Archive for August 5th, 2008

Photoshop Graphics in 4 Easy Steps.

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

by Lucas Heijn

Sometimes the most difficult part is knowing where to start. Have you ever had someone show you just how to do some something. They go click, click, and click - Done! And you’re none the wiser; You see everything is easy once you know how. That’s my purpose here. It is to help you see it as easy. So let’s look at these four steps.

First Step: Choose Size

Go to “File” and click “New”. You now need to specify the size of your graphic. Normally you would have determined this in advance as you must first have a purpose for the graphic. Ours is a header graphic. Headers on a sales page are usually around 700 pixels by 120 pixels. So we can choose that as our size for the graphic.

Second Step: Decide On A Background.

There are three options to choose from. 1. We could put in a solid color as the background. 2. For more flair we may decide on a gradient. 3. We could insert a picture as our background.

If we decided on a solid color, here’s how to go about it. On the left hand side of the page there is a floating tool box. Towards the bottom of this box are two color boxes, one on top of the other. Click on the top box and a new window will appear. Choose the color you want by clicking the mouse on the color and click OK. Then choose the Bucket tool. If you cannot find a bucket tool, move your mouse over each of the tools till you find the gradient tool. Right click and it will reveal 2 tools, choose the bucket tool.

Once you have chosen the bucket tool, move your mouse over the new graphic you are creating. You will see the mouse pointer turn into the bucket tool. Just one click and you have your chosen color as your background.

To fill this with a gradient, change the bucket toll into the gradient tool. Once again you need to choose a color. This time you will need to choose 2 colors. The top square is your starting color and the bottom square is the finish color of the gradient.

Having chosen the gradient tool you will notice on the top of the work area new choices have appeared. This will allow you to choose the style of the gradient.

The third choice of a background is to import a picture. To do this just open a picture file that you wish to use. Make sure this picture is equal or larger in size to the new graphic you are making. With the mouse just drag and drop the picture into the new graphic. Move it around to where you want it and you’re done.

Please note: this does not work with Gif Files.

Step 3: Import more images.

Photoshop works with layers. Each time you import something or introduce more text you create a new layer. To the right of your work area you should see “Layers”. Click on it and now it will display all the layers in the graphic. Clicking on a layer in this box will make it the active layer, and you will be able to work on this layer.

To import a picture is exactly the same as what you did in dragging and dropping the background into the graphic. When you drag in a picture you always have some background with the picture. If the background is mostly one color you can easily remove the background and thus expose the background you want seen. To do this you will need to use the eraser.

If your background is all one color, let’s say white, you can use the magic eraser. Right click on the eraser. Three options will appear. Choose “Magic Eraser”. Move your mouse to the part of the picture you want to get rid of and click. In one click it will remove the unwanted background of the picture you dragged in. While you are in that layer you can move this picture to where you want it by picking it up with your mouse.

Step 4 The Text

In Photoshop your text is also a layer. Each time you insert new text you create a new layer. You are able to move the text around as you can any other layer.

To ad text just click on the text tool. “T”. You can choose your font and the size of the text as you would in any word processor.

Now that your text is in place it can be enhanced and made to stand out. Make sure the text you want to work with is the active layer. On the top bar of the work area is “Layer”. Click it and choose “Layer Style”. This will open up numerous options. To get an idea of what each of these does just play and experiment with it. As you choose an option it will instantly be seen before you commit it.

With this you have created a simple and professional graphic to use on the web.

There is only one thing left to do. Save it. First save it in Photoshop PSD as this will allow you to come back and edit it. Next if you wish to use it as a web graphic you can “Save it for Web and Devices”. This will create a smaller faster loading file for web pages.

About the Author:

How To Make A Website With Free Software.

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

by Lucas Heijn

Does the idea of creating your own web site frighten you? Many people think it is just beyond them, it’s just too hard. You may be surprised at just how easy it can be.

There was a time that you would need to know HTML to build a web site. Today you don?t need to have any knowledge of HTML and you will still be able to build a great looking site. Having some knowledge of HTML can be an advantage, but without it you will still be able to create that site.

There is open source software available that is every bit as powerful as the paid for variety. Open source software is created by a community of programmers around the world that work together to produce useful software. Just to highlight how good much of this open source software is; Have you heard of Apache Server Software? Apache is the preferred software used on most servers today. This is open source software, free.

The free open source software I have used is called NVU (pronounced N-View). If you search Google for nvu you will then be able to choose a download that suites your operating system.

How To Use NVU

Let?s look at using NVU. NVU is WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get). It looks much like any word processor program but it does not work like one.

One of the main problems you face is how to place text and images where you want them. Like all things they are easy once you know how. In this article we are going to concentrate on how to put things where you want them to appear.

The screen looks like a word processor and all the text features work the same as any word program. You can choose the font, size, bold it, and so on as you would in any program.

How do you place text and images just where you want them to be? The key to this is tables. The use of tables allows you to put anything just where you want them. If you need to place text next to an image, all you need to do is create a table with 2 columns. In one column you place the image and in the other you place the text.

You can create tables inside of tables. You can change the background color of any table or column. You can set the width of your table in pixels or percent. Percent allows you to create a table inside another table to a set size depending on the size of the table it is created into.

Tables are the building blocks of the HTML site. They allow you to control how your page will look. Tables can be made invisible so everything looks seamless. You can create an invisible table by making your border thickness 0 pixels.

This is the main thing you will need to master. Once you understand this the rest of the program will fall into place. In mastering this free software you are now able to use such programs as Dreamweaver and Microsoft Front Page as they are similar to use.

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Web Hosting 101

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

by Matt Hedges

Many people may not be remember life without the internet but it was only back in 1990 when web hosting came to life as this was when Tim Berners Lee developed the initial program for the web. This was followed by a variety of programs and soon companies were developing web hosting services of their own and this has created the modern environment where there is a huge level of growth in hosting web sites. Web hosting may seem like a familiar term but before 1991, this term was unheard of, which means so was the internet. If you would like to study the growth of the internet, a great place for research is the internet itself which shows you how far it has developed. Recent decades has seen an explosion in technological advances and after the radio and television products, the internet is probably the next biggest. Bear in mind there are over 50 million websites on the internet and think what you would look at if you didn’t have websites to view.

A look back at earlier days

It was back in August of 1962 when J.C.R. Licklider of MIT introduced the ideas that went onto form the internet. Licklider created a lot of articles regarding the future and one of his main topics was about the Galactic Network which was based on millions of computers linked to each other providing information of many people to benefit from. The next step for Licklider was to take a trip to the Advanced Research Project Agency [ARPA] which was the computer science project offered at MIT. When there, Licklider attempted to wow and detail the benefits that would come from networking and linking computers together.

It is always interesting to be aware of the political background at the time and ARPA was developed at the same time as NASA. After the Russians launched Sputnik, their artificial satellite, there was a huge need for the Americans to keep pace with their Soviet counterparts. The first form of computer networking came through packet switching, which enabled data to be transferred as tiny packages through telephone lines which was a huge improvement over the previous form of utilizing circuit lines that were solid. A great benefit was that this connection was busy only when information was passing through and this helped to free up room to allow the computer to undertake additional tasks. Paul Baran invented the Hot Potato network design when he was trying to create a package that would ensure telecommunication data to be passed in the event of a nuclear war. This design was to play a major role in the development of the internet.

Following on from this, was the process that allowed computers to talk back and forth to each other and there is no doubt that 1991 was a pivotal year for the development of the internet. It was already around before then but this year was the base for the internet to grow into much bigger things. A major step came when the National Science Foundation] NSF] made a judgment that the web restrictions that prohibited commercial activity should be lifted. This changed everything and resulted in much more scope and possibilities for the internet. What is now known as e-commerce was born and a whole host of companies who foresaw the benefits the internet would bring came rushing in behind. It was at the tail-end of 1991 that WWW or the World Wide Web started to be used by CERN and it incorporated Hyper Text Markup Language [HTML.] HTML was developed by Tim Berner Lee and it was linked to the website address or it’s Uniform Resource Locator [URL.] That’s a whole of abbreviations to learn but it is now synonymous with the location of addresses for websites and the World Wide Web.

Although its early use may have been mainly benefited by computer and technologically minded people, the internet was soon to spread to the general public, greatly assisted by its simplistic methods. Of course, as the internet grew, complexities followed but it was offering many new benefits and the business world was not slow in predicting a positive future nor was it slow in cashing in on it.

Web hosting was pretty expensive in the earlier days, but now it is quite reasonable, though a bit complex for a common man to decipher. The beginning saw big companies renting space on their server, and this has become a business now. The number of companies offering web hosting services is equal to the number of companies providing access to the internet. The internet has evolved with the evolution in computers. The way business is conducted has seen a drastic change with the introduction of computers and web hosting facilities.

There are statistics available to state that more than 35,000 businesses host over 100 websites on the server they own. It is easy to see that there is huge growth with this level of competition, and in the time this article has been read, there have been probably hundreds more companies who have joined up also. The NeXt machine had the glory of having the first WWW program written for it and it was a hypertext editor that provided it. A student by the name of Nicola Pellow created a line mode browser and this was to help others researching a specific topic to have somewhere to discuss. Listings of UDI, HTML and HTTP were provided by the server to enable this discussion. For machines that were not NeXt, browsers such as Cello or Mosaic were created to enable other users to access the internet. The World Wide Consortium came into being in 1994 when a number of companies joined to create a system of shared protocols that could be used on the Web and this moment can be seen as the true birth of the web.

Prior to this, there had been publications of various TCP/IP related features which enabled networking without even knowing the potential that this protocol had for the future. In the past couple of years, most of the discussions at the IETF meeting gave a lot of importance to topics related to the TCP/IP protocols and the manner in which it could be expanded. For this purpose, some tools were required, and discussion was also done on its features. Some basic products meant for networking were developed for this purpose, which provided an internet connection. These were the limits to which commercial efforts went. But when the users of the internet grew substantially, it became an essential service and the internet captured the imagination of the common man. Technology developments had a big role to play in making this possible.

This is why many Information Technology firms and trend setters, such as Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM and many more have got into the internet industry and provides services, products and tools to better the service of web applications. People dont want to think about too much on the internet, they mainly just want to get to a specific site and this is the way that web servers have been created to perform.

In addition to tools and services, there has been a requirement for the makers of hardware to improve the size of their power servers to ensure the growth of the web hosting industry continues. There is no doubt that the way the internet is used today is drastically different from its origins. It may have started off with Personal Computers onto the client server and then to the Peer to Peer [P2P] type network. There have been abundance of different features that came to life thanks to the internet and these include passing of information and data, communicating via email, being able to log on remotely and many other useful functions. It seems that if you want it you can have it but also bear in mind that the internet is still rapidly developing. With television and videos on the internet being the latest features, it may be hard to predict what is coming next on the internet but whatever it is, it should be interesting.

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The Benefits of Using a Real Estate Website Design Service

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

see the amazing results they profess to achieve. About the Author:. Article by http://Onlyforwebmaster.com Visit http://www.onlyforwebmaster.com/website-design/ for more website design articles, over 100 webmaster tips, and more!

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How to Put adsense below the title ( blogger/blogspot)

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

This is great tips to make your adsense earning increasing by put the adsense adse below the title . the new blogger beta make you not easy to put adsense below the title of the page , I think we only can put it at sidebar, footer,

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Learn all about web page design company

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

Web hosting and Web Design tips and learn before you pick right hosting for your web VistaPages Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:44:26 +0000 VistaPages, Inc. is a privately-owned organization located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

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Joomla Magic Video Tutorial, Joomla! Tutorial, Joomla Magic

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

Learn web design tips and techniques by video, Learn joomla by video tutorial … be sent via email for you to access this freebie after joomla video purchase! … Internet Marketing - Tipsheet Joomla - the dynamic portal engine and content

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How to Quickly Get Listed in Google

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

Finally, you no longer have to wait an eternity to get your web pages listed with Google and other major search engines. Just use these steps and you are on your way to optimal SEO. Do You Know this Secret about Search Engine

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Tips on Looking for Web Site Designers

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

With consumers turning to the web more often for directory information and purchasable goods, all kinds of businesses have decided to leave their own footprint online. One of the best ways to display information, set up e-commerce or

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Top web design tips for your business

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

Want to design a website that’ll generate website hits? Here are some tips to design a website that’ll grow your business online. 1. Keep one topic per page. A general guideline is to have no more than two ‘screenfuls’ on a page so

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