I’m going to make this fairly quick as there are so many fundamental things wrong with this site technically, it’s difficult to know where to begin. I guess I’ll start with file size. The home page is over 240 KB. Although, it currently ranks as sixth in a Google search for “felt”, this puts a stake through the heart of many of their potential visitors. The vast majority of visitors are still using dial-up modems and many of those aren’t even 56 K. That means this site takes over a minute for the average visitor to load the Home page. Most of this is due to the over 200 KB used for images, but even the HTML coding is over 30 KB by itself.

As an owner of 2 martial arts web sites and a web designer, I have spent a lot of time on the web looking at martial arts related sites. This site’s general look is rather amateurish and not atmosphere producing. It does not make me want to buy the products.

Well, viewing the site was a little shock at first, but it was not the site’s content. In general, the whole site looks more like a personal webpage than a commercial website. The general design is very bad and the graphics are lacking.

The days of bland business documents are over. Well, at least as far as design. Graphics departments – also known as presentation resources – are common in businesses across America. This merging of business and creativity isn’t always smooth. As a part-time graphics specialist, I often witness bad client to personnel relations.

Question: I’m running Windows 98 SE. Up until two weeks ago I had no trouble opening any or all web pages on Netscape 7.0 or Internet Explorer 6. Then suddenly, without warning certain web pages would no longer open in either browser.

Well, maybe. But let’s define free. Finding anything on the Web takes time. Often it takes a lot of time. So free must somehow be related to how you value your time.

Corelhas announced the availability of the Corel Smart Graphics Studio development platform, “designed to speed and simplify the creation of SVG-based smart graphics.

What is the difference between your regular ole Flash site and a professional one? Well, it largely comes down to opinion, but there are also some key elements to look at. I’ve learned after viewing Flash sites for years that the ones that catch readers’ attention more than anything are the ones with great graphics. Yes, graphics and design, NOT programming.

Graphic design is an intimidating subject for many Internet entrepreneurs. However, most of us must learn some basic design techniques to avoid the high costs of hiring a professional graphics designer.

Your graphics on your sites can slow down how fast the site loads up – and can be costing you to lose your visitors. People will sit on a site only so long before clicking away if it doesn’t load quickly enough. The graphics include backgrounds, banners, images and photos, buttons, certain types of links and text, etc. You should take each and try to compress it to less than 10 Kb – and have only a very few of them on any page. Make sure not to lose too much quality, or choose a different graphic.

Ebook cover graphics. They are an essential marketing and selling tool for your ebooks. As I’m sure you’ve been told before, they must be unique. They must give an accurate representation of your ebook. They must also make use of the right colors and images in order to be effective. Sounds like a daunting task, doesn’t it? Lay your fears to rest, we’re going to give you some insider design tips on how to create ebook covers that sell, regardless of whether you do-it-yourself or hire a professional.

From the moment a visitor arrives, your front page conveys a feeling to your visitor. From the look of your site, the wording, and the colors you use, your home page projects a message to your potential customer about who you are. First impressions are lasting. It’s very important for your site to project an image of professionalism and invite the visitor to want to know more by gaining the reader’s attention, capturing their interest, creating desire, and calling them to action.

Graphics often need a bit of a tweak before you add them to your pages. Cropping, making the background transparent, resizing, or just finding that picture that you **know** you’ve got somewhere on your hard drive! Irfan View can carry out all these tasks, and includes a great browser which loads at the click of a key, and displays thumbnails for you to choose from. It will also do screen captures. Available from many freeware sites (see below), you can also download from http://softwarecenter.net/irfanview/

If you ask the Internet marketers of today, many if not most of them will tell you that banner advertising is dead. They say that it’s expensive, the click-through rates are low and that unless you know exactly what you’re doing, it is likely that you’ll end up spending more money than you’ll make.

Graphics images on the internet come in three major formats: GIF, JPEG and PNG (and PNG’s close relation MNG). Each of these formats has it’s associated advantages and disadvantages. It is important that you understand all three formats to make the correct decision as to which to use under what circumstances.

There are 2 types of graphics and it is very important to understand the difference between them.

Bitmap Images

I mentioned quite a few different methods of creating WBMP image files back in March, and now I’d like to elaborate on that topic a little more, focusing on Macromedia Fireworks.

SVG is built on top of XML in order to describe 2D vector capable graphics. XML stands for “Extensible Markup Language”. A full description of XML is best suited for a future article since it can be quite technical. To simplify XML, it is similar to HTML but provides greater customization of the tags. HTML is a set of pre-defined tags that are used to describe a web page. XML however, does not pre-define the tags.