Web Site Design by David Rutstein from A to Z

Most copywriters are employees within organizations such as advertising agencies, public relations firms, company advertising departments, large stores, marketing firms, broadcasters and cable providers, newspapers, book publishers and magazines. Copywriters can also be independent contractors who freelance for a variety of clients, at the clients’ offices or working from their own, or partners or employees in a specialized copywriting agency. Such agencies combine copywriting services with a range of editorial and associated services that may include positioning and messaging consulting, social media and SEO consulting, developmental editing, and copy editing, proofreading, fact checking, layout, and design. A copywriting agency most often serves large corporations.

A copywriter usually works as part of a creative team. Advertising agencies partner copywriters with art directors. The copywriter has ultimate responsibility for the advertisement’s verbal or textual content, which often includes receiving the copy information from the client. The copywriter is responsible for telling the story, crafting it in such a way that it resonates with the viewer/reader, ideally producing an emotional response[1]. The art director has ultimate responsibility for visual communication and, particularly in the case of print work, may oversee production. Although, in many instances, either person may come up with the overall idea for the advertisement or commercial (typically referred to as the concept or “big idea”), and the process of collaboration often improves the work.

Copywriters are similar to technical writers and the careers may overlap. Broadly speaking, however, technical writing is dedicated to informing readers rather than persuading them. For example, a copywriter writes an ad to sell a car, while a technical writer writes the operator’s manual explaining how to use it.

Because the words sound alike, copywriters are sometimes confused with people who work in copyright law. These careers are unrelated.

Famous copywriters include David Ogilvy, William Bernbach and Leo Burnett. Many creative artists spent some of their career as copywriters before becoming famous for other things, including Peter Carey, Dorothy L. Sayers, Eric Ambler, Joseph Heller, Terry Gilliam, William S. Burroughs, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Lawrence Kasdan, Fay Weldon, Philip Kerr and Shigesato Itoi. (Herschell Gordon Lewis, on the other hand, became famous for directing violent exploitation films, then became a very successful copywriter.)

The Internet has expanded the range of copywriting opportunities to include web content, ads, emails and other online media. It has also brought new opportunities for copywriters to learn their craft, conduct research and view others’ work. And the Internet has made it easier for employers, copywriters and art directors to find each other.

As a consequence of these factors, along with increased use of independent contractors and virtual commuting generally, freelancing has become a more viable job option, particularly in certain copywriting specialties and markets. A generation ago, professional freelance copywriters (except those between full-time jobs) were rare.

While education may be a good start or supplement in a budding copywriter’s professional education, working as part of an advertising team arguably remains the best way for novices to gain the experience and business sense required by many employers, and expands the range of career opportunities.

Web Design

Our effective expression of a concept goes beyond conventional technique. We translate mere understanding into passionate belief.

Read more: Custom Web Design | Professional Web Design Services from PLAVEB – Web Designer in Los Angeles, San Jose, Bay Area, California

Web Design always goes beyond technique; design is art. When a website is often the first impression customers see of your company, many aspects must be considered in order to develop a professional, impressive and intuitive site. PLAVEB has vast experience within enumerable domains and a passion for professionalism. This allows PLAVEB’s Web Design division to provide a unique identity that allows your company to thrive within your business space.

A professional website is a fine blend of technology and creativity. Taking this observation into consideration, we have poured every ounce of experience and skill into mastering the art of building professional, elegant, and intuitive web designs. PLAVEB – web design company aims to enhance the web design of your site in such a way that traffic increases, browses longer and deeper, converts more effectively, and returns often.

Creative web design begins our designer‘s thorough research and analysis of your mission, target audience, and your competitors. Our web designer’s intent will be to design around the purpose and content of your site, offering the custom web design touch that provides credibility and most importantly meets your needs.

But websites are not our only competency; we excel at creating corporate identity, logo design and flash website design. Our smooth project execution process and excellent customer service make starting anew or redesigning a breeze.
Custom Web Design Services

Browse through the above sections to find out more about our website design and related services.

Read more: Custom Web Design | Professional Web Design Services from PLAVEB – Web Designer in Los Angeles, San Jose, Bay Area, California

What do developers mean by “backward compatibility”? If you ask them, they’ll say they mean “supporting all our users.” And who could argue with a sentiment like that?

In practice, however, “backward compatibility” means using nonstandard, proprietary (or deprecated) markup and code to ensure that every visitor has the same experience, whether they’re sporting IE2 or Firefox 8.5. Held up as a Holy Grail Porn of professional development practice, “backward compatibility” sounds great in theory. But the cost is too high and the practice has always been based on a lie.

There is no true backward compatibility. There is always a cut-off point. For instance, neither Mosaic (the first visual browser) nor Netscape 1.0 supports HTML table-based layouts. By definition, then, those who use these ancient browsers cannot possibly have the same visual experience as folks who view the web through slightly less ancient browsers like Netscape 1.1 or MSIE2.

Developers and clients who claim to strive for backward compatibility inevitably specify a “baseline browser” such as Netscape 3 and agree that that’s the earliest browser their site will support. (Netscape 2 users are out of luck.) To fulfill their commitment of baseline browser support, developers layer their markup with a series of browser-specific, nonstandard hacks and workarounds that add weight to every page.

At the same time, developers write multiple scripts to accommodate the browsers they’ve chosen to support and use browser detection to feed each browser the code it likes best. In so doing, these developers further increase the girth of their pages, pump up the load on their servers, and ensure that the race against perpetual obsolescence will continue until they run out of money or go out of business.

The Road to Stupidville

In early 1997, it was a common practice to write JavaScript for Netscape browsers and JScript (a JavaScript-like language) for Microsoft browsers. It was also common practice to use JavaScript (which worked only in Netscape) and ActiveX (which worked only in IE/Windows) to send each browser the code it needed. That’s what we did for 3.0 browsers.

This practice didn’t do a bit of good for “off-brand” browsers like Opera, and it didn’t function correctly for users of Internet Explorer on the Macintosh platform, but it worked for “most” web users and quickly became the industry norm. If we wanted to create active web pages that did more than sit still and look pretty, we had little choice but to follow these procedures.

Late 1997 brought the 4.0 browsers from Netscape and Microsoft, each bragging of powerful “Dynamic HTML” (DHTML) capabilities that were, as you might have guessed, completely incompatible with each other. They were also incompatible with previous versions of themselves (what worked in Netscape 4 would not work in Netscape 3), not to mention being utterly incompatible with “off-brand” browsers that meekly supported basic specs like HTML instead of making up their own languages and attributes.

Was this any way to run an airline? Netscape and Microsoft thought so, and many designers and developers agreed. Those who disagreed had little choice but to grit their teeth and grind out the versions required to deliver an acceptably “professional” site.

If you’ve been having a good time adding color, backgrounds, text styles, and margins to your pages, the fun has just begun. You’ll be expanding your knowledge (which, at this point in the book should be quite sophisticated) to include the most significant aspects of CSS to be put to use in the past few years.

The combination of technologies you’ll be working with in this chapter will provide you with the basis for what you need to know about creating great CSS-based layouts, instead of the table-based ones discussed so often in this book. Fortunately, contemporary browsers have enough CSS supportand we have enough knowledge of workaroundsto apply these techniques to create great-looking pages.

Positioning refers to the scheme in CSS that enables you to use elements to create boxes and move them around in relation to the document and browser. You’ll learn what these schemes are and how to begin applying them.

Float refers to a CSS technique that places an element to the right or left. The text in the document can then flow around that element. This is likely to be most familiar to you in the context of images. You can float an image to the right, and the text will flow around the image. Add a little padding, and you’ve got a great look.

The use of floating has expanded to include floating div elements, allowing for the use of floated boxes for navigation or, even more adventuresome, the creation of multiple columns that can be used with or without positioning in the design of various layouts.

A z-index serves as a means to place element boxes along the z-axis. So far, I’ve discussed only the x- and y-axes, with x being horizontal and y being vertical. The z-axis provides the third dimension.

Think of it this way: Hold up a deck of cards in front of you. The order in which the cards appear from the closest one to you to the farthest one away is a good way to think of the z-index. Using it, you can literally stack items on top of one another and offset them. This is somewhat useful in layouts and to create effects, but the use of the z-index usually comes into play when combined with JavaScript. It’s an interesting aspect of CSS, so you’ll get to play with it a bit here, too. Okay, thenon with the show!