6 Fatal Design Flaws “Newbie” Web Designers Make:These Mistakes Will Kill Your First Website Baby Written by Mitone Griffith
Even if you’re not an accomplished webmaster you can still have a professional looking website. You may be like I was five years ago—you’re teaching yourself web design and you’re starting to catch on to that HTML stuff. You’re so excited about your new bag of tricks—but slow down partner, sometimes less is more. In fact only time more is more is when it concerns chocolate cheesecake or something like that. (I can never get enough chocolate!)You’ve worked hard to get traffic—now don’t drive them away. 1. Fatal Flaw One—Bouncing, Wiggling Animated Clip Art This one is really annoying to website visitors, and a sure sign you don’t know what you’re doing, especially if you have them all over place. Just because they’re free, doesn’t mean you should use them. SOLUTION—You’re probably not a graphics designer if you resort to using clip art, so don’t worry about your weakness, just choose a nice color scheme instead in your tables. (More on that later.) Colors don’t take extra time to download either. 2. Fatal Flaw Two—Embedded Music Clips Good grief. Don’t do this. I don’t care how catchy your elevator tune is. No one wants to hear it. Sometimes speakers are turned up and a sudden blare of music will scare heck out of your visitors. They’ll probably leave! SOLUTION—If you have a site that sells music, then people will expect to hear it sometime somewhere at your site. Make your music links clickable—a choice that visitors can make to listen! 3. Fatal Flaw Three—Unstructured Text I can’t stand it when I land on a site that I have to read from each side of my screen to other left and right as well as up and down. Even if you want to write one long sales letter—which obviously works fine for hundreds of rich webmasters, you still need to format it into a legible width. SOLUTION—Put your text in one single data cell of a simple table. Center your table. Voila.
| | Designing your Web Site for ALL BrowsersWritten by David Bell
Let's face it. Building a web site that browses consistently on multiple platforms and multiple browsers is not always as easy as we would like. It is safe to say that most designers spend most of their time building their sites on a given platform. Those with highest standards should, upon completion, take a look at their creation in different browsers and different platforms. Sure, you could see how it looks in Window 98 with Internet Explorer and let that be good enough, but do you really want to risk a bad web experience for millions and millions of potential visitors? Consider this.... A recent statistic I saw reported that 12% of internet users were Macintosh users. Ignoring this fact is like creating a catalog that can only be optimally viewed by one in eight of your customers.Furthermore, not all of Windows users are using Windows 98. Windows 95 continues to be widely used, and Windows 2000 and NT represent a significant percentage of visitors. It would be remiss to ignore small, but growing contingency of Linux users. Though small in number at this time, popularity of OS grows daily. Platform issues aside, Internet Explorer, despite Microsoft's inclusion of it with all Windows Installations, does not represent only browser option. Netscape continues to enjoy a strong following of users numbering in millions, and Lotus Notes is being used by numerous corporations as "standard" browser and e-mail application. Then, of course, there is AOL. Although basically an IE engine "under hood" AOL continues to include certain differences. Considering vast numbers of AOL users, this browser must not be overlooked. If your site does not look good in AOL, then you are risking turning away a huge percentage of potential visitors. It should be clear that cross platform and multiple browser compatibility is a must. Therefore, understanding a few very basic and simple techniques to help keep your pages looking their best in most places is also a must. Following, you will find a few tips and ideas to help you do just that. #1 Paint canvas your visitors will see As a web site designer wanting to be as efficient in my work as possible, I have configured my Mac to use two monitors. As my mouse leaves screen of one, it appears on other. Thus, I have a canvas that, on most days, is 1856 pixels wide over 32 horizontal inches. If I want to, I can easily boost that to over 2000 pixels wide. But, my clients and average visitor on web do not have two monitors. In fact, most of them have screen resolution set to 800 X 600 or 1024 X 768. What's more, every single time I have gone to a client who uses AOL, their browser window opens to what looks to be a 640 pixel wide default no mater how large monitor or screen resolution. On one of my first projects, I had designed a site to a modest 700 pixel wide format with a nice top navigation area. I went to my clients office to get some "point and discuss" feedback to find her new 21 inch monitor -- set at 640X480 resolution. My designs looked terrible! If you intend your web site to appeal to broadest range of visitors, you need to design in a way that will look good even at low resolutions. Check with some of your typical visitors and see what kind of resolutions they normally use. #2 Use Tables to Control Width Tables are great things when trying to control way text and images go together. In order to achieve a nice looking design, using tables is first technique to consider. Tables can be assigned a fixed width in pixels or a fixed percentage of window width. There are advantages to both approaches. If you are not concerned about relative vertical arrangement of objects in a table cell, using fixed percentage allows for more fluid layouts. If, however, you want to keep text wrapped around an image with more consistency, using percent approach could lead to major differences. Text will wrap quite differently in a cells of different pixel widths.
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