|
[Slashdot community deals with site design]
"Too often, people get too gadgety when they design software. Keep it as simple and as direct as the functionality and purpose of the site allows you to. Gimmicks are worthless. The best web designs get out of the way and promote the presentation of their content. Once you've taken into account the structure of your content, half the battle is over."
"There is no such thing as good web design. There is only good user design. Who are you users? What do they want to accomplish by visiting your site? What do you want them to accomplish on your site? Once you answer those questions you'll be in a position to make some decisions about a design that compliments your goals."
"There's a huge split. If you ask the "Slashdot Community" what makes good web design, you'll hear... a lot of noise.
There's the progress camp:
www.webstandards.org [webstandards.org], that wants everyone to upgrade their browsers and live on the bleeding edge of style sheets (how ironic is it that their bleeding edge stance has been replaced with an "under construction" sign).
Then there's the compatibility camp:
anybrowser.org [anybrowser.org] that wants every web page to work in the old browsers.
There are probably a few things everyone can agree on, like Flash being worthless at best and extremely annoying most of the time.
Personally, I say: look at the successful dynamic sites. Google, Yahoo, Slashdot. Light HTML, very light images, strong dynamic backend. Don't get too caught up in the format details; it's the power of what's driving the web page, and the content, that matters."
"
- Content is King - good presentation will bring in viewers, but good content will bring them in again and again.
- Cross-platform - don't rely on obscure plug-ins, Microsoft extensions or other technology that will unnecessarily limit your audience. Preview the growing website with multiple platforms.
- Intuitive Interface - frustration at not being able to navigate a site easily will drive away users."
"1. World Wide Web Consortium is thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods.
2. Flash is evil, and of the devil. Flash is blaspemy.
3. Javascript can be useful for on-page functions that don't necessarily require a server call, but remember your page still still fundamentally work with no javascript enabled.
4. Images should be used for illustrative purposes, not to show you found a neat image and *never* as a background.
5. Images should be small and reduced to webpage resolutions.
6. Content shouldn't be laborous to read. Black on white text is the best, but at least always make sure to use contrasting colors.
7. Style sheets should always be used (see number 1) but make sure that necessary style pairings (such as colored tables and the text within) are defined in the same scope. A page-declared table color and text/css file declared table text color could cause problems if your style sheet file doesn't load.
8. Design for non-compliant brower protocols *only* if your business depends on it. Private sites should *always* be written to the HTML specs (see #1) all browsers be damned.
9. Do not covet they neighbors hyperlinks. Links should be used in *context* and not in a random listing. Don't say "you can find a link about greyhound adoption *here*." Instead, write either "There is a lot of information about *greyhound adoption*" or "*Greyhound Puppies Inc* has a lot of information about greyhound adoption." All of this results in a page more useable by non-traditional browsers. (see number 1)
10. If you change the color of links, you should make sure that the default colors (blue, purple, red) will show up on your site. Another reason not to use picture backgrounds. Also, don't ever *ever* reverse the color scheme... cool (blue-like) colors for unvisited links, purple or red-like (hot) colors for visited links."
"Of course, content is king. But one of the tradeoffs is always nice graphics vs. load time.
To some extent, you can have your cake and eat it too- a fair number of graphics, as well as a page that displays quickly if you always use the "height" and "width" attributes in your IMG tags to manually specifiy the dimensions of your graphic. This way, the user's browser can go ahead and render the rest of the page quickly before the graphics are downloaded since you've alreay told it how big that image will be.
This is potentially a HUGE gain in the perceived load time for your site. I hate waiting for a bunch of graphics to load, but if I can start reading the page while the graphics load in the background I don't really mind." ... [more]
1:22:54 PM 
|
