Web Design tools & info
ADOBE PHOTOSHOP
One of Dual Media’s favourite weapons of choice is Adobe Photoshop which for years has been the industry standard for producing high quality print work and web sites. All of our concepts start in Photoshop where we produce our client a flat proof of the job we propose to do. This gives you a feel and idea of where we are going and what we are proposing for your web site design.
Photoshop offers a huge range of web design tools for us to use when producing your media be it a website design, CD-ROM, or Print Work.
ADOBE DREAMWEAVER
Adobe Dreamweaver is the industry’s widely used HTML editor offering a range of functions and tools to produce simple to complex html structures throughout our websites. Dreamweaver is where we actually build you website piece by piece, adding individual images to the site layout we build using tables and DIV tags. Most text is added using Dreamweaver too as this allows search engines to read its content and also us to style it in different ways such as colours, font, size, line height and spacing etc. This is usually done using CSS Style Sheets.
Dreamweaver also produces some code and scripts for us such as JavaScript which is commonly used for simple tasks such as button rollover images, showing and hiding layers and much more.
Not only does the Web Designer use the html editor to build the website but our programmers use it too. Once the website is designed and built we hand it over to the programmers who using Dreamweaver in code view start adding and tweaking code to allow the website design to perform such tasks as secure shopping checkouts, database integrations, database lookups etc. Yeah all the technical and boring stuff happens at this stage of the site design.
ADOBE FLASH
Adobe Flash formally known as Macromedia Flash is our excitement tool. Flash allows us to use animations, use special effects and produce dynamic images and games throughout our website designs. We have years of experience in using flash animations and we have two in house flash animation experts enabling us to produce some breath taking web design. Our Flash animations are checked and verified by our team to ensure they run correctly and smoothly over an array of machines, operating platforms, browsers and older versions of the flash player.
Don’t let the UK St Anne’s / Blackpool location fool you. Lots of our work is produced for other top media companies based in London and Manchester.
HTML
Hyper Text Markup Language. This is the universal base code used to produce all websites on the web. HTML allows us to build our websites by specifying many different elements such as Table formats, Div Tags, Image sizes, text, font size and colour, justification, titles and meta tags. And this is just a base of how HTML is used in our web design studio.
Html is a document stored on a web server that presents a software browser such as internet explorer, Firefox, and Netscape etc with instruction on how to display the website and its intended content.
ASP
ASP is an abbreviation for Active Server Pages which is a programming language produced by Microsoft to allow programmers to add secure coding to their website applications. ASP serves many tasks throughout website design. Some common examples of using ASP would be, Programming shopping baskets in ecommerce websites. Writing applications to take secure payment information or pass it to a third party payment provider such as world pay, PayPal and the HSBC. Adding client managed sites (CMS) and administration sections to websites.
.NET & XML
The forever changing language of .NET is another creation of Microsoft. .NET is Microsoft’s term for using XML to design and send data online. .Net offers a range of uses that have replaced a lot of the standard ASP programming functions and methods. This is mainly down to the efficiency and added security that ASP .NET provides.
SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY
A major part of web design is taking into account and planning for search engine optimisation. We want all of our websites to perform well in all major search engines no matter the topic and competition level. Search engine optimisation (SEO) starts with the core design of the website as we have to plan how we are going to produce and provide relevant data to the search engine without compromising the results or the website design. There must be a fine balance between these two structures.
