Top 10 web design software

Whether the layout design is a pretty simple one or something out of the box, it is always the magic of web design software that help to produce the stunning results! However, as a web design and web development company we may not care about the top 10 web design software - we use so many of those at the time of designing. Hardly there is any doubt about that! However sometimes, our inquisitive minds (may be as clients or the designers) do want to know what are the best web design software?

Now let us see the top 10 web design software that comes in different web design purposes. We will simple have an overview on those with little mention on how they work:

1. Photoshop: It is a very highly accomplished graphics editor for web designing purposes. Any designer can use this application for manipulating images and creating web graphics in his or her own way. Photoshop offers various tools and options though which automatically design effects to images can be given. Various automations with brushes or the workflow enhancement with Layer Comps can be done. And there are so many other features in Photoshop that help in building the first block of a web page - PSD design.


2. Dreamweaver: It is one of the most featured-packed software. It comes with various tools and that helps in syntax highlighting, code hinting, project and workflow management options to make team work easy and fruitful. It comes with a built-in FTP client and Live View of the work and source code. Dreamweaver very easily works with other popular software like Photoshop. And for this particular feature sharing smart objects, easy updating and editing of graphical components have gone mush easier.


3. Fireworks: It is one of the most useful raster and vector graphics editors. Fireworks bring you a too many tools and options that make full web layout prototyping a class to admire. It carries various features, for example, slicing and dicing a design mockup into HTML/CSS can be done amazingly fast. With is software any designer can turn a layout into a PDF with clickable components for interactive and impressive attitude. Similarly a designer can optimize web graphics very lightweight. It is a true magic software to use for the web design purposes!


4. Kuler: If you want to choose, create, modify, mix and match colors to your heart’s content, Kuler is what you should use. It is the best media to create color swatches, complete with RGB and HEX codes. Using Kuler you can even extract color palettes from illustrations and photographs. It is the best ploy for the designer in color related issues.


5. Pixlr: If you are looking for really worth using and free image editor you should take the help of Pixlr! The greatest advantage of this editor is its availability in 13 languages. It provides a great alternative to Photoshop. But it does not mean that you will not get the same level of functionality or performance; rather it is little bit cooler to use in designing.  Whether it is the matter of handling layers or array of filters and effects, Pixlr is superb in its performance and output.


6. Pingdom: It is a full page test software that designer use to find if the web pages are loading in a browser properly with each images, CSS, JavaScript, Flash and frames. The load time of each object is shown with easy visual comparison. You can also order each object into a hierarchy to identify if there are any problem areas or not. Designers like this software to find out if their design efforts 100% perfect or not.


7. Panic Coda: When a designing team is working on Mac OS X operating system Panic coda is best software to handle the team work. It can reduce or distribute the amount of applications separately (CSS editor, and other tools) designers need to work in a team. With a tabbed interface text editing, file transfers, CSS editing can be separately by individual members yet, monitored by all.


8. Yuuguu: If you are looking for a multi-platform screen-sharing tool to know how the complete design team is working on a design projects, you have to take the help of this software. Instructing the team members on any issue on the mistakes with an instant messaging was never so easy! Even sharing each others’ screens is possible to keep the project on track to complete perfectly on time. So designers never mind to use this software that ultimately pushes the work process fast and perfect.


9. BEEdit: It is a HTML and text editor for the Macintosh platform. The moment designers need high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text, they go for it. Its intelligent interface provides easy access to BBEdit's features like grep pattern matching, search and replacement across multiple design files, project definition tools, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages, code folding. It has a complete set of robust HTML tools for the designers.


10. Scite: Another text editing software that designers sometimes find useful is this one. It is a very lightweight program to use in any design situation. When a designer is working with so much heavy software and may come to situations of system collapse or something like that, Scite can be run and removed after text editing work is done.

The above are the top 10 web design software of the present time used mostly by the designers for producing and completing any design project. The software list you find is completely a tentative one, you may find other people showing you the different list of top 10 web design software.

Whatever the case is, if you have a business and want to design a website, you need to find out if the web design and web development company has the expertise in using above software for your project. Ultimately you are looking for best design right? On the other hand, if you are designer, remember these are the software your clients may ask you about. Know how to use these and remain always ready for any project!

The top 10 web design mistakes - You should avoid for better return against your investment in website building

We all aspire that our websites will return us maximum business against the investment done on those. But it does not mean that we think twice on pouring some extra money to improve the return? No, we are ready to go almost all extends to make it attractive to the user eyes and easy to access.

However we find that our initiates fail! Again in most of the cases we go on pouring money, yet the intended result is not found. Now what are the reasons of this type of problems? There may be many a reason for these failures. But the most effective is the design issue!

We all know that design is the first thing to attract the users to a site. Depending on the success of the design, the other parts can work for sure. Whether it is your ecommerce site to showcase and sell the products or a site through which you provide various services, the design has to leave a mark in the mind of the users.

Anyways, plainly speaking, if you can avoid some great mistakes done at the time of designing the templates or the layouts of the websites, you will save money, time and see your websites going more productive.

Let us now see the top 10 web design mistakes that may pull your initiative to sea:

1. Browser compatibility: The first and vital mistake that may have a deep impact is the compatibility of the design in several browsers. It is found that either for the lack of experience of the designers or for your hurry the designs are not made compatible to all the popular browsers. Mainly the “Internet Explorer”, one of the most used browsers, creates design break issues. So whatever hurry you are having, do not forget to make design of a webpage browser compatible. Otherwise, users will have a bad impression for your website; being irritated, they may not return again.


2. Splash page: Try to avoid in having a splash page (introductory page) for your website. Remember whatever beautiful the ‘intro’ is, those take time and visitors have less time in their hands (just 30 seconds in general). They may not push the “skip” button and enter your site to see more relevant information! So concentrate or let the designers put effort on the design of the home page.


3. The color: In whatever structure a webpage is designed, it has to have the sober color in use. Otherwise, the highly glossy or the gloomy colors may irritate the viewers. Do not try to force your personal taste of colors on the site; better try to go by the purpose of the site. In other words, there are some specific match of colors according to the convention of the designs; say the ‘sky blue’ for corporate, ‘red’ for medical purposes, the multi colors for fashion business etc. The color depth and glossiness should not poke eyes.


4. Animations and JavaScripts: For making a site interactive designers tend to use the animations. The animations may be of Flash, javascripts, 3D and etc. But remember these the excess use of things should not become bar against the overall performance of the site. Many a times JavaScripts are blocked by several browsers while flash players may not be present in user’s machines; even larger 3D and Flash files take time to load and users see the blank pages! These create bad impression in visitors mind.


5. Missing contact info & irritating forms: It is very much necessary that the websites prominently put the contact information in proper places. The visitors do not have so much time to find out the contact info; rather they should find it prominent in front of their eyes. Whereas sometimes the contact forms are long and do not work properly and users feel bored to fill them up. So it is necessary that you check out that the contact information is well displayed and several forms are well designed and not long for sure.


6. Irritating Advertisements: It is evident that the advertisements are needed for sure in a webpage. They bring revenue for the owners of the sites. But does it mean that ads have to irritate the viewers with their wrong placements? Sometimes in the layout structures the ads are misplaced among the valuable information or they are paneled in a way that viewers feel irritated. So try to instruct the designers or understand that proper placements of the ads and relevancy with the page information are a must.


7. Navigation and link: It is more than necessary that the page navigation menus are nicely designed and the links are properly clear to the visitors. Many a time it is found that designers forget to design the navigation menus properly or use the lengthy dropdowns. On the other hand, the links are designed as images (not texts) which create problem for search robots in crawling your links. Even when there are some links in the body texts the colors of those does not change on clicking for helping the visitors understand the visited links. These mistakes somehow may mislead the visitors. Try to avoid these.


8. Frames and scrollers and fixed width: Sometimes just for the enhancements of the design the frames are used or for fixed width horizontal scroll bar appear on the user machines. Do you think the users have time to scroll horizontally to know your hidden information? No, many a time they avoid these things. So try to convert your fixed width layouts into liquid layouts (100% to fit all the windows) and do not use frames.


9. Fonts and text format: Most of the times it is found that the designers do care to use light weight images and graphics but do not care the font size, type and text formats. Due to fixed font size or type the viewers feel uneasy to read the information. At the same time there should not be the use of any font family that is not commonly available in user computers. Tyr to always keep the Ariel, Verdana, Tahoma as default. Again you should look into the paragraph format of the texts. The text should not be in long paragraphs. The bulleted texts and small paragraphs help users understand your business motto.


10. Pop-ups and new windows: Last but not the least is the unnecessary use of the pop-up and opening of the new windows for explanation purposes. Generally in many cases the pop-ups are blocked in user machines and when users are provided with new windows, they either tend to see those or forget coming to the main pages. So your designs have to use “page refresh” on the same window the users have landed.

However these are the 10 design mistakes that designers many a time happen to perform while they are in hurry to meet the deadlines. If you follow the above points, you will notice that these can be easily be avoided. Actually these may be out of lack in professional attitude of the designers or the companies. Always remember that you have to choose a web design company which is grown to avoid these issues neatly to provide you error free and best design layouts. Same applies in the case of a freelance designer. If you can do so, you will save money and time and you will find that your website is keeping mark in the viewers' mind! Three cheers to your success!

Google farmer update - is there anything to worry about

There is nothing to worry about the Google farmer update (some say Panda update) for the SEOs and the website owners who never think to utilize the content (huge volume but low quality or stuffed texts with keywords) of their sites maliciously to get better SERP and page rank. Google has been trying ever to keep its database free of content those are worthless against human legibility and understanding. And this time with Google farmer update it has applied strong filtration by updating the search algorithm. Till date the process has been applied to index of Google.us and it is supposed to be applied to the complete search indices world-wide.

However, let us now see what has happened and what will be the consequences in the search results and the page rank in short:

• After the Google farmer update the search giant has implemented a filtration to find if the huge volume of content in a site is of poor quality (without valuable information). How far relevancy the texts are having and if there is any repetition of same content or the sentence, phrase to lengthen the volume of the text or there are several copied text in any web page.
• It has been made sure that the text content is with rich links both inbound and outbound. Google farmer update heavily prioritized the relevancy of links and the web pages with more valid links are given better page rank and SERP. But the content (and the domains) with irrelevant links are scheduled to go to the purgatory – sandbox.

• The Google farmer update has started a process of checking if the web pages are attempted to be prepared with equal density for all keywords mentioned in the title and meta key words. It is obvious that this type of usage of keywords make the content stuffed unnecessarily. Now onwards there will be greater filtration on these issues.
• With the implementation of the Google farmer update the process of screening the web pages with higher ratio of ads against the information. It is found that websites are stuffed with advertisements against giving the proper information to the users. This is only done to earn revenue through advertisements. And it is fact that to get advertisement the sites try black-hat process to get visible in SERP.
• Last but not the least is the priority of visitor acceptability of the site content depending on the analytic reports. Google farmer update has started strictly analyzing how the users are taking the web pages of the sites. Are the visitors staying on pages that are made to deliver information on the business of the sites? On the other hand, if the visitors are trying to “contact us” or “request a quote” on the basis of the reputation of the site? How is the continuous bounce rate of the sites? These things are analyzed to know the visitor preference of the site and depending on these factors; the sites are getting better SERP or page rank.

Hope with the above points you have understood how is going to be the future Google search indices after Google farmer update comes to effect for preventing the search engine optimizers and the website owners who are looking to make the web pages worthless to read by the human beings. We should cheer up the Google Inc. for taking one of the major step in making the website really for the information spreading. Let each and every entity related to website building (web design company, SEO company and others) understand that websites should be built with the primary goal of making business with proper information, not for getting fast higher page rank or SERP. Finally let’s wait for Google farmer update to be applied in the whole indices of Google.