Bad Website Designs

Posted on July 1, 2009 in Web Design | 1 comment

webking 300x144 Bad Website DesignsDesigning and producing a website is a creative endeavor, and it takes a lot of skill to produce a website that is appealing, easy to use and informative, however as you scan through the Internet there are quite clearly some people out there that have absolutely none of the necessary designing or color matching skills necessary to create a website that does not offend to the eyes and cause severe headaches – here are few examples of bad website designs .

Blinding color schemes, annoying flashing lights, data overload and dizzying geometric patterns that can only have been masterminded by a crazy person litter the websites of the daft and inept, and if the graphics alone weren’t bad enough some of them also have scary robotic voice overs that actually send creepy shivers down your spine.

In this day and age where web hosting services offer a vast number of attractive pre-designed templates to suit any kind of personal or business need, there is simply no excuse for websites that are so poorly designed that even experienced website users cannot work out how to navigate around them, or designs so awful and disturbing that you just want to click away from the site as soon as possible so that you stop feeling nauseous.

Just get your sunglasses out and have a look at this one http://www.paperrad.org/ to see what I mean, personally I can’t stay long enough here to work out what this website is actually for, but the flashing psychedelic dog heads are certainly very memorable (especially as they have been burnt onto your retinas).

If you can bear to stay long enough on a bad website, and if you can find anything that resembles a ‘Contact Us’ section send an SOS to the administrative team alerting them to the fact their website seriously sucks, and point them in the direction of a web design manual. You would be doing them a favour in the long run.:)

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Basic Webpage Layout and Design

Posted on April 27, 2009 in Web Design | 0 comments

Fundamentally a website is designed to carry information, whether this be about product, services or subject of interest, and so it should be functional, easy to read and appealing. Design and layout should then focus on getting the information across quickly and efficiently, as any website that looks overcrowded and hectic will put viewers off.

Flashing and scrolling text, animation and auto loading sounds all seem like a good idea at the time, but they can be very irritating to experienced website users, who just want to know what your website is about, and whether it has anything of interest to them. Keep it simple and leave out the gimmicky animations and sounds – industry testing has shown that visitors are more likely to click straight out of websites using these methods immediately, without bothering to read any of the content.

Pop Ups – pop ups carry a significant security risk, and for that reason most people have them blocked or turned off in their browsers. Avoid using them, as you will just annoy any visitors and distract them from what they came to your website for in the first place.

Advertising – this is a good way to make some cash from your website, but try and keep it to a reasonable level, and balance it with the content. Websites should be looking at a ratio of around 80% content, 20% advertising, and this should allow you to create and interesting, and profitable website. For example East of the Web (www.eastoftheweb.com) has some subtle, effective advertising, and by keeping it restricted to the top section of the website it is visible, without being intrusive:

east of the  web

Image Backgrounds – the point is to keep your website simple and easy to read, and image backgrounds are no good for this, creating a confusing, amateurish look, which overwhelms the text and may also cause slow loading times. If you are going to have a background, use a plain colour, leaving any design logos or images in the to the headers and borders. Successful professional websites do this so why not you!

Journalism.co.uk example:

journalism Basic Webpage Layout and Design

In short – professional web design improves any website and brings better ROI ;)

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Macromedia Contribute Quick Guide – Metadata

Posted on March 20, 2009 in MacroMedia , Webmaster | 0 comments

Metadata is simply the definitional information about your webpage (title, date published, data type, etc), and is very important as it embeds the page into your website and server system, and provide keywords and information for search engines to locate your site with.

Before you publish a webpage in Contribute, ensure the metadata has been updated:

  • To amend this metadata go to the top toolbar and select ‘Format’. Then scan down and select VOA Metadata – a shortcut on the keyboard is Ctrl+Alt+K.
  • This will then bring up a dialogue box that will ask you for information about your page. This is a sample from an internal Intranet network version of Macromedia:

dhk2j2b3308qdfs7f9b Macromedia Contribute Quick Guide – Metadata

  • The original title you set up when you created this page (such as yearmonthdate-title) is known in this dialogue box as the identifier, so you need to copy and paste that from the title box and into the identifier box below. Now in the title box type in the title you would wish to appear on link to the article, i.e. Catalogue, Product Information, Contact Us etc…
  • Now you need to write a brief explanation of the article in the summary box – just one or two lines will do.
  • In the ‘type’ box select ‘Article’.
  • In the ‘Language’ box select ‘English’.
  • If you are using an Intranet version of this program, you may be asked to select the ‘Importance’ of your webpage – this would usually be ‘Normal’ unless advised otherwise.
  • In ‘Country’ select the relevant option such as ‘England and Wales’.
  • In ‘Date Created’ type today’s date.
  • In ‘Date to go live’ type the date of publishing.
  • ‘Date to review’ should come up automatically but if not select a date either 6 months or a year in the future – however long you feel you would like the article to run before changes are made.
  • Leave the ‘modified’ section unchecked.
  • In ‘Delete at review date’ only check if you want the article deleted at the review date without notification.
  • ‘Category’ is for Intranet programs, and here you can select options as necessary such as ‘Staff News’ or ‘Head Office Announcement’ etc.
  • In Keywords select the description that best fits your article such as ‘Communicating’ or ‘News’.

What appears in the Metadata box will depend on what version of Contribute you use, but in most cases of shared systems, you will be asked to identify yourself as the author/publisher at some stage.

Once you have completed the metadata, click on ‘OK’ to save the information.

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Video Tutorial CSS Div Layers & Classes

Posted on February 25, 2009 in CSS | 0 comments

Here is a simple and quick tutorial on using CSS Div Layers and classes tags to start off your design skills. :)

YouTube Preview Image

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