Web Site Design Considerations
Here are some websites that will help you design your own website! Click on the logo or the link to the left of the description to get to the page described.
Basic Design Principles
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Smashing Magazine is a great website filled with articles, information and help on building your own website. This particular article is great in teaching you about what a user looks for and how they react to things on your page. There are tips on usability, writing, design elements,and testing. The information is organized under separate headings with images and it's easy to find what you're looking for. |
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About.com is full of articles on all sorts of things. This particular page covers Web Design and HTML and contains articles on anything from CSS to the Favicon and fonts. You can easily find anything you're looking for, as on the top of the page you can reorder the list of articles by date or by topic. |
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This site is full of all kinds of articles under headings such as Usability, compatibility, and new pages. They tell the reader what you should and should not do when designing your own site and are all easy to read. |
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If you ever wanted a guide for every step in the process of making a website, this is the site for you! It takes you through all the steps from the initial design on paper to uploading it and maintaining it. |
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Interface Usability
| Alertbox |
The Alertbox Current Issues in Web Usability page holds many articles on the usability topic. Reading through some of the articles (which come out once every other week) will help you with the design process and making sure your design does what it's supposed to do: help the users, not hinder them. |
Compatibility
| Opera Mini |
This is a simulator for the Opera Mini Browser that comes on some cell phones. Keep in mind that not all cell phones can support all of the CSS rules that this one can. Most have to be displayed in plain text with very few colors and very small images, if any at all. |
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Layout
| Eric Meyer |
Eric Meyer is a CSS Guru and has even written popular books on the subject. This page is full of his articles and books, ranging in topics from fonts to tables to colors and debugging code. His writing style is friendly and very easy to read, so it's a great first stop for beginners to find out what CSS can do for their design skills. Check out the rest of his site, too! |
| SitePoint |
This article is definitely long and scanning some areas is recommended, but it will definitely help you with designing the website, from conception to coding, following guidelines on symmetry and balance. Following the advice it gives on many design subjects will ensure your design is great. |
Typography
| AmpSoft Web Design |
Here is a list of 'browser safe fonts'. It gives examples of all the fonts common in all Windows computers and their Mac equivalents. Using these fonts will ensure that the user will see the site the same way you do. At the bottom of this page it even has screenshots of how some of the fonts will look on different computers. |
| Code Style |
This is the survey results showing the most common Windows fonts. It not only states what the font is called but also uses the font to show you what it looks like. This is a great tool to help you decide which font you'd like to use when designing your website. Near the bottom of the page there are links for the Mac and Unix surveys as well as links to pages that split the survey up into separate kinds of fonts (serif, sans-serif, monospace, etc). |
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Content and Organization
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While this page is meant mainly for developers working for Mozilla, it can also teach you more technical things such as file naming rules, subfolders and keeping your code clean. It also gives tips on writing styles and what regular viewers would read and what they'd scan. |
Web Graphics
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This page is all about graphics and how they can both help and hinder your page design. It goes through the separate image types and when to use one over the other, as well as loading times and sizing. It also gives tips on animating the graphics. |
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