Paragon Media One Blog » Website Design

NEW! Adobe Photoshop CS5

nicole — Fri, 07 May 2010 15:08:20 +0000

Here’s me being a complete techno-geek at her finest. Have you USED the new Adobe Photoshop CS5? Amazing, to say the least. It’s got everything that you’ve wished they’d come out with while working in the application, and more. The coolest thing I found is the content-aware fill. It allows you to completely delete a subject, and it will fill in the background around it using a technology that matches lighting, tone and noise, and ultimately makes the image look like the deleted subject never even existed. If you were sick of using drop shadows and fussing around to make things look 3-D, your techno-prayers have been answered with the Enhanced 3-D realism and reach materials feature. This feature enables you to make a subject three dimensional, and make materials look like glass and chrome. Sweet. Puppet warp. What is that you may ask? The example used on the Adobe website is an elephant’s trunk. It’s hanging straight down. With the puppet warp feature you can warp or stretch graphics, text, or image elements. So, you can curve that elephant’s trunk however the heck you want it to go, and it uses the content-aware fill to fill in the blank spot after the subject has been changed. HDR Imaging? Yep, they’ve included Superior HDR Imaging, which literally creates surreal HDR images with a precise accuracy. Ever gotten tired of keying out the green for green screen images? Especially if you’re using a girl as a subject with tiny strands of hair that takes a ridiculous amount of time to key out (can you tell I’m speaking from experience)? Don’t worry anymore, because now complex selections are made easy. I could literally go on forever, describing how amazing this new Photoshop will be. But, I suppose that’s what their website is for, and I won’t take all their glory. It is, in fact glorious, I might add J So, try it out. It’s amazing, and they’ve even got free shipping until May 31^st. Well, that’s it for my geek rave! Talk to you soon!

Nicole

Knowing Who is Important

nicole — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:45:54 +0000

So you’ve got your design in mind, and you are ready to add content to your site. Something you need to consider is who is important to you. Sure, it’s important that the site looks good, for your client, and for your reputation. However, are you thinking of not only the client, but the client’s clients or customers? Many website companies forget this crucial step. You need to put yourself in the mind of the client’s clients. This way, you’re not only creating a design to wow your clients, but you’re providing them with a site that’s actually useful, and will actually make them money.

Ensuring a Customer-Centric Site

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:58:13 +0000

There are a lot of easy solutions for ensuring a customer-centric site. No worries… we’ll help to provide some of those solutions right here. Once you’re ready to evaluate the company site, you can keep this checklist in mind. First, make sure that while on your site, it’s very easy for the customer to get what they want. If it’s going to take too long to load, to order a product, if you have to download instructions, you may as well post a page that says “Go Away!”, because that’s exactly what the customer wants to do. Your site should also have an efficient way for previous and current customers to give feedback about products and services. Another thing you need to remember when building a customer-centric site is contact information. You or your company will need an easy way to be reached, whether it be for support, questions, feedback, anything! Keep in mind – It will only frustrate a customer if they have to search for a way to contact you.

Is Your Website Customer Centric?

nicole — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:26:57 +0000

Evaluating your site regularly is one of the most important things you can do to maintain it. One of the things you need to ask yourself during the site evaluation is if the site is customer-centric. What does this mean? A customer-centric website is centered completely around the potential customer’s wants and needs. This means the site needs to have a certain level of focus on customer benefits and overall experience while visiting the site. This can be obtained with different sales drivers such as customer loyalty programs, word-of-mouth advertising, and testimonials. After all, your sites visitors are potential clients, don’t you think they’re going to want to see some credentials before they sign the dotted line? Of course they are.

Web Design Mistakes Take Two

nicole — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:33:05 +0000

While designing your website, whether it’s a complete redesign, or you’re just starting out and want to launch a site. There are a few things you need to consider not doing. We’re here to help prevent you from making those horrible mistakes. Although these seem like no-brainers, a lot of companies make these simple mistakes. One of the mistakes companies make is leaving out search engine optimization. If your site isn’t optimized, it won’t show up in the search engines, so how can you expect anyone to get to the site? This is one of the problems you need to fix immediately. Another big one according to a recent online poll shows that downloadable PDF files are a huge annoyance to readers. It makes sense, you’re reading a really good article, but to finish it, you’ve got to click on a PDF. It breaks the flow of the surf, if you know what we mean. In accordance with this, make sure your text is able to be scanned. Some people just plain don’t like to read, and for those people, you must accommodate! Make sure that your text still makes sense when it’s scanned. The last and biggest problem we see with site design is the fact that promotional graphics are looking too much like junk ads! Surfers don’t like to see lots of ad clutter on a page, so try to keep your graphics fun instead of looking like an ad.

Biggest Redesign Mistakes

nicole — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:46:18 +0000

Is your company ready for a website redesign? We’ve given you tips on what to do now here are a few things you should avoid. One of the first things you need to avoid is the fact that some sites need redesign, some sites need redeveloped. To redesign your site, this entails, well, just the design. This means your content is where you’d like it to be, you just want to make the site more aesthetically pleasing using better graphics and better site design. Sometimes, this includes navigation, but navigation really isn’t the bulk of redesign. If your site needs redeveloped, however, this is a little more involved. A redevelop needs to occur when every aspect of your site needs revamped, and it might be better off to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. You’ll still be keeping the main concepts in mind, but you’ll need to polish up your content as well as graphics and navigation, giving your site a total revamp. If you’ve got a static site, you may want to add a CMS (Content Management System) to make this much easier for everyone. Another thing to be sure to avoid is missing the initial target. A lot of times, you can get so caught up in the redesign, that you start to redesign everything, including the target market. Be sure to keep your company goal at heart while redesigning and redeveloping, otherwise you’ve done a lot of work for nothing! One last thing you need to avoid is a redevelop when everything is working out. If your site is bringing in great revenue, you don’t need to change a thing! You may still want to change your graphic design, but that’s alright as long as you keep your content and your goals in tact!

Redesigning Your Website

nicole — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:55:46 +0000

Need to revamp your site? Before you do, there are a few things you should know. First ask yourself, is the website looking outdated, out of structure, or unappealing? If the answer is yes, you’ll need to change graphics and color schemes. Is the website making sense? Is it easy to navigate? Are the pages properly grouped together? If not, then you’re in for a redevelop. In order to have a successful redesign, you need to get back to the basics, and ask yourself the questions you asked when you first designed and launched the site. You need to be sure your fundamentals are all in order, and that you are still hitting home with your target market. If not, your redesign will still be easy, but will just take a little more work to get back to the basics.