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You may - as many do - emphasise one aspect and neglect the others.
The typical case is that a site looks 'cool', but isn't easy to get
around.
And this may be almost appropriate for some sites,
e.g. small ones acting as billboards on the
Internet.
They want to get their message across as effectively as possible,
and the user is not expected to be spending much time there.
But I say 'almost' because still the designer should consider the other
issues - especially the conceptual foundations.
HTML
became so incredibly popular because it empowers us to communicate
in ways previously only dreamt of. You get a real kick the first time
you see your words and pictures nicely arranged on the screen - and you
realise that your creation is available worldwide! Then you can go on to
discover the power of Java, JavaScript, animations, etc... and the end
result is that if ever there was something useful on your site, it's
buried.
I sometimes feel that the style of The WDVL is a little 'baroque'
compared to the rest of the web, and that we could do with a little
lightening up; but at least most pages are very fast to load and I
don't have an image map to redo whenever I want to update the home
page. There is however a price to pay, in that you can't be absolutely
sure how a page will appear to everyone, since there are variations
e.g. in how colors and layouts might be rendered. We occasionally get
complaints or suggestions about such things as illegible color
combinations which appear perfectly legible to me, but if it seems
reasonable, we try to accomodate such comments.
I've been through many, many iterations with
The WDVL's home page,
and each time I was sure that this was it, I'd found our perfect style.
Less than a week later, I'd be changing it again
(as Lucy is fond of pointing out).
IMHO
A few "do's and don'ts" and personal observations from
me, myself, and I.
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But I've learnt several lessons; the main one I think is that
there's much more to good web design than just 'kewl'.
What's left when you take away the gimmicks ?
Can anybody actually use your site ? Would they want to ?
How easy is it for them to get around ?
Is your information accurate and up to date ?
Are your pages legible ?
Many sites have pages that are unduly hard to read.
What looks good on one monitor, with your eyes,
may not look good on another, with someone else's..
Don't assume that if you can read it, so can everyone.
The commonest
mistakes are poor choice of background / foreground colors, and image
detail interfering with the text.
As important as the visual aspects, there's also the more abstract ones
such as navigation; structuring of content; use of language and other
media in support of communicating ideas; etc.
Navigation is important,
especially for a moderately large site such as ours (500 pp.).
I've occasionally had email to say they couldn't find such-and-such,
please could I help - but what they were looking for,
was perhaps only a couple of clicks down from the home page !
But if a page has many links then it's critical to give them some
context for the extra semantics that will help people choose the best
path to follow.
I pay extreme attention to the structuring of our site, even to the
extent that I once moved almost everything around to make it more
'logical' (IMHO).
The table on our home page is supposed to reflect that.
I think of myself as more of a
librarian than a graphic designer.
Selecting and
arranging suitable categories (as reflected by URL paths) is extremely
important, to help people find stuff. What this boils down to is, choose
your directory structure very carefully, and be prepared to change it as
your site grows.
sensory
conceptual
reactive
Resources
Further web design links.
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