Websenergy

Junior Designer - Web Designer

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 10:28:27 +0000

Junior Designer - Web Designer

Remuneration:	basic salary
Province:	Western Cape
City:	Cape Town
Job level:	Junior
Type:	Permanent

Job description

A well established web design/development digital video based studio in Green Point is seeking a Junior Designer with a minimum of one to two years Art College / Relevant Diploma.

Work experience is a bonus, but not a requirement for recent graduates, but must have a creative portfolio. Applicants should be extremely passionate about design and creating websites.

You will have an opportunity to work on some of the most progressive digital brands in South Africa with a small, easy going but focused group of individuals.

There will be a great opportunity to also learn Video Editing (Final Cut Studio), post production (AfterEffects, Motion Colour) and DVD creation (DVD Studio Pro).

Requirements

HTML
Adobe Creative Suite
PhotoShop
Illustrator
Microsoft Office

Advantageous

Flash
Indesign
Dreamweaver
Fireworks

Contact details
Ken Mehrtens
iCode
+27 21 418 6061
info@icode.co.za

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Posted on 21 Jun 11:28

The illusions of Web design

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 10:27:25 +0000

But profound changes may be afoot in the way people catalogue and consume content that may require a rethink of the established norms of design and development

Content publishers make much of the design of their websites. Most major newspaper, blog and other publishers constantly agonize over how to improve their Web design. And there are several metrics to measure this improvement: how many visitors do they get at all, how many come back frequently, how many look at ads, how many click on ads, how many leave comments, how many share links through email or social networks and so on.

And often when popular sites unveil design changes, the announcement is usually followed by a whirlwind of analysis, criticism and sometimes even online activism. In 2010, the BBC unveiled a substantial redesign of its popular website. Expecting the inevitable backlash, the website tried to soften the blow by sending out plenty of feelers and sneak previews. It didn’t help much. Critics lashed out. But the new design stayed.

Both consumers and producers take the design of their sites very seriously indeed.

But profound changes may be afoot in the way people catalogue and consume content that may require a rethink of the established norms of design and development.

While RSS feeds and feed readers have been popular for perhaps a decade, consumers are now using even more sophisticated tools to curate content. Tools such as Instapaper and Readability combine a bookmarking service with a reauthoring function that strips Web pages of all unnecessary content and advertisements. This “clean copy” can then be read on devices such as mobile phones, tablets and e-readers. Other services such as Flipboard or Zite for the iPad convert RSS feeds into rich, interactive magazine-like layouts. Apple recently announced a new multiplatform reading list function that will work like Instapaper.

Content consumers are slowly beginning to get farther and farther away from the physical source of news. While attractive Web design may draw them once to your site, subsequently readers are going to draw content through these tools.

This can have profound implications for publishers. First of all, this negates the effect of most content-adjacent advertising. There is a double-edge sword here: repeat visitors—one of the holy grails of Web publishing— are now increasingly likely to pull content automatically through tools.

But everything boils down to this: how do publishers make money? Do you fence in your content? Or let it fly?

One thing is certain. You are better agonizing over content than design.

Does Web design matter? Tell us at views@livemint.com

Amazon bigwigs to jet into Cape Town for ‘Grand Opening’

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 10:23:38 +0000

The world’s most famous online retailer, Amazon.com, is gearing up for a big launch in Cape Town, with bigwigs flying into the country from the States.

Among the executives will be Marc Onetto, Amazon’s Senior Vice President of Operations and Customer Service. Onetto will be joined in August by members of the press for what Amazon are calling a “Grand Opening”. The VP will view a “new facility”, which is essentially the company’s upgraded call centre that was set up last year.

The centre, which has been operational since October 2010, came with the promise of 600 new jobs in its first year, along with an extra 400 seasonal jobs annually. Call centre support is provided primarily in English and German to Amazon’s American and Central European customer bases.

Amazon also operates a development hub in Cape Town, which has been running since 2005. The team plays a key role in the building and management of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

According to the Development Centre’s site,” EC2 is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers”. The service also claims to provide “developers with complete control of their computing resources and lets them run on Amazon’s proven computing environment”.

South Africa’s time-zone proximity to Europe was cited as one the major factors in choosing to have a Customer Service Centre in the country, along with a lower staff turnover rate than in other regions, such as India, which are more well known for housing customer service centres.

Prior to the centre’s becoming operational, Brent Jaye, director of Amazon’s North American customer service division spoke about the online retail giant’s decision to situate the facility in the Western Cape and Cape Town in particular.

“…Cape Town is widely regarded for its hospitality, and we are excited about drawing upon this customer-centric talent pool,” he said at the time.

The Western Cape is becoming a choice destination both for development centres and customer service centres like Amazon’s. Previous big name entrants to the province include Google, with its startup lab Umbono and Tata Communications who opened its Cape Town data centre, in March 2010.

By Stuart Thomas: Staff reporter

How to increase sales through web design

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 10:18:47 +0000

If your company is able to compete well on Internet with other similar business websites, you can hope to stay in tough online competition. Web design of your online site can be a determining factor to make or break your company. Main aim of crafting a site on web is to lure the customers to it. A good design is the one that converts the visitors to the site into buyers of the products and services on sale from a company. Therefore, when you hire a designer, make sure that you have explored all the potential in the site to attract the customers for more business from them.

Each field of business today carries many thousands of websites. Your company has to beat a good amount of competition before getting some orders from the people. Clearly, if the first impression of your website is not capable to keep the visitors to the site, they will leave you for other similar sites. It is the web design that helps you keep the potential clients glued to the content and features presented on site pages.

Web designers are the people who understand all the requirement of your business website. It is, therefore, highly recommended that you hire professionals who are experienced enough to deliver the results. Know that designing an online site is not merely for the sake of a beautiful site on Internet. More than that, it is the usefulness of the site for the customers that matters. So, a user-friendly site can only work for your online business and designers should be clearly told about it.

There is no point in having an impressive and aesthetic web design if users fail to find the right button at right places on the site pages. If proper navigation features are missing, such a site will be of little use and will be just a showpiece sitting idle on the net.

Ask the web designers to let there be enough scope for further web development of the site. This is especially when you are likely to expand your company in the near future. As your company’s business increases, so will your website pages and its other requirement in the future. Therefore, the website development should be always kept in mind when designing a site.

A web designing company of good experience and professional approach believes in keeping the site design as simple as it can. The simplicity of color, navigation, features of the pages and content presentation is ensured to avoid any confusion for visitors. The designer should know the needs of the visitors and highlight those requirements on site pages.

Right keywords of your business are crucial to optimize page ranking of your website on search engine. Web designing is also about knowing those keywords and keyphrases and splash them everywhere right from the top to bottom of the pages. The content should be loaded with right keywords so that the search engines can display the site for the visitors.

For more details related to Website Design, Web Design, Website Development, Web Development. Please visit :-http://www.broadwayinfotech.com.au/website_design.html

Website Designers and Developers

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 10:14:57 +0000

Finding a web designer or website developer can be the toughest decision any website or business owner can make when building or improving their website on the internet. Many businesses attempt to find the same person to fill both of these roles, when in fact these roles couldn’t be more different. Finding a webmaster who can be both your web designer and your website developer can be like finding a needle in the haystack. In order to help with your search, it’s first very important to understand the differences between these two crucial roles.

Web Designer Core Skills

A website design is graphic designer who has skills building web templates, designing elements, website logos, images, backgrounds, website fonts and color palettes. They should have experience building sites that create an appealing aesthetic and improve the overall user experience. Many web designers will either create their designs from scratch in programs such as Adobe Photoshop or other graphic design programs, or use free public domain icons and free clip art on the web to help with their graphic design speed. Website designer’s play a key role into your corporate branding and their designs may need to translate onto business cards and advertising or promotional material. A good web site design can increase user engagement, sales, interaction, and the overall word of mouth marketing to your business.

Web Developer Core Skills

A website developer is a computer architect who is family with computer code that will make your site operate and function properly. A good web developer should be family with coding in many different languages such as PHP, ASP, .NET, JQUERY, JAVA, and also be aware of connecting code to databases such as MYSQL for database oriented web sites. A web developer must be able to implement a web design into a functional application. They should be able to dissect computer code to diagnose a problem and fix it, which translates into a faster web application and web site which will improve the overall user experience. Their code should be simple and fast and work with no bugs.

As you can see, these two roles couldn’t be more different. Aside from the fact that the web developer must be able to implement the web design into a working application, they are two unique skill sets. Therefore, finding one person who can accomplish both your web design and your web development is like asking someone to pitch the baseball and also catch the baseball. Here are some tips for finding a great web developer or web designer.

Don’t look on Craigslist. You might be able to find someone on craigslist to handle your project; however, you might get inundated with millions of automated responses.
Get a referral. Ask your contacts and business relationships if they can refer you to a great web designer, web design firm, or web developer. Therefore, you may be able to find someone with good recommendations.
Interview in person. Communication can be a major barrier with web developers and web designers. Therefore, meeting face to face can give you a good idea of how your communicate ideas into action and how well you will work together on your web project.
Try not to outsource. While outsourcing can save you money, you may also have a project that drags on for a very long time with not efficient code, so you run the risk of getting what you pay for.

To Summarize, proceed with caution and choose your web designer and developers carefully or you might pay the price later.

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Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:38:57 +0000

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