In contrast to five web button graphical disasters by ‘popular’ demand I have compiled a short article on choosing the best fonts for web design and staying away from those less appropriate ones. But before we even get into choosing fonts there are a couple things which should be understood with fonts in web design. The first of these is accessibility. Make sure that you use a font that was installed with your operating system by default. This will increase the chances that other people will have the font that is used on the web design as it was automatically installed on their computer as well. I learned this the hard way; I was showing my client his new site, only to have an ugly font replace my nice font because his computer did not have the font I used. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s another template.. I’ll try make this post as short as possible seeing as I just split my toe and need to go to the hospital. My objective for this design was to create a template that was light and shiny which brought out the contrast of the content (photography and images).

Click image for full preview.

DOWNLOAD HERE
Enjoy.

Note: You are not allowed to sell or claim this to be your own work.

Over the past few years it has been recommended to stay clear of flash, solely for SEO reasons. The problem is that the content in the .swf files was not ‘readable’ by the search engines, so in advance it was very hard to get indexed on the first page for certain niche’s (with the exception of major sites like McDonalds, or movie sites, as they have many many back links.)

This will all change.

Adobe is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. Quote:http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.html

In fact, according to the adobe web site they have already implemented the changes with Google

Existing SWF content is now search able using Google search, and in the future Yahoo! Search. Quote:http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.html

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, another .PSD for free. Enjoy.. it could be used for a forum, or for a logo.. or something I don’t know, it’s your choice You could also take the trophy away and replace it with something, that you like.

Like all my other .PSD’s it should be easy to edit it. Enjoy!

Download PSD

Note: You are not allowed to sell or claim this to be your own creation, without the consent of Explosive Web Design. You are aloud to use them free of charge.. but leave it at that.

Here’s another free template.. This one isn’t as good as normal, but I think it doesn’t look too bad.

Similarly to every template, it should be pretty easy to modify the template.

Read the rest of this entry »

Again, another template with a smooth web 2.0 layout. I think this is probably the best so far, but it’s not as modern. (make sure you download the psd, it looks a lot better then the preview image below!)

As with all my other layouts everything should be pretty easy to change without having to redo the whole layout

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a pretty cool web template that I designed. It’s pretty sleek, very transparent and quite modern that gives a new twist to web 2.0. I’ve decided to call it ‘The Sleek Design‘

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This is a tutorial on creating a single picture background (so that it doesn’t repeat).

An example can be found here http://www.eighteenmile.com – note how at the very top left there is a very dark background picture, though, in this case the picture only gets repeated once?

In this tutorial we will learn how to do this. There are three main design principles that are important to understand whilst using this background method.

• The picture shouldn’t be distracting – Since there is only one picture that is not repeated continually, it can be tempting to make the picture look fabulous and attention grabbing. Though we want the viewer to continue to concentrate on the content. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve decided to make a list of 5 graphical disasters I most commonly see on web sites navigation’s, which don’t look ‘trendy’ at all.

The ugly bevel and emboss

I’m not a big fan when it comes to bevel and emboss; It looks quite ugly. However, if you do need to (or really want to) use the bevel and emboss on your buttons use it quite carefully or your page will begin to catch the pre’ 2000 look, which is bulky and ugly. Try to avoid bevel and emboss, though, if necessary use it sparingly.

Read the rest of this entry »

I recently wrote about HostSmart web hosting in one of my posts called ‘top 10 web sites for completing your web design .

I think that it’s only fair to go into a little bit more detail with my experience with them.

I started hosting with HostSmart around 6 months ago when a client of mine asked me to find a very cheap web hosting company to host their web site on. After a few hours of searching I finally came across Host Smart. At first I was a bit reluctant because they were so cheap and offered so much (Cpanel, Fantastico De Luxe, unlimited email accounts, 50g bandwidth, 10gb storage) for only $1 a month. Read the rest of this entry »