Web Design Tips and Tricks

Using Graphic Design on Your Website

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Almost everything is available on the web… products, services, e-books, software, audios, videos, membership sites, or newsletters. Regardless of what you’re promoting, there’s a never-ending supply of prospects and customers on the world-wide-web. Your goal is to capture and turn those prospects into paying customers.

Perhaps the best avenue is by the use of graphics. Three important sections of graphics that should be used for a compelling website are 1) header graphics 2) product cover and 3) background graphics.

Let’s start at the top with the header graphics. Without excellent quality header graphics it won’t much matter what’s on the rest of the page. Here’s why. Once a prospect clicks on your site you’ve got approximately 8 seconds to convince him to continue with the information you’re providing. You only get one chance to make a dynamic first impression.

The next area is your product cover. No matter what you’re selling you should have a product cover. Even if you’re promoting services you should still have a graphic image. People want to see what they are getting for their money. There’s no better way to do it than with a picture. There’s an old saying, “ You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Guess what? Most people do exactly that! Their opinion is based upon a visual image. Even as you read, your mind creates visual images of the perception of the words. Make sure your product cover fits the bill. Don’t sell this area short!

The last area is background graphics. Most people will spend very little time considering the background graphics for their website. This can be a major mistake. Properly crafting the background will have subliminal, almost magical effects on the overall potential of the entire website. It’s like the glue that pulls every other aspect of the site into a uniform, well functioning profit-making machine. This area is the major play in helping to create the overall flow and unity to your site. Again, don’t sell it short!

In the creation of each 3 areas of your graphics special consideration should be given to the overall theme of your site. The theme will help with continuity of branding and marketing. Today, the Internet surfer is often bombarded with look-alike products and services. Your key to a successful website lies in being faster, more imaginative, and more unique to get your prospect fired up. Simply put, you must stand out from the crowd. The theme of your site will help you do just that. This is not to say every aspect of your graphics should look alike. Far from it! Each area should however, complement the work of the other.

Color, size, tone, relativity, and uniqueness are all important attributes to consider when designing your graphics.

Copyright 2005 Andrew Eaton

Firing a function from your browser

The concept is as simple as firing a function from your browser, and it leans on PHP's call_user_func_array.

I'm going to outline the concept as I have implemented it. This exact implementation may not work in your case, but perhaps you can adapt it to do so.

if(isset($_GET['f']) && function_exists($_GET['f'])) {
$func = $_GET['f']; // Get function name.
unset($_GET['f']); // Drop function from from get.
// Fire and print function, passing 
// remaining GETs as function parameters.	
print_r(call_user_func_array($func, $_GET)); 
exit;
}

In our CMS/Framework, we set up a controller with the code from above to respond at a given URL, for example http://www.example.com/__FOO. By passing a function name as a GET variable, in this case 'f', and the parameters necessary for that function to work as subsequent GET parameters, the result of that function will be printed to the screen.

So, http://www.example.com/__FOO?f=hello_foo&a=world would fire the function hello_foo('world'), perhaps printing Hello World! to the screen.

This allows for a quick and dirty test of a given function, and can be done remotely on a live site, if necessary, without touching any files or whatnot.

We hide this behind an authorization wall and also clean our parameters before they get to this level, so if you try this, keep these points in mind.

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