Web Design | Website Design, SEO

A Question of Scroll Bars.

Share Does your website have scroll bars? It might not seem like an especially important question, but it is. In fact, when it comes to website usability, the question of scrolling is one of the most vital ones out there. Do Users Like to Scroll? One of those eternal questions of web design is whether [...]

The 5 Principles of Effective Navigation.

Share A website’s navigation is one of its most important parts. Sure, your users mostly come in through search engines now instead of via your homepage, but how can they get from whatever page they’re on to any other page they might want to go to? The limited space available at the top and sides [...]

Putting Multimedia to Good Use.

Share Multimedia on the web is often seen as a bad idea: it breaks the flow of textual information, makes your bandwidth costs spiral out of control, and annoys visitors who aren’t expecting it. Used properly, though, multimedia can enhance your website to no end, putting you light-years ahead of your competitors. The Principle of [...]

An Issue of Width: the Resolution Problem.

Share There is a problem that has plagued the web ever since graphical designs for web pages started to become common – and yet it’s a problem that’s never been solved. You see, different sized monitors can handle different widths of page, and yet HTML doesn’t really let you take width into consideration when you’re [...]

Image Formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG and More.

Share When you want to put graphics on your website, you’ll face an unexpected problem: what format should they be in? On their own computers, many people save pictures in Windows’ default BMP (bitmap) format, but the files it creates are simply much too large to put on a website – they’d take about a [...]

Fonts are More Important Than You Think

Share Most of the visitors to your website are going to spend 99% of their time doing one thing: reading your content. Given that the web is a medium mainly devoted to reading, it’s surprising just how ignorant most page authors are about typography. If you use the wrong font, you make your page painful [...]

The Importance of Validation

Share Once you’ve written a web page, you can upload it to an HTML validator. This site, run by the web’s standards body, will check that your site is valid (‘correct’) HTML, and give you some idea of how to fix it if it isn’t. This is an essential step in the development of any [...]

Finding a Good HTML Editor

Share Once you’ve decided to write your own HTML, and you’ve got some idea of how it all works, there’s one thing left to think about: which program are you going to use to do it? While you can use programs like Notepad or Wordpad that come with Windows, they don’t have any specialised HTML [...]

5 Ways to Avoid the 1998 Look

Share If you’ve looked around at a few websites, you might have noticed that many of them look absolutely terrible. In many cases, this is because they were produced in the early days of the web’s mainstream popularity, but they haven’t been maintained or updated since. The chances are that their creators have never even [...]

Building a Budget Website

Share Once upon a time, building a website was very expensive. Now, though, you can have a site up and running for the price of a used book, if you’re frugal and careful. Getting the cheapest website you can is a great first step on the ladder, to get started on the web and see [...]

Cut to the Chase: How to Make Your Website Load Faster

Share So your web pages have great content, a nice design, but hardly anyone seems to click through from them to any other part of your website. In many cases, the problem is the load time – people are abandoning your site for the simple reason that it just takes too long for the thing [...]

CSS and the End of Tables

Share In the bad old days of the web, the only way to create even slightly complex layouts was to use tables. Some sites featured silly numbers of tables, one inside the other, to create relatively simple-looking effects. With CSS, though, tables can finally be replaced. What’s So Bad About Tables? If you’ve ever worked [...]

How Your Personal Site Can Pay for Itself

Share Has monthly hosting fees got you down? Well cheer up! There are a few simple additions you can make to your site that can help you make your money back and then some. The easiest thing is to add ads to your site. Google’s Adsense program offers site owners a way to display both [...]

Website Design, SEO