What you need to ask yourself is: “What can my site offer to social network users?”

There are already a lot of applications and many of the companies using this strategy are pulling great results. If you really want to expand your business reach you should seriously consider creating an application related to your website or service.

According to Wikipedia, screen display resolution is also set to change, 640×480 was the standard resolution from 1990 to around 1996. 800×600 was the standard resolution until around 2000. Last time I checked, the majority of active computers have their resolution set to 1024×768, but new PCs are coming with even higher resolution settings, so that too is set to change.

Other than the resolution issue web designers should also take into account the browser differences. Internet users with the same resolution might customize their browsers using different settings like toolbars. There’s also the browser issue: IE, Firefox, Opera, etc… they all display websites in different ways. To get around this resolution problem you should create liquid designs, which use the available space on the browser window to display the page’s content. Of course not all pages have the same design concept, in some cases you will not be able to create a liquid design, it really depends on the lay-out.

I’ve been designing websites using Corel for a long time, and just recently started working with Photoshop. I gotta tell you, if you are starting right now, go with Photoshop. This software is perfect for web designers, it let’s you slice images, export for the web, create animated gifs and so much more. It is as if Adobe developed the software with the web designer in mind. I once read that the best design software is the one you are good at, and that’s really true. I have seen beautiful designs from people using different software. In the end, the software is not going to create the design for you, the most important thing is to have a creative and artistic skills.

To develop a website first you need to have an idea.

Step 1. Ok, you had that great website idea.

“This is going to be the next Google!”

Step 2. No matter what your idea is, there are four things you need:

Web Design
Programming
Marketing
Support

And yes, I’m this fast paced.

You don’t need to know every little detail on those subjects. Of course, it helps a lot when you have done past work on some of the above mentioned areas. I mean, you don’t need to be the best, just have a notion of what’s best, keep an eye on the latest trends and follow the standards. You probably will need some help from people to work on one, if not all, of the areas above. To find them you can post listings on job portals, freelance websites or even try to search on google for portfolios.

Web Design

It is the look-n-feel of your website. The basic design structure of a page is composed of a header, body and footer. Sounds simple huh? Well it isn’t. A good designer has at least 2 years of experience on creating website designs, I’d suggest you to look for someone who’s experienced with the latest software, standards and SEO techniques.

Programmers

They make your website run. Give it functionality. Most of the time what you want is already out there. Something you can adapt to your idea, for example: you don’t need to create a newsletter system from scratch, there are plenty of scripts out there. You can also use a framework depending on your site. If you are going to sell products, there are a lot of e-commerce scripts. And some good ones for free!

Marketing

Advertise, make your website well known. Manage the competitive aspects of your site. Get you on top of the search engines and use techniques to send you visitors. Techniques which are too numerous to mention, but I will try to cover as many as I can in the future.

Support

Will take care of customer inquiries, emails, complaints. This is the human side of your website.

Now that you know this from now on you’ll never need to go through this step again. From 1, the Idea, go straight to 3, the Layout.

Step 3. Layout

You’re smart and beautiful. I bet you didn’t expect me to say that. Ok, enough joking around. The layout of your website is created by joining all of those areas and putting them all into one place. I mean, write every little aspect down so you know what you need and where to go. A lot of the website functions are added during the development, but you need to start from here. For an instance, Let’s say you want your website to have a newsletter.

1 (Web Design). You will have to ask yourself “Where is this going to fit/ be displayed?” In a box on the left, or at the bottom of every page? You need to think where everything is going to fit.

2 (Programming). How will it function? If you want to get a ready-made solution look for “newsletter scripts” on google or hotscripts.com. You might even find a free version, GPL, of the script. But if you want to go the other way and create a custom made newsletter. Then you’re stupid. I’m sorry, well sometimes you can’t find what you want. So you need to explain everything to your programmer, or do it yourself if you got coding “5killz”.

3. (Marketing) Using the newsletter example, in marketing. This is how you are going to approach the “email list” you have. Are you going to ask your visitors if they wish to receive advertisement or only site related news or features? How often are you going to send and manage messages?

4. (Support) Once your clients got that email, they will try to contact you, or just purchase an item, but eventually they will contact you. And it doesn’t matter if they are asking a question related to a product or for a discount. You need to send them a prompt answer. If possible offer instant messaging options. Why do you need to make your prospects wait 24 hours to give them an answer? This is the information age,
people want things now. They can get instant answers on the phone. Why can’t they get their questions answered fast over the internet too? This is crucial.

I just wrote how I work, I go from an idea to something real, managing every aspect of the creation and maintenance processes. In the near future I’m going to write more detailed information on all the points mentioned in this tutorial. But if you are in a hurry, contact me and I will do the hard work for you.

I am working on a website with a gallery on it, I checked for a few and here are the coolest ones I found, in my opinion. I needed something easy to create multi-galleries which also offered transitions and some other cool effects. Of course I was looking for a free alternative. Open-source rocks! I always look for scripts using Ajax and Mootools because they are light and have great visual effects. But since nobody knows it all and in order to make this list more efficient, I’d like YOU to make recommendations, I will add them to the links.

1. SmoothGallery 2.0 - Allows you to have a set of galleries. This feature alone made me select it, because we will need a multi-gallery website.
2. Webtwo Ajax SlideShow - It let’s you zoom the freaking picture!! It adds a real professional look to your website..
3. (E)² Photo Gallery Made With Mootools - I almost chose this one for the second section of the website. It has a cool slider under it.

This one is just to break the ice. I will use this blog to talk about my past and current work experiences. Here I will let the world know about the latest web trends, cool scripts, plug-ins, components, the projects I’m working on or whatever I think is worth mentioning. In order to get all the information organized I will create a few categories. I think I will start with News, Professional and Personal. This is going to the News section.