As part of the business community your organization is often asked to sponsor events, make donations, and participate in other organizations in exchange for visibility. Of course exposure is not the only reason that you make these contributions, but it definitely is part of the return. As a designer who builds websites for many of the organizations that you may contribute to, I am often hunting down company logos to put up on these websites. It’s often a difficult task because many business owners don’t know how to get their logo in the format that I need, or it takes a really long time to track down.

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Welcome to part 2 of the series! Before starting this tutorial, please complete “Designing a Professional Website from Scratch – Part 1”.

For the sake of brevity, I’m not going to go over slicing images. You may download my sliced images in order to follow along, but please note that I am not including the social networking icons or the photo. I don’t believe that I have the right to redistribute these. I included the link the photo in the last article, and you can download the social networking icons from the original creator.

Also, remember to download the 960 Grid CSS Framework. This will give us a big step in the right direction.

With that out of the way, we’re ready to begin.

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This is the first part in a three part series on building a professional website from scratch. This part will go over the design process, so we will be making a PhotoShop mock-up of our website. In the next step I will go over marking-up a template with HTML and CSS, and then we’ll complete the series with converting the template into an ASP.NET Master Page. To complete this Tutorial in its entirety, you’ll need:

• PhotoShop (the version doesn’t matter much, as we’re not doing anything overly complicated or tool-specific)
• Visual Studio (I’m using 2008, but you should be able to use 2005 as you just need support for Master Pages)

After reading Smashing Magazine's article on "Lessons From Swiss Style Graphic Design" I started thinking about the principles they presented and how I incorporate them in my own work. I have always been a subscriber to the “less-is-more” state of mind when it comes to my work; however it is really easy to get bogged-down when trying to design user friendly interfaces for data-intensive applications. Here is what I took away from this article, and my ideas for incorporating their bullet-points into data driven applications. More...