Firefox

Designing your own successful web page can seem difficult and nearly impossible if you do not do a little research first. The reason you need to know the basics of web page design is because the design of your website will actually influence whether or not people continue to visit your site and ultimately, whether they will buy from you or not. Obviously, a lot is riding on your design so it is worthwhile to take this seriously and put some effort into doing it right the first time.

We’ve all been to that really “neat” website… the one that made us take a second look.. the one that had more functions than a swiss army knife… the flash website. Flash website is truly a sign of the times. It’s beautiful, and by far one of the most interactive ways to design a website. If your business is thinking of designing a website, flash is definitely an option to consider. However, there are always a few rules and drawbacks when it comes to have your business’s website design in pure flash.

Eric Engler was up next, talking to us about how to design a web site. Web sites, in this context, are collections of pages with a common data layer, a common code/deployment model, some common UI elements, some common plumbing, and more. Starting with the data layer, Eric discussed the differences between a traditional ntier architecture and the ORM approach. Eric displayed favoritism toward the ORM approach and the Olymars tool specifically.

The view is that OfficeLive offers partners plenty of commercial opportunities such as website design services and consultancy. However, I also see it helping you to keep existing clients as well. For example, the MD of your client wants you to design a website for his son’s football team and you know you’ll be too expensive. Don’t want to lose him? No problem! Just give him an OfficeLive site and your client is a happy bunny.

There are volumes on IA that go well beyond the scope of a single blog entry, and I encourage anyone who is interested in website design or simple surfing to at least browse one or two, if not take the time to thoroughly study the concepts. The larger websites of the world are designed by teams these days, and those teams typically have a person or person(s) responsible for and educated in IA, but the majority of sites are still put together by individuals who give cursory if any consideration for the organization of the content within the sites. (There are still large organizations that apparently have little or no understanding of IA, or else have allowed the concepts to fall victim to internal politics — I won’t name names, but will generalize that higher education and some e-commerce sites are impossible to comfortably surf on occasions.)

The trend toward 1024 and 1280 resolutions means more than you might think. When designing for 800×600 we typically keep “important” items such as navigation, news scrollers, images, key text, etc. above 400px. We call this the ‘fold line’. This term is more commonly used by Newspapers to determine placement for news stories. Newspapers put their best stories in the upper half of the page ( or above the “fold”). A website design concept with an overall height of 700px high means navigation and key elements should be in the top 400 pixels to make sure people browsing at 800×600 resolution view the content without having to scroll down. But, if the accepted standard shifts from 800×600 to 1024×768, your “fold-line” moves down and you have more of that non-scrollable real estate to devote to key web elements. If the trend shifts towards 1280, as the graph suggests, you have even more.

If you’re a webdeveloper, webdesigner or simply someone who does things with websites, Firebug is the ultimate tool for your needs on the topics CSS, JavaScript, HTML & XHTML, AJAX…

This may sound paradox but spreading your content on the web and different sites may be a much more efficient way to make it available than keeping it on one server. Of course you need to use the right sites to do so. We live in exciting web times where you can upload your photos to flickr and connect to other picture enthusiasts, upload videos to youtube , share links at del.icio.us and documents at writely.

I started this blog to put on the modern equivalent of paper some of the practical challenges about running a church website from an an intersted non-professional. Now Google search for “example of good church website design ” gives a link to David’s blog at churchblogger as its first on page 1 where cambray’s site is under the wordpress sites on the page. (I have only found 3 in the uk from a google search for wordress church uk or some such search) , it was only when sitemeter.com started to see links from churchblogger, (see my blogroll for link ) I thought what is going on? Flattering, but I have seen many, many better sites than cambray.org site.

It’s rare, in this day in age, to hear of a business that doesn’t have some type of website presence. Some hire website designers. Others do it themselves. With so many software programs out there, creating your own website can be simple and fun. However, you need to avoid making mistakes that can turn potential customers off your website. Here are three common mistakes:

Favicons are a great way to enhance a website, reflecting the website design, it let's the user quickly find the right link in his bookmarks.

Author Roger Johansson goes on to explain how you actually save money by doing effective website design testing. They key is to test how visitors will use your site.

So, after having posted a website design for the Oliver Pfänder website some time ago I wasn’t really satisfied with the overall look and the design of the website for this talented musician. Therefore I sat down and came up with something new. I wanted to create a more vibrant and colorful design that reflects the music Oliver creates. The design still needs to be approved and I will be using different pictures since these ones are just the ones from the mockup version but have a look for yourself:

I wrote a short article about website design and senior citizens and posted it to the main Proimpulse site under articles. It seems like we forget a lot of times that younger people are not the only ones using the internet. We get all carried away and design websites that are complicated to use. These websites have very small text, non forgiving forms and other elements that make it difficult for the “Silver Surfers” to use them.

Ever since the Google Maps API was released, I have been waiting for people to start integrating these in novel ways (even I had some ideas), and whilst idly surfing earlier, I had the fortune to find the London Panoramas Google Map. Returning to the TLD I discovered literally hundreds of such implementations each containing a map and a varying degree of information.

Our local newspaper here, the Star-Tribune, just rolled out their new website design. Interestingly, the site appears to be opitmized for Firefox, as the top navigation buttons have drop down menus that appear in Firefox, but not it IE. The doctype they use is HTML 4.01 Strict, and using my Html Tidy firefox extension, it appears that their html is rather clean. As I said, they just rolled the site out this morning, and the site was actually down for a few hours it seemed (at least for me, not sure what my deal is lately). Also, if you move your mouse over the top navigation buttons in Firefox, you can see three advertisement windows flash on the screen quickly, if you move your mouse quickly over the buttons, you can see who the ad is for :-) The flashing ad thing is definitely a javascript bug, I'm not sure where those ads are supposed to show up, but its rather annoying right now.

I was just reading a post on Alan Levine’s CogDogBlog, Not so great moments in Web design, and was reminded about a recent experience that I had with poor website design.

Other key elements in website design such as font size, navigation, page length are explored in this report. An interesting finding is that a smaller type face encouraged focused reading. Larger type face on the other hand promoted scanning. Short paragraphs are looked at for greater periods than longer paragraphs. The report suggests that “longer paragraph format seems to discourage viewing.” Also a one column format was viewed more. This study also found more eye fixations and longer viewing with right-column navigation than left.

I’m currently working on a new website design for my friend, musician and guitar-maniac Oliver Pfänder. He was looking for a simple layout that combined his love for music and especially guitars and that is able to hold lot of content without the need of scrolling too much (talking about the fixed-width vs. fluid layouts discussion). The website should also represent and his person and reflect his personality. Therefore I decided on a floating CSS layout with a sidebar that could hold extra information and/or news and links, and a main content area that accomodates itself to the browser-width. This screenshot is taken at 1024x768 resolution, so that you know. Furthermore I used a pale green color and duotone pictures to reflect his music style that varies from metal to accoustic guitar and everything in between. :-)

One thing that did not escape my notice was the male/female ratios on the course, leaving me wondering if this was representative of the website design industry - 11 males, and only 3 females (one of whom is me obviously). Incidentally, I don’t feel that old - there are at least two students who are about my age on the course. The rest look like they’ve just been released from Nursery, but at least I am not alone.

Two weeks ago, I used this space to write about the importance of usability in website design. The article was supposed to act as a lead-in to a short series of articles on the basics of search engine optimization and as a gentle suggestion for webmasters concerned with converting visitors into buyers.

Another bug which is extremely strange is with the Javascript rollovers for the thumbnails in Mozilla Firefox. I have my blog open in 1 tab and the Perodua Myvi website in another tab. When I rollover my mouse on the lower left thumbnail, the main image changes to a resized version of my Malaysia Topblogs button! WTF? I have not tested this in Internet Explorer.

There were a couple of great training sessions I attended however and one in particular more than made it a worthwhile investment. As they always say, the ‘devil is in the detail’ and there was one point about website design and lead capture that I had overlooked on one of my affiliate sites that should ramp up the profits. Now all I need do is implement the changes…

Some other research on website design showed that high uncertainty avoidance countries prefer restricted options and simple controls, while low uncertainty avoidance countries prefer multiple options and complex controls.

I’ve just been informed that users of Internet Explorer cannot highlight and copy text from either Phatic Communion or Phatic Verse. Checking out my version, IE 6.0, reveals the truth of it. Because I use Firefox almost exclusively, except for when I check out the appearance of my blogs, I never knew I had this problem for IE users. (Opera, like Firefox, allows easy highlight-copy for text.)

Surprisingly, the most important part of good website design has really nothing to do with what most people think. It is true that they all play a big part:

The Crea8asite Forums and Kim's blog, Usability, SEO and Web Design, are two of my favorite resources for getting a broader view of website design, blending as they do SEO and usability. The blog post Search Engine Optimization Wins Over User Centered Design and the thread It's the SEO that counts, not user centered design address this particular mixture head-on. Both reference the somewhat puzzling article from C|Net entitled Is search ruining the web?

WEBIT, a UK website design competition, has honored Bilal Mohammad and Imran Khan for their efforts in the “Fabulous Fiction” website, which they tout as “the ideal way to get into reading”.

Lists used to be for displaying bullet points on a web page, but now it seems that they can play a big part in your website design, such as using a list for navigation with CSS to style it (Sitenetics uses such a technique). The most commonly used type of list is an unordered list (ul). The other type is an order list (ol) which displays the list with some kind of semantic meaning such as numbering each item:

Although I wouldn’t call myself a website design guru, I know what works and what doesn’t in creating a successful website. I’m a super-fast learner, and I want to pass on my knowledge of website design to you, in only a few short paragraphs. Of course this isn’t meant to be a full-fledged course on website design — I hope to tell you the main things that you should be doing to design an effective website.

If you follow those five basic website design tips outlined above, designing your first website (or touching up an existing one) shouldn’t be such a horror! Read all of the website design articles that you can to get a good working knowledge of design.

i cant seem to get the coding right on here. its working in firefox, and as far as i know, on IE. this is an all-mac household though, so don’t take my word for it. my only concern is that there is a table reproduction issue in safari.. i’m sure its bad css.. i should probably run that css verification thing. hmm.

Putting aside the discussion on whether the new version of IE will win back converts from Firefox and Opera, I find the most interesting aspect to be the new possibilities for CSS layouts. They are quite doable already, but with IE's enhanced support, even the most stubborn table-defenders are going to have to reconsider their position. With the bugs gone, CSS layouts will no longer be the tricky magic they've used to be. Rather, they'll hopefully be an everyday alternative for projects ranging from trivial to extremely complex.

The San Francisco-based Macromedia claims the top spot in the market for website design, with about one-third of the market, followed by Microsoft. It also produces the Flash and Shockwave software used in many games and Internet applications.

Why have I not discovered the scrolling problem before? Because I only ever deal with my site using Firefox on Linux and Safari or Firefox on OS X. Oh, by the way, Safari seems to have a CSS bug, too. It can’t display the line-through text decoration on a span element in a paragraph. Maybe line-through is a problem for all elements in Safari’s CSS rendering. I don’t know. I’ll look into that, too… eventually.

I've been using Firefox for several months - ever since my new computer was laden with viruses and adware. It took me a while to download the web developer extension, and I'm only learning its power now. I have been using its "view CSS" feature for a while, but the real power is in the "edit CSS" option. With this feature, you can view any web page employing CSS, and yes, as the name indicates, edit it on the fly. The page will immediately alter its appearance accordingly. If you are doing page design, this is incredibly useful, whether you are troubleshooting or simply trying out different looks (e.g. you can change the colour of the page). Download the extension and use it. You'll find it's a time-saver.

The new Mozilla Firefox 1.0 browser seems to be a bit pickier about displaying incorrect coding (HTML or CSS) than other current browsers – that is, you might get a bit of a shock on some pages. While this sounds like a problem, I welcome a browser that immediately displays any coding issues. One note: from my initial tests, Firefox 1.0 seems to suffer from the same type of caching problem as IE — once you've visited a page, then updated and uploaded the page and revisited it, FF1.0 does not give you the updated version. How annoying is that? Lots of manual clearing of the cache is in order.

I've updated Google Desktop Search Tips to the new style sheet. I think it will be easier to navigate. I also discovered IE handles anchor links a little differently so my 'return to top' links weren't working on both my GDS and Firefox tips pages. I've fixed that. Also, I enhanced the format for printing.

Another article discussing the ever increasing market share of the Firefox browser from Mozilla. I wonder how long it is before advertisers, web designers and the like start noticing it. I would bet it will be right around the time Google releases their Firefox based browser ;-)

This is a comment to a blog about web design and it brings up some good points with respect to CSS and IE workarounds.

An update to IE that i.e. incorporates position: fixed or css2 selectors must be separable from earlier versions. Eric states that the few pages that would break after an update, would be fixed by their web designers quickly, because they would be pages maintained by authors who actually want to use standards and care about doing things right. I agree - but if the fix isn’t supposed to break the site for those users that hasn’t upgraded IE, the webdesigner needs something to distinguish the update from its predecessor.

This might not be easy without introducing new problems. A lot of web designers use conditional comments to fix IE-specific problems. A version change - i.e. to 6.1 - would enable them to continue with that approach - but I don’t think Microsoft wants to introduce a new version if the only improvements were “hidden” for the vast majority of the users (as css improvements in the layout engine is).

Another tricky part is whether the bug in IE’s doctype switch - the one that sends IE to quirks mode for any doctype if it finds markup (either a comment or an xml-declaration) before the doctype. A lot of pages makes use of this behaviour - i.e. to trigger quirks mode in an xhtml-document. Other pages - where the designers are not aware of doctype swithing - displays awfully in modern browsers, because they trigger quirks mode on IE but trigger standard mode in all modern browsers.

I too hope that IE will be updated in regards to css - and I believe that Microsoft should do a lot more to advertise an open web. I just think we need to remember that an update wont magically solve our IE problems as web designers - it will just add another version of IE that we have to test and check our sites with.

Great tips on web design considerations with Firefox.

The new Mozilla Firefox 1.0 browser seems to be a bit pickier about displaying incorrect coding (HTML or CSS) than other current browsers – that is, you might get a bit of a shock on some pages. While this sounds like a problem, I welcome a browser that immediately displays any coding issues.

One note: from my initial tests, Firefox 1.0 seems to suffer from the same type of caching problem as IE — once you've visited a page, then updated and uploaded the page and revisited it, FF1.0 does not give you the updated version. How annoying is that? Lots of manual clearing of the cache is in order.

My favorite Firefox add-on is the Web Developers' Toolbar (now in version 0.8), which allows you to emulate window/resolution resizing, along with more neat tricks than one could imagine — HTML and CSS validation, paths to images. Very useful for developers and designers.

Click through for a useful discussion on finding the right website hosting company if you use Movable Type.

In the first weeks of October, 2004, LMT conducted a survey of Movable Type users regarding their web hosts. The survey had 234 responses and participants were drawn from visitors to Learning Movable Type, the MT Support Forums, and the MT Professional Network. The 234 responses represented more than a 130 different web hosts. Of these web hosts, only 20 had 2 or more responses. For the purpose of identifying the most MT-friendly web hosts, I have chosen to focus on those web hosts that had multiple responses (3 or more), to help give the resulting data more relevance.

Of the 234 respondents, 90% were very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their web host, and 90% would be very likely or somewhat likely to recommend the web host to another. There was very little differentiation among satisfaction ratings for the most popular web hosts. However, there was a wide range of responses when questioned specifically about reliability, support responsiveness, and MT-focus.