Today, i would like to discuss a bit about website design. We need at least a website to facilitate our internet marketing ventures.
Before we talk further about it, let’s define what a web design is. Web design refers to the look and feel of the website. It’s part and parcel of a website development. Website design is abuot the ways on how to use various website technologies, like CSS, HTML, XTML, JAVA SCRIPTS and so on to make the site look the way you want it to.
I will cover some rules of thumb you could follow through the design. Some points to think about when you making a page include:
- where you want things to appear; whether the navigation bar should be, accross the top, down the side etc.
- where is the content pool, is the window resizeable or do you want it just enough so that the display just so,
- how heavy will the graphics be and how will the flash animation be;
Layout information is key and you want to be aleast aware, if not absolutely control where the browsers’ eyes goingto travel.
It is worth it, especially for beginners to engage in paper and pencil exercise, and literally draw out how you want the page to look before you start coding anything; then whether the design is appropriate for your target market and whether it will fit the screen.
They present lists of color combinations that work well together so that you do not accidentally come out with something that is completely unreadable by color blind persons.
I also have some caveats about not so good web designs.
As much as you want to include all the photographs you have collected into one page, probably making the one page too busy is not a good example of a page that you would want to do. If you overload a page with a lot of photo-shop effects, it could get really messy really quickly.
Try to avoid nested tables for layouts. It’s difficult to maintain over time. While it may get you initially upfront, the exact dimension you want to the pixel using Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), especially going forward is a much simpler way of maintaining pages and the layout.
A web page with a list of things which you might want to consider avoiding in terms of website design is www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html. Another reference site for things that you probably want to avoid is www.webpagethatsuck.com/. They make some really excellent points about what you should and should not do and talk about why with concrete examples of really ugly sites on the web.
In general, if it looks bad on paper, it will probably look bad if it is displayed on somebody’s monitor.
No matter what level is your web design experience, here is some good reference which you can use:
You may also want to bookmark this page at www.visibone.com/colorlab/ to guide you with what color combos work well together and what you would want to avoid.
Well, that’s for today. I hope these little pointers do help.
The Online Biz Guy
www.online-biz-guide.com
