As you know, I love small business websites. The variety of the designs is amazing. The needs of the owner, the types of products they sell, the inclinations of the designer are all manifest in these varies webpages. Using webpage templates for small business websites is my focus.

I recently looked throught the website of Carlos Dantas and saw some very good designs - so I had to interview Carlos.

How did you get into web design? “I always had the passion for arts and any creative form of expression. In 1979 with some college’s classmates to develop a program for our business school project anyway I became more addicted to the internet in 1985 when I came to the US to study marketing and design for the advertising industry.”

Do you remember the very first site you designed? “Yes I do, my first professional website was made in 1991 for a Brazilian company call ME Editora this site is no longer available on the internet.”

Where do you get your art for these web pages? “Basically from my own ideas and some from what you see on the internet.  I have in mind that what is important for any web designer is to accommodate the customer’s message with the layout. It is very important to understand the business, their marketing niche, if you are designing a personal site you have to understand the person’s ideas, which you as a designer have to express on the webpage.”

What will be your next project? “The new autoseats.com website, it is full auto accessories store the pilot is on you can check it out http://www.autoseats.com/newSite/ it will be lunched on June of 2007.”

Have you ever worked with website templates? “Yes I do work with them sometimes, especially when clients bring the templates to us for integration and changes to accommodate their ideas and business to it. You can be creative but not all the time, so it is important to be open for someone’s ideas and take the good from these ideas and bring it to your work.”

What website template providers have you tried? “I have worked with the Boxedart.com and Templatemonster.com templates.”

What was your experience with them? “I personally do not have much experience, because as I told you previously usually the clients bring the templates, but all the templates we have had to change or work with were well done and easy to change and integrate to the original client’s project.”

What do you think about Flash technology? “I see Flash technology as the jewelry of the internet. Let me explain it. Flash is an important accessory, but not the body, unless the brand name itself is so powerful that you can design the site in flash and it won’t compromises the search index or the download time. I.e. Disney or Coca-Cola, etc…”

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Flash? “The advantages is the animation and multimedia capabilities that make flash the most powerful instrument to enhance any website, Flash brought to the internet, life, interaction, you can design your site to achieve the 2 must important senses (Audio and Visual) to be successful on any message you have to delivery, but the disadvantages is that if you populate the site with to much flash movies, menus, it can be very trick to be indexed by the search engines and then we come to the dilemma beautiful but not found, or to hard to be indexed. The search engines, besides google, yahoo and others that claim their spiders can index flash movies; if you run a search on those engines you don’t see much of full flash websites on the first 5 pages. Most companies, for example don’t have Disney characters tied to their products.”

What are your sources of inspiration? “I use my entire surroundings, my personal experiences, my imagination and I put my self always open to new ideas and up to understand the client’s business. I also have in mind that You ‘Can’t Please All of the People All of the Time’ it is impossible then you have to express the client’s personality and their point of view.”

What are your favorite website designs that you did NOT design yourself? “http://www.netinho.com.br – click on Entrar”

What was the toughest project or customer situation you’ve encountered? “http://www.Masterpiecefactory.com this website is in constant development and the project is huge involving most of all internet technologies and the client is very creative and demanding, constant alterations and updates to the site which makes this project the toughest, maybe the correct word is the most challenging, of all times.”

What are your interests and dislikes in webpage design?
“Every aspect of the webpage design interests me. The fact that you can create anything amazes me and the constant technology development makes you never loose the urge to learn and discovery new frontiers. I have no dislikes, when you love what you do there is no dislikes, maybe to let it go, because each project is like your child and is very hard sometimes to let our babies go…LOL.”

Thankyou Carlos for the benefits of your experience and your viewpoints.

Mr. Special,
Arthur Browning