There are plenty of web sites out there in which basic elements of design are ignored. The viewer may experience overkill and frustration, instead of gently receiving the message or information. Here are some simple ways to help clarify your web site’s message for your company or organization. Use the web as a tool for sales, community contact, and to improve, rather than detract from a business entity’s image.

The key to creating graphical images for the World Wide Web and software applications is keeping the image file size relatively low and creating images that are optimized and display correctly in the browser window. By obtaining the knowledge of when to apply the proper image format to a given situation and how to properly optimization images to decrease download times, developers can assure themselves that graphics used in their projects will be optimized for success.

I’ve talked a lot about the need for speed. Specifically, the importance of your web pages loading quickly. Images are the number one culprit. Like a vampire, they are seductive and at the same time suck the life out of your site. (By the way, since this article deals with images, I will be using some as examples and this will cause the pages to take a while to load.)

“You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizons. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about–the more you have left when anything happens.” — Ethel Barrymore

One of the most frequently asked questions by new webmasters is how to add text to their images. I have good news for everyone. It’s easy, so relax.

In the previous article on optimizing GIF images for the web, we learned a few basic things about the GIF image format – who developed it, the (Limpel-Ziv and Welch) compression algorithm it uses and how we can decrease the file size of a GIF image by removing unwanted areas and reducing the number of colors.

Most of the time stretching an image by setting incorrect image sizes within the HTML code would distort it horribly. Below is a review of the example comparisons from our related article, “Adding Text to Images: The Right Way“.

Images are an integral part of the “web experience”. Without them a web page looks really dull; however, I have frequently come across web sites where the images take such a long time to load that I either go off to sleep or employ the most frequently used button of the browser – “Back”!

Optimized images are a hallmark of a good web site and they are the first indicators of the skill of the web developer. This is a two part article in which we’ll take a closer look at Gifs and how to optimize them for the web.

Millions of potential buyers visit the online auction sites every day. In 2002 eBay’s 27 million active members participated in transactions totaling over $4 billion dollars. If you are looking for a share of that market, all you need are the items to sell, time, and some auction know-how.

Here is a really neat and simple tutorial to have you animating like a pro in no time! It’s mainly a photoshop tutorial, but it’s a quick and easy way to add moving effects to your movies.

Making non-text elements, particularly images, accessible is fundamental to accessible web design; even if you attended to this issue alone, you would make a big impact on the accessibility of your site.

Your web site’s loading speed has a significant impact on your visitors’ loyalty. A slow web site will cost you sales. Most visitors won’t wait more than10 seconds for your web pages to load. Apply these techniques to speed up your pages, keep potential buyers at your site, and increase sales.

Question: I have a Sony Vaio running Win ME. I have installed a CreativeCD DVD player. The software will recognize the name of the DVD inserted, but I cannot get any video to appear. When I press “play,” the counter starts as if the DVD were playing normally.

Can you suggest something?

Al Siebert, Ph.D., who studied resilient seniors, discovered that they had “a childlike” curiosity, and a lifelong love of learning. People who die in their 5th and 6th decade had this life trajectory: school, then work, then leisure. Resilient seniors had combined all three throughout their lifetime.

Once upon a time, in the dark ages of the Early Internet, there were no images on the web pages (in fact, this is poetic – no images, on the web pages). There were just links. Hyperlinks, hyperlinks everywhere, and not an image to click.

But as the Internet and the browsing technology improved, web developers were able to incorporate images, and as the HTML matured, images could also be used as Hyperlinks. And now some developers develop imageless web sites just as some “arty” filmmakers want to make black and white silent movies.

A new e-mail worm has surfaced that purports to show screensavers of U.S. spy satellite pictures of Iraq or animations that are either patriotic or that mock President Bush, a computer security company warned Thursday. The worm, dubbed Ganda-A, spreads by sending itself to e-mail addresses on an infected machine and tries to disable anti-virus and other security software and infect certain files on the hard disk, according to Sophos.

Back in 11-2002 my candle website was ranked #3 at Google under the common keyword “candles”.

Getting your web site to look right can sometimes be a hair-pulling experience. Even for professional web designers! I can only imagine how frustrated many newbies can get.

Let me share with you some of the common problems in designing a well-functioning web site. If you haven’t made these mistakes yet – trust me: you will! Keep this troubleshooting guide handy for when you need it.

A number of times I have come across advice on the internet regarding the insertion of graphics in web pages, which stresses the need to ‘Constrain’ images in order that they download faster! …… WHAT! … Of course this maybe a case of misplaced terminology and what the bearer of the advice may in fact mean is ‘Compress’ images which of course may be an option and indeed will shorten download time.

Is a picture worth a thousand words? On a Web page, it can be worth substantially more in download time.

Few visitors are willing to stare at an empty screen for 10-20 seconds while your graphic image loads. They’re far more likely to leave your site entirely.

There are three main reasons why you would want to have a flexible HTML layout. First; if you need your layout to adjust dynamically to the size of your browser window. Second; if you need to have a “box” which adjusts to fit around dynamic content. Third; to prevent user specific font settings from breaking your carefully planned layout. This short beginners tutorial will show you an easy way to do this.