Thanks to HongKiat.com, I learnt about Design by Humans, the cool tee shirt site designed by humans for humans.

Anyone who is interested in design can upload their design to Design by Humans and if it gains popularity, the design will be printed on tees. If you like a design, you can vote for it. For example I like these two designs so help me by voting for these designs so that they will be printed on tees.

Click here to vote:
http://www.designbyhumans.com/vote/detail/31367
http://www.designbyhumans.com/vote/detail/30864

The tees are priced around $20/$25 and if you order over $70, they will ship the tees to you free. They come in men and women sizes which I think is great. I am fed up of getting tees that are too big for me because they only come in one size (L)!

Here are two tees that I like – An American Werewolf in London and CMYK.

Don’t forget to vote:

http://www.designbyhumans.com/vote/detail/31367
http://www.designbyhumans.com/vote/detail/30864

I received an interesting e-mail from SitePoint recently. SitePoint is selling web technology books priced two for one.

I am tempted to buy The Principles of Beautiful Web Design and The CSS Anthology. Has anyone bought any of these books from SitePoint? I have seen copies of The PHP Anthology at Waterstones book store and the books published by SitePoint are very suitable for designers and developers who want lots of hands on help. I know some books that waffle about the technology but lack in examples.

Here is the link: http://www.sitepoint.com/books/freepdf/

If you want to learn how to use Photoshop effectively, I suggest that you download the free Photoshop e-book from Sitepoint.com. SitePoint.com is giving everyone the chance to download the Photoshop e-book for free for a limited time only. I found out about this offer when SitePoint.com sent me an email with a link to the free e-book.

Get your copy now.

Not too long ago, I signed up with Adobe Photoshop Express Beta to try out the online version of Photoshop. Photoshop Express is the cut down version of the full blown version of Photoshop and it is a web-based application. In fact Photoshop Express is a flash-based web application. It lets me upload photos from anywhere in the world, edit and touch up the photos and publish it onto my own personal gallery which I can share with friends.

What functionality comes with Photoshop Express?

The usual crop and rotate.
Auto correct lighting and contrast
Exposure
Red eye reduction
Touchup blemishes and scratches
Change colour saturation
You can tune white balance, highlight, fill light, sharpen photo or soft focus the details
Effects available are pop colour (make one colour stand out), alter hue, black and white, tint, sketch and distort.

Are you impressed with the functionality yet? If you enjoy taking photos and enjoy post editing and do not want to spend lots of money on a legal copy of Photoshop, this is the next best thing available. I know some may argue that Gimp is free and has more functionality but Gimp is not web-based. I use Gimp at work when I am called to do design work. Gimp is great but Photoshop Express is also a great tool because all you need to use Photoshop Express is a broadband connection.

What are the new goodies available in Photoshop Express?

I received an email from Adobe recently informing about more goodies available in Photoshop Express Beta. The goodies are:

Flickr integration

The guys behind the Photoshop Express application have hooked up with Flickr. This means you can import your Flickr photos into Photoshop Express, amp them up and then upload them back into Flickr.

Embeddable player

The embeddable player will allow you to take your slideshow to the wider webified world. With the embeddable player you can post your slideshows to Facebook, MySpace and other sites.

Save as

The Save As feature will allow you to save multiple versions of your photo.

Aren’t you glad that Adobe came up with the brilliant idea to develop Photoshop Express and make it a free web application?

If you run a website, chances are you often wonder whether it is the right time to do a total redesign of the layout of your website. Here are some points to consider:

Redesign for a specific purpose
Be sure why you want to redesign your website. A design serves a specific purpose. If you are not sure whether to redesign or overhaul your website, then it is best not to redesign yet.

Try to retain website brand/identity
On the other hand, if your website design has been the same for a few years, you may want to consider a fresh look but you should retain your website identity. It may be wise to keep your logo so your visitors can recognize your site even though you have a new design and new layout.

Ask your readers what they think.
To play it safe, put a poll on your site to let your visitors do the talking. If they think it is necessary for the website to have a fresh look, ask them what they would like to see in your new design and incorporate where possible.

In my last article I wrote about Website design guidelines. Here are more pointers that I found useful and you may want to consider when designing your website.

Website optimization

a) Reduce the number of images on your website.

Images make your website load very slowly and the more images you have, the longer it takes to download your web page.

Include only images that are essential on your website. Make sure the images are optimized for web using your image editing tool so that they have a minimum file size.

b) Keep text paragraphs at a reasonable length.

How you structure your content on your website is important.

Example:

How many articles should you display on your main page?

Do you show the entire article on your home page or just teasers and a click here to read the full article on a different page?

I limit my WordPress home page to display five most recent articles. Others may decide to display more articles or less articles. That is a personal preference but remember the more text paragraphs there are to download, the longer it takes. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

c) Cross browser compatibility

It is important to make sure that your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

d) Scripting language

Most browsers these days support JavaScript but avoid using scripting language unless it is absolutely necessary. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

f) Style sheets

Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

The more time I spend updating my website/blog, the more I am aware of how important design is. Bad design alone can turn away a visitor. You will be surprise how visitors react to good design. Apart from good content, I think design is the next most important aspect of a website.

Here are some website design pointers that I think should be considered when choosing a good design for your website.

1. Do not use splash pages

What are splash pages? They are the first page you see when you arrive at a website. Splash pages usually contain beautiful images or a Flash animation. It is nothing more than an introduction page. Splash pages are pretty vases with no real purpose.

Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the back button. It is best to give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2. Do not use excessive banner advertisements

How would it make you feel if you go to a website that has excessive banner advertisements place all over the website? I would be put off and ignore the advertisements. If I arrived at the website from a search engine, I would be expecting to find relevant content relating to my search.

If I don’t find what I am looking for I would click the back button and go to another website. Having too many banner advertisements also limit the space available for content. Bear in mind, content is king in a blog or website. To put it another way, by having excessive banner advertisements you are wasting valuable website real estate.

Instead you should provide more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead or being pushed to buy.

3. Have a simple and clear navigation

I am a great fan of simple and clear website design. This should also apply to navigation. If your website visitors don’t know how to navigate around your website, they will leave.

I personally would rather not have complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. Just keep it simple. It is also beneficial to include a sitemap on your website.

A sitemap is a map of your website and visitors can use the sitemap to get around your website if they find it difficult to use your website navigation. Don’t give your visitors an excuse to leave your website just because your website navigation sucks.

4. Avoid using audio on your blog

I find this most annoying especially if I am going to be spending a long time on a website but some website owners like to have audio on their website. If you insist on having audio, remember not to enable audio looping or give your website visitors the option to turn off or mute the audio on your website.

Let me know if you have other good suggestions on website design besides what I have listed above.

A few days ago I wrote a post on the importance of a WordPress theme. Today I attempted to create a few banners that I think will suit this website. I have not made any decisions yet, I am still getting used to using Photoshop CS2 and I have some other ideas that I would like to try out. I am putting up the banners for you readers to see and let me know what you think. Whether you like or hate it.

Banners shown here are not the actual size.