How to design a website
Votes: 546Website design is a great skill to have. I started learning in 1998 / 1999 while still in High School, oh how my grades suffered. I said "started" because you never stop learning website design, I always learn new things.
Designing a website is like making a flyer or brochure that can be viewed on a wide variety of paper sizes, types, orientations, and printed using various inks. If you have done desktop publishing before prepare for some frustration, website design is really "information design".
Website design tools
- Dreamweaver - My favorite, great for CSS and HTML $$$
- NVU - OpenSource css and HTML editor and it's FREE!
- HTML-KIT - Also free and good.
There are many more tools, some free and some not, either way look for syntax highlighting and that it works with css2 and xhtml. You'll notice I left out FrontPage, we will never use that word again.
Learn the code
Many people will tell you, "That html stuff is too confusing, I just use the WYSIWYG Editor" (What you see is what you get). They are right, html can be confusing, but so is the English language, and comparatively, html is WAY EASIER!
Design Philosophy
Like I sad before, website design is more like information design, because the job of html is to describe content. HTML says this is a headline, or this is a paragraph, or a list, not this is red, or 24 pixels tall, or Ariel font. This is where CSS comes in, Cascading Style Sheets has a simply but important job, to make a website look good, on the screen and in print.Want to see the power of CSS? http://csszengarden.com This website uses the same html code with different style sheets, prepare to be amazed.
Key design principals
- Less is more
- Keep it clean
- keep it readable
- Target your audience
You might think, all these designer websites are dull and boring, and you might be right. I have found that as you get immersed in design more and more you realize that all of those animated gif images and background patterns only distract from your information. My goal as a designer is to communicate to my user, anything that distracts from that gets axed.
Here is a good article on website design, or rather how not to design.
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/biggest-mistakes-in-web-design-1995-2015.html
Design Ideas
Design is something that can be taught to a point, then you have it or you don't. Here are some good design resources.
A note on images
3 types of images:- GIF - Best for low color images, solid colors - offers transparency.
- JPG - Best for photos or graphics with soft gradients - No transparency
- PNG - Best of both worlds, but IE 5-6 does not support it's transparency.
Mastery of these images types can make your website designs fast loading and usable!
Write a comment
- Required fields are marked with *.
Posts: 626
Reply #625 on : Mon October 29, 2007, 21:43:51
Posts: 626
Reply #624 on : Mon October 29, 2007, 14:43:29
Posts: 626
Reply #623 on : Mon October 29, 2007, 13:39:02
Posts: 626
Reply #622 on : Mon October 29, 2007, 11:25:38
Posts: 626
Reply #621 on : Mon October 29, 2007, 11:13:04
Posts: 626
Reply #620 on : Mon October 29, 2007, 11:12:53
Posts: 626
Reply #619 on : Mon October 29, 2007, 11:12:51
Posts: 626
Reply #618 on : Mon October 29, 2007, 10:16:19
Posts: 626
Reply #617 on : Mon October 29, 2007, 10:11:30
Posts: 626
Reply #626 on : Tue October 21, 2008, 08:10:31