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By admin, December 30, 2010 5:12 am

Using Xsitepro Web Design Software to Create a Website for Your Business

Good web design software such as XSitePro or Dremweaver is a must. In today’s world, very few businesses exist without websites.  Having a presence on the internet will expose your company to more people, allow greater geographic expansion, and enable you to do business over the internet.  Because of these benefits, it is important that you maximize your return-on-investment through your website.  Outsourcing web design can be very expensive, especially if your company is rapidly expanding or beginning to offer more services over the internet.

Fortunately, there are many web design software packages, such as XSitePro that allow you to create your own website without the help of an outside professional.  Web design software with a great variety of features is available, with costs ranging from free to thousands of dollars.  Because of the high cost of outsourced website creation, however, this investment can lead to a great deal of saved money over time with your own web design software package.

One of the distinct advantages of buying your own web design software and building your website is that you can add and modify your content whenever you wish.  This is especially important if you plan on expanding your website to include features like customer feedback, blogs, articles, or an e-store.  These features may require a significant amount of time to create, but are miniscule in cost compared to the outsourcing of their creation.  Owning your own web design software is a must. Websites are most appealing when their content is fresh and dynamic; if your want your website to attract a large number of visitors, plan on adding content on a regular basis.

Another good reason to invest in your own XSitePro web design software is for experimentation.  The ability to modify your website and track changes in activity using your web design software package is vital in optimizing the layout and content of your site.  By trying out different versions of your website with your web design software package, you can determine what your visitors respond best to.  You can then customize your site and your advertising to make it most effective in bringing in potential customers.

Another moneymaking strategy for business websites is third-party advertising.  Pay-per-click and affiliate campaigns can supplement the revenue that you generate with your website.  By investing in your own web design software, you can choose which PPC provider or affiliate program you use and make sure that it is appealing to your customers.  Your website will be very appealing to customers if they know that they will not only be able to view your products or services, but also related products and services from other retailers.

Buying web design software and creating your own website may seem like a daunting task; however, the financial benefits of doing your own web design instead of outsourcing can be considerable.  Being able to add and modify content whenever you wish as well as having control over third-party advertising gives you complete control over your website, which may provide the first impression of your business to many potential customers.  Having an attractive, engaging, and useful website is one of the most important steps that a business can take in increasing sales—why not take control of it yourself?

XSitePro web design software can assist you in achieving an excellent solution.  A 30 day free trial of XSitePro web design software is currently available. 

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By admin, December 12, 2010 4:06 pm

Choosing Web Design Software

When it comes to choosing web design software, there are many different options.  To choose which web design software package is best for you, you should consider the different features that the software comes with.  Following is a list of different features that you may want to look for when you choose a software package to design your website.

WYSIWYG

“What You See is What You Get” web design software allows you to visually design your website and have the program generate the HTML code for you.  This feature is especially important for designers who are not familiar with HTML and CSS.  If you decide to use this type of web design software, it is important that it allows you to view and directly edit the HTML.  Even if you’re not HTML literate now, you may be in the future, and being able to directly edit the code gives you added versatility.

Templates

Many web design software packages include templates that you can build your website around.  Some of these web design software programs such as XSitePro offer hundreds of different professional-level templates.  By using templates that have already been created and tested, you can be sure that your website will be readable and attractive to your visitors.  It’s also important that you’re able to create your own templates so that you can customize your pages and reuse the design.

Affiliate and PPC Management

Affiliate marketing and pay-per-click advertising are two of the most popular ways to make money with a website.  Because of this, having the tools to take advantage of these two methods built in to your web design software can be very helpful.  By keeping your affiliate codes organized and easily accessible, certain types of software can reduce site creation time.  Direct interface with a PPC provider, such as Google AdSense, can also save time and make your advertising more effective by only displaying ads that are directly related to the content of your site.

SEO Tools

Search engine optimization (“SEO”) has become an increasingly important part of making sure that your website gets seen; because of this, web design software that automates optimization can be very useful.  By making suggestions based on analysis, some software packages can greatly reduce the time spent on SEO through automation.

Script Insertion

Scripts allow a website designer to customize their page with both useful and interesting actions and events.  Because of this, script insertion can be a very useful tool within web design software; instead of re-writing the script each time it is to be used—which can be extremely time-consuming—the web design software is able to automatically insert it upon command.  This is an important time-saving feature available in many software packages.

The needs of every web designer are unique and require different features from their web design software.  Some tools, like those listed above, are useful in almost every situation.  Before choosing a software package to invest in, it is important that the designer determine the functions that the software needs to perform.  This can save a great deal of time when it comes to choosing the correct program. A web design software package like XSitePro has all these tools and many more.

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By admin, November 10, 2010 12:44 pm

Web Design Tools For Budding Web Designers

Two of the recognised industry standard tools for web design are Adobe’s ‘Dreamweaver’ website design software package and Adobe’s ‘Photoshop’ which is a graphics tool used for editing and formatting digital photographs. There are of course other similar software packages and additional tools such as Adobe’s ‘Flash’ program(which handles dynamic graphics) and that anyone seriously concerned with the production of professional looking website designs should be familiar with; but essentially Dreamweaver and Photoshop  form your key components for basic web design and are, I believe, the best web design tools available.

The ‘Flash’ software program is a very nice to have accessory that can provide an added dimension to your designs, but should be used within the context of the design brief.

There are a number of versions of Dreamweaver available but they all effectively perform the same or similar functions. It is a professional HTML editor for designing, coding and developing websites, web pages and web applications. The application offers 2 design environments in which to work, the code view and the design view. You can also select a ‘split’ view that lets you see both the code and design views simultaneously.

The design view (visual editing features) allows you to very quickly create web pages without the need to write the associated code that lies behind the design, Dreamweaver takes care of this on your behalf. You can drag in and position the various page elements from an adjoining panel and streamline the development work flow by creating and editing images in third party graphics applications such as the aforementioned ‘Photoshop’ or Adobe’s ‘Flash’ program.

What you will find in practice is that although you can in theory design a website completely from the design screen that you will in fact combine both functions to produce your designs more effectively i.e. typically the basic design is drawn together using the visual editing features and then the coding view is used to fine tune your design to complete the final details. From my experience, it is likely that as you become more familiar with the program that you will find yourself utilising the coding functionality more and more, particularly for managing the pure code aspects of the design such as CSS functionality (cascading style sheets).

Photoshop also comes in many versions and forms, but again the basic functionality is very similar for the different versions. Photoshop allows you to configure and manage static images such as digital photographs or generated images that you may have created within the program. One of the key benefits of Photoshop is that it is relatively easy to use and has been developed with website integration in mind. You can create and save files for the web, reducing resolution for fast loading on the Internet whilst retaining the quality of the image to a level where the differences to the original file are for all intents and purposes indiscernible.

It goes without saying that in order to benefit from any of the programs mentioned, any budding web designer should consider taking a web design course to at least get the basics sorted out. My recommendation would be that any courses that are undertaken would include what I consider to be the two core industry standard software packages mentioned and ideally would also include a basic course on the use of Adobe’s ‘Flash Program’.

There are also many free courses and lots of information on the Internet to cover almost every topic, including website design, and once you are past the basic principles and standard practices stage of your development you will find that these courses plus practical experience will prove invaluable for further development of your design skills.