webpage design philosophy

ID:154591
 
Dec 13 2000, 10:47 am
I'm taking this in IT right now, so don't think I'm ragging on you or anything. A lot of these principles I knew already... some I didn't, though! =)

There are several principles to adhere to when you are making an effective webpage design; they are:

  • Alignment:
Human eyes are much more adept at appreciating information when it is rigidly presented. When something is aligned centrally, it loses its professionalism and it appears lax.

One should always bump text away from the immediate left edge of the screen; if text is too close, it appears that it might fall off.

Stick with one alignment! Centred headers and left aligned text looks out of place. But if you have it all centred, it works pretty good for a homepage.


  • Grouping:
Like elements should be near each other. If a variety of information is presented close together, persons viewing your page have difficulty distinguishing between them (through no fault of their own; it's a tendency of the human mind to break up large lists into groups of five, just to be able to comprehend it... it's a lot easier if you help their minds out).


  • Repetition:
Everything should look like it belongs to the same whole; even if pages look nice individually, if they don't have similar elements they look as though a lot of different designers sat in a lot of different rooms and couldn't talk to each other.


  • Contrast:
Text on a page must be VISIBLE. That means very bright colours on very deep colours, or vice versa. Get rid of boxes around tables. Put unimportant multimedia elements off to a subordinate and small position (eg. MIDI players, etc. should be small and unapparent).


  • Punctuation and Spelling:
For Heck's sake, it only takes a few minutes! Go over everything you've done, and check, recheck, and re-recheck! Even the slightest typo can remoev the strenth from a sentense.
Dec 13 2000, 11:24 am
On 12/13/00 1:47 pm Spuzzum wrote:
One should always bump text away from the immediate left edge of the screen; if text is too close, it appears that it might fall off.


I am doing a bunch of NPC dialogue right now, and this has really been hitting me. The text is right up against the left, and it's pretty annoying to read.

Dantom, I'm wondering if there's any ability to add a 3-5 pixel buffer on the left side...
Dec 13 2000, 11:32 am
In response to Deadron
On 12/13/00 2:24 pm Deadron wrote:
On 12/13/00 1:47 pm Spuzzum wrote:

Dantom, I'm wondering if there's any ability to add a 3-5 pixel buffer on the left side...

Good point. I'll look into that.
Dec 13 2000, 2:47 pm
In response to Deadron
On 12/13/00 2:24 pm Deadron wrote:
On 12/13/00 1:47 pm Spuzzum wrote:
One should always bump text away from the immediate left edge of the screen; if text is too close, it appears that it might fall off.

I am doing a bunch of NPC dialogue right now, and this has really been hitting me. The text is right up against the left, and it's pretty annoying to read.

Dantom, I'm wondering if there's any ability to add a 3-5 pixel buffer on the left side...

I might like the ability to set left and/or right margins too. (Though right now I'd settle for tab stops!)

And I am wondering if anyone knows how to set just the left and right margins (or border padding in one frame) on a web page. Or just the top and bottom margins.

Z
Dec 14 2000, 4:30 pm
Don't forget bandwidth.

If target audience uses 56k modems to connect, there's nothing worse than to make them wait ten minutes for your banner/imagemap/graphics to load before any of the site is available.

I ran into that yesterday trying to find out if a site had information on Baldur's Gate 2 which I might find usefull and I timed it... it took 14 minutes for the java to load and during this time nothing else on the site was available. As soon as it loaded, the scroll browse expanded four pages of news articles and the navigation script became available. I can only connect at 26.4k at home. DSL, Cable, ISDN, etc are not available (ISDN is available for $200/mo which is unreasonable to me). Except for a few locations, most of the US is in the same boat I am!
Dec 14 2000, 6:00 pm
In response to Gabriel
On 12/14/00 7:30 pm Gabriel wrote:
Don't forget bandwidth.

Heh! I'd better tell my teacher that! ;-)

If target audience uses 56k modems to connect, there's nothing worse than to make them wait ten minutes for your banner/imagemap/graphics to load before any of the site is available.

Indeed, I knew that, but I wasn't thinking about it at the time. Most webpages that I make load in about 15 seconds, tops, unless they're long manuals, in which case they take longer, but you still get to read as you go along.