PajMon Information Blog

Posts Tagged ‘computers and the internet’

With so many companies these days relying on the internet as an electronic storefront for selling their wares, web page design has become a fast-growing occupation. However, there is still a lot of argument as to the best approach to designing a web page; with those having a background in graphic arts opting for a website that has visually appeal and those with a more technical background preferring web page design to incorporate elements that are appealing to internet search engines. These two approaches will often be at odds regarding the site’s structure, but the common goal is surely to drive more traffic to the website in question.

These two different angles, if combined, can very often deliver the best of both worlds and not only help visitors to the site find the information they are looking for, but also make it easy for users to find the site. Design-oriented web developers may be forced to rely on advertising, such as Google Adwords, to bring visitors to their site. Developers who are more technically aware may not create sites with a strong visual appeal. However, they may end up attracting more search engine traffic.

Regardless of the approach, the important aspects of a website will always be the same: content, usability and design are the three most important elements to web page design and pages that are strong in all these three areas have a better chance of attracting an audience and being successful.

While some attractive websites may have an initial aesthetic appeal, if they are laden down with graphics, audio, Flash or video files, they may be slow to load. This can frustrate potential visitors and can lead to less traffic than would otherwise be the case. Each page in a website should take just a few seconds to download.

Content is also immensely important. Both search engines and humans are attracted to good content. If your site has original content which is not available elsewhere on the web, it stands to reason it will get visitors. If users visit a site and it does not contain the information they want, they will simply leave in search of better information.

When planning and designing your website, a useful exercise is to try to place yourself in your visitors’ shoes. What are they looking for? How much of it can you offer them? How can you make your version of it more attractive than what’s on offer from your competitors?

Selecting pixels in a bitmapped image can be a tricky process. That’s why Adobe Photoshop offers so many different ways of making selections. There are the selection tools, the four modifier icons and the keyboard shortcuts. Once you’ve made your selection, you will often want to preserve it so that you can reuse the same selection in the future; especially if it’s taken you a lot of time and effort. You can save a selection in two ways: as a path or as an alpha channel.

To save a selection as an alpha channel, choose Save Selection from the Select menu. When you save a selection in this way, Photoshop creates an alpha channel which is simply a special type of channel that can be viewed by going to the Channel window and clicking on its name. Alpha channels are greyscale images which use a visual code to represent selections and masks: the black areas on the channel represent masked (non-selected) areas and white areas represent those areas which will be highlighted when the channel is loaded as a selection. (The reverse can also be true: the user can set his or her preferences by double-clicking the channel thumbnail in the Channel window.)

Since the different levels of grey within an image represent different levels of selection, alpha channels are ideal for saving selections with feathering and fades. By contrast, paths are incapable of representing different degrees of masking and selection. Paths are vector shapes which can be manipulated using a series of tools imported from Illustrator, Adobe’s vector-based drawing program.

To change a selection into a path, choose Make Work Path from the Paths panel menu. Photoshop will then ask you to enter a number representing the tolerance setting that the program should use in creating the vector path. The acceptable range is from 0.5 to 10. Lower numbers give a very detailed trace resulting in shorter line segments and many points. Higher numbers give a less precise trace with fewer points. A number between 1 and 2 usually yields good results for most selections. Having converted your selection to a work path, remember to save it. A work path is only temporary, so always choose Save Path from the Paths panel menu and either accept the default name or enter a new one.

With the use of the imported Adobe Illustrator vector-based editing tools, paths can be modified to correspond very precisely to edges around elements inside the image. This make them ideal for creating cut-outs of products and human subjects within photographs.

Each you choose New from the File menu in Adobe InDesign, you may have noticed the option to create a new book without ever knowing exactly what a book is. Well, in fact, books are a really useful feature: they allow you to take a series of related InDesign document and process them as a single entity called a book. All documents in the book can then share the same resources such as paragraph and character styles, swatches, master pages, sections and page numbering.

Once you’ve created a book, by choosing File-New-Book, the Book panel is displayed. It contains a panel menu with all the options necessary for managing a book. The first task is to add some documents to the book: from the Book panel menu, choose “Add Document” and select the documents you want to be treated as part of the book. The book panel will now act as a launch pad for each of the documents it contains: simply double-click a document to open it.

The book file can now be saved. The book is a separate entity to the documents it contains and the documents in a book do not have to reside in the same location as the book or as each other. To save the book, choose Save Book in the Book panel menu.

Next, elect one of the documents in the book to be treated as the style source. The document chosen as the style source will be used as the master document in the process known as synchronization whereby InDesign replaces the colour swatches and styles of all documents in the book with those in the style source document.

To manage page numbering across the whole book, choose Book Page Numbering Options in the Book panel menu. The default is “Automatically Update Page & Section Numbers”: this will number pages in the documents within the book according to the order in which they are listed in the Book panel.

Books are a terrific tool for division of labour since the fact that a document is part of a book does not stop it from being a regular InDesign document. If a book contains ten documents, ten different people can work on each of those documents and then, at the end, the whole book can be preflighted, printed and output as PDF as a single unit.

Both tables of contents and indexes can also be generated for the entire book as well as for a single document. Simply create the table of contents or index in the usual way but activate the option “Include Book Documents”.