When you are a photographer, no matter if professional or amateur, you want your art works to be seen and appreciated by people. How can you achieve the biggest auditory? - Of course by creating an online gallery. Photography portfolio at the World Wide Web lets the whole world to see your masterpieces, thus bringing you the success you dream about. But in the world of competition your portfolio has to be the most outstanding one, it has to suit your personality and the character of your art works. FlashMint has a huge collection of incredibly designed Flash Templates for online photography portfolios ensuring you’ll find the design for your amazing art works. So take a minute and look through the best of them:

Photo portfolio XML flash template

This beautiful XML Flash template is the best choice for a fashion photographer. XML technology allows you to update your galleries easily and when you want to. Plus there is a “buy” button which a;;ows you to sell your art works right from your website. Continue Reading

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You won’t argue that Flash is an awesome technology. Used appropriately it can create the most incredible and breath-taking pieces of creative web design. Surfing the web I constantly come across websites designed with Flash, some of them are good, some are not, and some are really awesome. These awesome samples of Flash in web design I’m going to show you today.
Well, the top5 of Flash websites:

#5 CREAKTIF !

creaktif

The use of Flash makes this design studio website a very nice example of interactive web design. I won’t name this site the most amazing Flash based one, but it definitely deserves to be named at this chart.

#4 Aksident

aksident

Another good example of interactivity in web design. I find the navigation of this website to be incredible, the design is plain and the use of photography just amazes. Very good piece of Flash web design.
Continue Reading

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The end of year 2008 has shown some new tendencies in web design that tend to develop further in 2009. The glossy buttons, lustrous looks are left for business websites, more and more artistic web sites are designed with a touch of hand made. Photo galleries, design studios, art-connected websites, music bands personal pages tend to have elements of grunge and vintage, collages and sketches.

Grunge
Grungy designs have been on stage for quite a long time, but this year more and more music websites and blogs will be designed with lavished backgrounds and dirty looks.

Design Studio Template

Musician Web Template

Medium Web Template

Vintage
Old school drawings, illustrations and photos bring nostalgic atmosphere and somehow this atmosphere becomes more popular nowadays. Use some vintage pictures at the background and make your website trendy looking.

Art Design Studio Template

Film Maker Template

Sketches
Sketches and hand writing at the background definitely make designs more lively. If you want to make your website a bit more personal, to have a light human touch than this is the best artistic method for you.

Fashio Business Template

Video Portfolio Template

Collage
Collages are a great way of mixing elements together. Before Photoshop collages used to be popular, it seems now they are heading back into web design becoming more popular than ever.

Music Maker Template

Do you think these trends will leave web 2.0 looks behind?

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FlashMint is always on the point of supporting you with useful and constructive tips on modern web technologies and extensions. Today we will speak about the most powerful tools for web developers working with Mozilla Firefox browser - specifically 5 Firefox must have plugins.

1. Web Developer
Web Developer is the most potent Firefox plugin for the web developers as it tends to provide you with extremely useful options. Its awesome features include the possibility of finding broken images, clearing cookies, viewing any element parent class, running a DOM editor and what not easier than you could ever imagine. And you can make use of all these amazing options just from one menu with simple mouse clicks.

2. Firebug
This tool makes it easier for web developers to monitor and edit CSS, HTML and Javascript codes within any web browser. You can run Firebug in a separate window or just in the browser bar, and everytime you need to work with your pages it gives you plenty of necessary information so you can edit them live. Besides, Firebug will help to understand what prevents your pages from quick loading, find the code errors, illustrate all the sizes and margins for you as for the CSS metrics and will ease your work with Javascript profiler.

3. Flash Switcher
This software is a very useful one for those who are involved in Flash developing. With its help you can easily test your pages with different versions of flash player. Flash Switcher is supplemented with all flash player plugins so you have the possibility to switch quickly from one to another or even remove some of them, e.g. to test the plugin install. Flash Switcher will help you to identify your code compatibility with all current versions of Flash.

4. FireShot
Fireshot is a Firefox extension that allows you making screenshots of your entire website’s pages as well as the selected fragments or current windows providing you with necessary editing options to modify the captures and supply them with text explanations if needed. So if you need to send screenshots to your customers or make a portfolio Fireshot will appear an ideal tool.

5. ColorZilla
This is a tool that will be much appreciated by graphic designers as it helps web developers to simplify accomplishing of any color related tasks. Using ColorZilla you can easily adjust colors and paste them from your browser to another programs. ColorZilla is provided with built-in palette browser with color sets allowing you to choose the appropriate tints and colors quickly. ColorZilla is definitely a brilliant solution when you are in need of some new graphic creation.

We hope each of you will make use of these pieces of advice we have prepared today. For its part FlashMint will continue supporting you in every possible way and your feedback and ideas are greatly appreciated!

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Building a website is not so hard nowadays. But still there are certain little secrets and tiny ways you should follow in order to achieve the best results.
Of course there are a lot of different factors that can influence your success and it is hard to keep all them in mind. But in fact you should know only few most important secrets for your website to be a success.
So we are ready to disclose you 10 crucial points for your online presence to be an ideal.

1. An Eye-catching Design

What is attracting the visitors first is a very design of your website. It shouldn’t be irritating – neither dull nor too flashy.
The main purpose of your website’s attractive design is to keep the visitor and make him stay online for further actions. In this case even color gamut will influence user’s mood and can win his or her favor or quickly lose it.
So the first helpful hint for you is to think over your website’s design thoroughly. If you succeed at this stage you can make use of the following points.

2. Convenient Navigation

It is clear that you visit a lot of websites every day and not all of them please you while surfing. Coming to a website you want the interface to be easy and understandable, right? So let it not be a secret for you anymore – your visitors want the same.
Think about placing all the links on your website in such a way that the user won’t become irritated by not knowing where to click at. It is a significant point not to confuse the visitor of your website and thus not to make him leave and forget about its existence.

3. Proper Content

What the users like very much is a content they are promised to see on the website. You better not play with it.
Once disappointed the visitor may not come again to see whether something has changed. So make sure your website contains enough useful information to make the user interested and then your further updates will really make sense.
Don’t forget about some helpful information concerning your website operating. All the users appreciate the possibility to find the accurate answers for their questions.

4. Contact Information

It is essential some problems may arise during someone is wandering pages of your website. Perhaps not problems but specific questions for sure. Anyway you should persuade the visitor that he or she may always rely on your support.
It is not that good when a user can’t find the way to contact you. So be attentive to put all necessary contact information (e-mail address, phone number, a link leading to a special contact form etc) in such a way that the visitor can easily find and make use of it.
You should really mind that fact if you want your web presence to be evaluated not only as qualitative but also supportive and responsible one.

5. Search Option

In case your website is crammed with different information it will be very convenient for the user to find the necessary content with the help of search field. All he/she has to do is type some keywords and then check the results of the search process.
Providing the visitors with search option will let them find what they are eager to quickly and easily, and believe they will be much pleased with such possibility.
You can use either a Google Search or your Content Management System to establish a search function on your website.

6. Sign-Up Form

It is very important for the user not to spend hours in search of “Sign-up” or “Register” button.
Remember that all the necessary fields and links have to be easily found by the visitor. Otherwise you may start losing your clients as only a few will send you an e-mail asking where they should subscribe at.
Imagine what will happen when they can’t find an e-mail either, huh? So mind it.

7. Sitemap

Another useful option of your website is a sitemap which usually is of two types. One is for search engines and the other is for the very visitors.
A website map itself is a list of links leading to all the pages your website contains. So by clicking the necessary link each of the visitors may quickly get at necessary section of your online presence and enjoy his or her stay.

8. Web Browsers Compatibility

There is a number of web browsers used by the Internet users. And it is very important for your website to run properly in each of them, whether it is Internet Explorer, Firefox or other browser.
It will be better for you not to prefer only certain web browsers and avoid others. That will somehow show your respect to the potential clients if you try to make your website compatible with as many web browsers as you can.

9. Images

Building your website you of course paste a lot of images there to make your online presence look nice and eye-catching. So it is very important for all the pictures to be of the proper format – neither too large nor pixelated.
300dpi is considered to be the standard resolution for an image but in case of website creating you should choose lower one. Thus you will make an image file smaller and allow your visitors to download it quickly.
Some image editors has the “Save for webpage” option which helps you to save your picture automatically with a proper size and resolution.

10. Analytics

The last useful point concerns the very owners of the websites. Statistics and analytics function helps them to see how popular their web presence is and what aspects should be improved first of all.
With the help of statistics you can discover how do people find your website, who links to you, how many hits you have and so on. You will get useful pieces of information from the stats and be a breast of your website’s every aspect!

So make your online presence the most successful source on the web! And if needed, Flashmint will help you with this.

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