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Web
Design Elementals:
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Planning a Website: The First Element of Web Design | |
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A website is a collection of pages that comprise a total work, just like pages in a book all add to the final product. Just like a good book, a website should be well-laid out and consistent in both its form and content. Just like any book, a website is made for some purpose, and should have an intended audience in mind when you design. When thinking about your website, before any type of design is started, try to figure out who your audience is - who you want to reach and how you can best do that. To relate websites to books when considering your audience, think about how different books (or any product, really) are designed with the end user in mind. A book aimed at an elderly audience will have large fonts and high contrast in it. A book for children will have lots of color and pictures. The content of your website will be vastly different depending on who you are trying to reach. You should use different styles of design to cater to your audience as well, but we'll speak more about that later. Be sure to also think about what your intended audience will most likely be viewing your website on. Webpages are made up of many elements that all share one thing in common: they have a size (measured in bytes). To view a webpage, a person actually asks for a bunch of elements that come together to make up the whole page. These elements include text, pictures, and an HTML page that formats it all into one nice webpage. Since all that needs to be sent from a server computer to that person's computer at his or her home or wherever, its a good idea to try and keep all those files as small as possible. Large file sizes take longer to download. This may not be a problem if you are making a website for an audience with high-speed Internet connections, but it becomes a serious issue for those people using low-end connections, like telephone lines, to connect to the Internet. My grandparents have
a small 15" monitor and use a 56K modem to surf the Internet, so
making webpages with big file sizes would not be the most considerate
thing to do if I wanted to make a website they could easily see. If I
was making a website for UNC-Chapel Hill students, however, I could be
much more free in my use of large files since the campus is wired with
high-speed Internet connections.
Form Follows Function Follows Form Okay, so you have targeted your audience and you have a good idea of what kind of constraint to place on yourself regarding webpages and file size. Guess I should tell you now that no matter how you design your page, it may not look right. Its not your fault, its just that there is very elite standardization on the Internet these days, and people have many different types of computers, monitors, and browsers, which all affect how a webpage is displayed. How do all these things affect your design? Well, monitor size alone can limit just how wide a webpage you can / should make, not to mention the capabilities of various computers to display colors. Some can show millions of colors, some only 256. Besides the monitor, web browsers, what people use to view the Internet, process the code that makes up webpages differently. The code, called HTML for hyper-text markup language, offers a limited dictionary of "tags," set in brackets, (< and >), to build a webpage. These browsers, like the basics: Internet Explorer and Netscape, and the betters, like Mozilla, and OmniWeb, are most commonly used to view the Internet. However, none are standardized, and sometimes, this can really affect how a webpage looks. Always check your site out on different browsers to ensure that your design holds together. HTML is the standard for designing a webpage, but every browser may interpret the code differently. For example, say you write a note about what is in your refrigerator and use poor handwriting. You could give that note to ten people and each may decipher what you wrote a little differently. They will probably get the basics, like water, ketchup, etc., but they may miss some of the details, like the fact that it is a list of what you have, not what you need to get at the grocery store. Sometimes, this misunderstanding can be very bad, and you may end up with ten bottles of ketchup! Since you cannot really be sure of how your webpages will look once you put them up on the Internet, it is very important that you design well (write legibly). This ensures the least chance that your webpage will go awry and fail your audience. Since the user has final control, always remember that it may look cool on your computer, but the user is not on your computer. See how closely you
were paying attention by taking a java
test.
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