use to search the Web. They are different things though, and an understanding of the differences will help you promote your site successfully.

How Does a Search Engine Work?
Search engines use highly sophisticated software to search the web for new pages. It then automatically creates and updates their indexes. Whenever they find an active hyperlink, they will follow it and add that to the index and so on. These programs are generally referred to as ‘spiders.’

Normally, all this is totally automatic, but sometimes human intervention is involved. The spider will return periodically to the pages and check for updated content. Often there will be a delay between you uploading your page, and the spider finding it, unless you submit your URL directly to the search engine itself. You can submit a web URL to Google free of charge.

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Today we launched a new ASP.NET MVC Design Gallery on the www.asp.net site. The design gallery hosts free HTML design templates that you can download and easily use with your ASP.NET MVC applications. Included with each design template is a Site.master file, a CSS stylesheet, and optionally a set of images, partials, and helper methods that support them.

The gallery allows you to preview each of the designs online, as well as download a .zip version of them that you can extract and integrate into your site. The gallery allows anyone to create and submit new designs under the creative commons license. Visitors to the gallery can vote to provide feedback on them (thumbs up/thumbs down). The most popular designs show up at the top of the gallery.

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This position is ideal for an enthusiastic junior Web Designer wanting to break into the industry. This very busy design agency that is currently expanding and will offer you the opportunity to gain valuable experience working on a variety of projects for an impressive list of clients. If you’re a diligent worker, work well under pressure and are wanting to learn the ins and outs of the design world, this could be the perfect opportunity for you!

Overview of daily tasks:
Content and Graphic maintenance to existing client websites via either offline methods such as Dreamweaver, or Content management systems.
Implementation of banner ad campaigns across different sizes.
Direct Client Liaison in the form of text and minor graphic changes to electronic mailers, website layouts etc.
Deep etching, Image optimization and manipulation.

Ideal candidates should:
• Know HTML very well.
• Know CSS (no we don’t mean the indie rock group)
• Be familiar with Photoshop
• Have experience with Content Management Systems
• Be able to work well independently and as part of a team.
• Pay meticulous attention to detail
• Have good interpersonal skills
• Want to grow with a dynamic company

Nice to haves:
• Any other design related experience, as your role in the company is likely to expand and develop
• A love for coffee

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International Business Times

The online bookmarking service, Delicious (http://del.icio.us)has been a long time staple of Web 2.0, but data released by the service’s operators on Friday indicate the service serves the technology audience more than other groups.

The site, owned by Yahoo, allows people to store, tag and share bookmarks collected across the web. According to an official blog on Thursday, the top ten types of bookmarks users were making were broken down as follows:

1. news Along with the usual faces such as BBC News and CNN, Delicious likes Slashdot, Digg, and a visualization called Newsmap.

2. blogs These results contain a variety of lists and tools for people who want to find more to read or want to write their own blogs, including The Hype Machine and Edublogs.

3. reference People find Delicious useful as a practical source of knowledge, hooray. Delicious users betray their nerdiness by providing specialized resources for programming and web design for many of these results.

4. wiki Several of these results are for wiki software (which makes sense, since deciding on a software package might be the hardest thing about starting a wiki), but one of them is Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki, which looks like a handy reference.

5. restaurants Guides for New York, London, and everywhere. Sounds good to me.

hotels Most of these results are useful for cost-effective comparison, but a lot of Delicious people have also bookmarked Unusual Hotels of the World, Design Hotels, and Unique Hotels for Global Nomads.

6. css Delicious’ slight geeky bias means that searching for a technical topic gets you the best tutorials, documentation, and tips. And luckily, people searching for CSS probably aren’t looking for anything else.

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By Jennifer Kyrnin, About.com

Why CSS is Important for Web Designers

Cascading Style Sheets or CSS are an important way to control how your Web pages look. CSS can control the fonts, text, colors, backgrounds, margins, and layout. But it can be very difficult to learn CSS, and some people would rather not learn it. There are some very good reasons to learn CSS so that you can control your Web pages look.

Modify your site designs to look how you want them to look.  It’s easy to take a free Web template and build a website. But these templates can be very plain or common. So your website will look like every other site on the internet. By learning CSS you can modify pre-built templates so that they have your colors and styles. Thus you’ll have a customized website without a lot of effort.

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