In today’s time-crunched world, most people literally don’t have a minute to spare. This hurried pace extends to the realm of website design — your professional Web design must satisfy the demands of users with a wide range of options for viewing the Web.
Even if you create a website design that’s worth a wait, visitors faced with slow download speed aren’t likely to stick around. So how can you make sure that time is on your side? Pay close attention to seven professional Web design tips to create a website that won’t slow your business down.
Clean up your code
While HTML text is much faster than graphic text, there are ways you can make it even faster. Watch out for extraneous HTML coding like spaces, unnecessary tags and even white space — that can increase the size of your files. Remember that less is more, and use defaults for tags or remove them wherever possible.
Compress your images
Images are a great example of how looks can be deceiving in professional Web design. You might not realize just how much space they occupy when you create a website design. By compressing your images before adding them to your professional Web design, you can reduce/shrink a GIF or .JPEG image by up to half its original size. You may also want to specify the height and weight of your images in your HTML, which can decrease loading time.
Pay attention to page size
Even if you use all of the tips above, your page size may still be big enough to cause a slow response when all the pieces of your website are put together. Remember that less is often more in professional Web design, and use only the content that is absolutely necessary. Ideal page size is around 30KB.
Use thumbnails
Thumbnails are an especially helpful website design technique for ecommerce websites. Provide customers with a small, fast-loading image of your product and let them decide whether they want to view the larger version of the image.
Limit use of flash
Flash is a classic example of style over substance and, while it definitely has its place in professional Web design, it must be used sparingly when you create a website. Even if your visitors have the right flash player (and many won’t), it will increase your site’s download time. Flash is also one of the Web site design elements that is not yet accessible to search engines, which means it can only hinder your search engine optimization efforts.
Reduce server requests
Any element of your design that loads from a different server whether it be a graphic, an audio clip, or an ad will elicit an HTTP request each time the page loads. Create a website with limited external content to reduce loading time.
Switch to CSS
Many Web designers now use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) instead of the more traditional table layout. CSS is a styling language that has a dual purpose in professional Web design: it can save you time when you create a website and save your visitors time by drastically reducing page size and download time.
When you create a website design for your business, go the extra mile to ensure your website has the speed your visitors need — or risk getting passed by.
Tag: CSS
How to Design a professional Web Site ….be simple!
It’s hard to find information on how to be a designer You can easily find loads of stuff in books or online to inspire you about beautiful graphics, and plenty of technical know-how on CSS, HTML and code. But if you want to find out how to be a web designer, structure a site that succeeds, decide on layout and craft pages that work, there are very few resources available.
Simple solutions are always the best.
The goals of each web design can vary greatly from one project to the next, but we should always strive for efficiency and simplicity. This will deliver a cleaner result that facilitates accurate communication with less margin for error. It also takes less work to make something simple than it does to make something complex. When crafting a web page, We aim to use as few -things- as I need to achieve the purpose. -Things- includes pages, words, pictures, choices, gradients, borders, boxes, graphics, columns etc. etc.. This helps make each step seem more obvious and feel easy.
This approach isn’t new. Economy has always been one of the core disciplines in Art and in Design. The Old Masters were masters of economy. Look at the brush strokes on an old painting, and you’ll see how much people achieved with so few strokes. It’s not that they didn’t have the talent, or the time, to do more strokes, it’s just that they knew that using as few strokes of the brush as possible to create the desired effect produces the best result. Using rougher strokes on areas like backgrounds or material on clothing helped the eye to focus on the finer detail.
The same goes for web design. While your mode of interaction with a web site is very different to a painting, a lot of the principles that artists have used for centuries can apply to any medium. Web designers should follow the same discipline to apply only as much detail as is necessary, putting it where it’s most needed, to manage viewers’ attention.
Our experience, along with a great passion for art and design, are the right and ideal solution to understand and meet your web requirements.
Ideen & label studios, Web Design Milano! Born to help you improve your business ! Visit us on www.ideeenlabel.com
Web Design
Fantastic And Creative Web Design Styles www.guidedcreative.com Recently, my department was tasked with a goal that left a few of us filled with a bit of anxiety (as it does most teachers when asked to take on this task)-our goal for the new year is to create or revise an online teaching portfolio. While most teachers are expected to have a completed portfolio they can call up at a moment’s notice, that portfolio is generally in print form and lacks the interactivity that is possible with today’s technology. So, I was excited to tackle this project and expand my already existing mini-portfolio to a full-fledged site with samples, student work, videos, images, and lesson plans.
George David Clark of The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses three tips for a successful portfolio in his 2012 article on the subject. According to Clark, in developing a portfolio, a teacher should focus on organizing to minimize By providing the target audience with a clear organizational structure and cutting content that doesn’t web developers support that structure, a teacher can ensure that one clear message regarding theory and approach to instruction is being communicated. In addition, a strong teaching portfolio should clearly chart a teacher’s development and maturation as a professional. Finally, Clark suggests focusing on the student as a measurement of success.
Christmas is coming and we should think how to cheer up yourself or your design related friends and I came up with list where I included all bestsellers and the most popular and recommended design related books I could find. I am reading slowly through these books myself and I plan to review and feature them in future one by one! Of course in blogosphere you can find endless articles you could read,but what’s great with books – books have very clean and detailed content structure explaining and teaching you everything point by point slowly and clearly!
With a swift and convincing stroke, the authors of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web tear down many entrenched ideas about web designers london . Flashy animations are cool, they agree, as long as they don’t aggravate the viewer. Nifty clickable icons are nice, but are their meanings universal? Is the search engine providing results that are useful and relevant? This book acts as a mirror and with careful questioning causes the reader to think through all the elements and decisions required for well-crafted Web design. -Jennifer Buckendorff -This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Standards, argues Jeffrey Zeldman in Designing With Web Standards, are our only hope for breaking out of the endless cycle of testing that plagues designers hoping to support all possible clients. In this book, he explains how designers can best use standards-primarily XHTML and CSS, plus ECMAScript and the standard Document Object Model (DOM)-to increase their personal productivity and maximize the availability of their creations. Zeldman’s approach is detailed, authoritative, and rich with historical context, as he is quick to explain how features of standards evolved. It’s a fantastic education that any design professional will appreciate. more information
Specificity & Cascade Rule Css External, Internal, Inline Style Sheets
External Style Sheet:
Enter Following Code between HEAD tags of web page.
eg. Available Continued Link
This will links to your .css file once you define your path.
NOTE:
(Site Editor does not allow CSS Code but can view Article Continued Link)
eg. @import method – use within the STYLE tags:
Available Continued Link
eg. import file within a CSS style sheet: @import
Available Continued Link
(NOTE: @import rule must come before all other content in .css (comments included) or .css may not load properly)
(Efficient; global changes for large web sites can occur automatically by altering only one file. Ensures a consistent look, easier maintenance, improved flexibility for updating, saves download times (style sheet is cached, net weight of page decreases).
Internal Styles are EMBEDDED within HEAD tags using STYLE tags
eg. Available Continued Link
(NOTE: Styles within this method SUPERSEDE styles in External Sheets).
(Increases load time but useful if testing pages; saves time)
(NOTE: The More Specific Rule between internal and external style sheets WINS the SPECIFICITY contest).
Inline Style Attribute:
Code is entered within tags using the XHTML style attribute (this case paragraph tags).
eg. p tags Available Continued Link
(Inline styles have the highest priority, HOWEVER keep in mind this could interfere with the Cascade Rule. Benefit; quick to alter one-off or less occurring situations). This method mixes content with presentation losing many of the advantages of style sheets.
The Cascade Rule influences the flow down effect of the CSS selectors with a Weight or Order of importance assisting browsers to interpret hierarchy of selectors to parse. Basically it Resolves conflict between selectors.
Specificity (determines how specific a CSS rule is) it’s determined by ID attribute count, how many pseudo-classes are in the selector, and number of element names in the selector.
The rule coded last takes precedence if two+ style rules are considered equal in specificity.
Specificity is calculated by ranking selectors; Inline Selector TOP > NEXT ID’s Selector > THEN classes/pseudo class Selectors > LAST Tag Elements/pseudo elements (CSS 2.1). Calculation represented in this fashion 0-0-1-1 (the higher number wins specificity race).
Remember Inline Styles take Precedence over ALL.
COMPLETE ARTICLE Includes Specificity Calculation Continued Authors Link
Advantages Of Tableless Websites
HTML was originally designed as a semantic markup language intended for sharing scientific documents and research papers online. However, as the Internet expanded from the academic and research world into the mainstream in the mid 1990s, and became more media oriented, graphic designers sought ways to control the visual appearance of the Web pages presented to end users. To this end, tables and spacers have been used to create and maintain page layout.
Problems then started to arise from the use of these techniques. As many webpages are build with tables nested within tables, this resulted in large HTML documents which use more bandwidth than documents with simpler formatting. With slower performance, the internet slowly begun to decline and the Web development industry shrank. Because of this, several UI development was carried out by coders with greater knowledge of good coding practice. It was around this time that many became critical of messy coding practices and the idea of tableless design began to grow.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were developed to improve the separation between design and content, and move back towards a semantic organization of content on the Web. According to popular Web design outsourcing Philippiness companies, the term “tableless design implies the use of CSS to position HTML elements on the page but it should be noted that tables and CSS are not mutually exclusive. Many experienced HTML coders use CSS to manipulate tables frequently.
Advantages
There are several advantages through the use of tableless websites, these includes:
Accessibility
As a result of the separation of design (CSS) and structure (HTML), it is also possible to provide different layouts for different devices, e.g. handhelds, mobile phones, etc. According to different Web design outsourcing Philippiness companies, it is also possible to specify a different style sheet for print, e.g. to hide or modify the appearance of advertisements or navigation elements that are irrelevant and a nuisance in the printable version of the page.
Maintainability
In tableless layout using CSS, virtually all of the layout information resides in one place: the CSS document. Because the layout information is centralized, these changes can be made quickly and globally by default. The HTML files themselves do not, usually, need to be adjusted when making layout changes. If they do, it is usually to add class-tags to specific markup elements or to change the grouping of various sections with respect to one another.
Bandwidth Efficient
Clever implementation of tableless design can produce web pages with fewer HTML tags thus reducing page download times. According to web design consultants and Web design outsourcing Philippiness companies, using external style sheets to position page elements means more mark up language may be cached and further reduce download times for subsequent pages using the same resources.