Applying Blending Modes

The new features in Macromedia Flash 8 Professional continue to extend the Flash authoring tool’s interactivity and functionality; providing designers and developers both with capabilities that before its arrival were the sole realm of programs such as Photoshop. Even importing those files to Flash later too dramatically increase the file size of the project. Now you can create such content directly in Flash 8 with more flexibility, control and smaller file sizes. In this article I’ll introduces you to one of those capabilities and by the time you're finished, you should be able to effectively implement it in your Flash applications with confidence.

If you have used graphics design softwares as Photoshop then you are probably familiar with the image compositing effects called blend modes and filters (image special effects). I’ll cover how to use filters effectively in the next article.

Blend modes let you create composite images; you can use them to achieve a variety of compositing (It is the process of varying the transparency or color interaction of two or more overlapping objects) effects by changing the way the image of one object on the Stage is combined with the images of any objects beneath it.

O.K. let’s workout step by step how to apply blending modes for some interesting effects. Applying blends to your Flash objects is a very straightforward process.

First you’ll have to convert the objects that you want to blend to either a button or movie clip symbol as blending modes do not work with graphic symbols.

Adjust the color and transparency of the movie clip instance using the Color pop-up menu in the Property inspector.

Then you should drag the symbol over another object on the Stage so that there is at least some overlap. The symbol can be on the same layer as the second object or they can be on separate layers.

Position the movie clip with the blend mode over the graphic symbol whose appearance you want to modify. Select the specific blend mode from the Blend pop-up menu in the Property inspector for movie clips. Then apply blend mode to the selected movie clip instance accordingly. Done!

May be you shall get it all with this simple example:-

o I open new Flash Document and import a PSD picture from Webshots on the stage. Select the PSD picture on the Stage. Select Modify > Break Apart. This breaks the instance into its component graphic elements. Use the painting and drawing tools to modify these elements as desired. (This is Just to add a cool look as shown in the picture below).

o Draw another circle nearby having the same Dimensions and convert each of those into a movie clip.

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o Drag one symbol on another so that it overlaps. You can now see the blend button and all the blending modes in the lower right corner of the Stage in property Inspector.

o Finally I start experimenting with the blend mode from the Blend pop-up menu in the Property inspector to have the desired look as per my likes. In order to achieve the effect you want; you should better experiment with both the color and transparency settings of the movie clip and the different blend modes.

Blending mode basically have these elements:

Blend color	The color applied to the blend mode.
Opacity	The degree of transparency to which blending is applied.
Base color	The color of pixels underneath the blend color.
Result Color	The result of the blending effect on the base color

Blend Modes:	Description
Normal	Applies color normally, without any interaction with the base colors.
Layer	Lets you stack movie clips on top of each other without affecting their color.
Darken	Replaces only the areas that are lighter than the blend color. Areas darker than the blend color don't change.
Multiply	Multiplies the base color by the blend color, resulting in darker colors.
Lighten	Replaces only pixels that are darker than the blend color. Areas lighter than the blend color don't change.
Screen	Multiplies the inverse of the blend color by the base color, resulting in a bleaching effect.
Overlay	Multiplies or screens the colors, depending on the base colors.
Hard light	Multiplies or screens the colors, depending on the blend mode color. The effect is similar to shining a spot light on the object.
Difference	Subtracts either the blend color from the base color or the base color from the blend color, depending on which has the greater brightness value.
Invert	Inverts the base color.
Alpha	Applies an alpha mask.

Flash provides the following blend modes:

It’s better if you should experiment with all the blending modes available in Flash 8 on the range of overlapping graphic objects to get the lot varying and amazing results. I’m sure now you get familiar with one of the latest feature of Flash 8. You just try changing the order of the layers, change color transparency, use different blends and animate the movie clip to create fascinating desired composite graphical effects that are dynamic and can react to user interactivity.

How to replace text links with images using CSS

Ofcourse the general advantageous form in today’s web oriented world is always to use text links for the navigation of a website. Using text links helps search engine's to crawl your site, identifying content & keywords and listing them properly; because it can read the text but is uncomfortable in reading text with images.(To get more on the SEO functioning visit: SEO ).
More than often we want decorative text to have the aesthetic appeal means we do need to format a text, so that you can have effects and aliasing. Here we want to replace the text by an image containing the graphical presentation of the text or of any of the suitable image. As they are for the purpose of glitter, adding necessary flavour & to have strong visual effect; so there is no need to include them in the code. You should include them in style sheet. Just by using this bit of CSS code, you can use your text links, and then replace them in browsers with images. This way you can fulfill your both purposes. Search engines do crawl your site and can read the text and relative links plus visitors too get the pretty looks of your web pages as per your likes.
Want to implement this! Let’s take a look……..
• General Solution The technique which is widely used is to wrap the text with a inside the header tag, then use CSS to hide the text and use the header tag as an image; as shown in the given format:

How to replace text links with images using CSS

But using this technique certainly has its disadvantages in other forms:
o Adding a meaningless tag, it shows
o Nothing will be visible if the user switches off images.
o Fine with search engines but it cannot be read by visitors.


• Compatible Solution There's another technique which hides the text just by using CSS. Here the text won't be enclosed in the neutral element span, we are going to format it with the background image and absolutely positioned. In this technique text will still be readable by screen readers as well as search engine spiders. The text will be visible, if the image (for any reason) cannot be displayed otherwise; the image do covers the text.

How to replace text links with images using CSS

This way you can push the text down inside the header with a rather large line-height then the overflowing overflow: hidden hides the text. Isn’t that simple! We fulfill all our purposes and still end up with slightly clean shorter markup and according images.
So these are one of the few methods which I know. If you have some better solutions then please share it with me below this article and tell me your views on these methods of replacing text links with images.

Use XHTML Sitemap To Index Pages

Today on the World Wide Web there are literally over 1 billion websites and this figure is still growing at an exponential rate. The issue which holds the core attention in website design these days is the aspect of 'Indexing the website’. No matter if you have a great looking site, if it isn't 'indexed' well; search engines will not find it in the first place leave alone any listings and traffic. The ranking of the page of your site is decided by the manner that page is indexed into a search engine's database.

There are different ways we index a site and these days this is key to a prominent position on the Internet. Currently on the Web less than 8 % of sites can be accessed easily and of these only a further 5-6% are indexed properly and further out of this only less than 1/3^rd are fully functional and valid enough for access to the general Internet users. Rest all are gets buried in the cyber dust of web to the point of near inaccessibility.

WDC is specialized in indexing methods that are extremely successful and now some of our clients are attracting huge amount of traffic by being on the first page of a search that often will yield hundreds of thousands of results.

See - the Google’s Opinion

Visit the Google’s guidelines for sitemap which wisely clarify the merit of creating site maps and directing to offer a site map for your users with links that point to the important segments of your site.

Ofcourse using an XML site map do allows you to instantly index every page on your site. Even many of you are using your archives essentially as a solution for this problem, See, archive pages of WordPress, CMS etc do not contain links to all the pages and related syndication feeds of your site. On top of that, most archives also fail to link to every post. So using them is not considered a good practice. Even using XML sitemap is just a good SEO advice for optimisation of any of the site but still there are some SEO issues need to work out beyond the criteria of displaying links.

In order to have an effective indexing of your site, you should better create an XHTML sitemap to link every page. This XHTML sitemap is certainly going to work w.r.t. any of the designed, layout or template on which your site is builds.

If you are using WordPress theme

With WordPress implementing effective XHTML sitemap is quiet an easy task. It’s even not that difficult to activate your new sitemap; it can be achieved in the following pattern.

1^st you should upload your sitemap.php to your active WordPress theme directory. In the administration panel- on write page- fill in the title.

Select s sitemap template from the page template dropdown box. Finally click on create new page.

In order to download the XHTML sitemap generator Template for WordPress 2.1 or higher Visit:

Designed by Mr. Pearson (Visit him at Pearsonified.com )

Ofcourse you certainly have to work on the sitemap style later. Well to get back the relative style of the sitemap w.r.t. rest of your site is a very easy process even for those who are not familiar with WordPress theme files or XHTML. You just have to delete the codes in the existing page.php file and copy all of the code that lies between the opening and closing tags and then saving the file.

In case you are using Cutline theme

In case of Cutline theme; you can download the specifically formatted XHTML Sitemap for better indexing.

Conclusion

Using XHTML sitemap certainly is the best option for linking to all of the pages on your site as it is a step forward in building a topical keyword index of your site. In other cases pages are all definately get buried several layers down in Wordpress- once they get a bit older. This method is especially helpful for search engines that don’t take advantage of the XML sitemap which is linked to at the bottom of every page.

I do hope that this article helps in shining the SEO ratings of your site and to subsequent accelerating traffic. Still if you’ve got any more tips or hints on better indexing then let me know through commenting below this article.

How Much Should a Design Cost?

It’s an obvious fact which you can’t ignore for too long that someday your business will need a web site, so why not today? You might be afraid of the cost. You have heard of many who built their web sites themselves and others who have spent some 5 figure amount. Some business owners are very pleased with their site, but still there are many who having a sluggish design and navigations failed in their objective and regard it as a waste of time and money.

What’s the fact?

Almost every week, potential customers calls or emails me -who all want to know one thing: How much for a site design?

Some eight out of ten run for the hills after listening my answer. Believe me. Well it is according to industrial buzz- even 15% lower correctly speaking but I think it might still sound scary.

Ofcourse no two websites cost the same. We (better say all designers) work on an effective website strategy based on your budget and needs. There are some parameters which define it like the scope of your content type, design, size of site needed, advanced programming, multimedia content, and time taken to develop in accordance with your target audience and then the web site will be constructed to your wishes.

In order to have a successful website what you need is:

1. Atleast one Domain names

2. Server space to hold the site

3. Content

4. Web Site Design

5. Professional placement and search engine marketing

6. Website Maintenance

Let's go through each of these elements:

Domain Name
It’s your online identity. Domain name is how people will look for you on the web. Generally, you can have a unique domain name registration for some $70 for two years. A professional web developer can show you how to select and register your name. Every day hundreds of domain names are registered.

You should visit sites as www.domain.com or www.buydomains.com . They are the best location for solution to your registration needs.

After looking at the first process’ Buy a domain name: $ 70. Doesn’t sound that bad. Next comes the reality of hosting.

Server Space
As you will want your site hosted with a commercial hosting company to avoid slow loading or search engine related complications related to free hosting providers. While for a general site; it’s like about to pre-pay for two years in order to lock in that great price of $5.50/month. For a small business site figure is somewhat $20- $30 per month. If you want to use E-Commerce and take credit cards then $50/month is a good estimate as hosting fees.

Keyword Rich Content
I’m sure you may already have catalogues and brochures to serve as a basis for your site. But still developing a quality content w.r.t. your need specifications is a major challenge ahead. Plus to get the traffic from search engines you also need to use the keywords more effectively. Obviously the costs here will vary widely, so it’s not possible for me to give any estimate. If you have the text, photographs, and art work available then the cost should be minimal for sure.

Web Site Design
A professional web site designer will save you hours of valuable time and produce an original and attractive site. The designer should work with you to capture your vision for the look and feel of the site. If it’s regarding a business site for potentially millions of people, you should have the site professionally designed. Figure on $250-$500 per page for a basic page, more for an E-commerce page. A top designer will probably not start a project for less than $1000.00.

You can also opt for web templates they might cost you far less. Even if its just a hobby site or is just for leisure then you can also choose among the thousands of free designed templates available on internet.

Search Engine Marketing
Just having a well chosen domain name and a great looking web site are not enough. Your web site needs to be properly marketed so that potential customers find your site.

For that to achieve you will have to rank higher on the major search engines. A professional web site marketing firm may make necessary changes to your site in order to achieve that goal. The firm should register your site with various search engines and directories. They may recommend special pages called Content Pages for your site. You should get a full report on their activities and your search engine placement. Companies as www.patrickgavin.com , www.greenlightsearch.com offer solutions to take your website to the top of the major search engines at effective rates.

Web Site Maintenance
Site maintenance is a must on almost all web sites today. It provides your current and prospective customers with up to date information on your products and services. A web site needs to be maintained, both in content and in positioning.

Some firms offer to maintain your web site on daily, weekly or on a monthly basis. You can use this service an hourly basis or you can simply hire them on a 6 - 12 month maintenance contract, where they monitor, tweak and update your web site as per needed.

Search engine positioning is a dynamic process. Your site needs to be modified to reflect the latest changes in search engine criteria. You will want reports reflecting your latest search engine ranking. Periodically most of your site will need to be reregistered.

You need to budget of somewhat at least $100-$200/month for marketing maintenance, and if you have large sites then expenditure is in the excess of $1000/month or more in order to aggressively marketed and maintained. Content maintenance costs depend on the number and difficulty of the changes requested needed to be implemented.

Conclusion All of the above said things affect the final expenditure amount. Beware! Never to go by the developer who just throws out a price without going over the options with you. There should be no charge to discuss your requirements and your design specific outline that depicts a picture of what and how much is needed to be done.

Finally the site design must meet the web standards based on the W3C guidelines and full testing in multiple web browsers and on both Mac and Windows platforms.

Things to remember while choosing among free web layouts.

On internet, every now and then, we comes across a website that are cluttered with information and graphics, pop ups, revolving text which sometimes makes searching for useful information on a web page a very frustrating experience. It may certainly hurt your traffic ratings if it takes more than 10 seconds to load such extravaganza. That’s why concentrating on the effective layout become a vital task in website design.

Designing a layout involves deciding how to organize and present your content on the web page as a web page layout defines the geometry of the page. You can use the available tools to easy accomplish this task. Even there are thousands of free web layout templates are available on the net; from which you can choose the best suited one and fill the content and here is your web page ready to load! Free layout contains ready images and other facilities from which you can choose the combination that you would like to have on your web page. Don’t just go by their attractive looks; keep these following tips as a reference point to check out each part of the web layout before selecting it as your web page.

Screen Resolution: You should better optimize for 1024x768, which is currently the most widely used screen size. Of course, the general criterion is always to optimize for the most common resolution of your target audience. The below statistics by w3schools for the month of January for the last 5 years seem to reflect the general trend we are seeing on the Web, though I think the 800 × 600 percentages are a bit low.

Year	Higher	1024 x 768	800 x 600	640x 480	Unknown
2007(January)	26%	54%	14%	0%	6%
2006(January)	17%	57%	20%	0%	6%
2005(January)	12%	53%	30%	0%	5%
2004(January)	10%	47%	37%	1%	5%
2003(January)	6%	40%	47%	2%	5%

Contrast: Layout should have strike a good balance between graphics and text. It is easy to have too much text on your site. Too many graphics on your web layout may create too much clutter. It also slows the loading time of your web page. So have layout with compressed graphics just to emphasize the points you are trying to make as they can also distract people’s attention from the message you are conveying in content. So you‘ll have to take care of contrast in the following relative segments

· Contrast of color

· Contrast of scale

· Contrast of proximity

· Contrast of Value

· Typographic contrast

Color: Avoid having a layout with dark background and dark text. It’s hardly readable. Better to choose among the samples having light background with dark colored text. For example, a white background with black text is the easiest to read. The color should not distract your reader from the main details of your page. It is a always wise to get feedback from users or friends about what they feel about the color combination
of the layout. Use web safe colors as much as possible.

White Space: This is the space between the elements on a web page. Your web page will appear disorganized if there is none or too little white space, Try to have a web layout that look clean, simple, easy to read and navigate to have an effective online presence.

Navigation: Good web layouts have clear and simple navigation scheme as it’s the key for smooth movement within your site and over long scrolled pages. This helps visitor to find the information quickly and easily. If the presentation and organization of the content is vague, the visitor will get lost which surely hampers your purpose. So have a web layout with easy and intuitive navigation scheme; which on the whole makes visiting the site pleasant and easy. There are many free scripts available on the Net that you could use to create great navigation systems. A favorite resource center is SimplyTheBest.net . Here you'll find tons of useful navigation menus that can be installed very easily.

Keeping these points in mind while choosing among the free web layouts on the internet makes your web page a pleasing experience with clear, clean, simple and attractive layout. Still I personally feel that the best bang for the buck is a web layout from Template Monster. It may not be quite free but it can come very close with designs as low as $20. A little money out of pocket may guarantee that you won't have the exact same design as your competitor.

Such good interactivity engages the user and makes your site memorable by good content presentation, graphics and user-friendly navigation. Your visitor will have an enjoyable experience and wish to return again.

The Newbie's Guide to Small Business Web Design

Designing for any online business is a vital and serious issue as it says a lot about the business, its owners and product or services. It is the thing which keeps a customer on a website and its easiness compels and convince him to buy a product. So it’s important to have a professional look.

No doubt launching a website for small business is a hilly task. To achieve it you better do some research on your needs; the site purpose, the target audience and finally look for skilled website designers, developers and graphic designers or a designing company. There are many different website design companies, offering different facilities. However for gaining an effective internet presence what should be the look of site of small businesses? This article will guide you in understanding the structure for your site specific design. Keep this article as a reference point. When you go through the process of development then check out each part to have an effective web site for your products and services in accordance with your target audience.

Choosing web designer- Don’t go by the cheap web design. This will certainly diminish your professional image among potential customers other than financial losses. To have a professional web design, don't compare web designers by their price; always look at your requirements regarding the type of service, internet marketing and updates you needs w.r.t. growth.

Domain Name
Choose simple, short and relevant domain name for your site. Don’t get settle down on anything to get your web space as every word on your web site has relevancy in its success. Being a serious online venture you should register it for atleast two years. You can get your own domain name by paying as little as $ 17-18 for 2 year registration with ICANN approved sites such as Register . You can find out if the name you want is still available by using the free search tool on the sites.

Web Hosting
Web hosting can be obtained free of cost from content portal sites such as Yahoo! Geocities . Such sites invite users to establish Web sites on their domain in order to create a critical mass of core content on their online property. The user does not have to pay for service because it is subsidized by banner advertising. As they do not charge, they offer limited service depth and relative quality. They do not even provide customized hosting services where domain names are personalized.

So, avoid getting lured by the free hosting providers as nothing is really free. It mostly retards the downloading speed of web pages. Even avoid messing around with small time web hosting. Affiliate yourself with a reputable company that provides top-notch service and have the resources to provide fast and reliable servers.

Text Content
Content of the site deserves utmost attention as it’s the words that people read, it’s the words that call people to action, and it’s the words that sell. The rest also helps, but a site with poor content is an as bad as a site without any words.

Keywords In order to end up high on search engine use the relevant keywords and place them accordingly on a web page. The number of times each word appears on a web page is the factors that determine how high you end up in search results

Regarding resolution Make sure that your pages should work at any resolution, from 800x600 to 1280x1024 and beyond. Currently the most widely used screen size is 1024 x 768. Of course, the general guideline is to optimize for your target audience's most common resolution, so the size will change in the future. You shall see the statistics for the month the month of January for the last 2 years provided by w3schools seem to reflect the general trend we are seeing on the Web.

Year	Higher	1024 x 768	800 x 600	640x 480	Unknown
2007(January)	26%	54%	14%	0%	6%
2006(January)	17%	57%	20%	0%	6%

It’s always safer to keep your web site at less than 750 pixels wide as you don’t want to alienate your visitors by having them scroll to see the whole page. Make sure that that your web pages show up the same in all web browsers.

HTML Tags
You will have to make sure that your title, description, and keyword meta tags are bang on with the text on each web page you build. The linking structure of your website should have to be good as it’s easy for the visitors as well the search robots to understand the details. All of your optimized pages must be linked from the home page itself.

Graphics
It’s good to place web graphics in context with the information being presented. If you have product descriptions on your web site, then you should have the related graphic depiction next to them. Avoid using graphic that has no any relation with your text. Overusing graphics will only make the site look amateur. Make sure if you use web graphics as links that they work at all times. There is nothing worse than clicking on a graphic that does not work.

Conclusion These basic tips for small business website are just the tip of the iceberg. You should also have to provide correct contact information plus regular updating w.r.t. your products; which I already explain in detail in my earlier articles. Web design can make or break your business. So always remember to create a site that is appealing and easy to navigate.

Your website should be like an investment and for that you are certainly going to receive a return.

How to design a best web site

Everything is online in today’s high tech world. Here you can do everything from playing, downloading pictures to buying, selling and lots more. There are millions of websites around on any of the topic you imagine. And as the internet usage is on the rise with every single day means web designing is also getting more technical and diversified. Hence the chances of someone having similar site as you are also not rare. Every site owner have this question that why do some sites succeed while the other vast majority might not perform that better. There are fewer web pages on the internet that clearly have a best web site design. The features that they have which you need to explore in yours are:

Smooth Navigation: Best web site’s navigation scheme is very simple and is consistent from page to page. It really doesn’t matter where their menu bar is; they always have a small text menu at the bottom of every page. Of course flash add necessary glitter to your site but you should avoid using it to design your navigations. Besides such practices doesn’t work well with search engines. As most of the search engines won’t be able to read the pages if it uses flash for navigations.

Logos & Graphics: All well planned sites have graphics of reasonable size, used suitably in accordance with the products and page descriptions. Average net savvy today never wait for more than 10 seconds to see your huge, beautiful logo if it takes too long to loads onto the screen. So compress the graphics if you must have to use lots of graphics to make your, point. For details on how to apply graphic effectively in your web site design, visit: “ Importance of Graphics in Web Designing “.

Stick to your goal & subject: Best sites always stick to their subject and their whole layout and presentation is worked around it. So keep your goal in mind. The temptation to put as many bells and whistles as you can on a page is overwhelming without any doubt. Avoid them unless it’s that necessary to have them as the purpose of designing a site is not to have a cool looks but to accomplish the intended target of the site.

Index Page: 1^st page of every great website have the information about who they are and what’s their offerings. Sometimes I got surprised when any site misses out on this basic stuff. Net surfers have no patience they’ll just gonna click away in a second.

Resolution: Resolution for the design is a subject which confuses many. The general norm these days is 800x600 although there are still few who are limping along in 640x480. Always look at your site in different resolutions to get a better idea. If you don't mind letting the small majority scroll right and left, I recommend that you should go by 800x600 as it still is acceptable for those surfing in mega resolutions.

Privacy Policy: Best sites always have a clear privacy statement. So if you collect any type of information from your visitors, even if it’s regarding their email address then you need to include a privacy policy. You should post a link to it on every page of your site. Commercial web site must have a privacy statement. Provide a link to your privacy statement from every page on the site as well as from any of those locations where visitors have to submit personal information.

Links: The best feature of great designed site is its links that connects to other pages of the site as well as external links to connect to other related links on the web. If you have more links in your site then better to use them liberally in your pages. Links also simplify the navigation scheme of your site.

Be Search Engine Friendly
As more than 9/10^th of all web users find what they are looking for by searching through the top search engines means your web pages and content must be easy for the search engine spiders to find and navigate through. Your focus should be on keywords and their relative density in your pages in a meaningful way. Use them in naming your pages and within the body content of the page. Try to use meta tags keywords, description and title as much as possible.

Contact Information: All neatly designed sites have contact info along with their email address at the bottom of every page. No body likes if he has to search through an entire website just to send the owner an email. Don't force visitors to fill out a whole form when he just wants to add a simple comment.

Implementing all these tips while designing your web site will not going to change your site into Microsoft’s overnight but you'll certainly have an interesting, well-designed site. These steps will accelerate your site's traffic; which ultimately have a fruitful result. If not in weeks then surely in months your site will be the one people will want to return to again and again.