Start Here!

Planning a website can be a very daunting task. There are many things to consider and many decisions to make. This is where 123 Design Studio is different! I will help you every step of the way. Click here to download my FREE Website Planning Guide (opens in new window). This is a detailed document that will get you on your way to your new website!

Articles

Tips, tricks and ideas to help you in your website planning process.

 

Design :: SEO :: general tips & ideas :: stock photography :: definitions

Design

Here are links to some great color palette generators and ideas.

Adobe Kuler This is my favorite color resource. It is a collection of color palettes that various people have submitted. You can browse by popularity, rating, latest uploads or keyword. It’s just a really nice collection.

Color Blender This is a free online tool for color matching and palette design. You can slide the colors around to find your perfect color match or you can go to their already created palettes (click “browse blends” in the upper right corner.) A great place for color inspiration.

Color Jack This is a fun little color palette creator. Slide the little circles around in the color sphere to create different blends of colors. Use the drop down boxes for variations on your color designs.

Slayer Office Color Palette This is a nice tool for choosing various shades of one base color. This is a nice help when creating a monochromatic design.

Definitions

123 Design Studio's FaviconA Favicon is a a small graphic (16 pixels x 16 pixels) that is displayed in the browser bar next to the web address and also shows up in your favorites list when you bookmark a page. You can see my favicon is a red letter “i” with a brown dot on a tan background. (It’s the “i” from Design in my logo.) I create favicons for every client. It is part of the branding package.

A Domain Name is your “address” on the web. It is something like www.MyCompany.com or www.MyGreatSite.org. You need to have a registered domain name and web hosting in order to have your own website.

Web Hosting provides the place for your domain name to live. You have to have both a regiestered domain name and web hosting to have your own site. There are many sites that offer free web hosting in exchange for placing ads on your site. This is an good solution for some people. If you are a business, I would recommend paying the small amount it costs for yearly hosting to avoid other business’s ads on your site.

Information Architecture is also known as your site's navigation system. This is how the pages are related to one another based on how the end users will work through your site. There are many recommendations for making IA good and they can boiled down to: keep it simple and obvious. Don't make your web visitors guess or try to figure out how to get where they want to go.

Flash is a software program that makes great vector-based animations and interactivity with relatively small file sizes. Many sites incorporate Flash these days, some better than others.

Stock Photography

Here are some good places to find affordable stock photography online.

iStock Good, affordable stock photography. Easy to sign up and easy to use.

AbleStock Pricey, but nice.

PD Photo Public Domain=FREE! Sometimes public domain photos are lousy, but there are many nice photos on this site.

Stock.xchng More free photos!

Comstock Excellent stock photography (with a corresponding price tag.)

Stockxprt Similar to iStock in that you purchase credits for reasonably priced stock photos.

Photos.com Purchase subscriptions by the month. (Subscriptions are good way to go if you are planning to purchase a great deal of photos.)

ThinkStock This site will search multiple stock photography sites and give you search results from all of those sites. A good place to start.

BigStock Photo BigStock claims high quality images for $1-$2 each. That’s a good price!

General Tips & Tricks

Make sure every email you send, even your personal emails, has a link to your website in the signature. In one week, I had three business inquiries from my email signature alone! You might be surprised how many people will click on your business link when they see it at the bottom of your email!

Here is an online pdf creator. You upload your document and they generate the pdf for you. Pretty nifty!

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Here’s a great article on SEO by none other than Jill Whalen. This article, very neatly, sums up my philosophy on how I optimize my clients pages for search engines.

Here’s a nice, easy to read article by Janice Kalyniuk of PerthWebs. (This link will open in a new window.) It’s as much an article about marketing as it is SEO. Good stuff!