Managing graphics on your own

Managing graphics in your website design can be a difficult task and many people take the help of professional graphics designers to do a professional job. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but for most small-to-medium sized companies, the website design can be kept simple so that the services of a graphics professional or professional web design expert are not necessary. Abcdesigning has huge experience with Photoshop and Dreamweaver to help create the eye catching designs.

In fact the website design should avoid too much of graphics and sophistication because this may run contrary to good website design practices and may affect both the impact of the site as well as the time taken to load the page, which is an important consideration.

Once you settle for a website design that avoids too much complexity, it is possible for you to do most graphic jobs yourself without taking the help of professionals at a high cost. You may have to invest in a simple graphics software such as Corel’s Paint shop Pro, which is inexpensive and allows you to download a free trial version that can be used for one month. Thereafter, you have to register the software to continue to use it, but the small price of £39.99 that you pay may well be worthwhile, considering the image enhancements that it can help you provide to your website design.

What does graphics involve

Simple graphics will have to be used by everyone to enhance the effect and appeal of their website design. These will involve adding visual effects that are applicable both to graphic images as well as a lot of text other than normal body text such as banners, logos, titles and so on that are usually part of any website design. You could use Paint shop Pro or any other comparable graphics editing software to manage the graphics part of your website design. Most of the graphics editing software available in the market is targeted at amateur photographers who would like to enhance the quality of their photographs. The same basic enhancements can be used to give an appealing and professional look to both text and images that form part of your website design.

Common graphics operations

Whether you are working with special text such as banners and titles or with images, there are certain basic operations that will help you to achieve a good amount of enhancement in visual appeal. Some of these operations are discussed in this section.

Size and background: The first thing as part of your website design that you should decide upon is the size of the graphics, and the location within the web page where it will be placed. Selecting appropriate background and foreground colors are also important for creating good graphics appeal in the website design.

Effects: There a re few common effects that you can create with graphics packages. Two useful effects that you can create with Paint shop Pro are Drop Shadow Effect and Graduated Color Effect. Drop shadow effect comes with different settings from which you can choose to create the shadow effect that you prefer. Graduated color effect allows you to select two contrasting colors, and gradually changes the color of the image, starting with one of the chosen colors at the top and gradually changing it over the height of the image to reach the other selected color at the bottom. These effects can be used to create good visual appeals without making the website design too complicated and without overdoing the visual effects.

Enhancing Text

The above effects are available for both images and text. Let’s see how you can format text to give the best appeal to your website design. Text has certain additional variables that you will have to choose. These include the font details – the font type, color and size – that you want to use. You can type in your text by clicking on the text tool in the tool bar. This is the same as the one used in Paint that comes bundled with Windows and looks like an ‘A’. The text box is represented by a series of moving dotted lines. This box can be resized and moved around to the location and size that you want.

Once you’re finished with the text itself, you can add the effects that we discussed above, if you want. Now your text is ready the way you want it to be displayed. The learning time for Paint shop Pro is quite small, and as you go along you can master other simple techniques that will enable you to handle your graphics with a professional touch.