Some Great Free Website Design Resources By Howard Berenbon
If you’re a Website designer or new to designing sites for personal use or business you should know that there are thousands of valuable free resources on the Internet that will help you with your new design. Here are some of the important tools and tutorials that I’ve used in my Web site designing days to save you time and money so you can get a professional looking page presence on the Internet.
Navigation Buttons with Text and Cascading Style Sheets
If you use Adobe Dreamweaver (CS3 or CS4) for Website designing, you’ll know that the best designs use Cascading Style Sheets because they allow you to store much of your page formatting on a separate page. This feature allows you to reduce the memory usage on your pages which can help get improve your search engine positioning when Google, Bing and Yahoo come by with their robots to index your site. Cascading Style Sheets can also be used to replace graphics navigation buttons with text links built around CSS styling and unordered lists. The less graphics the faster your pages will load, and this can often improve your search engine indexing.
Listomatic
The first great resource offering pre-designed text navigation buttons with lots of styles to choose from is Listomatic at css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic. You’ll find hundreds of navigation designs here, submitted by many authors. The CSS and HTML coding is listed for each of these designs, so all you have to do is drop the navigation button code into the HTML of your page, then change the text and add your links. The navigation buttons on the top left of our site look like graphics, but are actually one of the rollover text link designs from Listomatic submitted by Ingo Turski. Colors can easily be changed, but in this case the original design matched my site perfectly.
Mals-e.com Free Shopping Cart
This second great resource allows any Website to sell products or services and accept orders using a free SSL secure shopping cart from Mals-e.com. I have been using the free Mals-e.com shopping cart for the last 8 years at The Water Exchange to accept credit card payments, and it works flawlessly. Instead of paying a few hundred dollars for shopping cart software installed on your server and up to $1000 a year for a secure certificate, you can sign up for a free account, at Mals-e.com and start taking orders immediately. You’ll get a unique account number that’s incorporated into the BUY NOW button coding with product/service description and price. When a customer clicks on the BUY NOW button, it adds that product to their shopping cart, and when done shopping they’ll fill out a form in their name, address, phone number, shipping address and credit card information into a secure browser. When the form is sent, a copy iof the order is sent to the Website administrator and the customer. However, the credit card number is not included in the form e-mail, but is accessible from Mals-e.com in a secure area using a secure browser and separate ID and password to pick up payments. Before you can use the shopping cart, you’ll probably need to get a merchant account to accept credit cards. You can apply for one locally (I use Chase) or get one online. You can even sign for a merchant account through Mals-e.com, or you can just use PayPal as your merchant account, and that can be set up in the cart.
The shopping cart has many options including discounts for shipping, or free shipping above a certain dollar value. It also allows you to set up discounts or vouchers with a specific code number you make up. It so flexible it accepts any type of currency, even Euros, and it’s all free. It also calculates sales tax if required. A premium service is available starting at $8 if you need more features, but the free options have been good enough for me.
One great feature from Mals-e.com is their mTracker program, which is an affiliate sales tracking program easily added to your site. It allows Website owners to refer customers to your site for a specific commission per sale. I use mTracker at The Water Exchange and have several affiliates sending customers. Website owners can join your affiliate program from a link at your site and then add text links and banners to their site with their account number for tracking. If a sale is completed through the shopping cart, the sale and commission is stored at mTracker at Mals-e.com. When an affiliate’s sales totals a certain amount or time (specified in your affiliate program operating agreement) you’d send them their commission. Payment is not automated, so you’ll have to go through affiliates sales by hand and then make payments on your own. I pay my affiliates using PayPal.
Nifty Corners Cube
If you’d like to improve the look of your site, adding rounded corners to page columns can really help, but that type of formatting normally requires graphics images to round edges. We’ll , I found a free resource called Nifty Corners Cube from Alessandro Fulciniti with a neat technique for adding corners without using graphics using CSS and Javascript, and it works great!. It uses a javascript file named “niftycornerscube.js” and a CSS file called niftycorners.css . Visit html.it/articoli/niftycube/index.html for eveything you need to know, with lots of examples. I’ve added corners using Nifty Corners to my blue navigation structure at The E-commerce Shop software-exchange.com. The rollover button design is a text button modified from Listomatic.
Free Adobe Dreamweaver Tutorials
Adobe offers a lot of free help through their online text and video tutorials. For text tutorials visit Dreamweaver Development Center at adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/css.html. Visit tv.adobe.com/show/learn-dreamweaver-cs4/ for Dreamweaver CS3/CS4 video tutorials from Adobe TV.
Layers Magazine
Another great resource are articles and tutorials at Layers Magazine. For some of the latest Dreamweaver CS3/CS4 tutorials visit layersmagazine.com/category/tutorials/dreamweaver
