Vestal Web Design Blog

Yet another website blog-style allowing users to post and apply for jobs–Design Jobs on the Wall offers an inexpensive and easy way to land or post a quick job or two. Do you need a quick freelance designer to make that sleek logo or enhance your color scheme? Are you the designer in need of a few bucks and can handle this kind of request ? Try your luck at this job posting wall. Jobs are easy to post–only $50 or $75 dollars for 30 days, with a refund guarantee.

The web designer is simple and compact, causing little confusion or lost time. If you wish to post a job, simply create an account, write a 3000 character post including a graphic and deposit either $50 or $75 dollars for freelance or full-time, respectively.

Also, visit the host, Web Designer Wall for full posts on web design techniques.

Are you looking for a high-profile way to increase your web base, design something big, earn significant pay from a design job? Coroflot.com is the well established answer to any of these questions.

Coroflot is a web tool for design teams and contractors to post design jobs. Coroflot is free for individual designers to post their portfolios online and apply for the many jobs that fill Coroflot’s job listings wall. The jobs range from Graphic Design, Design Education, 3-D Modeling, Marketing and Sales Design, and Design Management. Besides the wide variety of job types and scopes, Coroflot is truly set apart from other design job listing sites by it’s reputation and the sheer number of respectable companies that make up its company job postings list. There are nearly 300 companies ranging from Microsoft, to Kraft Foods, to frog design.

Coroflot’s ease and simplicity of use make it a must for someone with a design background. It will be your link to a significant web design job (or many of them).

(All corporate names are copyright of their respective companies)

Take a look at the web’s most professional, yet artistic CSS-based websites at CSS Remix and CSSclip These websites offer clear, visual galleries of today’s most highly rated websites (from a design standpoint). Both sites have rating systems and high standards for the web content that is listed on their sites.

CSS Remix is a basic visual gallery of every site with dynamic CSS design and content listing back from 2006. CSS Remix advertises to be highly selective in which sites become listed in their gallery. Anyone can submit or suggest a site, but the number one priority in making it into the elite is demonstrating this highest of CSS design and web standards.

CSSclip is a web design inspiration site. The site has a clever search option that allows you to view sites in its gallery based on color scheme. Many of the sites listed are not only inspirations for your own designs, but are actually design companies showing off their best material in an effort to provide a solution to your web design needs. The site itself is designed with high-standards and can surely give that designer new ideas and new ways to look at web design.

A sample of the visual gallery at CSS REMIX:

A sample of the visual gallery at CSSclip:

In addition to providing visitors with inspiration, both sites offer much in the way of marketing. Both sites have high-traffic advertisement spots open for purchase. If you own a website that is worthy of listing on CSS Remix, submit it now and you will likely have a new following or new customer base.

Are you looking for a job in web design? Are you looking to show off your talent in a freelance web design job? If so, browse the job listings at Authentic Jobs to find a challenging and rewarding job opportunity. Authentic Jobs offers some of the most “standards-aware” design and development teams to post job listings on the site hire talented designers like you. The jobs can be either design or development, full-time or freelance, region-specific or home-based.

Here is a look at how Authentic Jobs lists its many, constantly updated job opportunities:

Also, if you a stuck in a rut, or in need of an extra hand in a design or development project be sure to consider posting your job on Authentic Jobs ! Posting a job is cheap and has a money-back guarantee. Authentic Jobs is sure to bring in talented professional job-seekers with impressive portfolios that can fulfill your project needs.

Web design tutorials can really get the creative juices flowing.  A tutorial can give you the jump-start that you need to get a project or a design off the ground.  If you can follow the steps of the tutorial you can have a simple, customizable, professional-looking website in your hands in no time.  The tutorials at PSDTUTS.com offer intermediate to advanced tutorials that give you a professional edge.  These tutorials are step by step and have amazing results and reviews.

Methodically create a site design with a simple structure and a simple color scheme.

Whether you are looking to design a personal website or a professional website for a customer, tutorials are always a safe way to go. Whether you choose PSDTUTS, or another tutorial design site, tutorials will offer you a professional and creative advantage without any chance of copyright or creative infringement. The tutorials are there to give you an idea to build from, or to follow exactly and make minor customizations. The end results can be brilliant.

Do you want to boost the stylishness of your site and logo?

So what if it looks a little bit stereotypical of a Web 2.0 site..? These logos are cool, clean, and stylish. They are also very simple to make. For a quick and easy logo solution, design your own at Creatr.cc. Creatr.cc has a simple web application to design a logo like the one above.

You may also want to look at LogoDesign.blogspot. This blog tutorial gives an in-depth look at how to use Photoshop to design a Web 2.0 Logo. LogoDesign also has posts about other aspects of Web 2.0 Logo design, such as ‘vectoring’ your Photoshop art (found here).
If you find any posts that are worth noting, please post the hyperlink in the comment box!

When I first opened my Dreamweaver MX program back in ‘04 I was excited about the Javascript Image rollover function. You could insert a hyperlink button that allowed you to choose one main image and then a rollover image. The rollover image would appear when the mouse went over the button because Dreamweaver input a Javascript code to load it. The code was pretty cumbersome, however. It had to preload the rollover image and then call an action or two to get the rollover moving. What this meant was that either the page would load slowly because it had to load the extra image and action, or the rollover would lag because it took time to load the image after the mouse was over the button area.
How do we make rollovers without the lag and coding hassle? With CSS, of course! Below is a code that you may use that demonstrates how CSS rollovers work.

Basically, if you do not understand CSS, this code says that the background area of any link in the div box with id “menu” will have button-bkgd.gif as teh background until the mouse is above it. The background will then become button-over-bkgd.gif.

#menu a {
...
background: url("button-bkgd.gif") top left no-repeat;
}
#menu a:hover {
...
background-image: url("button-over-bkgd.gif");
}
#menu a:active {
...
background-image: url("button-active-bkgd.gif");
}


See how well this works?

( This code adapted from a similar code found on WellStyled.com )

(If you want to know what a Vector is, read the bottom of this post…)
There are many sites with free vector designs and graphics, but I am going to showcase some from Vecteezy.com. Vecteezy’s graphics are numerous and top of the line. Best of all, they are free. They can be downloaded and used for any purposes. Follow Vecteezy’s guidelines and you will be able to use these graphics to make great Web 2.0 design projects. Some of the vectors are fully designed graphics and others are simply template with which you can make buttons are web tables on.

   
 

–A vector graphic is an image based on mathematical lines and curves rather than bitmap pixels. This way, vectors are extremely sharp looking graphics no matter how far you zoom in. They can be described as more cartoony than regular ‘raster’ images, but they use less space to store and don’t have any excess detail. All of the technical stuff aside, vectors are sharp graphics that integrate well into Web 2.0 Design.

Found an awesome css template to use with your website or blog? Don’t hesitate, use it! Sometimes it is just necessary to use a clean template created and tested by someone else. You may feel that you are stealing or that you are not promoting your own design capabilities, but a good template is better than one that needs work. The only formality in using an open source css template is to ensure that you give the original creator the credit(s) that he or she requests. In most cases, this credit is as simple as a link back to the designer’s website in the footer of the page or hidden documentation in the html coding. Many of the creators follow the GNU General Public License (found here). A basic summary of this license includes the ability to edit the template and to use it for any purpose you desire except for unauthorized resale as long as there is the desired link or documentation. You may sell items and monetize your site however you like.

The following are screenshots of templates from FreeCssTemplates.org

   

Many large applications such as blog applications (WordPress, Blogger.com, phpBB, etc…), store front applications (oscommerce, zencart, etc….) , and do-it-yourself-websites have large databases of user-generated open source css templates. The more popular templates are well-documented and rated by other users and creators on every aspect of their usability. Creating your own template to fit every specification of one of these big sites can be a big job and take needless hours to fine tune. For the amateur designer or businessman who wants to open a store online I highly recommend using a clean and creative free Web 2.0 template designed by a design company using the GNU Public license. It will not only enhance the look and feel of your with no cost, it will save you time and hassle in getting your website published in a timely manner.

Ready to design some of your own Web 2.0 graphics and sites? Designers can find a wide array of web design tutorials fat ‘kaagepukka WordPress blog.’ The kaagepukka blog post lists and links to 40 tutorials for web design. Below you can see a sample of the graphical work that takes place in the tutorials. The design is of these tutorials is top-notch for the web. Whether you are a beginner trying to learn the ways of design, or an advanced designer looking for ideas, the lessons are detailed and laid out in step by step post format. I highly recommend these tutorials for the end result that they produce!

Specific aspects of Web 2.0 Design:

Step by step instructions with graphics:

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  Various design projects.
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