Web design session with Simon

People only look at a website for an average of 5 or less seconds before they make their mind up as to whether they want to keep looking. Therefore it is really important to work out what it is that makes you look and enjoy looking at a site.

DESIGNING A WEBSITE
- web standards
- Start with a root folder which will hold all the information for the website.
- Always measured in pixels.
Always design for lowest common denominator.(800x600) This therefore restricts the size of the web page.
This introduces the idea of using scroll bars - seen as a negative thing. (horizontally is a no no so don't go beyond 800px)
If you are following all the web standards will be hard to stand out from the rest. BUT ... the standards are there for a reason.
- Fonts aren't embedded on your website - need to chose standard fonts.
Can get the website to go to another font (if the one you have chosen is not on the users computer) have a list which also works with the site rather than just times new roman.
To solve this could use an image instead of text file. But this is a much larger file size so takes longer to load - and realise this is very frustrating for the user (only give a website 5 seconds so be aware of this)
- Another draw back with this is that an image is not searchable.
- Law in England is that everyone has to be able to access a website. (screen reader for the visually impaired, wouldn't be able to read through image)
Colour - RGB - What we design therefore needs to be what we want people to see, makesure you work in this colour mode.
- On photoshop - on colour picker. check box only web colours. Always use hexadecimal code for web (coding/html). more limited than expected. Again - have to work specifically with colours that can be viewed on all systems profiles as they vary with the way RGB is viewed.
- Images have to be saved specifically for use on the internet.
Save for web and devices. - can alter the quality and therefore the size on an image so that it uploads quicker on all devices. (jpeg) Always save it specifically for the size in which it should be used.