WordPress Services
St. Louis Web Design
The professionals at 314media in St. Louis offer web design and development services and an affordable price. Our web design clients around St. Louis have some of the best tools and processes in place to manage their web site. From content management systems (CMS) to static HTML and CSS pages, the web design team at 314media will complete your web design project on time and under budget. Don’t trust your web design project to amateurs or “that one guy’s cousin”. Contact the St Louis web design professionals at 314media. We offer complete packages that allow you to manage your web site with the latest tools available. We use powerful web design tools and strategies to make your web site stand apart from the competition. In St. Louis, there are a lot of web design companies, but the professionals at 314media have the tools and experience to make sure that your web site is easy to maintain and manage.
If your business is not currently publishing your own web content, then your business is not an effective sales and promotional tool. Remember back in 1999 when the phrase was “If your business is not on the web, then you’re not in business”? That phrase has evolved into “If your business is not publishing your own content, then your not in business”!
314media can develop a web design package to allow your business to effectively communicate your message to your target audience. Most web design companies in St. Louis sell you a web site and then it is up to you to either hire them back again for changes down the road, or make them yourself with your in house staff. We believe that the most effective strategy for business is to have a web site that is easily managed by anyone on your staff with basic word processing skills. Think about this… If your website content is stale, why would anyone keep coming back to your web site? Even the best looking web sites will not retain visitors when someone comes back and the content is the same.
Contact 314media in St. Louis about our web design and development services. We not only design web sites, we offer packages that allow you to manage your web site. We have been providing St. Louis with web design since 2008 and we will continue to use the latest tools to keep your web site easy to maintain and afford. Contact the St. Louis web design professionals at 314media for a risk-free quote to learn how your business can publish your own content, integrate your social media tools, and have a web site that is easy to own and manage. We have the best web design rates in St. Louis and we would love to learn more about your web design project. Contact us today!
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Artisteer – Review in PCPro
These days, whether you’re working on a static website, dynamic application or content management system, the final appearance of your pages comes down to cascading style sheets (CSS). Artisteer is designed to reinvent the way that CSS is handled, and it does so with considerable success.
To understand what’s so radical about Artisteer, it’s necessary to understand the advantages that CSS brings – and the problems. The great strength of CSS is its centralised control, flexibility and efficiency: update a single rule and the look and feel of your entire site updates accordingly. It’s simple in theory, but not in practice. The inherent complexity of trying to manage all the possible elements of a design through CSS, with its hundreds of parameters, cascade of rules, and infuriatingly different browser implementations, means most users never stray beyond the default templates provided by Dreamweaver or their CMS.
To get around this, you can visit one of dozens of online directories to download preset themes created by real CSS experts. But even this approach isn’t ideal, as the design you choose is neither unique nor tailored to your content. And if you try to adapt the design to ensure that it is, you’re thrown back into the complexities of directly editing CSS.
This is where Artisteer comes in. At first sight the program seems very much like one of the online theme directories. It looks as if it simply provides a number of preset templates to apply to your layout, but this isn’t how it works at all.
Instead, when you hit the large Suggest Design icon on the ribbon bar’s Ideas tab, Artisteer randomly generates something for you. It’s a clever idea that takes full advantage of the flexibility and power of CSS, but it also sounds like a recipe for disaster. It’s hard enough to find an attractive hand-crafted template, so what are the chances that a computer-generated theme will fit the bill?
The good news is that the Artisteer approach works brilliantly. It’s clear that, rather than changing parameters at random, it intelligently varies groups of elements together to produce consistent, coherent and attractive designs. And the advanced dropdown menus and use of generated bitmap textures show Artisteer is going well beyond straight CSS.
Once you’ve found a theme that appeals, you can use other commands on the Ideas tab to suggest new colour schemes, typography, menus and so on. With a few clicks you can hone in on a custom design that could easily have taken weeks to produce from scratch.
Output options are just as impressive. Themes can be exported as a collection of HTML, CSS, JS and PNG files ready for use in a program such as Dreamweaver. You can also export designs as ready-to-go themes for use in WordPress or, if you upgrade to the Standard Edition, in Joomla 1.5 and Drupal 5/6.
The nature of design means that you will almost certainly want to tweak things further. With a downloaded template this is a real nightmare, but it’s far simpler here. Alongside the main Ideas tab, Artisteer provides no fewer than ten other tabs offering comprehensive control over colour, fonts, layout, background, sheet, header, menus, articles, blocks, buttons and even footers. The icing on the cake is that in each case Artisteer lets you explore your changes live on the layout before you commit yourself. Standard Edition users can call up dialogs to take absolute control.
Without the ability to add styles or edit code directly, Artisteer certainly isn’t a complete CSS solution. And it has limitations: liquid CSS layouts aren’t supported; there are some problems with how themes interact with CMS modules (most obviously Drupal’s Panels); and the way blocks are created rules out multiline headings.
But the program is developing quickly, and these issues are likely to be addressed. Plus, it’s so cheap that criticising it for these small weaknesses seems churlish. By making it child’s play to automatically create tailor-made and easily customisable themes that look good and work well, Artisteer really could revolutionise the way we all go about designing for the web.
Author: Tom Arah
