Category: Web Design

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Firefox Bane or Boom

Just two years ago Internet Explorer owned the Web, now Firefox owns nearly 20% of the market. If you haven’t looked at your older website with Firefox, you really need to take a peak.

If you are not testing your website in Firefox you really must be. In fact here is my list of browsers that I routinely test on:

Internet Explorer 7

Thinking about web design.Internet Explorer 6 – actually more people have 6 than 7 so make sure your site looks good in both

Firefox

Opera – but marginally here I still look, but don’t majorly stress out over incompatibilities as Opera is a nice browser but still used minimally in the marketplace.

The big difference between each browser is how they interpret the box model. In layman’s terms this translates into crazy spacing and padding and margins around important design elements. Sometimes the difference is so big, that you simply have to choose the least terrible approach. You will simply never get your site to look identical in all browser types and versions.

Typically I will identify what the client is using and make sure that it looks good in their flavor and version and them make sure it looks good in IE 7 and Firefox and not terrible in IE 6 and Opera.

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Top Five Web Design Myths

Here are my top five web design myths and answers to each one.

  1. Search engine spiders can index Flash so I’m okay if my website has been built in Flash.
  2. How long it takes to load a website page doesn’t matter – everyone has DSL anyway.
  3. I like an entry page for my website that is all graphics it’s pretty and sets the tone.
  4. I was promised by this firm top placement on Google if they overhauled my home page and website.
  5. I want my website to have a lot of video why are viewers complaining to me that they can’t see my video.

1.  Search engine spiders can index Flash so I’m okay if my website has been built in Flash.

Wrong, sorry, even Google states that they aren’t good yet on indexing Flash even though for nearly a year they have said they can index Flash. I can tell you that I get more calls for pay per click promotion and search engine optimization from websites done in all Flash. It is far better to use Flash judiciously say a hybrid html site with a Flash banner. What’s the purpose of having a website if no one can find you on search engines and if they can’t even bookmark a content page on your website?

2.  How long it takes to load a website page doesn’t matter – everyone has DSL anyway.

Wrong, sorry, even Google AdWords is now counting how long it takes for a page to load. The industry standard is a load time under 10 seconds. The faster your load time the better.

3.  like an entry page for my website that is all graphics it’s pretty and sets the tone.

Whoops, so sorry this one is wrong too. Splash pages are old news. Now search engines want content and they want it fast. Readers don’t want to watch a movie about your business. It is the Burger King Syndrome – my way right away!

4. I was promised by this firm top placement on Google if they overhauled my home page and website.

Hmm, the home page IS really important, but no one and no firm can guarantee top placement on Google. Google very closely guards the secrets of placement to prevent others from spamming the system. If they are not on the Google payroll, they simply cannot know how to guarantee top placement.

5. I want my website to have a lot of video why are viewers complaining to me that they can’t see my video.

Video is great, but the home page should be about spiderable content. When you do provide video make sure you provide options. I have found that videos turned into Flash are the quickest loading on the Web, then comes Windows Media Player files, and last of all QuickTime. If you are going to have video use only one on your home page and make it a Flash video. Try a preloader option in your body tag for other important videos and provide viewing options.

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Adobe’s Kool Kuler Picker – Kuhler

Adobe has a very cool, whoops kuhl, color picker our called Kuhler and it is KUHL!

This flash application allow you to custom pick colors for a new web design, graphic artwork, test new schemes, save them and in general see what works visually before you design it.

I consider this an excellent design aid and will be using it for my new website redesign. You can visit the application here: http://kuler.adobe.com/.

I have tried many color picking applications and this one is by far the most advanced, most interesting, and super easy to use. Even if you are not a designer, I think that you’ll have fun moving the dots around on the color wheel and seeing where the triads fall for the best color scheme. Check it out!

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Use CSS for Print Friendly Pages

It used to be that if you wanted a print friendly page version of each page of your website you made one and blocked the search engines from indexing them as duplicate content by blocking them in your robots.txt file, but now you can get your printer friendly page with just a wee bit of CSS code and a print style sheet.

With all custom web sites that we design now, we include the CSS to create a printer friendly page, just by clicking print – no new URLs just smart coding. It’s a fairly simple thing to do and yet so very elegant and much appreciated by readers.

In our print friendly versions, we block out colors, navigation, and sometimes images. In our current site www.mccordweb.com and www.mccordwebdesign.com we do not use CSS print versions as these sites are older sites and we will be replacing them with new designs this year, but all new client websites have CSS print friendly pages.

If you have a website in design right now, make sure to ask your web designer will they be doing CSS print version pages for you as well.