Creating The Feel & Look of Your Web design

The look and feel of your website must reflect your over all vision for your company or business. In my opinion, the "Header" is a very important aspect in creating the over all look. If the client has a logo, that is always taken into consideration, and a priority factor. Then the task of finding just the right visuals - image - to incorpoate into the over all feel. "Every picture tells a story," "a picture is worth a thousand words," you know the sayings, and it's true! I usually pull the entire color theme from a single picture, perfectly coordinating it through out the design.

It would be nice IF we could use beautiful high resolution images all over the website! BUT, this would not be wise as the pages would become to heavy, making the site useless. Always optimize your photos to the best download size while retaining the optimal quality... easier said than done sometimes. One or two fantastic images is always better than many images of less quality and impact.

It is always helpful IF the client has an "image" in mind or available. While working on http://www.wisernow.com/, my client had an image of an apple. That was all we needed, and the entire look took off beautifully!

Keep in mind that knowing WHAT you desire, and being prepared from day one in providing examples will only result in a more satisfying web experience.

In my opinion, the entire web page should not exceed 50k at most.

Woman With Websites...

Marketing to woman, woman owned websites, or a web audience that focuses on the female market, is proving to be very beneficial. The new year is off to a great start as LuLu Wow has attracted 5 new clients. Two are powerful and accomplished women that are authors and public speakers. One is a women Realtor, another, a women owned website, and lastly, a school in California owned by a women.
Marketing to and for women is specialized and a very needed service in the web community. I am enjoying all of these new projects enourmously!!

Marketing Events

With the holidays approaching - is your website ready? By now you should made some changes to your web site, a holiday promotion, thought, image... something to update your website to keep it fresh and interesting for your web audience and the search engines. These ongoing changes, be they small blurbs or big announcements are very important in keeping your website alive! Think of it like other media industries , print, TV or radio. You would not keep picking up the same magazine, or watching the same TV program if it was the same every month... ditto for your web marketing!
LuLu Wow includes monthly maintenance for all of our web design clients. If you happen to have a website that is basically dead because you have no way to add fresh information, give us a shout. We can provide you with this valuable service at a very reasonable fee.

Vision...

Vision - n.
The faculty of sight; eyesight: poor vision.
Something that is or has been seen.
Unusual competence in discernment or perception; intelligent foresight: a leader of vision.
The manner in which one sees or conceives of something.
A mental image produced by the imagination.

Creating a website begins with "vision." A spark, an idea that flows into the mind. What creates this "spark?" For me it is usually something as simple as a word, a picture or a color. Turning that VISION into a workable and awesome CONCEPT come from communication with my web client. Every client has a vision of what they desire their website to look like. Since we all see things differently, communication is the key to a beautiful and positive result. We will talk about color, shapes, style, emotion, and all possible aspects to have a genuine meeting of the minds. Then OUT vision begins to unfold and ultimately produce the desired outcome. Talk to me about your VISION!

LuLu

Using old browser platforms.

Okay, I have a huge pet peeve! Why in the world would anyone not update their web browser?? It's fast and FREE. Who would choose to keep an old - outdated browser? As a web designer I am not fond of Internet Explorer to begin with. Yes, IE7 has made progress, but they have a long way to go! Firefox renders properly and is totally up to speed. I know that I am supposed to work like hell to make my designs cross-browser compatible, but why should I have to continue to do this. Honestly, if someone is still stuck with IE5 I don't care how their web page looks. That may sound rude, but I will not cater to those that can not keep current with simple technology. I am starting to feel this way about IE6 users too! I would love to hear how everyone feels about this!

Go PINK for October!

I am "going PINK" for October breast cancer awareness month! Come on women of the web, and men too ... swap out your background webpage color to pink (I just did) add a "going pink" graphic, spread the awareness and be part of a solution! Let's PINK it up!

Visit http://pinkforoctober.org/ and get involved.