Please read this article carefully before submitting a design to Design Express. If you have questions, please
contact us.
The Scope of Design Express
The scope of Design Express is outlined below. Should your design require services outside of this scope, you may request custom integration. Custom integration is charged hourly rather than at a fixed rate and may take longer than five days to complete.
- General -- Design Express converts a website design into a set of design templates that function on our content management system. The website designs can either be submitted as image files or as existing websites that are already cutup. In either case, Design Express will integrate the website design onto our software and deliever it back ready for use.
- Number of templates -- Design Express includes the cutup and implementation of two design templates. Typically, this would include a home page template and an inside page template. Please create your designs with this "two template" model in mind.
- Basic element styles -- Design Express will create basic styles for all of our included elements. As the designer, you can provide layout examples of how these various elements should display. In the absence of specific examples from you, we will provide basic styles at our discretion.
- Content entry -- Design Express only includes the implementation of design templates and does not include the entry of any content into editable regions or the building out of any website pages.
- Custom integration of 3rd party tools -- Design Express does not include custom integration of any 3rd party tools such as newsletter lists, shopping carts . . . etc.
Files and Technical Requirements
This section contains requirements that your submitted design files should meet. If your files do not meet these requirements, they may be returned for you to correct and resubmit.
Website design files should be submitted in one of the following formats:
- Adobe Photoshop
- Macromedia Fireworks
- Adobe Acrobat PDF
- JPG (100% size, high quality, low compression)
- Adobe Illustrator
- Macromedia Freehand
We appreciate intact layers, clear organization, guides, comments and notes.
We would strongly discourage building your website design in page layout applications such as Adobe InDesign, Adobe PageMaker, Quark Xpress or any of the Microsoft Office Suite (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Works, etc.). If you must use one of these applications, you should export your file as a JPG or PDF as specified above before submitting.
Files should be 72 dpi at actual screen size and set to RGB color mode.
Each design template should be submitted as a single file. You can zip your individual design files into a single zip archive file if you choose.
If you are simply converting an existing website design
Design Express can also be used to convert an existing website design into into the content management system. If this is your intent and if the website already exists at a location on the internet, you can simply provide us with the URL of the existing website in the notes section of the form. Alternatively, if you have the website's source files, you can zip those up and submit them through the form.
HTML Xpress Sample Templates
This section provides you with free layout templates. Our design staff has created templates for several popular applications that are setup with the proper settings, grids, fonts, and guides to give you a solid starting point for your Design Express designs. Feel free to download and use these files as you begin your design project.
Please choose a template that was created for your preferred design application. The files should work for both Windows and OS X versions of each application: