Having a banner for your E-Commerce website is one of the helpful ways in attracting consumers to check out your products and make a sell. E-Commerce banner is a creative way of telling people about your newly arrived products, on-sale items, buy one-take ones, and other featured products. In creating an E-Commerce banner, you need to align the texture, exposure, shadowing, and clarity of your product image to the text, logo and background that you choose.

Having a banner for your E-Commerce website is one of the helpful ways in attracting consumers to check out your products and make a sell. E-Commerce banner is a creative way of telling people about your newly arrived products, on-sale items, buy one-take ones, and other featured products. In creating an E-Commerce banner, you need to align the texture, exposure, shadowing, and clarity of your product image to the text, logo and background that you choose. Producing a bad quality banner for your website gives a negative impression towards your service and products from your possible consumers. To avoid negative impressions, here are some ways in creating an effective E-Commerce banner using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.

First – pick an image of a product and retouch it accordingly in Lightroom

1. Go to Adobe Lightroom, click “File” and add new Catalog. Rename it with your desired file name and click “Save”. (Creating a catalog will take a while to load.) If your new catalog is ready, click “Import” and choose your desired image.
2. After your image has been loaded, click “Develop” which can be found on the right top of Lightroom.
3. In Develop mode, you will be able to adjust the exposure, clarity, shadows, lights, etc. of your product image. You can also do some cropping and aligning the image. 
4. If you are satisfied with the editing you did with your image, click “File” again and click “Export”. Save the edited image to your desktop or assign a specific folder for your image.

Second – Create the banner by adding the edited image and text information of the product.

1. Open Adobe Photoshop; click “File” the click “New”.  Make the size 960 x 400 pixels and click “OK”.
2. When the Photoshop art board is loaded, open the window box where your product image is located and drag the image to the art board.
3. Align your image using the Rule of Thirds for right composition. To get rid of the white background, click the Rectangular Marquee Tool and make a horizontal rectangle without touching any shadows or color of the product.
4. Press Ctrl + T to and make the adjustment by dragging the small box in the middle of the selected rectangle that you have made. Press Enter and Ctrl + D if you are satisfied with the adjustment. Do the same thing in the vertical area.
5. To create a perfectly aligned text with your product image, use Rectangular Marquee Tool to measure the size of the spaces. Also use some grid guides by dragging it from the ruler which is located at the side of the art boards. With the same space size of the product margins, you will be able to find alignment and balance for the next step which is adding text.
6. Now, select the Horizontal Type Tool to create text. Select the font that you would think that will fit your banner. Always make the brand name bigger and the description smaller with a thin font. If you want to change the size of your text, simply select the text and hold the control key and start dragging the small box.
7. Add some promotional offer (if you have one) and export it with the best quality.

Learn E-Commerce in Bangkok

If you would like to learn more about Photoshop, Lightroom, Alibaba E-Commerce, and E-Commerce Start-up, check out these courses at Web Courses Bangkok. All lessons are taught in English with professional instructors in a small class of eight.

Learn the Unique Uses of Adobe Premiere in Bangkok

If you loved the ‘Confessions Tour’ of the ageless diva Madonna or liked the Mark Zuckerberg inspired movie ‘The Social Network’ for their design innovation and editing techniques with your keen eye for details and passion for video editing, it is not impossible to learn the methodology involved behind these successful ventures! This article highlights the benefits of Adobe Premiere and its effective applications to develop useful editing solutions!

Creativity of Adobe Premiere

The Adobe Creative Suite is an extremely versatile and unique collection of graphic designing, video editing, as well as various web development programs. Anyone interested to dabble in the art and science of creativity, must understand the nuances of Adobe Creative Suite. Adobe Premiere is the latest software application from the stable of Creative Suite and it is a video editing, timeline-based software application. The popular Adobe Premiere Courses Bangkok is an excellent choice if you want to understand the different applications of this versatile software.

Different uses of Adobe Premiere

Adobe Premiere offers a host of different applications and it can be used effortlessly for various purposes like adding effects, titles and filters. It can export an edited video in a range of formats that include DVD, DV, video tape recording and many other common internet video formats. It’s a powerful tool to edit videos and is capable of producing high definition, broadcast quality video.  Hence, it is popular among television production professionals and enthusiasts.

When it comes to inspired work, smart thought process, and perfect execution – nothing beats the incomparable performance of Adobe Premiere. From supporting high-resolution video editing, sample-level audio editing, plug-in support for VST audio, to 5.1 surround sound mixing – the capacities of Adobe Premiere include different features to add a whole new touch of brilliance to your editing techniques.

You can effortlessly import audio, video, and graphics in various formats including Internet video; arrange, edit, edit, improvise these elements over the visual timeline; create and add filters, titles, and effects. Offering such important usages, Adobe Premiere has become an integral tool for editing.

The Courses in Bangkok

With the Adobe Premiere Courses Bangkok, you can grasp the finest and most complex features of the software so that mixing a variety of techniques becomes easy for you. The software set supports an array of audio and video file formats and codec simultaneously on both Mac OS along with Windows. Diversity is the name of the game when it comes to Adobe Premiere. The best part is that both the business owners as well as freelance designers can use it to achieve the desired result.

These courses are effectively customized to offer an overview the past features and current modifications of the Premiere so that students recognize and appreciate the regular changes and overall perspectives of this software set. Designed usefully, each of these sessions provides necessary training to the students to develop them as industry ready professionals.

You need to understand the nuances of the software for combining it with a host of plug-ins, software, and applications to generate a seamless and superior experience. The helpful Adobe Premiere Courses Bangkok with industry-trained instructors will help you learn and experiment so that you grow into a professional to offer personalized services to your consumers from day one.

Check out the latest Adobe Premiere Courses Bangkok to understand the language of creative video editing!

Producing a good video doesn’t mean you need a complicated video editing experience or a high-expertise skills. If you’re a beginner and want to create a video for your presentation, an advertisement, or maybe even a video just for fun, I’ve got 5 tips to make your video editing flow smooth.

Get ORGANIZED

Being organized is one of the main key of being more productive in editing. Using separate folder in each category will help your editing flow continuing without any distraction or any misplaced files. Rename your video files and images according to the video flow that you desire. With them being renamed, you will be able to know which one you have used and what you have not used yet.

Use the 5 basic file-folder organization

• Assets – consist of images, subtitles, lower-thirds, and other files needed for the video.
• Audio Files – consist of background music, voice over, tracks, and other audio files.
• Video Files – consist of video clips and b-rolls.
• Project Files – consist of Adobe Premiere preview files and saved AP documents.
• Final Export – folder for the exported video file.

Use the RIGHT sequence preset for your project

In Adobe Premiere, there are a lot of video presets to choose from. You need to choose the right preset based on the properties of your video file. If your sequence preset and your video file did not match, your video will be slow, have low quality, or even unplayable. Here’s some links in knowing about sequence present and a tutorial in choosing the right sequence preset.

Put your clips in the SEQUENCE box

After making your files organized and choosing the right preset, it’s now time for you to edit your videos. With your files being renamed and organized, you can easily choose which one to put first and which background music should accompany the video file. You can put your video file to the timeline by simply clicking the video file and dragging it to the sequence box. You can add video and audio transitions for your video. You can also add video and audio effects to make your video more presentable. Transitions and effects box can be found on the left side of the screen.

Do the Rendering

In Adobe Premiere, rendering is not the same as exporting. It is commonly mistaken because of the other previous software which uses the term “render” as “export”. The use of rendering in Adobe Premiere is to preview the files on the sequence box smoothly. Three colors will appear on top of the sequence timeline according to the task given to a specific file. If it is red, it means it needs a full rendering. (If you preview the sequence having a red color on top, the video file won’t preview properly.) If the color is yellow, it means it is alright to preview but it will be a slow one. If it is green, it means the file is all ready to be previewed properly. Rendering will also help your exporting to be fast. Just press “Enter” to start the rendering.

MATCH your export with the Sequence Setting

Using the sequence you chose for your video project, you should base your exporting setting along with it. The export file should always match the sequence setting. If not, the video will either be unplayable or out of sync. You can also choose which setting to use to make the file be able to play on a specific device.

With these 5 tips, you will be able to have a smooth editing flow and an organized video timeline that will definitely result a good video presentation.

If you really wanted to create a professional video, come and learn more about Adobe Premiere at Web Courses Bangkok. Let your creativity flow and let it be seen through motion graphics.

Learn Photography in Bangkok

As a beginner, one of the problems I’ve encounter is taking a perfect shot of a landscape. The images I took are either blurry or overexposed. Sometimes, I got to the point that my images were not as sharp as I wanted them to be. But over the time, I’ve learned some tricks to get that perfect shot of landscapes that I want. I want to share with you my 5 photography tips on capturing a perfect landscape.

Play with your White Balance

Landscapes have different types of color temperature. Sometimes it is with a blue sky and enormous clouds, there are times it have a cozy feel due to the warmth of the sunset. Having your camera set in an “Auto White Balance” gives you the right temperature for your photo. But there are times the camera does not get the exact photo that you want. White Balance gives you the option to control the ‘feel’ of your images. Take a photo in each white balance settings you have in your camera and pick the best one and cut out the rest. Either way, you won’t lose a thing, plus, you get a chance to capture the best landscape temperature you have.

Work on your Point-of-View (POV)

Having a good point-of-view is always a big aspect in taking a shot of a landscape. Have a balance of the land and the sky. Look out for the perfect horizon and work on your location. If you can stand up on a chair, or lay down on the ground just to capture the best angle of the landscape you want, do it. Some of the greatest photos were taken with the weirdest position in taking a photo.

Use a Tripod

Holding your camera with your bare hands comes in so much handier than taking a huge and heavy tripod just to take a minimum of 30 photos. But using a tripod is always better in taking a photo of a landscape. Tripod eliminates the shaky and blurry parts of an image. It also allows you to take a wide variety of photos with the same exact level for continuous photos. If you’re not comfortable in carrying a huge tripod, try using a monopod.

Take as many shots as you can

With the recent technology today, taking a lot of photos of one specific object won’t be a big issue because you can immediately delete the images that you don’t like. Take as many shot as you can and pick your 3 best photos. Don’t limit yourself if you’re not satisfied yet with your shots.

Apply some minimal editing to your photos

Digital and SLR cameras are just some high-tech equipment  As a photographer, there are some specific shots that you want that your camera will never recognize. Before you take a photo, paint an image of that landscape in your brain of how you want your photo would look like. Then, take your best shot of that landscape and pick the closest photo to the one you had in mind. Then, use a photo editing software and apply some editing to your photos. Some of the best Image Editing Software are Adobe Lightroom, GIMP, Paint.NET, PhoXo, and PiXBuilder Studio.

Here are some other blogs about Photography tips that might help you in choosing the right lenses, navigating the image’s depth-of-field, and doing post-editing.

These 5 tips will be more applicable if you know your camera well. Take an hour or two and practice to navigate your camera for better results. Try to take variety of photos and track your skill level week by week. It will help you bring out the best photographer that you can be.

If you want to learn more about your photography skills, check out the One Day Photography Course or Photography Essentials at Web Courses Bangkok.

We are back with the week six of Friday’s Inspiration, this week yet again I will be sharing the screenshots and links of the websites that I have found inspiring.

CSS Web Design Awards:

1) Plums:

Winner 7th May 2013

www.fullten-plums.com.tw

The site is neat and based on infinite scroll, true to the Asian pop culture this site has there own Plum anime over the web explaining the different flavours.

 2) Apartments:

Winner 6 May 2013

www.weareapartments.org

This is also an Animation based website. This is a campaign website for helping living in a home that’s right for them.

3) Jam-Work:

Winner 3rd May 2013

www.jamvisualthinking.com

This is a website of a design agency based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The website also have Instagram and Twitter integrated so when ever a picture is taken from Instagram or a tweet is posted on Twitter it links directly to the website. This helps the page SEO and also keeps the interest of the daily visitor.

Awwwards:

4) Adam Hartwig:

Winner 9th May 2013

www.adamhartwig.co.uk

This is a portfolio wed site of award winning graphic designer Adam Hartwig. His website is simple and interesting at the same time. I have taken the screenshots of almost all of his website pages, their were so good.

The Best Design:

5) Tivix:

Winner 9th May 2013

www.tivix.com

Tivix is a custom mobile app and custom web developers, their site is simple and neat.

Interested in making neat and clean websites ? have a look at our Web Design Basic and Web Design Intermediate class.

This week we are back with the screen shots of the most inspiring web site of the week. The purpose of the screen shot is to see the various layout and pattern of the award winning websites.

CSS Web Design Award:

1) C-Roots:

Winner 2nd May 2013

www.c-roots.com

2) Smallfish Digital Agency:

Winner 30th April 2013

www.smallfish.es

3) The Interactive Ear:

Winner 27th April 2013

www.amplifon.co.uk

Awwwards:

4) Designembraced:

Winner 2nd May 2013

www.designembraced.com

The Best Design:

5) Pedalsouth:

Winner 2nd May 2013

www.pedalsouth.org

To make neat and professional websites and templates you can take a look at our Web Designer Basic and Web Designer Intermediate Course.

That perfect sunset:

With summer approaching it is now time for vacations, those long awaited long weekend. Where we can pack our bag and to head to beach. Chilling out at the cottage drinking beer and watching the sunset. Why not pull out your camera and capture a new wallpaper or create a piece of art to hang over your bed. My friend ask me “How do you get a stunning pictures of gleaming sunsets, rich with colour and warmth that seems to reach out beyond the boundaries of the photograph” I will share with you a quick an easy way to do so.

Top Tips:

• Depending on the position of the sun, metering above the horizon, or below will determine how the shot looks like.
• Setting your camera (a manual camera is best) Shutter speed is key here, first make sure you are not to high never go above 1/125 sec, Don’t go below 1/30 unless you have a tripod or a stable object to put your camera on.
• ISO should be at the lowest as possible you want to try to eliminate noise, don’t forget the sky is still bright.
• White Balance setting it to daylight is a good place to start, to get that rich red sky.
• Finding the right spot, move around don’t get lazy and just don’t go where every tourism goes, some times moving a few meters is just what you need.
• Try using reflections when possible.
• Silhouettes of people or trees, really just anything against the sky.
• Why not try a panorama quite useful when you don’t have a super wide lens.

Last thing, shoot more than one photo, try darker or lighter, you might prefer having a rich dark sky, or be able to have details of the surroundings.

Last tip of the day:

Get to know your camera, don’t have time then switch stop play Angry birds tonight play with your camera, what you can get out of it much more rewarding.

Thanks to Eric for this Article, he is a instructor here at WCB and if you would like to follow one of his classes check out the One Day Photography Course or Photography – Essentials.

 Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Hi! I’m Harry, I’m a 22 year old web designer and front-end developer from the UK. I specialise in writing CSS on big projects with a lot of developers and a lot of code. I speak at conferences, write at csswizardry.com and tweet at @csswizardry.

Why be a web developer and what led you down this career path?

A few years ago, when I was abotu 16, I really wanted to become a graphic designer. My best friend Sam and I started working on small design projects for local businesses and I decided that we needed a website. I started reading up on HTML and CSS and stuff and soon realised that I was much better at front-end development than I was at design (I’m a terrible designer) and that I also much preferred it.

From there I just kept building stuff, kept tinkering, and now I’m here.

What was the first website you made and how was that experience?

The first site I made was the aforementioned portfolio site (long dead). It was a lot of fun but equally frustrating. When you’re just starting out the simpler things are far more complicated so the effort:reward ratio means that it takes a lot of work to achieve very little. However, once you make a few breakthroughs, it all seems pretty worth it. I got hooked!

If you can tell us, what are the projects you are currently working on?

I work at Sky, at the moment; it’s a pretty huge British organisation where I head up the front-end development and architecture in our area. I recently built the front-ends to skybet.com and m.skybet.com, two of our most profitable websites.

What are the best projects you’ve worked on? Tell us about them.

I worked on an app called faavorite with a really great friend, Nick Payne. Unfortunately, for one reason or another, faavorite had to be wound down. It’s a shame, but that was a very fun project that we built entirely in our spare time; it was huge! We’re thinking about open sourcing it soon, though.

Could you tell us what’s in your personal “toolbox”? Software, apps, hardware, books?

My toolbox is pretty light; all I really need is Chrome and Terminal… I code in Vim, I use Git and Sass, all of which happens from the command line. My personal hardware is simple a MacBook Air, and at work I have a dual-screen Ubuntu desktop machine and a MacBook Pro (again, on both I just use Terminal and Chrome). I use Photoshop when necessary, and I can’t live without Spotify!

I have used Mixture a little but it just doesn’t fit my workflow too much, which is a shame. It’s a great tool though, and I’d recommend everyone give it a shot!

Tell us about your best experience as a developer.

Probably speaking, speaking is terrifying for me, but the feeling afterwards is nothing short of elation and adrenaline. My time in Poland for Front-Trends 2012 was probably the most fun I’ve ever had because of my work.

Tell us about your worst experience as a developer.

Any time I feel boredom, or a lack of motivation. It’s happened a few times to me in my career and it just takes it out of me; it makes me not enjoy my work, and I coulndn’t ever do work that I don’t enjoy. Life’s too short to work a job you don’t enjoy.

In your opinion, what is the difference between a good web designer and a great web designer?

Caring. A lot of people will show up and do ‘just enough’. People who do more than enough are, by and large, the people who get places.

What advice would you give to our Web Courses Bangkok students?

Make sure you enjoy what you do. No one will make that happen for you, so you need to keep yourself happy all the time. This is such a cool job, make sure you keep it that way. Things change, techniques come and go, jobs are fun, then boring, but you need to just keep yourself happy. Keep that constant and things will follow.

Want to know more about Harry?

You can also find him here: speaker deck, github and twitter.

We would like to thank Harry for taking out the time to talk to us and answering our questions. Best of luck to him on his future endeavors.

Would you like to learn how to make great websites? Have a look at our web design courses at WebCoursesBangkok !

-A.A

Think about the documents stored on your computer. If you were to save all your documents using a (brain-dead) file naming scheme like “1.doc”, “2.doc”, “3.doc”, … “9999999.doc” (etc), you will eventually face a problem of finding the right file if you’re looking for a specific document. One way is to sequentially check every single file, starting from “1.doc”, till you get the right data. But this is obviously a highly inefficient method of getting the right file. And it’s primarily the result of a highly inefficient method of storing your data (ie, saving your files) in the first place.

But it serves to make the point that once you have a lot of data, if you don’t have a good system of organising it, finding the correct piece of data is a very time consuming operation. And it becomes more time consuming as the amount of data grows. This problem is solved through a type of computer program that is designed to handle lots of data, known as a database. In this article we will attempt to explain how a database works.

What is a database?

Databases are designed to offer an organized mechanism for storing, managing and retrieving information. They do so through the use of tables. If you’re familiar with spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel, you’re probably already accustomed to storing data in tabular form. It’s not much of a stretch to make the leap from spreadsheets to databases. Let’s take a look.

Database tables

Just like Excel tables, database tables consist of columns and rows. Each column contains a different type of attribute and each row corresponds to a single record. For example, imagine that we were building a database table that contained names and telephone numbers. We’d probably set up columns named “FirstName”, “LastName” and “TelephoneNumber.” Then we’d simply start adding rows underneath those columns that contained the data we’re planning to store.

If we were building a table of contact information for our business that has 50 employees, we’d wind up with a table that contains 50 rows.

Databases and spreadsheets

At this point, you’re probably asking yourself an obvious question – if a database is so much like a spreadsheet, why can’t I just use a spreadsheet? Databases are actually much more powerful than spreadsheets in the way you’re able to manipulate data. Here are just a few of the actions that you can perform on a database that would be difficult if not impossible to perform on a spreadsheet:

• Retrieve all records that match certain criteria
• Update records in bulk
• Cross-reference records in different tables
• Perform complex aggregate calculations

Databases: Need to know

The Structured Query Language “SQL”

Database programs have many different methods for storing and retrieving data, as well as for organising the stored data on the computer. One popular way for accessing data, both to store and to retrieve it, is to use a computer language called “SQL” (often pronounced as “sequel”). SQL was specially designed for database access.

There are many databases that support the use of SQL to access their data, among them MySQL. In other words, MySQL is just a type of database, one of many. This database is commonly used by programs that run on websites, which is why you often see it being advertised in the feature lists of web hosts, as well as being listed as one of the “system requirements” for certain web software (like blogging software or content management systems (CMS)).

Selecting Primary Keys

How do databases keep all of these records straight? It’s through the use of keys.

Primary Keys

The first type of key we’ll discuss is the primary key. Every database table should have one or more columns designated as the primary key. The value this key holds should be unique for each record in the database. For example, assume we have a table called Employees that contains personnel information for every employee in our firm. We’d need to select an appropriate primary key that would uniquely identify each employee. Your first thought might be to use the employee’s name.

This wouldn’t work out very well because it’s conceivable that you’d hire two employees with the same name. A better choice might be to use a unique employee ID number that you assign to each employee when they’re hired.

Once you decide upon a primary key and set it up in the database, the database management system will enforce the uniqueness of the key. If you try to insert a record into a table with a primary key that duplicates an existing record, the insert will fail.

Foreign Keys

The other type of key that we’ll discuss in this course is the foreign key. These keys are used to create relationships between tables. Returning to our employees database, let’s imagine that we wanted to add a table containing departmental information to the database. This new table might be called Departments and would contain a large amount of information about the department as a whole. We’d also want to include information about the employees in the department, but it would be redundant to have the same information in two tables (Employees and Departments). Instead, we can create a relationship between the two tables.

Let’s assume that the Departments table uses the Department Name column as the primary key. To create a relationship between the two tables, we add a new column to the Employees table called Department. We then fill in the name of the department to which each employee belongs. We also inform the database management system that the Department column in the Employees table is a foreign key that references the Departments table. The database will then enforce referential integrity by ensuring that all of the values in the Departments column of the Employees table have corresponding entries in the Departments table.

Note that there is no uniqueness constraint for a foreign key. We may (and most likely do!) have more than one employee belonging to a single department. Similarly, there’s no requirement that an entry in the Departments table have any corresponding entry in the Employees table. It is possible that we’d have a department with no employees.

NULL is Not Zero or the Empty String

NULL is a very special value in the world of databases, but it’s something that beginners often get confused about. When you see a NULL value, interpret it as “unknown”. If a quantity is NULL, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the quantity is zero. Similarly, if a text field holds a NULL value, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an appropriate value, it’s simply unknown. For example, consider a database containing information about children who attend a particular school. If the secretary entering the record does not know a student’s age a NULL value is used to indicate the “unknown” placeholder. The student certainly has an age, it’s just not present in the database.

All Database Platforms are NOT Created Equal

There are many different databases out there and all offer a variety of different features at different price points. Some are full-featured enterprise databases designed to host huge data warehouses serving multinational enterprises. Others are desktop databases better suited to tracking inventory for a small store with one or two users. Your business requirements will dictate the appropriate database platform for your needs.

Want to learn more? Learn how to create beautiful websites through our web design beginners and web design intermediate courses.

-A.A

CSS Awards:

1) Axel Aubert:

Winner 25th April 2013.

axel-aubert.fr

2) Hey Zombie Design:

Winner 22nd April 2013

www.heyzombie.com

3) Leeroy:

Winner 19th April 2013

www.leeroy.ca

Awwwards:

4) Wootten:

Winner 26th April 2013

www.wootten.com.au

The Best Design:

5) Vintage Hope:

Winner 25th April 2013

www.vintagehope.co.uk

We have really good deal for Web Design Basic and Intermediate Course you can check them out !