30 Dark Designs You Should’ve Seen

As a second (out of five) part of our 50 Beautiful CSS-Based Web-Designs in 2006 collection we
’d like to present some stunning, but rather unknown dark designs, which you really should have seen if you are a web-designer. And, of course, if your aim is to develop web-sites in the modern “Look & Feel”-style.

read more | digg story

Digg this story if you want a ‘Books’ section under Entertainment on Digg!!

This link takes you to a UK pre-order page for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The recent media firestorm over the 7th book’s title release saw many a digg user submitting Harry Potter stories… but no where to submit them to! Digg this to the front page and let’s get a Book section for Digg!

read more | digg story

What Photoshop Brushes to Use When Designing your Web Template

Designing a web template or just an ordinary site (which is far less interesting to me) will require you not only good design skills but a pack of tools by your hand.

If you prefer Photoshop as your primary graphics editor you will need tons of add-ons like photoshop brushes. Below you will find a great collection of resources on the topics.

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Web Templates: How to Earn with Them?

Web templates are the in-thing now-a-days and most of them are selling like hot cakes resulting into huge profits for web template providers. You too can cash-in on this web template craze and make money. Discussed in this article are five effective ways of making money out of web templates.

Five effective ways to make money out of web templates

1.) Creating turnkey pages from web templates

Turnkey websites are the hottest resource on the internet. If you are a web designer, web hosting company or simply own a website you can make good money by creating turnkey websites from readymade web templates.

What are turn key websites?

Turnkey websites are completely functional websites having relevant content, domain names and hosting. Depending on the type, turnkey websites can have shopping carts, interactive scripts, graphics forms, forums, live chats etc. All that a buyer needs to do is buy the website and he is ready to do business.

What you need to do?

In order to set up a turn key website business, you need to do the following;

1) Purchase professional looking web templates with resell rights or join a template membership program

2.) Modify the web templates by adding relevant content, links, images and graphics

3.) Purchase domain names and hosting accounts

4) Host the completed web templates as websites

5) Advertise/promote your websites for sale/rent by SEO and Email marketing

What will be your ROI?
You ROI Will surely be very high. This is because of the fact that the retail value of turnkey websites is around $200 - $500 per website and can also go higher based on the website quality. You can also go for renting your websites instead of selling them. As you will be purchasing web-templates for a cheaper cost your ROI will be higher. The best way to go about it is by joining membership programs that will give you access to a host of web templates at a low one time cost. Also make sure to host your sites with hosting service providers who offer unlimited domain name hosting. One good example of a turnkey website service is ready-set-web.com.

2.) Joining an affiliate program
Affiliate programs are quite popular over the net. If you have a well ranking website with a good traffic margin then you can very well join an affiliate program offered by many if not all web template providers. All that you need to do is promote their templates and you can make easy money in the form of commissions.
What you need to do?

In order to join an affiliate program you need to register yourself for the program. As soon as the registration process is over you will receive a link or banner advert that you can place on your website at strategic places. In case your website visitor clicks the banner and makes the purchase you get a part of the commission. Commissions can range from 2% to 10% of the actual sales proceeds. Most companies use tracking software programs or individual services like clicksgalore, commission junction etc. for tracking sales.

Some good web template providers who offer affiliate programs are buytemplates.net, templatehunter.com, templatemagic.net and webzonetemplates.com Before joining an affiliate program make sure that the template provider offers allied/complimentary services like web hosting, search engine optimization, content insertion, domain name registration, template customization etc. In fact the more the complimentary services offered the better will be your returns.

3.) Reselling/redistributing web templates

If you own a website that attracts good traffic or is likely to attract traffic in the future, you can go for purchasing templates as a bulk and reselling them. To get redistribution rights all that you need to do is purchase reseller templates that many web template providers offer today. Some good web template vendors who offer reseller templates are http://www.buytemplates.net , http://www.templatemagic.net and freewebsitetemplates.com. Purchasing reseller templates on your own and reselling them can fetch you more returns than by joining an affiliate program.

What you need to do?

All that you need to do is purchase web templates that come with resell rights. You can then modify the templates and sell them to potential customers with non-exclusive rights. You certainly need not be a html pro to start this business; instead you can partner with template providers who offer related services like template customization, hosting, SEO etc. and earn good commissions by referring your customers to them.

4.) Joining Referral based programs

Referral programs are very unlike affiliate programs in the sense that they do not involve you to place links or banner ads on your site. This is basically a word of mouth program and requires you to promote products by word-of-mouth. In case a customer referred by you joins a membership program or buys a web template and refers your name in the referral section, you get a commission. But such referral programs are offered by very few template vendors today.

5.) Web designing with web templates

If you are a professional web designer you can earn higher returns by making use of web templates. Firstly you can satisfy your clients with the speed at which you complete the work and at the same time get more ROI as the readymade website templates are way cheap. All that you need to do is buy exclusive templates and resell them after making modifications. One way to go about it is by joining membership programs offered by web template providers. This will give you access to a host of web templates at a one time cost. Most web designers can almost double their profits, take care of multiple projects and also retain customers by making use of this technique. Also web designers can attract new customers by lowering their service charges.

So what if you can’t make web templates on your own, you can still cash in on web templates by making use of these sales techniques.

About the Author

icongalore.com is a quality web portal that offers high quality professional XP icons. Their high quality application icons come at extremely affordable prices and can be used for web designing, software applications and print media.

The Hottest WordPress Themes Ever!

The wordpress themes listed below are chosen for their design NOT THE CODE! I know pretty good that wordpress themes from Template Monster are not ideal but if you are a geek you can easily tweak any of their themes to you needs. It ususally takes less time then commenting about how bad they are.

The themes are here for their design (some for the images - we all know that a great image can make any design rock!). Sp don’t tell me they are poorly coded!

Now enjoy! (All the links are direct - I’m not TM’s affiliate)

WordPress Theme #12171

WordPress Theme #13126

WordPress Theme #12445

WordPress Theme #12626

WordPress Theme #12793

WordPress Theme #12871

WEBSITE TEMPLATES. THE IDEA AND REALISATION.

WEBSITE TEMPLATES

A website template is a tool used to separate content from presentation on the web design, and to the massive production of web documents. It runs in the context of a template system.
Websites often require regular content updates, and standardization of appearance. A news website, for example, needs to be daily updated. Each news item will be contextualized by a standard presentation (page layout, structure, etc.). A typical strategy to automate this standardization is:

1. choose a web template system to maintain the website;
2. specify the “presentation standards” through website templates;
3. specify and update the content on a database.

WEB DESIGN

Web design is the design of web pages, websites and web applications using HTML, CSS, images, and other media.
Web design is part of starting a website (web development) which can include web server configuration, writing web applications and server security.

A website is a collection of information about a particular topic or subject. Designing a website is defined as the arrangement and creation of web pages that in turn make up a website. A web page consists of information for which the website is developed. For example, a website might be compared to a book, where each page of the book is a web page.
A website typically consists of text and images. The first page of a website is known as the Home page or Index. Some websites use what is commonly called an Enter Page. Enter pages might include a welcome message, language/region selection, or disclaimer. Each web page within a website is an HTML file which has its own URL. After each web page is created, they are typically linked together using a navigation menu composed of hyperlinks.
Once a website is completed, it must be published or uploaded in order to be viewable to the public over the internet. This is done using an FTP client. Once published, the webmaster may use a variety of techniques to increase the traffic, or hits, that the website receives. This may include submitting the website to a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, exchanging links with other websites, creating affiliations with similar websites, etc.
A relatively new technique for creating websites called Remote Scripting has allowed more dynamic use of the web without the use of Flash or other specialized plug-ins. Leading the various techniques is Ajax, although other methods are still common, as Ajax is not a fully developed standard.

WEB PAGES

A web page or webpage is a resource of information that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser. This information is usually in HTML or XHTML format, and may provide navigation to other web pages via hypertext links.
Web pages may be retrieved from a local computer or from a remote web server. The web server may restrict pages to a private network, e.g. a corporate intranet, or it may publish pages on the World Wide Web. Web pages are requested and served from web servers using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
Web pages may consist of files of static text within the web server’s file system (static web pages), or the web server may read files of computer code that instruct it how to construct the (X)HTML for each web page when it is requested by a browser (dynamic web pages).
Web page is the main type of (and a referential for) web document.

WEB TEMPLATES SYSTEM

A web template system is a kind of “View subsystem” in a Model-View-Controller (MVC or similar) design pattern, to separate presentation from content, on web document production. A web template system is characterized by:

1. Template engine: the software, it processes input, transforming into web document. It have two typical entities on input:
a) Web template: a recipe with web document fragments, to transform content into web documents.
b) Content resource: a input supplier, like a SQL database or a XML file.
2. Template language standards: the language of the recipe.

Websites often require regular content updates, and standardization of appearance.
A news website, for example, needs to be daily updated. Each news item will be contextualized by a standard presentation (page layout, structure, etc.). A typical strategy to automate this standardization is:

1. choose a web template system to maintain the website;
2. group news items into sets, with different presentation needs;
3. specify the “presentation standards” through web templates, for each set of news;
4. specify a content resource to generate or update the content of each news item.

The idea behind the “template method” is to separate content (data) from presentation (data representation), and to separate business-logic from presentation-logic. It have many advantages in using:

1. Ease of design change
2. Ease of interface localization
3. Possibility to work separately on design and code by different people at one and the same time
4. Etc.

PAGE LAYOUT

Page layout is the part of graphic design that deals in the arrangement and style treatment of elements (content) on a page. Beginning from early illuminated pages in hand-copied books of the Middle Ages and proceeding down to intricate modern magazine and catalog layouts, proper page design has long been a consideration in printed material. With print media, elements usually consist of type (text), images (pictures), and occasionally place-holder graphics for elements that are not printed with ink such as die/laser cutting, foil stamping or blind embossing.

Since the advent of personal computing, page layout skills have expanded to electronic media as well as print media. The electronic page is better known as a (GUI) graphical user interface. Page layout for interactive media overlaps with (and is often called) interface design. This usually includes GUI elements and multimedia in addition to text and still images. Interactivity takes page layout skills from planning attraction and eye flow to the next level of planning user experience in collaboration with software engineers and creative directors.

A page layout can be designed in a rough paper and pencil sketch before producing, or produced during the design process to the final form. Both design and production can be achieved using hand tools or page layout software. Producing the most popular electronic page (the web page) may require knowledge of markup languages along with WYSIWYG editors to compensate for incompatibility between platforms. Special considerations must be made for how the layout of an HTML page will change (reflow) when resized by the end-user. cascading style sheets are often required to keep the page layout consistent between web browsers.

by Lucia from www.freetemplates.sk

Graphic Web Template - Why You Should Use A Web Design Template On All Your Websites

Graphic design templates, when it comes to graphics, most Internet marketers shy away from using graphic design templates. This article discusses why all these internet marketers are wrong and why you should use a graphic design template. Keep reading to learn how to customize all your graphic templates so that they look totally lookout with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Whether it’s ebook covers, website layouts or promotional banners many internet marketers shy away from using graphic design templates because they firmly believe that by using these graphic design templates, they are tarnishing their own business and reputation. Rather, they want to own a unique identity and for this reason will forever find a professional graphic designer to do the job when they could easily do the job themselves with the right web design tools.

Well, you’re in for a big surprise!

When you pay for a web template, you will be able to customize it to an degree or even build a perfectly new design based on it! What’s the point of using the website template then, you say? Well, it serves as a basis of inspiration and ideas for a completely new design. You can’t gain anything from a blank canvas, right?

On top of that, you are in reality saving a lot of valuable time that you can otherwise spend on more central matters like developing new products or marketing your products. When you purchase a pre-made web template, you only have to to edit a thing or two to give it an identity of its own, and that gives you extra time and flexibility to work on other things.

Okay, let’s say you dispute that hiring a designer to do the job is just as quick. That may be true but don’t forget, hiring a qualified designer to do a custom design for you will cost you a lot of money. Unless you need a completely unique identity that you are aiming to launch firmly in your niche market, you don’t need to get a designer to create it for you.

Not all web graphic templates are appropriate, so you have to be careful when choosing one. Consider quality over the price, and you’re on your way to creating a positive image for your company while saving more time for more industrious and profitable chores!

Karin I Manning from http://www.kaleidosite-pro.com

Website Templates as an Easy Way to Make a Website

Well… Just another one article about website templates as you may guess from the title

There are some amazing websites on the net these days. It used to be that if you wanted a really good website it would cost you thousands of dollars and months of time. Not any more! The quality and availability of website templates these days makes it easy for anyone to have an amazing website quickly and easily.

Initially you may be overwhelmed by the choices in website templates for your site. There are many sites that have many different web templates available. This is a good thing though. Just take some time up front before you begin searching to identify the type of site you are going to make. Once you have done this it will be easy to sort through the different website templates as most good sites have them categorized for you.

Theme or category isn’t the only thing to decide however. Once you’ve found the web template you want to use for your website you then need to decide on the level of customization you want for it. If it is a good site then you will be able to change things like color, font and logo without to much trouble. Other changes should also be available to you but will be more difficult to implement. You may need certain software or have to pay an additional fee…

On web hosting… In choosing your website template you should be sure of what features your hosting company provides you. Depending on the website template your server may need to support certain functions. PHP is a good example. Many free or discount hosting companies don’t provide scripting to their clients. Be sure you check before choosing your web template.

Some last notes on website templates. Whether you need a web template for a - system like osCommerece, PHP Nuke, phpBB or a custom site of your own, you can find one quickly and easily. Some research and organization on your part will save you time and money in the end. Don’t be fooled by some of the free website template sites you see out there. You always get what you pay for.

Author: D. David Dugan recommends the web hosting solutions offered by DD&C at hosting.dugancom.com.

Web Template or Web Designer?

So you need a business website? - It costs money right? And it’s hard to find a local reliable web designer who can work within your budget? So you gonna do yourself (or get nephew Jimmy to do it for peanuts, after all he is a computer whizkid at only 13 years old) ? Maybe you’ve seen those cool flash web templates with music for a few dollars - that will do nicely !

But what about registering the right domain name; setting up email accounts for all the staff; getting the right type of web space to host the site; how you gonna add a web form; have you got any decent web design software installed ? - Oops! that will cost mega bucks! Erm so maybe web templates ain’t so cheap after all ? And you’ll need to find a few hours/days to do this - maybe you’d be better selling your product/service ?

But Web Templates are so cheap !

Well, a good web designer is undoubtedly worth the money if you have the budget. He/She will build you a customized web site with your business logo, snazzy imagery in your brand colors, nicely laid-out text and menus. They may add a little Flash animation to create impact and a online form that helps your prospective customers contact you from the website. SOUNDS GREAT ! But your website needs to do a lot more that look pretty.

The more professional and experienced web designer will go a few steps further, beyond the bells and whistles. He/She will make sure the code is validated to W3C standards, it is accessible to the disadvantaged, it works in all modern browsers such as Internet Explorer, FireFox, Mozilla and Safari. They will ensure the content is optimized with keywords for Google and Yahoo, etc. They test all the links work. They’ll submit the site to the search engines that matter. They will install a ‘hit counter’ so you can check how your site visits are coming on. And best of all they will give you honest and practical advice on all things web, stuff they have learned over the years. Because they’re experts.

DIY web templates are just the beginning and if looks got you to the top of Google then I’d say GO FOR A WEB TEMPLATE. But the reality is the web is too big and competitive for you not to get the web designer in.

If you are serious about your website being a major part of your online marketing mix then my (maybe biased) opinion is get a web designer - it’ll pay for itself. Yep, there are thousands of web templates very cheap but the Google and Yahoo top 10 don’t seem to list them - enough said!

So is it web template or web designer?Harry Spirali is a web sales consultant for Digital Idiom UK Web Design - he helps advise on web development, design and search engine optimization in the UK.

digitalidiom.co.uk