Every kind of work implies the use of tools to make it more productive and professional. Whether it’s the industrial sector or the agriculture sector, tools work more profoundly and more quickly than manpower. Similarly, a number of tools are used by web designers to craft the most creative and professional looking websites within hours.

A web designer may not be termed one if they don’t use specific designing tools to craft a website from its conception to the end result. With several web design tools available today, we have handpicked only five effective ones for you:

1. Adobe Fireworks

Accessible by the Mac and Windows operating systems, adobe fireworks is a vector graphics editor hybrid from Adobe. Fireworks differ from Photoshop in a sense that it’s exclusively designed for web designers and offers a wide range of tools and choices to design a complete web layout easily.

The distinguished features of this tool are:

• Slicing and dicing a design copy into HTML/CSS. However, its better if you don’t use the auto generated source code.
• Capacity to enclose the complete website design as a PDF, along with clickable components for interactive and striking website prototypes
• Ensures search engine friendliness by providing optimization tools that help in making your web graphics smaller in size and easily downloaded.

2. Adobe Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver also incorporates with other admired Adobe products such as Photoshop, enabling you to share smart objects for quick and easy renewing and editing of graphics and images. This commercial web application is a fully loaded tool box for web designers including the following features:

• Wrong Grammar and syntax identification with smart Code Hinting
• A built-in FTP client
• Includes project management and workflow alternatives
• Illustrates the preview of your source code in the form of “Live View”

3. Panic Coda

The basic aim of panic coda is to decrease the quantity of applications you require for developing a website including FTP client, CSS editor, version control system and much more.

This tool entails a “one-window web development” idea by using a single tabbed interface for text editing, file transfers, SVN, CSS, and also web books. The straightforward and easily understandable interface of this tool made it acquire the Apple Design Awards two years back.

4. Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop is most probably found in every web designer’s toolbox, and it should be too. This tool is ideal software to control images, picture and graphics and is extensively used by designers and photographers. Photoshop is rich with all kinds of options and features a designer would want:

• Filters allow you to automatically insert effects to your selected image
• Brushes, actions and scripts allows mechanization and wide variety to edit images
• Layers and revert option work great as workflow boosting features

5. Firebug

This Firefox tool works best when used in connection with the Developer toolbar. Its special features like DOM inspector, HTTP request logger, header inspector, and CSS and HTML editing tools makes it an essential tool in web designing.

Basic features include:

• Inline HTML and CSS editing for modification or editing
• Console for logging
• JavaScript
• Innate Document Object Model (DOM) inspection tool to show you the co-relation between page elements

These five tools are a must in every successful web designer’s toolbox. If you are missing out on any of these, you can’t term yourself to be a savvy and updated designer yet.

Website  design is kind of a window through which a company, firm, store or an individual represent their goods and services to the world. Being such an important investment, don’t ignore these 10 critical web design factors while designing and developing your website.

1. Know your website goals

Each website is designed with a different purpose. Some to earn profits and some for the purpose of information, some for creating brand recognition and some for pure entertainment. For maximum results, always get your website designed revolving around these goals.

2. Usability of the website:

Make information easily available to the user. No matter if the design isn’t revolutionary, but if it’s clear and understandable, you’re going the right way.

3. Flawless Web Copy:

Though always underestimated, the biggest strength of a web copy is its power to induce prospects into action. So make the web copy error free, short, friendly and interesting.

4. Navigational Structure:

If you don’t want your visitors running off to your competitors, keep the navigational structure very simple and clear for the user to find exactly what they’re looking for.

5. Loading Time of Website:

The minimum the loading time, the better it is. Don’t make the user wait for your website or a certain page of your website load. In this respect, avoid flash and any other elements that slow down the website’s loading time.

6. Web Page Layout and Elements:

Avoid a busy layout with small print and too much text. Include white space, headers, and indentation carefully to make the site appear well for visitors. A balanced site, with just the right amount of organized elements can do the trick.

7. Cross Browser Compatibility:

Make sure your website runs in whatever browser visitors choose to navigate the site. You can ensure this through making the website WC3 compliant.

8. Professional Look:

Your website should instantly give a professional and credible feeling at first look. Half of the time visitors make a buying decision without concerning about the owner. You can do this by hiring professional web designers or web design services for the job.

9. Search Engine Optimization:

Optimize your website and web pages for the search engines. This will increase your chance to achieve higher exposure as well as higher amount of traffic. In order to be known on the web, you must take measures to make yourself visible to the internet users, and utilizing search engines for this purpose is the best method.

10. Privacy and Terms of Use:

This factor is critical to ensure user protection and safety, and must not be ignored by large corporations. If you’re an online shopping entity, adding this aspect to your website will considerably increase your credibility and sales.

To achieve accurate and profitable results from your website’s performance, keep the above given factors in mind the next time you design your website.

With the New Year rolling in, the old trends of web design are pretty much rolling out. The entire web community has become vigorous to bring up something unique and make a name in this wild and ever changing world of the three W’s. To keep your users interested in your business (whatever it is), you’ve got to integrate new elements to your existing website, or completely give it a drastic makeover to suit the upcoming trends in the year 2010. For a start, here are the things you can imply.

Gigantic Logos and Headers

This is probably the best alternative to all the flashy flash you want to use on your website. Make note and remember it, “flash is outdated” so better not use it in your 2010 website design. You can use a huge banner instead. This way, the first page of your website will give a one-image impression like that of flash, but instead of the annoying clicking your user will simply have to scroll down to get the information.

Magazine Layout

Since the internet users are inclined more towards entertainment and interesting short articles, web designers can profit this interest factor by creating magazine type layout, where all information is displayed attractively and briefly like that in a glossy magazine.

Hand Drawn Sketches

This is a big break to the traditional graphics and illustrations you find on the web everywhere. It gives simple, unique and personalized look to your website visitors. Similar to hand drawn images, handwriting style is also gaining much popularity.

Typography

This aspect is increasingly gaining popularity and is highly recommended for your 2010 web design. Instead of using the regular fonts, it’s always better to try some larger, more happening fonts to make yourself stand out.

One Page Designs

Giving your website a “business card” look is another web design trend for future. This will eliminate the nasty experience of navigation and will give the user all info at one place. This kind of design will also help eliminate the needles material from your website.

Application of Large Images and Pictures

Large images and illustrations will be used as an invitation for the visitors. Exciting images have played a contemporary role in attracting website visitors and keeping their interest build up, this process will continue more comfortably by designers in 2010.

Replacing Icons For Text

A small icon representing the whole section instead of using words is also quite appealing and recognizable for users. This also increases the chance of people to spot that specific section easily.

Enough White Space

White backgrounds are the best choice for your website and perhaps a safer choice too. To make anything prominent and make your website a less hurtful setting for the users eyes, always prefer white or nude background colors.

The coming year is supposed to rock the boat of web design in many many ways! However, following the above given design ideas can give your website the trendy makeover it needs for the year 2010.

Web design and web development are two elements going hand in hand behind a successful website. The working of these two may be different, but their basic purpose remains the same, i.e. to produce good functioning websites.

Web designing refers to all the eye-candy we see on the surface of a web page, while web developing refers to the efforts making that eye-candy worth navigating. However minor, but it’s important to know the difference between the two so that you know what to ask for while getting your website designed and developed.

Web design basically involves making good-looking websites with good usability. Good web designers are experienced in graphic tools and and a little bit of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Web designing signifies the practice of crafting a website layout using the graphics program such as Photoshop, Flash, Fireworks, and Corel Draw etc. It basically lays down the foundation for how a web page would appear. The web design result does not usually contain code and it symbolizes only the graphical representation.

Website development on the other hand deals with the working aspect of the website. A good developer can create anything you can imagine online, giving you a workable website that is also competitive. Websites that require a login, provide e-commerce features including a shopping cart or online payments, online forums etc are some good examples of web development. Primarily, web developers help you build your website through coding (also called back-end programming). Coding is the crux of any website development and must be handled by experts if you want fast, reliable and secure baseline for your website.

Web designing is visible and helps in attracting visitor interest towards your site in first instance, while the unseen development process is crucial to increase visitor’s experience while browsing within your site. Good usable websites are those that give equal concern to website design and development. So if you’re planning to get your website done, you must by know what difference there is between web design and web development, and how necessary they are together for your website.