THE PERFECT WEBSITE

- A good website need planning and research. (Understand the market, analyze the competition and create an identity and tool be strong that rivals will be considering alternative means of employment.

Things to consider

To consider the purpose and anticipated audience of your site;
• Don’t overestimate the visitor’s experience and ended up creating a site that was simply unusable for the average surfers.
• Making use of the cutting-edge dynamic applications plug-in specific software might provide an impressive tool, but if this fails to degrade functionally on lesser browsers, customers will be force out of the loop.

Understand the purpose of your site and how anticipated users will interact is crucial to its success. Regardless whether yours is a personal site to promote a small business, or a complex database, driven e-commerce venture, you will need to determine how you intend to put your message across and what methods will help you achieve this.

Check out the competition.
Should have a detailed idea of what your concept has to offer. So check out existing sites that you may considered as a competition. Doing this objectively will provide a valuable insight as you learn from your competitors’ good and bad points and the process will save you valuable time and money as you determine the feasibility of your project. (dominance in this area – establish yourself with innovative design)

Blueprints for design;
• Puts some careful consideration into its propose structure
• A good website should be constantly evolving. Without due considerations as how your site might develop, you could run into problems if it’s unable to manage new and existing content.
• - By considering and planning for such evaluations in advance, you will improve your chances of creating a site structure that’s flexible enough to accommodate variety or expand to contain new areas.

Defining an identity;
• Next consideration is the appearance of your site.
• Branding is important feature of any website and care should be taken in the design and placement of your logo.
• Pages need to have consistency between pages, or visitors will lose their sense of location.

Maintaining your site;
• Keeping site to update.

Website Turn-offs.

• Over-designing for its own sake. (KISS)
• 100% Flash
• Content overload
• Mystery meat navigation.
  - Mystery meat refers to a user interface based upon rollovers, usually as part of some glossy, intricate design, where you only find out where a button or image leads when you move your mouse on top of it.

Web Graphics Design.

Navigation
• Navigation forms the basic of any website, and remains most essential aspect of the site construction.
• Proper site navigation should give the visitor a sense of “place” within the site.
• It’s important that anyone delving through your site knows how to get back to where they started.

Navigation musts
• Should have a tidy nav bar for effect with a bandwidth-friendly set of textual links somewhere on the page.
• Textual links or embedded links are the most basic form of navigation and represent a clear, instant method of assessing pages within a site. These are generally arranged in the form of a series of underlined words across the top’s of a page or a list running down the side.

Test runs
• Unleash your site to your friend and get them to try to navigate it.

Advice
• Keep eye on which sites are winning awards, analyze what you like about them, and then try to replicate that on an exercise.
• Sites that make an impact are ones that do something new not what that been replicate what’s been done.
• Inject the site with creativity.

Main things that great websites should have.
• Set goal for a site – All sites should satisfy that goals that they’re created for.
  Example: A site that market a band should convey that band’s image and vibe, as well as play some relevant music giving the user an immediate impression. A banking site should easily be navigable, provide account info quickly and solve any problems a customer may have.
• All site serve different purpose, but one thing every site should do is display properly on all browsers.

Make your site universal

Make the website as welcoming as possible.
• Wide range of browsers, make sure that you don’t built your website from ground up with only one browser in mind. Tip: Not everyone on the planet uses Internet Explorer
• It is also worth remembering that many people don’t bother to update their browser software, and therefore be using the same ancient version that turned up with their copy of Windows 95.
  Don’t tempted to fit your pages up with reams and reams of Javascript or other advances code that may make older or less advanced browser fall over. Instead, go for more functional interface to facilitate the widest possible demographic.
• Test your design in a variety of browsers at every stage if the process – to make sure that everything is as cross platforms as possible. Don’t just test things at the end.
• It’s also not a good idea to stick a great number of nested tables in a design. These are notorious for slowing access times down to a crawl for many users, and again to those who are using older software may have problems viewing them. Use CSS (This is universal universal method for controlling layout corners like fonts an visual text layouts and they go a long way to ensuring that each site visitor will see the site as you intended it, with very few compatibility issues.

Update regularly
• To keep hit count up, is to update the site content regularly.
• Keep supplying new material for your consumer.

Streamlining
• Keeps pages size to a minimum (keep the material small but plentiful)
• Small pages are one of the best ways to ensure that your bandwidth and access times remain constantly high. (means: time to load a page will reduce accordingly)
• Keep content of images and videos as small as possible. The images should be cut down to screen resolution (72 dpi) and compress them as possible in JPEG mode.
• The smaller the site the quicker it will respond.

Color the web world

1. Colors are the way to our brain, by use of our eyes, interprets electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength between 350 and 750 nanometers.
2. The different wavelength is seen as different colors.
3. Primary colors – red, green, blue (modern) As we deal colors on the screen, this is more practical.
4. Primary colors – red, yellow, blue (classic color theory)
5. Additative colors system and subtractive color system –
   a) Additative colors system is what computer monitors and TV screens use –Any color source that emits the lights itself. If you look very closely at your screen, you’ll see that it is built up of tiny red, green n blue dots. In this system, you will get white when the three primary colors are present at 100%. Colors on the web should follow this system
   b) The subtractive color system, is what comes to play in printing, drawing, painting and such. This is when the colors does not emits ant light of its own, but reflects light from the surrounding. In this system, you’ll get black when all colors are mixed. In this color system that one of the primary colors is yellow.

The few colors terms:

Red.
• Darker shades of red can be appealing, and can be used very efficiently on the web pages.
• Fact – bright red and bright blue mixes poorly. The reason is more physiological – red is the color with the longest wavelength while blue is the among the shorter wave-lengths. When viewing these colors the human length has to adjust slightly to get them in focus. And when you have red and blue mixed together the lens tries to focus on both, and tires the eyes very quickly.

How screens diplay colours

As discussed in the section above, what are colours?, a computer monitor is made up of thousands of tiny little red, green and blue dots which are grouped three and three. These little dots are close together-- so close that we don't really see them as dots, but rather our eyes mix them up to form one homogenous colour.

All colours in the spectrum can be generated with this system of dots. For instace, if the red and green dots are shining at 100% their strength, while the blue not lit at all, you will see the result as a pure yellow colour. Each of the three dots can have any value from 0 to 255, which means that the total number of possible colours is 256*256*256 = 16,777,216.

Any colour can be represented by a specific combination of three numbers. The yellow mentioned before would have the number 255, 255, 0. The first number represents the red dot, the second represents the green dot, and the last represents the blue. Therefore, a pure blue colour would then be 0, 0, 255. The lower the number, the less that color dot is lighted. For instance, by lowering the number for the blue dot-- to the colour identified as 0, 0, 100-- you can produce a darker blue. White is produced by the combination of the highest amount of all three colours, so the code for white is 255, 255, 255. Black, on the other hand, is produced by a lack of other colours, so the code for black is 0, 0, 0.

Web-safe colours.
Anyone who has done any sort of web page has probably heard of the web-safe colours. Web-safe colour is a rather debated issue among web desingers these days. Many firmly believe in using only these colours, while others feel they can allow themselves to use colours which are not regarded as safe.

What are web-safe colours?
Web-safe colours are somewhat of a remainder from the early years of the web, back when a normal screen could only display 256 colours. Back then, there was a need to worry about consistency in how browsers displayed the colours. The system is made up of some 40 colours, for menus and such, and the remaining 216 colours could be used to display the actual web pages.

Now, 216 colours might sound like quite a bit, but the problem is that no aesthetic considerations were made when these colours were decided, but rather they are based solely on mathematical formulas. To be more exact, the web-safe colours are what you get when you use 0%, 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% and 100% of the three different primary colours, and then mix these in every possible combination.

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