When you want to make changes to your website, what do you do? Most likely you go through every page and make the adjustments needed to update or change your website. With a smaller website this is an acceptable method and is done by many people on the web. But how do all those big companies update or change their website? Well its a simple concept that saves companies time and money. I’m talking about using a database. Using a database is the most efficient and effective way to build and maintain a large complex website. Instead of have to make a change on every page for a website, you can make one change in the database or to the sites template and presto its changed for the whole site. Saving many painful hours and money.
Award Winning Web Design
Winning awards in anything is usually a big deal and great for you and your friends and family. But maybe winning an award from www.webpagesthatsuck.com isn’t one of the greatest achievements.
Web Pages That Suck goes beyond just visually looking at websites and picking on small business and personal sites. They get down to business. Looking at websites for what they truly are on the inside and out. They judge sites by how they are designed and created. The use of color, typography, clean code, contrast, navigation, and even by the domain names used. This site is a great place to find out what you should and shouldn’t leave out of your planning document and it also may give you a little laugh. Check it out, even Microsoft’s website made the top ten list of worst design sites of 2007.
Type For the Web
When creating typography for your webpage, you want something that is creative, clean, and doesn’t take away from the overall design of your website. Now that websites are becoming more dynamic, the designs of websites have become more complex and creative. Experimenting with type was usually saved for printing, but websites are becoming more successful in creating type as image and allowing it to work with the website rather then against it. Being able to create a typographical treatment that doesn’t take away from the overall design of a website is key. Some treatments that seem to work well on the web are clean and simple type, cropped, alterations to the type, kerning, and color. Creating type for the web has become very similar to print. So designers shouldn’t feel constricted to the same old boring type treatment.
What’s Out There
What kind of technologies are out there for web development? If you spend the time you can find an endless amount of options. If you can dream it up, you can find some kind of technology or program that will allow you to do it. The use of multiple technologies at once has made most of these options available. HTML and JavaScript can be mixed together with multiple other types of code (ajax, swf, xml, etc) to produce many interesting and interactive features that you find all over the internet. The integration of multiple codes and technologies have allowed developers and designers to create a user experience that is more dynamic.
How Khoi
At the National Design Conference, Khoi Vinh made a very insightful presentation about designing for the web. Khoi does a great job describing what people or users think they want and what they really want. He also does a great job explaining how designers should and do look at design.
Khoi makes a great point in that it’s all about control. The designer wants to have control over what its viewer or audience can do or will do with their design. In web design you cannot always control what your user is doing, because of all the options they have.
Tools developed over the past years have helped designers develop web pages more effectively for their design as well as their client. Web 2.0 has giving the user more control and the designer has gotten more control on how the page is viewed by adding true types that download with the page. All in all the evolution of the web will keep changing and designers will have to continue to change with it. Following the trends and giving the user control while trying to control the user.
I Zag
When you zig…. I Zag. What I really mean is when everyone is doing one thing, I’m trying to find out what’s next. What will make my work different and stand out from everyone else’s. Being different is important in design. Business’s want to stand out and make their product’s stand out from everyone else’s. As a designer, this is your goal.
Designing for Dynamic Media
First of all what is Dynamic Media? I consider dynamic media as using multiple types of interactive media to communicate to your audience. This can include video, sound, and other types of media that will make the user or audience fell like they are part of your intended experience.
Designing for this type of media makes you step back and take a look at more then the design itself. If your design is to complex, you might not communicate with your users. Understanding your audience, where they are from, what they do, their experiences, and what kind of technologies they are using, can effect your design and the type of technologies you will use.
