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Website Design

Site Design Tip #1

Buy a book. There are shiploads of books on web design and web usability. Do a search on Amazon. You can hardly go wrong. Just get started.

Site Design Tip #2

Don't buy a book. The web is full of free design information. A HUGE percentage of the web design books that you can buy are printed almost verbatim off of the web. HTML tutorials have been everywhere since day one. Webmonkey will tell you almost anything you need to know.

Site Design Tip #3

Get Photoshop 6.0 with the integrated Imageready package. Or some comparable tool. The joy of Photoshop to the web design veteran is the "Save to Web" tool, which eliminates about ten repetitive steps that used to be necessary to get graphics down into the proper format at 72 dpi.

Just for the record, the proper format is 72 dots per inch (dpi), saved as "Jay-pegs" (.jpg) if you have photos and "Giffs" or "Jiffs" (,gif) if you are using flat-colored things like the buttons and background on this page.

Site Design Tip #4

Never resize the graphic using the resize capabilities of your website design tool. You either stretch the thing and it looks ugly (too grainy), or you shrunk the size but have gained NOTHING in terms of download speed. It looks small but it's still just as fat to download as when you started. This doesn't apply to vector graphics like Flash, which you can make virtually any size with no measurable increase in bandwidth usage. Another reason why they are flashy.

Site Design Tip #5

I know that this may be old news for many of you but there are certain colors that look good on the Netscape Browser, and certain (other) ones that look good on the Internet Explorer browser. Unfortunately they are not the same set of colors, but there is a subset of the two groups which looks good on both browsers. Make sure that your designer is creating buttons and bows with these, the famous "web-safe" palette of colors:

Site Design Tip #6

Not so many colors. Not so many typefaces. When your mom looks at the spice rack, she doesn't think of how many spices she can get into each meal. Just because it's possible to use all of the cool colors, all of the fonts, and all of the flashy technology, doesn't mean it's GOOD to do so.

Most people don't like flashing lights in their face. Similarly on a website, unless you are designing an online disco, cool it on the blinking lights and flashing text.

The point is, let the need guide the usage. Don't add something simply because it is available. Add it because it is needed to perform the function.

Keep the fonts to one family, if possible. And see if you can use only 3 different types within a family (i.e.- large Arial headline=1, smaller Arial button = 2, arial text=3) Or at least keep the flashy fonts for headlines/mastheads/logos and the simple ones for text.

Site Design Tip #7

Send me your tips and experiences and I'll add them here and we'll get a big list and I'll mention your name. It's called sharing. Whenever I need web design input or brainstorming I call Denyce, Steve, Jeff, Chris, or maybe even Hal. We all get help, and most of it is free.

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