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These days, most website design is focused on the improvement and upgrade of existing Websites. As the economy continues to sag, more emphasis has been placed on maintaining what already exists, rather than creating a new one. As a result, productivity, ROI, and other measures of efficiency have found their way into the lexicon of Web design.

This focus on productivity has seen Web site designs go back to basics. With the end user in mind, the prime focus of today’s sites is to offer details or make transactions speedily, basically, and without the distraction of long animated introductions, bombardment of visuals, or multi-hyperlink black holes.

So let’s take a look at the basics of great Web design, as well as some of the current tools and technologies available to assist you in creating powerful, usable Sites. We’ll also look at some concepts that are out there on the bleeding edge of design theory and browser technology, just to maintain you excited all the time!

A work well begun is half completed!

 

In the heady days of the blast, Web designers went straight to page design, building the overall concept and user experience 1 Web page at a time. Only after all the pages were built had been they connected together—the results were normally a chaos.

In today’s world, most Web designers begin by developing a concept just before they create their actual Web pages. Numerous techniques have evolved to assist designers develop a concept, such as wire framing and internet site architecting. In any of these cases, a designer defines a beginning point, then builds out the a variety of parent/child relationships between pages, documents, external links, and so on. In addition, a separate “link framework” can be defined to point to documents or external destinations. And of course, these days, programmatic elements such as dynamic markup language, database connectivity, and Web service support are defined prior to anybody begins to construct any pages.

Like a symphony performance, where the music binds each instrument together in harmony, so a Website’s concept definition binds every participant (graphic designer, copywriter, programmer) together in design harmony. And just as the conductor keeps time and manages the performance, the Web project manager uses this concept definition to coordinate resources, and ensure that the Web project moves via its milestones as scheduled.

Current Web authoring software programs, such as Adobe Go Live, offer Web designers with info architecture, user experience definition, and other design tools. With this type of toolkit, you can architect a much better user experience up front. Regardless of whether you create this roadmap for your self or for a team of graphic artists, designers, and copy editors, a well thought-out site design will guarantee your symphony doesn’t hit any sour notes. The result is that harmony is maintained.

Presentation is the key:

It appears ironic that a communication medium with the potential to supply rich info to billions of individuals revolves around tables. Tables are optimized to display tabular data in rigid boxes defined by height and width—which is great if you’re reading a spreadsheet, but awful if you’re trying to have an interactive experience. Sure, we tried frames for a while, but we all know which way they went. So, just what are designers left with?

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) seem to offer the most promise for unchaining design from the restrictions of tables. Simply put, CSS enables designers to separate the style of data from its structure.

Typographic elements (fonts, sizes, and so forth), colors, and other design elements are divided into a separate set of HTML that is leveraged for all the data on a page, which helps avoid fatter elements such as image maps. CSS is reusable across several pages, which adds to its versatility. CSS Level 2 (CSS2), an upgrade from the original CSS spec that’s been in use for several years now, supplies extra control and functionality such as “@media,” which allows the designer to set particular styles for particular media.

CSS1 took some time to turn into widely adopted simply because there were (and in reality continue to be) browser incompatibility problems associated with the technology. Even though a lot of the difficulties have since been fixed, it is still advisable to complete thorough browser testing prior to deploying your CSS-based design. As for CSS2, well, it’s still new sufficient to suffer from a number of deployment issues, so tread lightly. See HTML Utopia – Designing with out Tables Utilizing CSS, Parts 1 and 2 for the ultimate introduction to this topic.

Another concept of note to the burgeoning Web designer is “liquid tables.” Tables that stretch and shrink give designers considerable creative flexibility, removing the rigid constraints of standard table design. Liquid table design basically works by setting percentages for width and height, instead of specific pixel measurements.

But be cautious—liquid design is a complex technique that demands a designer to account for the users’ screen size as a separate element in a design. Elements such as navigation bars and menus turn out to be a lot more complex simply because a range of placement issues need to be accounted for in the design. Regardless, well-implemented, liquid pages supply designers with a higher level of flexibility

Advantage XML:

XML is in 1 sense a markup language like HTML or PHP. Even so, since tag semantics and tag sets are undefined, rather than fixed, XML is really a “meta-language” for describing other languages that you—the Web designer—defines. To use XML, you write a Document Type Definition (DTD) that describes a series of tags and the elements to be employed with those tags.

 

XML’s flexibility is not only its greatest asset, but also its greatest liability. In order for pc systems to talk to each other making use of XML, they require to share a standard (in the form of a DTD). This invites quite a few coordination problems, specially if different enterprises create diverse standards for the same application. Security is also an problem, specifically for government Web designers, once more due to the fact of the necessity of shared DTDs in order for different systems to communicate together.

Issues aside, there has been a lot of work done around XML, specially by enterprises with critical content management requirements. Small- and middle-market publishers have been aggressively pursuing XML-based workflows that elegantly store data for both print and the Web, and allow for cross-platform sharing of that data. Plus, these homegrown systems contain company rules and other logic that assist with content routing, deadline management, and archiving.

For Web design, extensible Style sheet Language Transformation (XSLT) is of specific interest. It makes it possible for Web designers to define transformations on XML documents and XML-based data, creating presentation structures for end users. XSLT can also support transform XML into non-XML formats, such as HTML. It can work behind the scenes on the Web server or on the client side with much more recent browser updates.

XSLT is still a very complex language that requires some programming sophistication. It has not been well incorporated into visual design tools, either. And sadly, today’s browsers don’t fully support direct XML rendering, so most XML-based Sites still will need to transform that XML back to HTML for optimum compatibility. However, as design applications and browsers grow a lot more sophisticated; expect to see a lot more support for both XML and XSLT.

Browsing Experience:

Every Web designer has his/her experience of trouble shooting while browsing. In spite of this, the number of browsers continues to grow — Safari and Opera are two of the most recent entries.

Fundamentally, though, the end user experience remains unchanged from years past. Content and data are presented in a window, and requests for other pages or data are made through this window. Browsers also continue to be thin-client in nature, requiring the Web servers on the other end to do most of the heavy code parsing just before they present outcomes to a user.

If you really want to glimpse the future, take into account events taking location at the extreme fringe of browser concepts. Here you will find applications that break the window metaphor and use visualizations, spider-Web imagery, and other non-standard elements to guide a user to data or a destination. Some of the far more fascinating concepts consist of the Ambulator, the DataCloud, and the Webstalker.

These ideas have a lot of possible, as the standard PC/monitor interface ages rapidly and the proliferation of wireless devices and wireless connectivity force the design community to deal with a myriad of new presentation platforms.

The next step:

As you approach Web site design, ask yourself the following questions:

Can my users get to their desired details in two clicks?
Are my visuals distracting or helpful?
What technologies are appropriate and not overkill?
Do my users know where they are within the Site at all times?
Can users get back to the front/property page with 1 click?
Is my content accessible to disabled users?

This list is straightforward sufficient, but many Internet sites continue to violate these basic rules–and frustrate users in the method. Remember, your competitor’s Site is only 1 click away, so removing these lacunas will keep your visitors stick to your internet site.

Attractive Design Sells:

The boom years distracted many from excellent design techniques as we had been lead astray by a rash of new technologies and competitive fervor.

In todays much more competitive and focused design world, the provision of clean, crisp information and interaction design leads to greater productivity on the design side and a far better user experience on the client side. Plus, design applications have improved over time, incorporating numerous sophisticated features that enable designers to optimize their creativity, even though keeping the programmatic side in check. What’s a lot more, these tools are no longer accused of writing “bloated” code—something that has in the past plagued these applications.

There are still many emerging technologies, a growing number of presentation platforms, and some lingering issues in today’s browsers, but it boils down to this — great design is very good company.