What to keep in mind when Designing - October 23rd, 2008

When designing a new template for a website, there are many point one should keep in mind. By following these from the very beginning, you can be sure your half way to a perfect design.

  • Try to code in <div>’s only
    This will reduce the size of your page greatly
  • For usability purposes, always keep the main navigation in sight
  • Design for all resolutions
    With technology moving fast, screen resolutions are on the increase, rapidly!
  • The BIG HEADACHE
    …make sure it’s compatible with IE6
  • When building the template, keep everything to web standards
    i.e. Make sure it validates
  • Look for inspiration
    Look at all the top sites in the world and you will realise that most have a very simple and clean layout. Very minimum use of images.
  • If it’s going to be a static site, use simple PHP to code a master template.
  • Keep SEO in mind right from the first day.
    Trust me, otherwise, it will prove to be a major problem later on.

By following these simple steps, you can be sure to have a well built design, that will surely get noticed (As long as the actual design is good looking) by both users and search engines.

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3d Spiral Flash Gallery Component - October 21st, 2008

As a designer I’m seeing a current trend for xml based flash galleries and this is just one of them. By using flash an xml file can be scanned to find the urls of all the images you wish to implement. It may also be a different way of showing your website gallery, for instance compiling all your image urls within your website to be displayed like an image archive.

3d spiral is a flash gallery component that displays images interactively in 3D. The application is fully customisable allowing the designer to obtain different layouts by altering the height and width of the spiral. The viewer can navigate the spiral using the difference axis of the mouse navigating freely through the spiral.

This is just one of many out there, so keep searching for latest versions and better competitors!

S.Whiston Web Designer.

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