Steps

1. Find a website design company. The easiest way is to google them or look in your phone book, but this is not neccessarily the best way. Good web designers are usually found by word of mouth, or reviews put out by other companies. Another good place to look for design companies would be web design directory sites that list companies in your area / country.
2. Evaluate the website design company’s site and own portfolio. Any company can say they have great designs but a company’s portfolio should speak for itself. To adequately judge a website you must look at: Quality of design, ease of use, initial impressions, how the site compares to others in the same industry, consistent look throughout each site, and ease of navigation.
3. Ask them what their technical expertise is. Don’t be afraid of bringing specific things up such as: Do they test on Mac and PC? Do they offer cross-browser compatibility testing? Do they offer Search Engine Optimization? Do they use templates? Do they have their own servers? Do they consider accessibility and standards? These are things that are often overlooked, but are very important.
4. Look at their attention to detail. Sometimes the smallest things can make all the difference. Look for: Page titles – each page should be unique and descriptive. Terms of use pages – every site should have a terms of use and a privacy statement. Use of contact forms rather than published email addresses – this will reduce spam.

Tips

• A lot of the things may get a bit technical; if you have a computer savvy friend, to assist when you start the consulting process.

Warnings

• Search Engine Optimization techniques can be tricky, beware of any company that promises to get you in the top 10 search results.
• Never pay for a website quotation – this should be a free service offered by design companies. However if you require a full scope to be compiled, this would be charged for.

If all else fails and you don’t feel like searching to the ends of the earth for a web design company that you think you can trust… Just contact Freedom Studios – we’ll make the process easy.

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Choose a Website Design Company. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Before you would copy and paste the link somewhere and email it, or perhaps add it to your browser’s favorites tab – but with the tools available today, the process is a lot easier.

While many users are already aware of these tools, we just wanted to share them with you in case you haven’t tried them.

As the web gets more and more profound, and there’s more to read and remember, browser bookmarking becomes less and less desirable to internet savvy users. Social bookmarking is a method of bookmarking which is posted online, catalogued with comments and “tags” (labels for your bookmarks), and shared with your friends.

Steps

1. Decide which site you are going to use to store your bookmarks; the most popular tagging site is http://del.icio.us/ , which is now owned by Yahoo!. We will use this site, but the steps correspond to most social bookmarking sites. Other possibilities include Furl, BlinkList, and Magnolia.
2. Register at del.icio.us. After registering, del.icio.us will allow you to add some buttons to your browser. Follow the instructions- these buttons are important for bookmarking. There are many ways to add bookmarks to del.icio.us, including a Firefox extension, but we will use this method.
3. Once you register with del.icio.us, say with the username “xyz”, you can view all your bookmark online as http://del.icio.us/xyz .
4. Say, for example, you would like to bookmark wikiHow. Go to the main page, and click the “Tag” button that you added to your browser. This button will bring you to del.icio.us- the website and title are already filled in, so add some comments and some tags. Tags for wikiHow would include “wiki”, “howto”, and “reference”. Separate these tags with spaces to distinguish them. These tags will be useful later when you are trying to find a specific bookmark.
5. You can navigate del.icio.us by URL; for example, you can see all the bookmarks saved by you and other users who have tagged with the description “wiki” at this address: http://del.icio.us/tag/wiki . This applies to any other tag if you switch the word.

Tips

• Make sure you use the same tags for the same things- keep a core list of tags in your mind.
• Del.icio.us has a feature which allows you to group similar tags together, called “bundles”. For example, the tags “baseball”, “coins”, and “stamps” would all be grouped together under the bundle “Hobbies”.
• Social bookmarking is meant to be social- invite your friends to use the service. Once they have registered, you can apply the tag “for:friendsusername” to let them know that they should check out that bookmark. When they log in (this works both ways), del.icio.us will embolden the text “links for you” at the top of the page. If they click that link, they will see that you have tagged something for them.
• Most del.icio.us pages have RSS feeds- you can subscribe to your friend’s bookmarks, a specific tag, bookmarks for you, your bookmarks, etc.
• Del.icio.us also allows you to subscribe to specific tags inside the website. Click subscribe at the top of the page and add that tag you want to be up-to-date on. You can also subscribe a RSS feed of your subscriptions.

Social bookmarking tools we personally recommend:

• Stumble Upon » http://www.stumbleupon.com/
• Digg » http://digg.com/
• Delicious » https://secure.delicious.com/

Sources and Citations

• Video: Social Bookmarking in Plain English
• What is Social Bookmarking?
• del.icio.us help
• Tagging
• del.icio.us tools

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Use Social Bookmarking. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

As webpages develop into more sophisticated works of art, it becomes necessary for designers to use different techniques to attract a viewer. One technique that is utilized is the animated .gif graphic. The animated .gif allows a designer to inject movement into webpage graphics to draw the attention of the viewer. There are many software programs available that allow the creation of these graphics. One such program is Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite 3 (CS3), which will be used for our tutorial. It is important to note that this tutorial requires basic knowledge of Photoshop CS3, along with experience using layers. For beginners, please refer to the Related wikiHows and Sources at the end before to become familiar with Photoshop CS3. The following tutorial, created by the Fighting Engineers, describes how to create an animated .gif graphic using Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Steps

1. Create a document with each frame of the animation on a different layer.
2. Select the layers to be used in the animation from the layers palette
   • Note1: To select a group of layers, select the layer at the top of the group. Then hold the shift key and click on the bottom layer and this will highlight every layer in # Open the animation palette by choosing window from the menu bar and selecting “Animation“.
3. When the animation palette opens, it should look like this. If it doesn’t that means it opened in the timeline view.
4. Change to frame animation view by clicking on the flyout menu in the upper right hand corner of the animation palette and selecting “Convert to Frame Animation”.
5. Change every layer showing on one frame to every layer showing on its own frame, by clicking the flyout menu on the animation palette and choosing “Make frames from layers”
   • Note: All layer don’t have to be selected, to select a few layers use the copy layer button at the bottom right of the animation palette to add layers.
6. Modify each frame by selecting the frame on the animation window and changing it as desired in the main photoshop window.
   • Note: To add or remove a graphic from another layer to any frame r, select the frame and in the layers palette, click the “eye” to toggle on or off the visibility for that layer.
7. Under each frame is an arrow head pointing downward. Click on the arrow head to display timing menu and select the display time for each frame.
8. From the file menu select export to export the document as a movie or under the save as option save the file as a gif. Be sure to select Save for Web and Devices (.gif under this option).
9. NOTE: If you want to loop your animation continuously you can select that option in window that pops up after you have chosen “Save For Web & Devices”. Under the color table that shows up is “Looping options”, just select “forever” and save it. You can also pick “others” and select the amount of times you want your animation to loop.

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Create Animated GIFs Using Photoshop CS3. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.