There is such fierce competition on the Web among the varying sites that it can be difficult to determine exactly how Flash your company’s site should use. After all, there are those organizations that can get carried away with the bells and whistles; so much so, that their core messages gets lost in a maze of flashing, neon signage on their site or just way too much going on at any given time, your eyes don’t know where to go first. On the other hand, the learning curve for HTML is a little more practical, putting the parts of the Website design process in reach of those who have had little training on how to do so.

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Aspects of good Website design depend on a number of factors, including the type of company, the product or service offered and a host of other small issues, such as the design company itself and, in some cases, the region of the country in which the business is located. Many factors are considered when designing a great site that it can be easy to overlook the fact that you may need to design a Website that caters to the area in which your customers reside.

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Sometimes the best way to understand what to do in web design is by knowing what not to do. Here are a list of things you can be sure will anger your visitors; and remember angry visitors spend less than happy ones.

1. Pop-ups
There is not much need for explanation here. Pop-ups are just annoying; especially the ones that are impossible to close. Some claim that pop-ups are still an effective way of advertising, I have trouble understanding this considering most web browsers now come with pop-up blockers already enabled.

2. Slow loading pages
I have said this over and over again; most website visitors are not patient. If your page takes too long to load they will move on! It’s much better to have a page that is plain but loads than one that has too much on it and takes forever. A page should load in under 4 seconds.

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There are probably a million web design rules out there and it can be really overwhelming when you are just trying to focus on what is important. So I explain the “Four critical web design rules” as stated by Nicolas LaPolla.

1. Make sure your page is easy to read
Most people do not actually go through and read everything on a page. They scan the page to find the information they are looking for. If a person cannot find what they are looking for in the first couple second they are on the site they will most likely move on to a different site. To make it easier for the reader try to break up your content. Use headers and sub-headers to make it simple to stop what you are looking for. Keywords can also help make it trouble-free to find information.
Font and background colors are important too. Make sure there is a large contrast between the text and the background and keep your back ground plain.

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Like anything else in this world, presentation means everything. There is probably nothing worse than visiting a site that not only fails to grasp this concept, but also completely throws out all the rules of design and causes an immediate ache behind your eyes. Color is everything. Color has the ability to invoke certain emotions. This means that using the wrong color—or waaaay too much color—can drive a potential customer in the wrong direction.

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Just 10 years ago the average monitor size was somewhere between 600 x 400 pixels to 800 x 600 pixels. Gasp! Imagine designing a site for either one of those two sizes today and you can see the designers run for the hills in horror.

As a design firm, the monitor resolution issue comes up quite frequently during the planning and designing phases of a project. Often, clients get upset when a design doesn't fit "their monitor" size or looks off size because the planning wasn't well thought out in the beginning.

So what is the average monitor resolution? What other resolutions should you take into consideration when designing a site and what sizes are falling by the wayside and should be discarded all together?



As you can clearly see the 1024 x 768 monitor resolution is used by almost half of the web community. Surprisinginly the number two resolution is 1280 x 1024 at a little over 17% just above the 9.5% 1280 x 800 users. The lowly 800 x 600 still holds an 8% grasp on user resolution but I predict a steady decline of this monitor size over the next year as new monitors begin to replace old tube monitors on home computers across the world.

The remaining six resolutions are all above even the moderate 1024 x 768 resolution.

So what's this mean to you?
Basically to design for a smaller monitor resolution (800 x 600) is an exercise in futility. Why cater to the 8% when the next step up covers over 90% of browser users? The 800 x 600 monitor is dead and should no longer even be considered useable, especially when planning and designing a website. The current web standard of 1024 x 768 is more than sufficient for almost all resolutions.

From time to time you'll be asked to do the impossible when it comes to using your design skills. This may leave you shaking your head but as a design service provider it's your job to make the client happy. What do I mean by impossible? Let's say you've got a horizontal banner ad to be place on local website portal and the client sends over the needed artwork to get the job done. Right off the bat you realize the imagery simply won't work. It's a huge vertical image that if used in the horizontal space will look like nothing more than a couple color blocks. or it will only be visible on one side and not all the way across. We as designers know this won't work but it's up to us to educate the masses as to why (as if common sense wasn't that common).

In my experience it's usually one of the following examples:

Vertical image in a horizontal space
Horizontal image in a vertical space
Too much content for the room provided or allowed

Though they sound like common sense most clients aren't really thinking about how it's going to work. They're thinking about what content they want and they expect you to make it work, or else find a viable alternative. The challenge is then giving them exactly what they want. The only real way to do this is clear communication with the client and some basic client education to keep this from happening in the future. Instead of simply saying "no, this won't work" offer helpful alternatives and options. You'll be seen as someone who's willing to work with it instead of another person to butt heads with.

1. Navigation: Ensure that your navigation is easy to use and consistent. You may be able to use it, but could a newcomer find the information they desire?

2. Sound: If you have repeating background sound, music or ambience get rid of it. Most users browse in a work environment and as soon as they hit your site they're not looking for the content, they're looking for the "stop sound" button.

3. Click here: Why? Change this phrase everywhere on your site. It doesn't make sense out of context. The user has to read the whole paragraph (which they probably won’t) to understand why they should click there. Consider phrases like "Download the pdf" or "view the full information listing."

4. Title & Alt Attributes: Use them how they are supposed to be used. If you haven't used any at all, then a quick fix will be to start adding them to navigation and other elements on every page.

5. General: If you’ve got any code snippets that could annoy the user, like resizing browser windows or opening new pages in a new window, then remove them. Just because you like something a particular way, your users may not. Don’t take over their desktop.

I've found myself working in RGB mode a lot more lately. Before the internet, the only time we would work in RGB was on drum scanned images. Once we got the scan back, we would convert from RGB to CMYK, then do the color correction. At this point, you would need to watch your ink saturation levels carefully - especially in the darker regions. Since most of the work I do now is online, I work almost entirely in RGB. On an RGB monitor, what you see is what you get. However, when dealing with CMYK printing - what you see is not always what you get.

Let me explain:

An image on an RGB computer monitor is created by projecting red green and blue light onto a black screen. In CMYK printing , your images are built by laying down precise amounts of cyan , magenta , yellow and black inks onto a white page. Id have to say that this area of design technology can be a learning experience. An RGB image that is converted to CMYK using the wrong settings or adjusted incorrectly can lead to oversaturation on the printing press. A black area that is built using only 100% black ink appears black on a monitor - but once printed is only dark gray. To get a true black or what we call "Rich Black" (Rich K) you need to run a good combo of all four inks.

My "Rich Black" contains the following ratio 60C, 50M, 50Y, 100K. This combo produces a nice well balanced black. If you wanted a "Warm Black" you could run 0C, 60M, 30C, 100K and if you needed a "Cool Black" run 60C, 0M, 0Y, 100K. If you really want to get tech you can set type using a Rich K and then set the background screen to Cool Black. This will produce a tone on tone effect that is quite edgy. To take it even further, you can lay down a 5th color as spot matte or gloss UV coating. This can really make things pop off the page.

As far as I know, print design will never be able to incorporate motion, sound or dynamic data. Next time you have a print project, kick it up a notch by adding a fifth color or run some Rich K / Cool Black combinations.

One major struggle we all have as CSS designers is keeping the consistency across multiple browsers and most of the problems come from the default setting that browsers have for common elements. By using a basic CSS reset and working from there you can override the browser's settings and start fresh from ground zero.

After doing some research I've put together a simple CSS reset. I've seen some more complicated ones but this one seems to work fine for general use. I've even added in a few additions I have yet to see in other CSS resets such as the dotted border that Firefox commonly puts around links and an overflow-x issue I've commonly run into.

Enjoy!

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