Web Design and all stuff related to it!

HTML forms and contact forms are a terrific enhancement for your website. These are used by various companies and individuals for collecting all kinds of important information, from answers and surveys to order forms.

A contact form is another way to display your email address as a link. When you contact a business or website owner through a webpage instead of your own email program you are using a contact form.

If you own any type of website, adding a HTML form or a contact form will give your site interaction between you and your visitors and, in some cases, interaction between visitors.

Some of the reasons to add contact forms to your websites include:

- Joining your newsletter

- Adding comments

- Asking questions

- Filling out an application for employment

- Answering survey questions

- Joining clubs

- Answering multi-choice polls

These are just a few of the reasons you may wish to add HTML forms and contact forms to your website.

We offer you the ability to create all kinds of HTML forms online so, all you have to do is copy the form and then paste it onto the page you wish the form to be displayed. You will be able to decide how many fields you need for your HTML form, name each field, choose the size of the field, and the type of data that should be placed in the blank. You can have the contact form blend in with the colors and text of your website or, make the form stand out by choosing the color of text and background.

Choosing what information is mandatory is up to you, depending on what you need the HTML form for. If you only need an email address and first name for joining your newsletter then, that is all you have to have fields for, however, if you need to ask several questions regarding expertise for an employment application you can add all of these with multi-choice features or blank fields for the person to fill in.

Polls are often a wonderful way to get your visitors involved in all kinds of things, from political questions to favorite entertainment artists or songs. With these polls, you can post the top answers chosen by your guests, which gives them a way to interact and be involved in your website. This information can then be used to add information to your website. Example: If you wish to talk about celebrities, you can find out which celebrities are among the favorites of your guests before you begin working on the topic. This will ensure more visitors to your website to read all the gossip.

HTML forms and contact forms will be a wonderful tool that can help your business whether you need it for employment applications, taking orders, sending newsletters, or just for fun. Add a HTML form to your website today and begin watching the difference in website visitors.

The content is separated from the design

Because you are able to create a separate Stylesheet and link it to all your webdocuments, you have great control over how your website looks. So if you want to change a certain aspect of your page, you only need to alter one file: your Stylesheet!

This Of course, generates some great flexibility. This flexibility is not available when your website is using tables for layout, inline font tags or inline defined colors.

A single CSS file can contain positioning, layout, font, colors and style information for an entire web site.

You site uses less bandwidth and loads faster

Because stylesheets are so lightweight, your website will load much faster. The main reason is because you do not need table layouts anymore for the positioning of elements. Since text loads really really fast your website will be visible in a flash.

This means that visitors will be happier when surfing your website. They only have to download the Stylesheet once, and it’s automatically reused for every page. So the only thing that needs to be loaded is the actual content.

On average a website will load five to ten times faster if it makes use of cascading style sheets.

Your website will automatically gain better search engine results

With CSS, you can position any element, anywhere you want. So if your menu is at the bottom of your HTML document, you can bring it up using absolute positioning. The reason this is useful is to make sure the search engine spiders pick up the main content first.

Another advantage you automatically gain is that your HTML code is much cleaner. So the search engine spider will not have to separate the junk code from the real content.

So make sure you put your logo text and your menu at the bottom of your HTML document at put it at the top using CSS!

CSS is compatible with newer browsers

Because more and more browsers are used other than Internet Explorer on a Windows machine, you need to be sure that your website is accessible by all major and newer browsers.

By using webstandards, defined by the w3c, you are making sure your content is viewable in the future.

Because there are so many browsers these days, it is impossible to test your website in all these browsers on different configurations. Coding to standards is then the only practical solution.

CSS can be used to display the same content on different media.

Because you are able to define different stylesheets for different media you have great flexibility in presenting your content.

The printer for example, is a medium on itself. If someone prints out your website, you will be able to modify the look of it. Add an extra black and white logo, remove the advertisements and change the colors to black and white values. It’s all done easily by using cascading stylesheets. And the best thing is, visitors do not even have to know you created a new Stylesheet especially for the printer.

Stylesheets can also be created specifically for PDA’s and such. As you will understand, this adds some great flexibility to the presentation of your web document.

Conclusion

Cascading Style Sheets are created to make things easier. It gives you great control of your website and makes your visitors happy when they are surfing your website.

You are prepared for the future and will gain better search engine results automatically. Start using CSS to its full potential today! It will suit you well.

Cascading Style Sheets is something every webmaster should learn to use, however it can be complicated to code by hand. Fortunately, the built in Dreamweaver CSS tools make it simple as pie as you’ll see in this introductory lesson.

Whether you are a total newbie when it comes to CSS or you are an expert, the built in Dreamweaver CSS tools can help you out a lot.

This tutorial is designed for the person who owns Dreamweaver, is curious about CSS and wants to learn how to put it to use.

CSS is not hard to learn and with the Dreamweaver point and click tools, it is easier than ever.

3 Types Of CSS:

You can have an internal, external, or inline css style sheet.

In this tutorial, I will discuss an external style sheet, which I think is the most useful when working on a website with more than 1 page.

To create an external stylesheet with Dreamweaver, simple click ‘New’ and under ‘Basic Page’ choose ‘CSS’.

This will give you a blank style sheet.

The next thing you want to do is experiment and create 1 or 2 CSS definitions.

You might create a CSS definition called ‘background1′ and make the color green.

Then save the CSS style sheet as something like ’sample1.css’.

Next you would open an html file in the same folder that has some text in it and ‘attach’ the external style sheet.

You attach the sheet by selecting the ‘Text’ dropdown menu and choosing ‘CSS Styles’ then ‘Attach Style Sheet’.

Once you have attached an external style sheet to a webpage, you can make changes to the external style sheet and change the content page. This is especially important if you have a website with multiple web pages.

The concept is, that by attaching an external style sheet to all of your web pages, you can update many web pages instantaneously by changing the one CSS style sheet that is attached to them.

In this manner, a large corporate website with 20,000 pages could be updated with new colors and fonts in less than 15 seconds!…Simply by changing the one external CSS style sheet.

So you see how useful CSS style sheets can be.

To get started, simply go into your HTML code after you have attached an external CSS sheet to your page in Dreamweaver. You can take any tag like a tag and start typing in a CSS class.

For example, . If you start adding a css class to any of these tags, Dreamweaver will start to auto-complete it for you and you can choose which class you want to add from a dropdown menu.

You can also use this to style page backgrounds, table backgrounds, fonts, and much more!

You only have to learn the fundamentals of CSS and then experiment with Dreamweaver and I promise you’ll be capable of using CSS with Dreamweaver in a matter of a few hours.

To learn more about Dreamweaver and Cascading Style Sheets, you can watch step by step videos at http://www.dreamweaverhowto.com

Web Design Some Quick Tips To Get Started

Web design can be quite a daunting prospect if you are new to the Internet. You would like to create your own site but have no idea where to start. Html? Photoshop? Fireworks? FrontPage? Dreamweaver?

This article/tutorial will give you some tips and hints on how to get started with web design – and which shortcuts to take!

Tip 1: Learn HTML

I can hear you groan. I said I was going to give you some shortcuts, now I suggest you learn HTML! Unfortunately there is no way around it. Even if you make use to the shortcuts to web design that I am going to suggest, learning HTML will still be the best investment that you can make. It is really not that difficult and it will greatly aid in your understanding of web design.

A really good place for online tutorials on HTML can be found here: http://www.w3schools.com/html/

Depending on your enthusiasm and level of technical skill I would also suggest that you learn a bit about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Cascading style sheets can assist you tremendously with controlling the layout, colors and images on your web page. You can also find good CSS tutorials on the w3schools website.

Tip 2: Use a web template for web design

Now this is really a shortcut to web design! I suggest that you create your first website by making use of a web template. There are lots of commercial templates available, and frankly, they are beautiful, but I am going to give you some hints on where to find free web templates. Most people would think that searching for ‘free web templates’ in Google would be the most obvious way of doing it – but I suggest that you rather search for ‘open source web templates’.

Here are three sources with open source (basically – free to use) web templates. The advantage of these templates is that they are normally well designed and will also teach you good web design principles (as opposed to most of the commercial templates which, while they are undeniably beautiful to look at, they are normally not built making use of good web design principles).

My favorite Open Source web design site is http://www.oswd.org – This site has over a 1600 free designs to choose from. Download any design and build your site! Most of these designs make use of CSS as well which is why it is a good idea to learn CSS.

Another site with lots of free template designs is http://www.daydreamgraphics.com – I suggest that if you are just starting out you stick with the designs made with tables. These are the easiest to manipulate and use. The templates on Daydreamgraphics are not for everyone – they are mostly geared towards a young funky look, so if you are looking for a design that you can use for your business or company, you might do better to rather select a design from OSWD, but if you are looking at setting up a personal website, a hobby site or a site related to music or entertainment, these designs will work very well.

Tip 3: Use Wordpress or Joomla to create your site

This option is really by far the best way to create your website in the long term. Theoretically you do not need to know HTML and CSS to create and modify your site but in practice it pays off to learn these skills since it will help you master these tools just so much faster.

The steps to creating your website using these tools are as follows:

1. Log into your CPanel control panel (if you are not using a host that provides you with a CPanel control panel and Fantastico scripts – frankly, my only advice is to change to one that does!)

2. Select Fantastico from the control panel

3. Select either Wordpress or Joomla from the menu on the left.

4. Install Wordpress or Joomla in the root folder. You will have to select an administrator username and password to access the admin side of your site.

Log into the admin backend (normally /wp-admin for Wordpress and /administrator for Joomla). There are lots of free Wordpress tutorials available – just do a Google search for ‘free Wordpress tutorials’ and to get started in Joomla, do a search for ‘how to use Joomla’.

To change the look and feel of your Wordpress or Joomla website is really easy! You simply install a new template. Wordpress and Joomla templates are specific to these tools (you cannot use any templates). For a guide to where to find the best free Wordpress and Joomla templates you can take a look at these resources: http://www.tm4y.co.za/joomla-tips/best-joomla-templates.html and http://www.tm4y.co.za/wordpress-tips/wordpress-templates.html

I hope that these tips will help you on your way to creating your own website – web design the easy way!

The following article will show you why to stay away from tables when designing a site.

Most web developers and designers will tell you to stay away from tables when developing web sites, of course there are some exceptions, like forms, and data. Instead they will tell you to use CSS. When designing your web site you should use CSS, along with the HTML tag. Now, you may be asking, why? The reasons are below!

1. Tabular Data. Not layouts.

Tables are for Tabular Data. They simply are not for designing a page. Here is a good page at about.com that explains Tabular Data.

2. Nested Tables

Nested tables is a common way to make layouts with tables. With nested tables, one, or more, tables are placed inside each other. There is a problem when designing a page this way, it takes the browser longer to render your page. With CSS there is way less code, and your code is cleaner, therefor it is easier on the browser.

3. Changing fonts, colors, and layouts.

Lets say you had a site with 100 pages, with tables, and you wanted to change the header of every page to blue instead of red. With CSS you could go into the CSS file, included on every one of those 100 pages, and change the font-color to blue. It would then update all of your pages with the color blue. With tables you would have to open every one of those pages and change the color.

4. Invalid XHTML

When using tables for your web page layout, you are writing invalid XHTML. You should only use tables when you are working with Tabular Data, as I stated above.

5. Smaller HTML files

No one wants a huge HTML file, full of messy code, right? Well, this is just another reason to use CSS. Since you can call your CSS stylesheet from external file, it doesn’t even need to be in your HTML file to work, making it even smaller.

Home Page: http://www.leetwebmasters.com