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How to Define Goals Before Designing a Website
Developing a professional-grade website is a big undertaking; its complexities are not to be taken lightly. With so many moving parts, people to wrangle, and steps involved ,you have to approach the madness [more…]
The First Steps of Website Design
When you buy or receive toys labeled “some assembly required,” you know you’re in for a brain-twisting treat. The design phase of a website is your chance to write the instruction manual for the team before [more…]
The Development Phase of Web Design
In the Development phase of web design, all video, audio, Flash animation, and graphics are prepared for the web: They’re compressed to speed up their travel across the web, saved in a web-friendly format [more…]
The Deployment of a Website Design
Just because the web is a flexible publishing medium, don’t be tempted to throw the site online and just fix any problems after it’s live to the public. Users [more…]
Web Design: How to Create a Sitemap
The outline you create for your website directly translates into your sitemap. The sitemap helps you visualize the structure of a website — its information architecture [more…]
Web Design: The Basics of Wireframing
A wireframe is a diagram view of a website page that uses simple shapes and text elements to show page structure, content, and navigation. You can use a program such as Illustrator or InDesign to build [more…]
Web Design: How to Create Clickable Wireframes
Early in the process of building a website, clients need to understand how the site is organized. Wireframes (detailed black-and-white drawings of each major web page) show what goes on the page, how the [more…]
Testing Methodology for Redesigning a Website
When you're building a new website or redesigning a website, you'll want to take the time to standardize your testing methodology. By standardizing on one testing methodology, you have a more accurate [more…]
Web Design: Color, Type and Graphic Elements
To create an effective website, you have to follow basic design principles for blending color, type, and graphics. You must also use your webpage space efficiently to achieve a layout that’s not too crowded [more…]
Use Grid System Layouts on Your Website
To help you lay out your website, set up a grid that you can use to align graphics, text, and HTML elements. A grid can be anything you like — a three-column layout, two horizontal sections, or a page [more…]
Establish Visual Priority on Your Website
If you're designing a new website for a client, this client may be so close to the subject matter that he can't decide which things are the most important on a website. Their inclination is to make everything [more…]
How to Use White Space in Your Web Design
Web pages that have tons of stuff packed into every nook and cranny make the page difficult to read and don’t give the eye a chance to rest. When building a web-page layout, always plan for some open space [more…]
Web Design: How to Establish a Design Style
After the design for a website is approved, it’s a good idea to establish a visual style guide that governs the color palette, font usage, and graphical treatments. Developing a style guide first — or [more…]
Use Legible Text to Design Your Website
Whether a website uses graphic or HTML text, reading text on the computer screen can be uncomfortable on the eye: You squint from the glare while trying to read the small text. You can minimize the torture [more…]
How to Choose Fonts for Your Website
Some fonts don't work well on websites. Unfortunately, too many fonts exist these days for you to find a complete listing of which ones do and which ones don’t. Also, it’s important to understand that [more…]
The Types of Text Display on a Website
The website you’re building may contain two types of text: graphic text (which is really just an image) and HTML text (which is either in the HTML code or coming from a database). HTML text is also called [more…]
Web Design: Using External and Internal Style Sheets in CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) technology allows you to define a set of font styles, which you can use consistently throughout your website. For example, imagine that you’re designing a large website and [more…]
Using the RGB Color System to Design a Website
When building a website for a client, odds are the client will want you to match, exactly, the colors they use in their logo and other branded material. The secret to all the colors you see on your computer [more…]
Web Design: Reduce Image Size by Limiting Colors
Although a computer’s RGB system is capable of mixing over 16 million different colors, the monitor is not always capable of displaying all these colors. Also, an image that contains all these colors can [more…]
Web Design: Be Mindful of Monitor Color Depth
A computer monitor has to work hard to display all the colors contained in a 24-bit image on a website. Some older or inexpensive monitors, and some devices, simply don’t have enough video memory [more…]
Web Design: Use the Hexadecimal Color Code to Match Colors
When you specify colors in HTML or CSS code in web design, you don’t use their RGB numbers. Instead, you use something called a hexadecimal code. For example, plain old white is 255,255,255 in RGB, but [more…]
Web Design: Why Image and Monitor Resolution Matters
If you’ve ever watched a movie on your computer or on a high-definition TV, you can really notice the difference in detail compared to a standard TV. This is because HDTVs and computer monitors have a [more…]
Web Design: Understanding Bitmaps and Vector Graphics
All the graphics you encounter on the web are either bitmap or vector graphics. The basic difference between the two is how they’re drawn on your screen. This simple detail affects everything from image [more…]
Software Used in Creating Comps and Websites
Before you begin designing a website, you should become familiar with the industry standard web-graphic software tools. While there are a number of tools on the market that may be more suited to the weekend [more…]
Explore Design Resources When Building a Website
When you sit down to explore different web-design directions, you’re not on your own when it comes to tracking down the assets and resources you’ll need to complete your designs. A number of online design [more…]
