Website Design – Guided Creative

The Pros and Cons of DIY Web Design

October 10, 2024July 24, 2023 by Guided Creative

Whenever web design is needed to create a new website, and in most cases, that will be for a business website, one of the choices that have to be made by the business owner is who is going to be responsible for it. In other words, who is going to design and build the website?

For the most part, there are three options: a web design agency, a freelance web designer, or the business owner, who may have some knowledge and even experience in website design, may choose to build the website themselves.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each of those options. Still, eventually, the choice will be between a “Do-It-Yourself” website design or hiring someone to do it, such as a web designer or a web design agency. This decision should not be taken lightly, especially if the website is for a business. That business’s success could greatly depend on how much revenue their new website helps generate.

For this reason, we thought it would be prudent to go through some of the pros and cons of DIY website design and highlight the main reasons why you could go for this option, and equally importantly, the reasons why you should not.

The Pros Of DIY Web Design

No Website Design Fees: One of the most common reasons business owners will decide to try and build their website themselves is that they do not have to come up with the fee to pay a web design agency or freelance web designer. It does not mean they will have no costs at all, but these are likely to be less than paying for professional web design.

7 Ways To Ensure Your eCommerce Store Provides A Fantastic Customer Experience

October 10, 2024September 26, 2021 by Guided Creative

If you own or run an eCommerce store online, there are many ways in which you can make the experience of visiting and using your store an exceptional one for your prospects and customers. If you do, you will accrue many benefits, including increased sales and revenue, more repeat buyers, and it could even improve your rankings on Google as customers share their great experience with others online and link back to your store.

The number one priority must be to ensure that the products that you sell from your eCommerce store are top quality. There is little point in getting everything else 100% right if what you are selling is sub-standard. Beyond that objective, here are 7 other ways you can make the customer experience in your eCommerce store better than what your competition offers their visitors.

Make Navigation Throughout Your Store Easy

One of the quickest ways to annoy and lose a potential customer is if the navigation within your eCommerce is difficult and confusing. You want it to be as easy to browse your store as it would be in a store in a shopping mall. Categorise and group like products, provide links in each description to specific pages, and always provide a way for visitors to return to the main store page.

Use Only Top Quality Images

In a real store, customers can touch, feel, and see products up close, so an online store is at somewhat of a disadvantage. You can overcome that by ensuring that every product image you publish is of the highest quality. You should try avoiding generic or stock images that other store owners are using. Make your store and your product descriptions unique by taking high-quality product photos of your own.

3 Easy WordPress Templates You Can Use Right Away

April 12, 2023March 28, 2021 by Guided Creative

WordPress has quickly become the preferred Content Management System of bloggers and website owners worldwide. Its stability, multi-functionality, and ease of use make it the perfect choice for anyone setting up a new website.

WordPress users choose how to display their content by picking a “template.” A template (or “theme”) is simply a pre-designed web page that can be configured to the user’s desire.

There are a wide variety of templates on the market ranging from simple ones to those having advanced functions. If you are new to WordPress it is best to start out with a basic template that will help you learn the ropes. In my opinion, the following 3 templates are the best for getting started right away.

1. Zweig

Zweig is a simple blogging template that draws the viewer’s eye to the written content. It is a single-column template that lists one blog post after another in the center of the page. It reminds me of the classic Blogspot type of styling although it is coded with the latest standards of HTML 5 and CSS 3.

Readers can navigate the website through the spacious menu at the upper right hand of the header. They can also just scroll down on the homepage to view all the different blog posts.

You only have to do a couple of things to get this blog template started. First you’ll have to do a one-click install from the WordPress theme repository. Next, as with all WordPress templates you have to set up your menu.

This is as simple as choosing what pages will be displayed and putting them in order. The next step is just to start writing. It is incredibly easy to write blog post after blog post to begin adding content to your site.

You can also create additional “static” pages (for content that will remain the same) and choose from hundreds of widgets to add even more functionality.

10 Tips To Ensure You Communicate Effectively With Your Web Designer

October 10, 2024March 12, 2020 by Guided Creative

If you have employed a professional web designer or web design agency to create your website, then you have made a positive step towards having a website that is going to contribute to the success of your business. Using professional web designers will reassure you that the people designing and creating your website have the experience, skills, and resources to produce a website you can be proud of.

However, whilst your web design team have a huge role to play in the creation of your website, your contribution is not minimal. There are several parts of the process that you will be involved in, before, during and after your website has been designed. One of those is communicating with your web designers and its role in the success of the project should not be underestimated.

Effective communications are essential for any project to be successful where there are two parties involved, and this is particularly true when it comes to web design. So, here are 10 excellent tips to make sure that the communication between yourself and your web designers is effective.

Tip #1: Ensure You Both Know What The Final Objectives Are – Both you and your web design team must be in unison when it comes to knowing what the objectives of your website are so that when you communicate with them, the goals you discuss are aligned.

Tip #2: Be Open And Honest At All Times – Never be afraid to voice your opinion to your web designer if something is not right. As long as it is done respectfully, you should raise a concern openly than avoid it and hope it will go away…it won’t.

Tip #3: Do Not Try To Rush The Project – Professional web designers will be upfront and realistic about the timescale for completion, so trust them on it. Do not be tempted to rush the project and especially do not ask them to cut corners to save time.

Joomla Cms – How it Works

October 10, 2024March 8, 2019 by Guided Creative

Many additions to Joomla make sure better performance and basic features of Joomla will help users to fast and easily build inventory control systems, application bridges, data reporting tools, and many other applications online. Joomla users will simply impress their customers by installing this superb creation. Joomla occurs to be a great open platform that anyone can make use of.

Everybody has access to it & many people contribute to the growth of this content system. Installing Joomla is free and in case you think you require this superb system then you have to follow simple instructions & get it downloaded.

You can fast look up instructions and find for yourself how simple it is to make use of Joomla.
Anybody can make use of it and gain from the features of Joomla. When you download this ideal system, you are rest assured to build all possible websites and some other applications online without lots of effort.

Your online tasks are made much easier by using Joomla. It is one great piece of modernization that is designed to make life much simpler and better for individuals. Thus, get set to make your life better with the use of Joomla.

Joomla Development

October 10, 2024March 18, 2018 by Guided Creative

Joomla is an excellent platform for incorporating any type of website design & most. Important it is not just user friendly to developers however it is SEO friendly as well.

Joomla CMS has made a large number of sites & extensively implemented for making corporate site development, e-commerce websites, Non-profit organizations, Government websites, Small business websites, Community websites, and Personal websites endless list.

Joomla’s easy-to-use text editor makes it easy to add any pages or articles to a website; as easy as working in Microsoft Word. You can very easily integrate tables, text, graphs, & flash elements, and so on. The design of the Joomla is search-engine friendly.

The Article Manager

Very use full tool for any of the article driven websites; as the title inspires, it is the article manager with different features, such as management of articles, deletion, editing, publishing, and so on. In article parameters, you will add titles, descriptions, keywords, published dates, create dates, and so on. Not just this, but also article manager has useful features

Joomla Web Designing

October 10, 2024March 23, 2017 by Guided Creative

Making a website look very attractive takes some days, but due to Joomla web designing now, anyone will be able to make a perfect website in a short time span. It becomes very easy to use ready to use open-source website templates. A person can make use of them to make an attractive website anytime.

A person can also look after the website by keeping complete control of that & there are many companies that give good Joomla web design.

These companies ensure that the Joomla website templates are protected by passwords, and the person accessing the website will make changes to the site.

These days there are some companies online working to serve customers with the Joomla web-designing methods. For people who are interested in this particular application can use these companies online & get themselves registered by online services.

One of the main benefits of making use of this type of web-designing method is that search engines will read the location of the Joomla websites at a much quicker speed than other types of websites. Users feel very happy to make use of the new method of Joomla web designing that makes a business successful.

Why To Use Joomla Web-Designing?

October 10, 2024March 25, 2016 by Guided Creative

By making use of Joomla website web designing services, webmasters & designers can enjoy the ease of adding web pages to their websites conveniently, like removing web pages from the website. Because of this added viability of appending or else deletion of pages from the site, Joomla CMS is more famous than those that make other familiar HTML-based web-designing tools & applications.

Those entire straightforward / HTML-based editors will make create simple products; on the other hand, Joomla is also known to increase furore amongst modern web designers. Hence, let us see why?
Joomla web-designing solution is open source, and that means users are not required to pay any of the hefty fees to license and nor are they payable for incurring any kind of registration fees.

However, most globally famous & commercial web-designing tools cannot be used unless users have made sumptuous payments to get rights. Being an open-source web-designing tool, Joomla is available through an open source as well as is available through a huge platform of online community websites. The community source of Joomla is now spanning all over the world & through local countries.

Thus, ease of availability and removal of the hassles of paying huge licensing fees that have contributed much to making Joomla a highly famous web-designing tool.

5 Essentials to Set up a Self-Hosted WordPress Blog

May 12, 2023March 19, 2015 by Guided Creative

Using free blogging platforms may seem like a great idea in the short term. Why would you want to deal with the technicalities when you only want to write and establish your expertise? However, not hosting your content can have a significant impact on your enterprise in the long run. If you are looking to grow your online business, you need to ensure that you have complete control and ownership of your blog.
Also, it is increasingly accessible these days to own your site. For as low as $10 per month, you can host your website and WordPress Blog. We present a list of 5 essential tools that you will need to set up your WordPress Blog.

1. Domain Name: Choosing a domain name is an essential step in setting up a blog. Since the domain name is directly linked to your branding strategy and cannot be changed later, it is necessary to choose a name that reflects your website’s products and services accurately. A memorable domain name helps people recall better. In fact, a domain name is just like a username for a site. The domain name must be easy to remember and catchy. This name is essential to establish your online presence.

2. Web Hosting: While a domain name is like a phone number for your site, the same is not the case with your web servers. Your site can be hosted on any server. A managed WordPress host will probably cost marginally more than traditional hosting, but your website will be kept secure and backed up consistently. It is essential to have a fast website for setting up a blog, as such portals deliver a better user experience and improve search engine rankings.

How To Create Your Own Online CV/Resume Website With WordPress

October 10, 2024December 10, 2014 by Guided Creative

Did you know that 56% of all hiring managers are more impressed if a candidate has a personal website? Sadly, only 7% of job seekers actually have a personal website. Think about the big opportunities they’re missing out on. Needless to say, having your own personal website is the best way to win over the hiring committee. By visualizing and showcasing all your work and information in one place, it’s guaranteed that you land an interview. A personal website is also a great way to promote yourself and your professional services. And it’s not just a method used by experts and celebrities either.

Have a look at Guy Gungell’s website and see how he uses the site to showcase his portfolio and services. So, how do you build a website like that? Here’s what you need -:

A domain name.
WordPress web hosting.
A quality theme.

You can get all of this for about $60 USD.

Why WordPress?

There are plenty of websites out there that allow you to create an online resume for free, so why spend money to build one with WordPress? First of all, those “free” online resume websites come with a lot of complications. You either get stuck with a boring website design that makes your resume look like everyone else’s, or you have to pay a monthly fee to publish your resume on the web. A resume tells more about a person than just qualifications and contact information. The design and the way you present your information also have a major impact on impressing your employer. With an online resume built with WordPress, you’ll not only get to set up the website easily with a pre-designed theme, but you’ll also get to customize your resume with a unique and innovative design.

WordPress on A VPS

October 10, 2024September 11, 2014 by Guided Creative

I remember having to make a huge decision about my websites a few years ago. I was using a shared hosting account that supports multiple domain names to host a number of my blogs and websites.

The service was great, but the performance of a shared hosting service could no longer keep up with the traffic I was generating. Naturally, there were two options I could consider: a larger reseller hosting package or a virtual private server (VPS). I had no experience in running a server of my own at the time, so setting up a VPS hosting was a daunting task nonetheless. Fast forward a few years, and I now have several VPS hosting accounts running and supporting hundreds of WordPress blogs and websites without a glitch. If you are in the position I was in a few years ago, these next few tips will help you get started.

Reseller Hosting Vs VPS Hosting

Reseller hosting is great for hosting a large number of sites, but you still don’t have the full control offered by VPS hosting. The performance level of reseller hosting is also higher than the standard shared hosting services; again, you can squeeze more performance out of VPS hosting in most cases.

You can also go into several levels of VPS, such as managed/unmanaged/fully managed, like the options found here, which can be a godsend if you’d like more than your average WHM interface! So, which one should you go for? Based on my experience, VPS is still the better choice for several good reasons. First of all, there are managed VPS hosting services to choose from. Managed VPS allows you to have experienced server administrators set up and maintain the VPS while you focus on the more important matter: managing your websites.

They are more expensive than unmanaged VPS services, but you get so much more performance-wise. VPS is also much more scalable than reseller hosting. Similar to shared hosting, you can only upgrade a reseller hosting account so much before you hit the hosting company’s limits. With VPS, you can always add more processor cores, RAM and disk space at any point in time. You can even reduce the size of your VPS hosting to save money if you don’t need the extra resources. Lastly, even unmanaged VPS is not so difficult to manage now that there are a lot of tutorials, resources and pre-made server images to use.

This brings me to my next point….

Tricks for better WordPress performance

October 10, 2024March 16, 2014 by Guided Creative

WordPress is the favourite blogging platform of our time, which helps us, spread our opinion web-wide.

The success of our posts depends on the quality of their performance, but unfortunately, there are many occasions when users are not maximizing the potential of this platform to their advantage.

It may sound like a challenging task, but we assure you it is an easy operation. For this purpose, we gathered a list of 10 useful tricks that will boost WordPress performance, even when executed by novice and inexperienced bloggers.

Many would agree that the main problem of WordPress is that it is a dynamic script that requires page loading all the time. The execution of queries can slow down performance or even cause a server crash, assuming the site experiences high traffic.

The truth is that you have to keep an eye on the performance at every moment and adjust your blogging settings accordingly.

As complicated as it seems, WordPress performance can be tackled with many tools and methods, from cache paging, leeching prevention, or file compression, to database optimization. All you need is a bit of time; and eventually a piece of professional advice.

Bittbox Free Graphic Resource

November 16, 2021March 11, 2012 by Guided Creative

Jay Hilgert’s bittbox.com is a great resource to designers, particular to web designers. Jay give away the best quality stuff on bittbox to help designers everywhere.

There are Adobe Photoshop free textures, brushes, Photoshop and Illustrator patterns, backgrounds, vector images, packs.

Jay also posts workflow tips about Photoshop and Illustrator to help designers work faster. You can learn Saving Patterns in Illy, Pixelated Fonts, about Dynamic Burberry Text in Illustrator, there is Photoshop tip for the layers palette for rasterizing shape layers combining layer effects at the same time, find out why your brushes look pixelated, and much more.

On Bittbox you will find 35 Free Abstract Illustrator Brushes, Grunge music, Fur, Tree bark, Rainy day, Light grunge, Concrete and lots of more different textures.