An Introduction to Paint Shop Pro.

Paint Shop Pro is one of the most popular image editors out there. Even though it's increasingly geared towards digital photography, you'd be surprised just how useful it can be to web designers. Features. So what features does Paint Shop Pro have? Well, for a start,...

Designing for Search Engines.

When you design a website, it's easy to focus on what your visitors are going to see. What you have to realise, though, is that you're going to have another kind of visitor with a completely different agenda: they're not going to be looking at your pretty logo and...

There’s More than One Web Browser.

If you're like 90% of web users, then you use Internet Explorer, Microsoft's web browser. Why? Well, because it comes with Windows, usually, and it's there on your desktop when you first want to use the web. When you're creating a website, however, you have to...

The 5 Principles of Effective Navigation.

A website's navigation is one of its most important parts. Sure, your users mostly come in through search engines now instead of via your homepage, but how can they get from whatever page they're on to any other page they might want to go to? The limited space...

Registering a Domain Name

Before you can start a website, you need to come up with a domain name. The domain name is the name of your site on the web – the ‘www.yourname.com' that people will type in their browsers and see at the top of every page of your website. Obviously, it's...

Putting Multimedia to Good Use.

Multimedia on the web is often seen as a bad idea: it breaks the flow of textual information, makes your bandwidth costs spiral out of control, and annoys visitors who aren't expecting it. Used properly, though, multimedia can enhance your website to no end, putting...

Encryption and Security with SSL.

When it comes to accepting online payments and other sensitive information over the web, normal HTTP just doesn't cut it. It's an insecure method of communication where everything is sent over the wire in cleartext – it's completely trivial for anyone in a network...

How the Web Works

Many people think the Internet and the web are the same thing. In fact, the Internet is simply a global network of computers – the web runs on top of the Internet, and makes it useful for us. So how does the web work? The Invention of the Web. The web was invented by...

How to Run Ads Without Driving Visitors Crazy.

As you travel around the web, you'll notice that most sites now have ads in some form or another. Some of them are subtle, but some of them just aren't – in fact, after a while, the ads at some sites can annoy you enough that you'll either block them out entirely or...

An Issue of Width: the Resolution Problem.

There is a problem that has plagued the web ever since graphical designs for web pages started to become common – and yet it's a problem that's never been solved. You see, different sized monitors can handle different widths of page, and yet HTML doesn't really let...

Image Formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG and More.

When you want to put graphics on your website, you'll face an unexpected problem: what format should they be in? On their own computers, many people save pictures in Windows' default BMP (bitmap) format, but the files it creates are simply much too large to put on a...

Fonts are More Important Than You Think

Most of the visitors to your website are going to spend 99% of their time doing one thing: reading your content. Given that the web is a medium mainly devoted to reading, it's surprising just how ignorant most page authors are about typography. If you use the wrong...

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