Related Tag Articles: website design

How does the growth of tablet PCs affect your decisions in website design?

17 October 2012

Technology today has meant that everyone who owns a mobile phone or a tablet PC can access the Internet on their devices no matter where they are. No one has to use either a laptop or static computer to get online whether for business purposes or pleasure.

This has meant that many people who want websites built for them have to rethink just how they need to go about it. Web designers have been faced with the new challenge of where the ‘fold’ should appear on the smaller and larger displays that people use. Many website designers predict the death of the fold and have done so for quite a while now.

This is due to the fact that people who surf the Net no longer need to be on 19” monitors with resolutions of anything between 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 700. Screens today can be as small as those in iPhones or as large as a 60” HDTV. But it is not just the resolution that can be dramatically different as the aspect ratio of screens today can change by the slightest movement.

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Why should you invest on your Website Design?

14 September 2012

For people thinking about bringing their businesses online, creating an effective business website may be all you need to propel your compel into the 21st century – finally. However, things are certainly not as easy as they were some years past. Web 2.0 shook up the Internet, and today’s social media dominance makes old-fashioned site design obsolete. And that’s not even touching on the constant changes made by Google and the introduction of Bing in the market.

It’s not just enough to create a website. You must produce an effective site that bolsters your brand tremendously while still playing to its respective niche strongly. If this sounds like a tough job, rest assured that it is. This is why it’s always a smart idea to invest in some website design.

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Benefits of Using PNG images in your website design

27 June 2012

Building a proper website is kind of like exploring the cosmos. You need much more than one discipline to do it. You need astrophysicists, particle physicists, biologists, electrical engineers, and a host of other help. With a website, you need to worry about coding, content, videos, text, and, of course, images. And that’s before you even get into marketing and working on the upkeep of the site.

Having the proper images on your website is very important. Whether you’re talking about your site’s banner image, various thumbnails loaded up, or any other type of image, quality and size are incredibly important when other people stop in to view your site. Remember, we’re also speaking about graphic images here. It’s not like you’re just showing a picture of your face or your pet.

So, which format is better for images on your website – JPEG or PNG? Without a doubt, PNG wins out across the board. And although the file size is larger, you will find out below why using PNG images is just the smart move.

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Make pages easy to find, how to create a great navigation menu

21 November 2011

If you run a site with lots of pages - be it a large eCommerce store or a multi-topic blog with over 500 posts - one of the problems you will inevitably run up against is organizing your content. At the heart of this problem is the top-level navigation, and how you organize it. Your limitations are normally that it can only contain a certain number of items. Other problems could be that you are not certain which way to create your page hierarchy.

Here are a few steps to take to make the process easier, and to set up your navigation to make it scalable as your website grows:

1) Map The User Journey
User behavior and User Stories are integral to software and website design, so it’s important to understand:

• Why your visitors are there
• What they are looking for
• What they are likely to click on when presented with a random page

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Are you designing your website for widescreen monitors yet?

16 November 2011

Technology changes all the time, and the type of technology people like to use is always shifting. The latest fashion is to have screens that are much wider than they are tall - it makes for better video watching, and allows you to see more information on a screen in one go. Yet strangely, most websites are still the width of early 2000s monitors - around 800 pixels.

This means there is loads of wasted space on either side, and visitors have to scroll down two or three times to see all of the content that you could easily have fit on one screen if you had designed your website for wide screens. Let’s review a few basic concepts of web design, to see how we can take advantage of wide screen monitors.

Above The Fold

This is simply the term for the content that people can see when they visit your website, without having to scroll down. One of the most irritating things to find on a website is when the top screen is entirely taken up by a fancy header and advertisements, and all of the content you want is two or three mouse scrolls down.

With the advent of wide screen monitors, you can now take advantage of this landscape-style layout to present more content to your visitors at first glance. This means you can direct their attention to the things you want, and you can still have your header and advertisements in the same frame.

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Why you should avoid frames in your website design

04 November 2011

Web designers are occasionally confronted with clients who have antiquated conceptions of what makes a website good. The most frustrating of these is the use of frames. Frames were cool in the early days of the internet, before CSS made styling web pages so much simpler. Frames essentially tell the browser to create a divide between two parts of the page, and to load a separate page into each panel.

You can do various things with frames, such as keep one part of the page static while the other part can be scrolled (useful for navigation), but all of these functions can now be handled much better by using CSS and Ajax. Here are a few reasons why you shouldn’t be using frames in your website design. After we look at these, we’ll look at a simple solution for using CSS to handle what frames used to take care of.

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Web site Design Mistakes - Database Parameters in URLs

20 May 2011

A good website needs to be thoroughly planned and extremely well thought out, otherwise it will not even get over the first hurdle that it encounters when search engine optimization is asked to play its part in the process of getting a site noticed.

Database Parameters in URL must be considered by website designers as these indicate to a server just what should be loaded onto each page on the site. In brief the page is activated by every click, the page effectively becomes dynamic.

Search engines use robot programs to index sites and unfortunately these robot programs despise dynamic pages, this often results in a site not even being listed by the search engine. In effect it is disastrous for the site.

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