Practical Web Designing Basics
The following are the key aspects which would help you practically craft a web design that would deliver results in terms of your audience visibility.
Part 1: The Unavoidables
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Definition of a good Web site: A site that delivers quality and eshaustive information for its target audience and does so with elegance and style.
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The rule of “Keep it Simple, Sober” is tried and tested, but it’s not a be-all end-all of Web design. Gamers, for example, expect a busy page with a lot of sophisticated graphics, flash effects, and the like. The usual understated page with the off-white background and the typical menu of links sedately trundling down the left side of the display leaves this audience cold; obviously the people who designed this Website aren’t on their wavelength — these guys like plenty of whizz-bang in the pages they visit.
On the other hand, if is a middle aged lady on the Web on the hunt for a couple of nice dishes for the kitchen, she's not going jazzy effects, Flash, purple-on-black color, style and a series of animated graphics to want to do gymnastics their old watery eyes. She is known for a stick to take the monitor to stop it. Corporate users expect something that can not be absolutely
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Attract Your Audience – Visually
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The key here is to know who is going to be using your page, and to design with their needs and desires in mind. The KISS rule generally holds good in most cases. If you don’t need something — a frame, an animated graphic, a Flash animation, a fancy DHTML effect, don’t use it. After all you don’t want an uninteresting page full of unbroken blocks of text with a dull color scheme and dreary graphics won’t attract anyone’s attention. Use everything moderately. Keep your audience in mind and design your site accordingly.
Every image that moves or blinks draws your visitors’ attention to itself. Be sure that it doesn’t distract them from your message. Whatever your site’s reason for being, you want to portray an image that conveys what your site is all about as well as the feelings you want to implant in your audience. It’s no coincidence that most financial sites use design and graphical tactics to give a feeling of safety and stability. No matter what the stock market does, this site won’t have its feathers ruffled. In contrast, the ultra-hyper site design of the Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network sites appeal to their sugared-up audience of pre-teens and teenagers; you can’t overstimulate that crowd. A site selling luxurious designer ware isn’t going to use the same design scheme as a site selling automobile spares! One will go for a colourful shades in the design, while the other will use a rough-and tough looking design scheme.
A good Web designer will be able to design all four sites, and others as well. Don’t forget, if you’re designing a Website for a corporation or business, that they very likely have trademarks, logos, color themes, and other elements that will need to be included in your design scheme. Colour speaks volumes about your company even before the surfer reads your content of the web site.
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Appealing to Multiple Audiences
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If you are middle-aged and both are trying to design a page that will appeal to a very active TV
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Connections Options
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And do not forget what your audience uses to access your site. Not everyone has a broadband or T1 connection that is lagging most of the world still with slow dial-up connections or have to flounder through the network through a maze of network connections. These people are pleased that you limit your use of the large, slow-loading graphics, or at least that the provision of loading the image automatically and to allow them to click for a larger (and slower loading shown). Remember. JPG images tend to be larger than the two. GIF or. PNG files (Flash animations, surprisingly enough, load fairly quickly, given its complexity, but they can slow down a page), in particular an access over a dial-up connection. Complex structures table may take a while to load, too, especially when loaded with graphics. Slow servers, causing slow downloads, if not from your provider, you bring your website up to date, you can go get someone.
Design for the World Wide Web is the smart balancing act between the graphic “wow” and the real-time “now.”
“Elegance” is a favorite term to describe good, clean Web design, but what it actually means is up to the interpretation of the designer and the site user. It actuallu should mean using a decent design, with well-chosen colors and graphical choices that don’t stress the eye, but instead induce the visitor to relax and enjoy the content. It’s the difference between being wooed over a candlelight dinner and being juggled in the overloaded elevator!
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What type of HTML Should You Choose?
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Every Web page conforms to a version of HTML (or XHTML, or even XML, though we’re not going into those here), and is determined by the DOCTYPE (document type) code. The line:
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at the top of the page covers (above the first day) your basis in most cases. It supports many of the elements of the latest version of HTML 4.01 Strict, supports style sheets for the most part, but also supports the most antiquated or obsolete HTML elements, frame, link targets, and other attributes that are not permitted in the Book HTML 4.01. This document type also holds older browsers such as Netscape 4.x in the game. If you are designing to the latest standards of HTML and / or advanced style sheets, then this doctype:
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“http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”>
should be used, but be aware that a lot of older browsers won’t display your page properly. Neither can you use frames unless you use the “frameset” version of this doctype. Note, too, that the “transitional” DOCTYPE I cite doesn’t include the URL of a DTD, or document type declaration. This is because using URLs in a DOCTYPE element sends some browsers, including IE into Strict mode, defeating the purpose of the “transitional” DOCTYPE.
Of course you can only slide on the ice with his bare cheeks and do not use a doctype in your pages at all (just) with the date, but that's not a good solution. Thus each browser will decide how to display the page, and while most browsers will cope well with the situation, some gag. You also need to get into the habit of using a DOCTYPE element. If you do not know to use a DOCTYPE from a typewriter, the
Note: You can visit the W3C Validator to check your document for compliance with W3C standards, or use Dave Raggett’s acclaimed HTML Tidy program, now an open-source project.
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Browser Compatibility
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During the initial days when the web was still a tabu among the users the novice Web developers designed the pages with Netscape for Windows in mind; as that was by far the most popular browser in use, designing the site for Netscape/PC users was “good enough” to satisfy the majority of users, and never mind the rest. Nowadays the same lot of designers make their pages for Windows and Internet Explorer, for the same reasons. This is where they lack in approach.
Millions of Windows users still employ Netscape (or the open-source Mozilla). Many others use Opera. Some AOL users are still trundling along with their out-of-date AOL browsers, and some hard-core folks still swear by Lynx, the text-only browser (there’s also the surprisingly large contingent of users who keep graphics switched off and read only text). Then, there’s WebTV to be reckoned with. And there are differences between the Mac browsers and the Windows browsers of the same name, not to mention the Mac browsers Cyberdog, OmniWeb, Chimera, iCab, and others. There are the browsers for Linux such as Konqueror, Opera for Linux, Mozilla for Linux, and others. According to the Browser Archive at Evolt, there are well over 100 browsers out there being used by someone and many of them are obsolete now. Why should the Web designer care? Because your page won’t display the same from one browser to the next. The more plugged-in designer uses one method or another, either client-side or server-side, to detect what browser his/her visitor is using, and “tailors” the code they send to that particular browser. But if you don’t want or can’t do something so slick, what can you do to meet the needs of your various visitors with their options of browsers?
Basically, the best thing to do is to be aware of the HTML tags and other features and protocols that one browser will support and others won’t, and avoid them whenever possible: the infamous “marquee” and “blink” tags come to mind, as do iFrames, layers, JavaScript, style sheets, plug-ins, DHTML, and others. Some of these, such as “blink” tags and layers, are long out-of-date; others such as DHTML and JavaScript are quite current. If you do use something that is browser-specific, choose a function that isn’t critical to your visitors’ ability to view your site: an example is the neat color schemes for the horizontal and vertical scrollbars that IE provides for. Netscape users will just get the plain-Jane grey bars, but it doesn’t hurt them to not have the colored scrollbars — it doesn’t affect the way your site presents its message and handles its content.read more
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