Web design has always been my passion and I am glad to announce the launch of a brand new XHTML design for a new web design client.

new web design - lowprofilelinks.com

The initial concept for the website design was first laid out in Photoshop CS3 with layers grouped as main Div wrappers. I find that if I visualize this in the mock up process it really helps to speed things up when it comes to the HTML slicing stage.

Main DIV elements such as menus, template areas and content editable areas should be all grouped individually. However I try not to get too pedantic with the hierarchy of it all; as long as its neatly named and if another web designer happen to need to update it in the future they can easily figure things out.

Screen shot of the web design layout in Photoshop

Since this design is for an SEO business, the final HTML needed to be clean and images needed to be kept at a minimum. Due to this requirement I opted to use SiFR for the main heading texts to add a little bit of glam to the overall design. Sifr allows web designers to embed font’s that would be otherwise considered not web friendly while still allowing the search engines to crawl and read the text. I had this in mind already when designing the concept, so I was free to use the font on the design ( which is Trade Gothic Narrow )

Once the concept was signed off by the client, I move onto the task of constructing the basic HTML framework for the web design. This is where the nicely formatted photoshop layers come in handy, basically I start with the main wrappers which have been grouped already. Once the main positioning has been done, its time to move onto the individual elements inside the wrappers.

SIFR in action

By structuring my workflow like this, I can keep the CSS stylesheet for the web design nice and neat, using IDs as the parent CSS style and adding classes from there.

The final stage of the design involves adding the content and the last thing is to validate the HTML. I know some designers like to do this during each step of the web design process, but I find it too time consuming. By validating the HTML as the last step, just works for me.

So that’s a little insight into my web design work flow for this project, this is how I work on basic XHTML designs, however processes and work flows generally change if we start involving web applications, PHP functions and databases.

Working as a Brisbane web designer can sometimes be quiet challenging as some businesses and consumers in Brisbane are still behind in grasping the power of the internet and how it can help their business. Brisbane is a growing city and I do believe that soon we will see a change. This change is brought forth by countless people in the internet marketing and web design industry in Brisbane, we are a small group no doubt; but the passion is there and with passion will always come success.

another new set of logos I recent designed