Web Designing Tip____________________by amirul nath

1. Keep your goal in mind

Too often, people forget why the site they're designing is being put up. The purpose of
designing a site carefully is not to make it look cool, or win awards. It's to accomplish the
intended goal of the site. If you're making a site for a company, sometimes the goal is
simply to distribute information about the firm. Often, however, the real goal is to sell or
advertise some product of the company. Obviously, the structure and design of the site
would have to vary greatly depending on which of these two objectives was viewed as
the primary one. Note, however, that you usually will have more than one goal in
building a site.

Before starting a project, carefully write down a statement of the goals of the site. How
do you know what your goals are? Simple. Ask your client. If you're your own client, ask
yourself what you would say if you contracted the project to an outside firm. This is
critical to keeping everyone in the project directed and satisfied with the outcome. It also
provides a constructive basis for design decisions during the project. When you're in the
middle of a long term project, it gets too easy to forget why you're doing it. Having a
clearly stated goal goes a long way towards resolving this issue, and can often settle
design arguments in a way that both sides agree with.

2. Design sites, not pages

Although you spend most of your time worrying about pages, rather than the site as a
whole, your primary concern should be the site's overall design. When starting to design a
new site from scratch, you should try to create a design that will make sense to users, has
a consistent look and feel, and is not to difficult to extend in the future.

Using a consistent page design across a site can seem "boring" or "uncreative" at first.
Stay with it. The consistency of design of a site is one of the factors that differentiates
amateur sites from professional ones. Yes, at times you may end up with individual pages
that are not as satisfying as they might have been had you designed them individually.
But your site will have a consistent look across all pages that will allow users to know
immediately when they enter your site, and that will help them remember your site as
well.

Designing on the site level also means that your work becomes far easier for others to
extend. Don't expect to always be the person working on a site - most of a site's life is
maintenance, rather than design. If you can create a site with a well defined and codified
page structure, you will enable people with less experience and design savvy to work on
updating and extending the site. This is critical if you want to go on to creating other
sites, and your customers will appreciate it greatly when they are faced with updating
their site.
3. Never Design in HTML

This may sound ridiculous. But it's absolutely true. When the time comes to design pages,
ditch your HTML editor and pick up a pad and pencil. If you can't draw, use Quark,
Pagemaker, Illustrator or Freehand. The last thing you ever want to do is initially design
your pages in HTML. While HTML is a great transmission medium, it is a miserable
design environment. Simple things such as tables, columns and alignment take far too
long to play with, and you get lazy about trying different designs out. By drawing your
prototype, or using a mature design program, you ensure that the only obstacle to your
designing a great page is your own imagination.

When you design in HTML, you end up with pages that look like every other page
designed in HTML. You shouldn't arrive at a design simply because it's easy to do in
HTML, or it's something you know how to do. You should want to create in HTML a
design your envisioned without considering the messy reality of HTML. Using HTML
3.0, just about anything is possible... it's just not necessarily easy. Solving the problems
of expressing a design in HTML are trivial - once you already know exactly what your
design should be.

Some of my best designs were done sitting in the sun with a pad and pencil. Wouldn't you
rather do that then sit in front of the computer fighting with HTML??? So even if you
don't believe me, give it a try. At the worst, you'll get to sit in the sun for an hour.

4. Write down your design

When was the last time you wrote down exactly what you did in order to produce that
great header on top of your HTML page? And when was the last time you sat there
cursing under your breath because you couldn't remember how to make a new header to
match that old one? I'm betting the latter happened a bit more recently.

When you create that great design that is going to be the centerpiece of your site, write
down how you did it! Write down anything that you can't extract later. This includes
typefaces (font, font size, leading, spacing, attributes, etc.), graphical effects (how many
pixels was the gaussian blur on the drop shadow?), and anything else you might forget.

A corollary of this is to always save a copy of what you created in Photoshop from the
point before you flattened the image. Save a copy in Photoshop format with all the layers,
etc intact. This is a lot of critical information being saved, as well as preserving
separately graphic elements you might need later on.

5. Go for consistency

I've already discussed this somewhat, but it's so important I'm going to repeat myself.
Consistency is paramount! Your goal should be to create a site where a user, if he or she
has ever been on any other part of the site, instantly knows they're on the site when any
other section loads into their browser. This doesn't mean all the pages have to look the
same. But the structure and metaphors used in the site should be consistent throughout. If
every section is totally different, you probably haven't really created a "site" - you've
created a bunch of little tiny isolated sites. Guess which one is better for users....

6. Templates, templates, templates...

A bit benefit of having a consistent, well thought out site design is that you can use
templates for the HTML of your pages. These are simply files with the basic HTML tags,
including common graphic elements such as navigation bars and site logos, already in
place. Usually, you'll need to create several of these for a site - say one for section pages
(which have a list of content pages) and one for content pages.

To create an actual page, you simply make a copy of a template and stick in the content
particular to that page between the existing HTML. Not only does this approach save a
significant amount of time and effort, but it also reduces HTML errors. Also, it means
that someone other than the lead page designer can be responsible for the creation of site
pages, without the designer being worried about major errors in the design of pages.

On a side note, users of BBEdit 4.0 can use a function included in the text editor to turn
any prototype document into a template. Simply select Extensions >> HTML
Debugging >> Format >> Document Skeleton to produce a template. This can also be
accessed by pressing CTRL-OPTION-CMD-F and selecting the Document Skeleton
option.

7. See it like a user

Just because you're using a 2000x1500 screen with 16 gazillion colors and T3 connection
to the Internet, don't expect your users to. If your site isn't easy to view for end users,
you've failed to achieve your goal, regardless of how cool your design is. The average
user has a 640x480 screen, 14.4 or 28.8 modem, and often as little a 256 color video.
Even if they do have an ISDN or T1 connection, they'll still appreciate a site that loads
fast and gets them where they want to go in as few clicks as possible.

Part of this is using clever design to reduce the download size of pages. Every time you
can reduce the size of a graphic, you've moved closer to making the perfect site. This
doesn't mean you should be using tiny little unreadable graphics - far from it. It means
that when you do choose to use a graphic, you should be making the best use of the
download time. If you have to create graphic with large areas of white space, step back
and consider what you're doing - there is something fundamentally inefficient going on.

Consistency (here we go again) can also help speed users through a site. If you use a
graphic over and over (say a logo or nav bar) it adds content to pages without increasing
download time. This is because once a user downloads a graphic, it stays in their cache
and the browser doesn't need to download it again. For this to work, make sure they're
accessing the same file or URL for the image, not just the same graphic.
8. Ask your users what they see

By asking your users what they see, I don't mean simply putting up a comment form on
your site. You need to go out and proactively research how your users perceive the site.
Ask friends to check out the site, then grill them on what they thought about it. Ask them
to be honest. This can be valuable input on what improvements are needed. Often, users
can be thrown by things such as confusing hierarchies, unclear icons, or other things a
designer might never see as problem areas.

Here's a easy example of the kind of stuff I'm talking about. When you're choosing icons
for a site, take the graphics, and print them out, without any labels or text on them.
Photocopy them and give them to a couple of people who don't know what the icons
symbolize on your site. Ask the users to write down what they think the icons might
symbolize on a web site. (Don't ask them to specify this for your web site - have them do
it for any web site.) If more than half the answers for a particular icon are right, you're
probably OK. If not, it's time to go back to hunting through those clip art files for a new
icon.

9. Content is king

In the end, all the design you do on a site is worthless if the content isn't there for users.
Make sure you have good content, and that it's accessible for users. If this requires you
forgo some design resources in order to provide more content, do so. If a user comes to
your site, and finds the content they want, they'll probably forgive any minor design
flaws. But if the content isn't there, what reason do they ever have to come back,
regardless of how "cool" the design is?

Yes, design is important, and only with both good design and good content can you have
a truly great site. But don't ever sacrifice content on the altar of good design. You may be
happier with your design as a result, but what does that matter if there aren't any users to
see your great design?

10. Don't link for the heck of it

Finally, a lighter tip to remember. Just because you can link, doesn't mean you should
link. Hypermedia can be extremely confusing for users. Putting in many, many links
doesn't help users find what they need. It's important to link in a consistent, well thought
out manner that users can learn to navigate. If your linking is intelligent, it will allow
users to "see" the path ahead of them when navigating to content. Don't make your site a
maze of links - instead, make it like the supermarket, where content is organized and
categorized in intelligent ways, making it easy for users to find that tidbit they're craving
without wandering the aisles endlessly.

Hope you found these tips useful. I've called them tips because that's what they are - not
rules, but tips. If you find some or all of them useful, go with them. If not, do what you
find works best!