Doing Business on the Web

E-commerce is big business, and has been for a long time. While e-commerce sites were once treated with suspicion by many internet users, it’s become as common as checking email. While I’m sure there are some internet users out there who have never made an online purchase, they’re getting rarer by the day.
As a designer, you can’t afford to ignore good ecommerce design. When designing a ecommerce site I feel you have to be very particular on who you are looking for to consume your product.  And also the newest, resourceful, and inexpensive products you can find with updated visuals.  3 main keys are  
Trustworthiness
Simplicity and ease of use
Transparency


If someone doesn't trust your site then they wont order from it.  You must make the consumer feel comfortable purchasing something on your site with their personal information.  Not only that but the fact that they will receive what they purchased in the allotted time given.  No one like jumping through hoops as well when trying to purchase something.  The instructions should be easy to read and understand. 

Copyright and the Web Designer

Copyright law says that the creator of the design and content on a web site automatically becomes the legal owner of said design or content the moment it’s designed or written.  It’s customary to post a copyright statement on one’s web site but it’s really not necessary nor is it required by law. Let’s face it, since when do a few words on a web page stop someone from stealing your content if they really want it. If you think a copyright statement is going to stop them, you need to back up and then move forward in re-think mode.  If you want to review the actual laws, one of the best sites to do so belongs to Attorney Ivan Hoffman. Attorney Hoffman is considered to be the most highly regarded authority on the subject of Internet web site law. He provides an impressive list of links for web site designers and site owners that you may wish to review.  But me personally I feel copyright will always be a big issue.  Your design is your design but when it comes to creating anything I feel everything before has had an influence on what we do today.  And even if its something you may have thought of it doesn't mean somebody before you hasn't come up with the exact same idea...........Moral of the story if you build it.....COPYRIGHT IT!! lol

Web Design as a career

Personally I see myself using Web Development not so much as a career but more so as a side job.  Taking this class has taught me numerous things that I probably in any other circumstance wouldn't have paid much attention to.  In a world where there are people starting new business's everyday, they have a need to get their business out to a vast amount of customers.  Websites these days are one of the top ways people are selling merchandise.  To where a lot of business owners may not know how to create one, I would be able to and charge a reasonable price.  More then likely they will agree due to the fact that in the end it will increase their revenue.

web site interactivity

Interactivity attracts users attention, brings excitement, makes them unique, keeps users interested and ensures that they have a memorable experience visiting the website.  Single user interaction is about engaging users in spending time on your website by displaying the content in an attractive way.  Flash has become another name for interactivity in website design. The conventional non-static elements have been replaced with flash that interacts with the user. Websites will use flash elements for their navigation, header and/or banner ads. Video streaming and music players are becoming more and more popular and easy to use. Statistics show that over 95% of computers now have Macromedia Flash Player installed on their computer.  Technologies and techniques have been developed to meet the ever growing and changing need for interactivity.

Mobile First Webdesign

Now me being a strong believer in desktop over small devices puts me in a one sided view when it comes to Mobile First Webdesign.  For one image resizing to me takes away from the original creativity of a design.  This is a major issue considering that every good designer must rely on images to illustrate its concepts.  Viewing a responsive website on a mobile device forces the CPU and memory of it while resizing images because you are downloading a large image, uncompressing it in your phone’s memory and then resizing it to fit a small screen. This process takes about 3 bytes per pixel of memory, so a 1024×768 image will take about 2.36 MB of memory.  Second In my opinion is mobile speed Vs desktop speed. 
The whole point of responsive web design is the potential to be viewed on different devices. Yes I know this but id rather take time to get all I wish to view on a desktop and know im getting all the information I seek.

Retina Display

The devices on which the web can be displayed increases everyday. Rather recently Apple released its new set of Macbook Pros with retina display, so called because at a normal viewing distance users wont be able to see any pixels. Designing for such a high resolution however, can become a little more tricky than you would expect.
Over the years the resolution of your average monitor has gotten bigger and bigger. If you’ve upgraded your monitor to a larger resolution but with the same physical monitor size you will probably notice that the elements (windows, icons, etc) will have reduced in size. That’s because the pixels are smaller, so if the window was 180 pixels wide, it now takes up 180 smaller pixels.

Media Queries

Being able to detect device state at any given moment is important for any number of reasons and so it's important that web app CSS and JavaScript are in sync with each other. In working on my website , I found that there are many media queries, although helpful, sometimes very unhelpful. Is the user viewing the site in desktop, tablet, or phone screen size? Easy from a CSS perspective but CSS doesn't directly speak with JavaScript.