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06.24.05
Custom Web Site Design Strategies
 By Nathan Drew Sire
Web site design has certainly, in the past decade, evolved tremendously.
More clients now are demanding custom design, as opposed to the 'cookie
cutter' sites of yesteryear.
Where once there existed a limit as to the types of fonts used,
the types of coding languages used, and the styles themselves, there
is now the possibility for more variety in Web site design than
ever before. This has come about because of the advances in technology
that did not exist even a few years ago, and it has opened up many
creative avenues for Web site designers in the creation of custom
designs.
Web development overall, has to be more competitive, and take into
consideration the needs of clients now, when literally billions
of Web sites compete for attention online on a daily basis. A Web
site is the first impression the owner of an E-commerce business
makes on their own potential clients, and the competition factor,
has now led to the burgeoning of more creative designs and implementations
to deal with this competition factor.
Web development now needs to speak to the needs not only of the
clients that are building the Web site, but the needs of the visitors
who are, overall "potential prospects' of the Web site owners.
E-commerce needs have created some rather unique approaches to
Web development, from the most beautiful to the most garish, unfortunately.
In an attempt to have their own E-commerce sites 'noticed', some
business owners have become too individualistic, and there does
abound many sites that are not easily navigable, nor especially
pleasing to the eye. A Web designer needs to use good judgment when
making choices about how much is 'too much' individuality.
Web site designers can avoid the pitfalls of becoming overly creative,
and yet do much now to make a client's site, very appealing and
eye-catching by keeping a few simple rules in mind:
A. Are the colors pleasing to most visitors, without being garish
and hard to view?
B. Are the fonts easily read by most visitors, which means not too
large (too much scrolling), or too small, (too much squinting)?
C. Is the navigation and usability of the site what it can be?
Can visitors find features easily?
D. Is the site clean and uncluttered? It should never look like
your grandmother's attic, where thirty years of junk abounds in
every corner!
At the same time, the E-commerce functionality can be maintained
with advanced creativity, as navigability and usability can be implemented
flawlessly also. The new advances in technology now have led to
the following changes that increase the ability to improve creativity:
1. A staggering number of font sizes that can be flawlessly implemented
to distinguish a site. Up until just a few years ago, Web masters
were limited in the choice of fonts, and font sizes. Times New Roman
and Arial were the two standard fonts used, as some browsers could
not effectively display other fonts with any reliability, changing
fonts that were not Times New Roman and Arial into the Sans Serif,
which is not all that attractive. This was a big deterrent to the
creative use of fonts. With new embedding technologies, this is
no longer a real problem, and many designers are now using great
new fonts that make a site 'stand out' effortlessly.
2. Original layouts can be more easily implemented due to the emergence
of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) technology. Prior to CSS, it took
much work (and therefore much money) to create designs with 'punch'
as every design demanded hours upon hours of work with HTML (Hypertext
Markup Language), the old standard for writing and creating custom
designs. CSS has freed Web designers from these restrictions, and
of course, saves clients a great deal of money spent on man hours,
leading more clients to demand great looking custom designs.
3. Navigation and usability have also increased, once the restrictions
were lifted from the creation and development of custom sites. Oddly
enough, for some reason, many years ago, it was thought 'common knowledge'
that all sites should contain a left-hand navigation bar, and nothing
else. This was the old standard that designers had used for decades
and no one thought to question this practice. This gave rise to sites
that were for the most part 'cookie cutter' varieties, each having
the same standard layout and left-hand navigation bar layout. Creative
use of right-hand navigation bars and other techniques have created
sites that are very much different in layout and navigation than the
old standards, and this has not proven to be a detriment for most
E-commerce businesses. In fact, uniqueness seems to be more memorable,
and may indeed be a competitive edge in itself.
4. The emergence of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML technologies
has opened up a whole new world of creative fonts, creative color
schemes, and creative layouts. With WYSIWYG, designers can see exactly
how a site will appear all through the process, eliminating much of
the time consuming trial and error that preceded this. Even novice
designers and those that seek to create their own site can benefit
from WYSIWYG, as most Web site creation software and online sites
used for Web site design incorporates this technology, which is easy
to use for almost anyone and requires no coding language knowledge.
5. Better flash techniques have also been discovered and employed
in the past several years, leading to greater effectiveness of flash
sites, and faster upload speeds (a problem with flash prior to the
technological advances was slow loading). Sites that employ flash
now have a more professional look and feel to them, and flash is
used often now in the construction of online videos and games that
appear on sites and educates and entertains visitors.
The past decade in technology has indeed lent itself to the emergence
of superior creativity in Web site design and Web development by
Web masters. Gone are the old days of stagnantly designed sites,
the 'same old, same old' fonts, dull colors, and slow-loading and
ineffective flash. It seems now, that the sky is the limit with
customization of sites, and this can only be called one of the best
developments of this century. Beautiful sites, that will hopefully
bring beautiful results to personal and E-commerce clients, are
now standard, and the future looks brighter than ever for Web site
designers and developers!
About the Author:
Nathan Drew Sire, President of Captain Media, services the web
design/development market. He's been developing code since the
age of eight. You can read more about his company at http://www.captainmedia.com
or contact him at info@captainmedia.com |
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