I will begin with the traditional method of web design and then explore a new method that many developers are now using due to the vastly changing web world. Feel free to sit back, relax and take notes as we explore the wide world of CSS.

First, let’s look at the history of CSS (Cascade Style Sheets). The governing body of the Web, W3C, recommended CSS in December 1996, with CSS Level 1 specification. CSS Level 1 described attributes for use in HTML pages. These attributes replaced the traditional font tag along with other “styles” such as borders and colors. In May 1998, W3C introduced CSS Level 2, adding additional capabilities to level 1, including positioning attributes. These attributes replaced the widespread incorrect usage of the table tag to design web page elements. The most recent version of CSS is 2.1 removes some of the attributes that previously had limited usage and adds refinement to others.

Problems with the Traditional Table Layout and CSS Responses:

Making simple changes such as moving images, changing navigation, or switching colors can take hours. Traditional Table layouts have slow-loading pages because the browser has to retrieve the page from the server and decipher the complex elements of the nested tables. When using CSS, the browser instantly renders content from the server because there isn’t extensive markup language there.

Another down side to tables is the browser needs to retrieve, analyze, and render each individual page. The browser has to go through these steps for each page, which can really slow down your website. But, if you use a cascade style sheet (CSS), the first page of the site allows the browser to cache the linked style sheet file that is used for that page. Meaning, all of the remainder of the pages will load faster since the style sheet has been decoded.

Lastly using traditional table layouts adds lots of extra code, which takes time for the computer to figure out and longer for rendering, features such as font tags. This can be minimized by moving codes to a CSS design. This will minimize your code by as much as 50% or more!!! Less code = a faster loading website!

Hopefully this has helped you better understand CSS and why it has become the web standard for design. If you have any questions feel free to comment on this article or contact us directly. We would love to help on your next project.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 15 CSS Habits to Develop for Frustration-Free Coding (noupe.com)

This may seem like a trivial thing but it actually has a big impact on our market exposure – and it allows us to market in a very economical manner.
Please take a few minutes and help us let the facebook community know who we are.

We are in business today in this tough economic market and we are hoping to bring brand awareness to others by having you on our list of Facebook friends/fans -

You can click here to the Sayenko Design facebook page
or search for (Sayenko Design) in the search box and click on “become a fan” – I would
love to add you to my friend list and stay in touch with you.

Thanks much – I hope your doing well!

Mike Sayenko

In a previous article we went over Blogging Basics. Now we switch our focus to the importance of weekly blogging. Blogging is about sharing your interests, desires, and experiences with others. Your blog is the central hub from which you share those experiences with others. A blog could also be thought of as your article or news section of your website. Since, you want to share this information with as many people as possible, your blog should be visible on search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

This process, called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, maximizes your blog or website in order to attain higher rankings on search engine pages. If SEO isof great importance to you, blogging should be done on a weekly basis and key words cleverly inserted into your blog post. This effectively brings the target audience to your website as they hunt for specific key words on their search engines or follow links from other sites.

Researchers have analyzed the dynamics of how blogs become popular. There are essentially two measures of this: popularity through citations and popularity through affiliation (i.e. blogroll) The basic conclusion from studies of the structure of blogs is that while it takes time for a blog to become popular through blogrolls, permalinks can boost popularity more quickly. Permalinks are perhaps more indicative of popularity and authority than blogrolls, since they denote that people are actually reading the blog’s content and deem it valuable or noteworthy in specific cases.

Will People find you in the search engine?

If you plan on blogging then you might as well go to the effort of doing it right. This means performing a keyword research analysis to narrow down a list of words that would help people find you on their search engines. SEO and blogging go hand in hand, complementing each other. Blogging helps with SEO by building fresh new content and strengthening your keywords. Conversely, SEO helps blogging by defining the list of key words you will use, thus setting the parameters. You want to emphasize the top terms within each post’s title, body, categories, and tags. The more often a key word appears, the more powerful that keyword is, thus potentially ranking you higher in search engines. But don’t be excessive with your keywords, rather, they should be added cleverly and creatively so that the blog flows naturally. Achieving these features correctly boosts the chances of acquiring comments from authoritative readers and gaining links from outside websites, therefore achieving better search engine rankings for your blog!

Now, get out and start blogging with strategy! Don’t know where to start? Our favorite free blogging websites include: Blogger, Wordpress, and Blog.com. If you have any questions or concerns feel free to contact us, we would love to help.

What is this tool and why is it so effective?

What is this tool?

A ‘web content management’ (WCM) system is a CMS designed to simplify the publication of Web content to Web sites, in particular allowing content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files.

CMS Backend Login

Old Problems

You have a website that has grown organically over time, much of the content is out-of-date, updating the website is very complex, its hard to find things, and the appearance is becoming dated. Its now to the point where you’ve lost track of where pages are in the website. You might have a skilled Webmaster that does this all for you, but even for them the updates are becoming a burden. You can’t remember what was on the site last week, or last month. If this sounds about right, you’re not alone. In fact, it’s the way most maintain their website, using manual tools such as Frontpage or Dreamweaver. This is where Content Management System comes in, to clean the mess.

Problems Solved

• CMS allows you to update your website through the back-end of your website, by logging in as an administrator, and updating your site directly through the Internet. This is very powerful as anyone can update the website from anywhere as long as they have Internet.
• The old fashion of updating content of a website is to edit locally on your computer then uploading it through a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program. This is tedious and time consuming, having a chance of overwriting documents by accident or loosing data.

• While with CMS, you have the ability to auto save files (archives) and go back to a previous saved version of the page if you accidentally deleted something.
• Add content without any technical knowledge of HTML.
• Control and maintain your newsletter subscribers and send out HTML emails directly through your CMS system.

Page View of all the Pages in the site

Why is it so effective? Business benefits

• Reduces site maintenance costs
• Fast publishing process
• Faster turnaround time for new pages and changes
• Great consistency
• Improved site flow and navigation
• Greater security
• Reduced duplication of information
• Superior capacity for growth
• Increased site flexibility

Besides the above, the greatest asset to the CMS is to support your business strategies and goals. These are all the reasons why Sayenko Design is operated on a CMS system and integrates this system into majority of our client websites. If you have any further questions don’t hesitate to ask, we would love to help.

Organic Baby Nursery Co. is a custom interior decorating company based in Mill Creek, Washington. The company is a start up, provide families with an easy way to design a healthy, personalized, organic nursery room for their children.

In designing Organic Baby Nursery’s website, our goal was to create an elegant image and highlight the safety of their products. We started with market research by sifting through different websites of organic baby products. We then pulled together a branding strategy that would make Organic Baby Nursery’s website stand out from the rest.

This led us to create a logo and color scheme that communicated an organic feel through the use of earth tones. To stand out we chose a color palate that avoided the usual bright green colors used on most other organic product websites and decided to stand out with a chocolate brown background.

From there, we used technology to help us display a modern, sophisticated and sleek image. We added home page flash animation, and a rotating image gallery with featured products that you can click on, to view those product pages. They don’t sell anything online, which usually is the case with a long product list such as this, this made the process seamless but not easy as there was a 100 page PDF we had to work off to pull all the images and products off, re crop the images and format them to fit the page layout.

Scott Carney the owner had this to say, “We are completely satisfied with the highly skilled and dedicated work of Sayenko Design.  Mike developed a fantastic logo which received rave reviews from many business associates and friends.  He really did a great job of partnering with us during the entire process of developing our custom website and blog. We are thrilled with the elegance, style, color, and animation which is sure to grab our customers attention. We can’t say how excited we are about launching our new business.  Thank you Sayenko Design.”

We are happy to see the website grow in success and enjoy our friendship with the fantastic people at Organic Baby Nursery.

1.    Potential Client meets Designer – to get a good grasp of the project we will get in contact over the phone, email, or set up a meeting.

2. Project Quote Issued by Designer – an email sent to the prospective client with an attached PDF quote for the project.

3. Approval of Quote by Client – usually an email sent back stating the approval.

4. Contract/Project Outline Issued by Designer - the designer emails the contract or meets in person.

Mike Sayenko

5.    Contract is Signed/Project Outline is Approved – paperwork is given back to Sayenko Design.

6.    Client Provides 50% Retainer Fee – along with the signed paper work we require a check of 50% deposit, you know to make sure you are serious about the project.

7.    Consultation – Client and Designer Meet, this may or may not happen as most of the communication is going to be over email/ phone. If there is a need to meet to understand the project better and to hand off project assets for example as CD with images, products that might need to be photographed, and anything that might need to be accomplished over a meeting.

8.    Proposal Provided by Designer – the designer sends an email to the client with a composition of the design usually in JPG (image) format.

9.    Proposal Reviewed by Client – client sends back revisions in an email.

10.    Revised Proposal Provided by Designer – the designer emails back the revisions.

11.    Finalization of Project – project is approved by client and ready to go live (if it’s a website).

12.    Final Payment Submitted by Client – client sends the rest of the payment (usually 50%) within 30 days of completion of the project.

Again nothing is set in stone we are flexible and try to work together with a client on things such as payments, sometimes things aren’t so linear. If you have any further questions don’t hesitate to Contact Us.

Below are questions to take you through the process of strategic web design.

Objective:

• Before you start designing any page, what is going to be the most important feature? Is it going to be a shopping cart? Your Blog? Your Image Portfolio? Just think for a moment on what you want users to do on your website. Some things to think about: imagery, usability, information, purchasing of products.

• Is the website going to need constant updates, such as text and graphics or a blog? Or is the site just going to be static with a few updates here and there?

• Will you be needing control of your content and have users access it? This is usually in a form of a user login on a website, with a backend database (usually used for news based websites, hospitals, clinics, services based sites)

• This is a critical one that many don’t think about. How can your site generate new users or clients, think marketing on social media sites such as twitter (we have a few great articles on Twitter I suggest checking out), facebook, and youtube to name a few. You want to get your name out to as many people as possible, social media sites are great for that. Also creating social videos are a great marketing tool and usually much more interesting to people to view then to read a four page article.

You are always looking to generate new users on your site, this should always be the end goal for any site. The next step is finding ways to keep existing users/clients coming back to your site. Think about marketing – promotional giveaways, a newsletter sign up, or an interesting blog.

Are you planning on generating revenue? If so what is the process from coming to the home page to the end result of purchasing a product or services?

Content

• What is the specific services you will be offering on your site? Is it a personal site? Or a business?

• If you are providing a service, how do you see the process flow from providing information to your viewer to the viewer purchasing your service?

• Do you send out any marketing material or information to your clients? This helps with keeping people interested and involved with your services. Things such as HTML newsletters, flyer’s, blog posts, social video. The end goal is engaging in your customers and giving them something valuable.

• What types of marketing or informational materials do you send to your clients to keep them involved with your business and services?

You should have most of your content laid out before you start on any design, or at least have a good idea of your content.

Design

You might have thought this should have been first. However, this is usually the last thing that brings all the elements together, as your not just building a pretty website, but rather a strategic one that understands the user, engages, and reacts. Think of the design as your overall picture in terms of how you want it to feel and look.

• Think of the “feel” of the site, the presence, what mood are you trying to convey when a user views your website. Is your site going to be simple and clean? A high-tech sophisticated look? A fun site that might be whimsical?

• A color scheme is very important to the mood of the website. What color scheme do you envision? What sort of feel or mood are you trying to convey? Why? Is it going to be cool vs. warm, black and white, brights, pastel, organic, skin-tones, earth-tones.

• Do you already have a logo, or are you looking to create your branding from the ground up?

This is the journey we take all our clients through to get a better grasp of their end goal and to have a website that is strategic in its design. After going through these steps you will have a good feel of what you will want your website to do and feel. We encourage everyone to go through the steps carefully while really thinking about the process, as design is as much about the process as it is about design. Remember design is about visual communication. You want to communicate with the user – not just making a pretty graphic but a graphic design that works strategically.

Jon Hickey – Co-Founder and director of Web Strategy and Development

Why do I need comprehensive web design solutions?

Marketing in 2009 is far different than marketing in 1999. 10 years ago, companies could survive with a static site that just provided basic information.  Even worse, these websites lacked strong branding.  Internet users in 2009 expect more.  Websites today need to engage users and add value to their lives.  This includes the use of video, blogging, and social networks.  We will provide companies with comprehensive web strategies that includes more than a nice looking website.

What services do you provide?

We now offer more integrated services than ever before.  These services include:

• Branding and Web Design Consulting
• Social Media and Social Networking Strategies
• Web Design Solutions
• Print Collateral
• Photography
• Web Video

This combination of services allows us to provide a truly comprehensive solution to businesses looking to expand their web presence.

Mike Sayenko – Co-Founder and Creative Director

One thing we won’t be changing any time soon is our focus on maintaining a long-term relationship with our clients.  Over the past 3 years, we have worked hard to build strong relationships with our clients both inside and outside the workplace.  These relationships establish a deeper understanding of our clients’ business and personal goals.  More importantly, they bring a personal connection to our work.  We enjoy watching our friends succeed.

Through these hard economic times, it’s more important than ever to work with people you trust.  We want to continue to build trusting relationships between Sayenko Design and our clients.

On a more personal note, we would like to thank all of our clients that we have had the pleasure to work with over the past few years.  You all helped us get to where we are today, and we look forward to working with you in the future.