We have already discussed the importance of favicon in web design in an earlier article. Favicon is often overlooked by Web Designers but is vital in web design. A professionally designed website should include a custom favicon as it important for website branding.

Favicon is a small icon that is displayed next to the URL of a website in the address bar of the browser. It is important to design a custom favicon for your website for branding reasons.

Most browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari support favicons. New versions of many browsers, support standard image formats such as gif and png in favicons. However for a wider coverage and to ensure the custom favicon for your website is displayed on most browsers, it should ideally be created in .ICO format.

How to design a Favicon in Photoshop

You can easily create a custom Favicon icon for your website without employing the services of a Web Design Company or professional web designer. In this tutorial, we are going to cover how to create a Favicon using Photoshop. Photoshop is easy to use and is one of the leading software used in web design. Other graphic design packages will offer a similar approach.

The process is simple. All you need to do is download the right plugin and place it in the plugins folder. That is all you need to do in order to start creating custom Favicon icons for websites using Photoshop. The steps are explained in detail below.

Step 1: Download the plugin

By default Photoshop does not have the right plugin installed to create a Favicon. You need to download the Favicon plugin first.

You can download Photoshop Favicon plugin for free from http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/

Step 2- Install the Plugin

Once you have downloaded the plugin, extract the file if it is compressed. Place the extracted plugin file in the plugins folder of Photoshop. This is typically located at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Plug-Ins\File Formats

The folder path may differ slightly depending upon the version of Photoshop you are using.

Step 3 - Design custom icon for your website

Once the plugin is installed, you will be able to create custom icons to use on your website or other web design projects. Create a custom small square image based on how you wish to present your website or your brand. You can use graphic, text or your logo. As Favicons are tiny, it is important to Keep the graphic simple.

Step 4- Resize and save your graphic

Once you have designed the right image, resize your graphic to 16 pixels x 16 pixels. In Photoshop, you can do this via the ‘image size’ option under ‘Image’ menu at the top. Enter 16px in width and height in the image size pop-up window and press OK. This will resize the image to the correct size. Save your image with the name ‘favicon’. The file should be saved as .ICO format. You can do this by selecting ‘windows (.ICO)’ in the file type option in the ‘Save As’ pop-up window.

STEP 5 - Upload custom icon to the web server

Finally, you will need to upload the custom ‘favicon.ico’ image you have created to the web-server where your website is hosted. You can do this by FTP. Place the file in the main folder where the website files are located. If a Favicon icon is already present on the server, overwrite this with your custom image. That is all. When you visit your website next, you will see your custom icon displayed next to the URL in the address-bar of the browser. Remember to refresh the page to see the change.

When you are designing a website for your company, you will be presented with a choice of many open source web design or content management systems. Of the many web publishing platforms, Joomla, Wordpress, Typo3 and Drupal are some of the most popular and widely used. For E-commerce websites Magento, OsCommerce and Joomla compatible Virtuemart are some of the widely used open source platforms.

Although most platforms can be used for developing professional websites of any kindm many professional web designers favour Joomla for developing websites and Wordpress for a blog.

Both Joomla and Wordpress release new versionsofthe software frequently to solve bugs and security vulnerabilities. Both have an established development community and as such they are able to releases patches and version improvements in time.

The launch of Joomla 1.5x platform which is a significant improvement from its earlier 1.0x platform, the usability of Joomla has improved considerably. Both Joomla and Wordpress have become popular platforms for developing and designing websites in the last few years. Although there are other powerful open source content management platforms, Joomla and Wordpress have soared in popularity in recent years.

In my over 8 years of web design experience, I have used a combination of approaches for designing websites. At first I relied mainly on hand coding a site from scratch. In recent years I have used both Wordpress and Joomla on many occasions. In my personal opinion, both software have advantages. I find Wordpress to be the ideal choice for blogs or informational websites where the business logic is simple and complex workflow is not required on the website. On the hand when complex functionality or business process needs to be implemented on the website, I find Joomla to be the better choice. This article compares the two software and provides an insight into suitability for different situations.

Wordpress versus Joomla

Usability

Most users find Wordpress to be more user friendly than Joomla. However it is vital to note that Joomla’s administration offers a wide range of administration features whereas Wordrpess administration screen offers a fewer set of features. It is also worth noting that Joomla 1.5 has made significant improvements in usability over previous versions of the software.

Admin Features

Joomla has a more powerful administration interface thanWordpress. Compared to Joomla, Wordpress offers an easy to use and simple interface where updating content and images is the key function. Joomla on the other hand has a much more advanced administration interface with a vast collection of core as well as add-on features.

The powerful back-end of Joomla can be used for a range of websites including large e-commerce (Shopping cart) websites, document management system, etc.

Versatility

Although Wordpress can be used to develop a variety of websites, some developers argue that it lacks advanced content management capabilities offered by Joomla. Some developers and web designers see Wordpress as a Blogging tool as opposed to a CMS platform. I have personally also used Wordpress for developing standard business websites and have found it be very useful and easy to use.

Search Engine Optimisation

Wordpress is excellent for search engines especially Google. Blog posts or pages created in a Wordpress site are optimised properly for search engines and stand a better chance of ranking than most other web platforms. Joomla on the other hand may lack some of the SEO capabilities of Wordpress in its default settings. However Joomla can be customers for search engines. With the right custiomisation, Joomla websites can rank equally high on Google.

Scalability

Some developers argue that Joomla has advantages over Wwordpress with regards to scalability. Wordpress is an excellent software for designing blogs or standard websites where web publishing is the key requirement. Joomla on the other hand is suitable for developing simple websites as well complex web applications of any scale.

Joomla is equally good for designing start-up company websites as well large bespoke web based applications.

Integration with third party tools

Joomla has a powerful development API that can be used to integrate Joomla websites with almost any other external system of source. The core website elements can be extended and integrated with other systems as required.

Development of bespoke features

As discussed above, Joomla is more versatile for advanced development. It offers a well developed API that can be used to develop custom features to meet the specific needs of a business. Web designers and developers have been quick to offer thousands of bespoke add-on features for Joomla that are readily available for installing on websites. Wordpress too is easy to extend and it is possible to develop bespoke features. However they are comparatively light-weight and limited.

Blogs have increased in popularity in recent years. There are thousands of blogs covering every niche from Web Design, and Web development through to travel and personal blogs. This list identifies the top blogs related to web design and web development. Similar to other topics, there are thousands of blogs related to web or graphic design.  It is not surprising to find Web design to be one of the more covered niches on the internet. In spite of the large number of design related blogs, the quality and influence varies significantly. While some web design blogs have turned into useful resources for web designers, there are others that are still in their early years that do not post as frequently as the established sites.

This is a list of some of the leading web design and development related blogs on the internet. The list is a mix of influential web design blogs as well some new blogs that show promising potential for growth in future. It is a diverse list that addresses a number of factors not just popularity and traffic.

1.    Smashing Magazine

www.smashingmagazine.com

Smashing Magazine - Web Design Blog

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