Fluid-Blog: Web Design Blog

A list apart is currently conducting a survey to get an understanding of todays web market. It focuses on a series of questions related to your current job position and location. I think that this will be a great resource to get a feel for what web designers are currently getting paid and also a great way to see the trend in where they are headed in the future.

If Your a web design and would like to take the survey head over to A List Apart’s website and take the survey

In the recent years flash has come under fire from accessibility and usability experts. I feel that flash gets a some bad wrap. While some of the arguements are valid I don’t feel that we should just opt to not use it.

I thought that I would highlight some of the good aspects and missconceptions of flash as well as some of the new technology that has some serious potentail to contributing to the future of the web.

When looking at when to use flash you should look at a few things.First you have to look at what is the value of using this technology. here are some great examples of when flash would be a great solution to use.

Integrated video: this has become a huge selling point for flash with its high ubiquity on browsers and now with flash 8 it is unparreled in what it can achieve with video. Some of the great features for video in flash are alpha transparency( for using blue screening and green screeening), skining the player with your own style, custom shaped video so you are not tied to a specific form factor, flash overlay to add aditional functionality to the video.
Interaction: Another one of flashes strong points is its ability to create interactions with your users. Don’t under estimate the power of being able to think out of the box with interaction. This is a great way to visually show your users presentations and how stuff works. Also with its powerful scripting language you could also provide complicated equations and graphs to illustrate your point. You can also update those results without refreshing the screen.

Shattering myths
Flash can not use the back button
In flash you actually can enable use of the back button. Application developers in flash will often leave this feature in active as it can actually confuse the user in complex application.

Deep linking
Many people don’t believe that you can not have a link to a section within a site using a url. this is actually false and it has been for some time now.

So you want to have a website for your company or for yourself here is a few things that will make the process a bit smoother.

First and foremost content. On the web “content is king”. When creating a site nine times out of ten the thing that holds the project up is the content. So when you are ready to have a site designed get you content together as soon as possible. Here is a brief list of content pages that most sites have: Homepage, about, contact, and services to name a few. It is best to get the content to your designer as soon as possible.

Design provides your content with a mood and can convey professionalism and trust in a site. When thinking about what your site should be you should ask yourself some questions:

Is this site an informational or a sales site?
This will dictate how your site is structured. A sales site such as an ecommerce site should funnel your users through the check out process. On the other hand an informational site can be better suited for browsing and so its structure would be different then that of a sales driven site.

What do you want the look and feel to be for the site?
do you want the site to have lots of smooth edges or sharp hard lines. It is important for the designer to know your taste. Also note that you should be doing market research to determine what the trends are in the industry so that you can make an educated choice in the matter.

What colors do you want to use for the site?
Color is a very important part of your website. Work with your designer to come up with what colors you should use for the site. Some things to think about are using contrasting colors for backgrounds and text so that the text is easy to read.

This should get you on the way to a great web site. The key to having a great looking website is not only a great designer but also putting the time into developing the sites structure and function. The old saying you can’t shine ” ” holds true in that a designer can only take poor content so far.

This is another interesting implementation of flash that is similar to SIFR (flash based text replacement). It allow the designer to implement and combine a small group of image filters such as rounded corners, borders, drop shadow as well as allowing users to scale images within an elastic image. It does all of this in a light weight script that degrades gracefully.

I really like to see these unconventional ways of using flash. It really gives flash a new life even with web standards based designers and search engine optimizers alike. Flash does not have to be a resource hog that takes forever to download and can really bring some extra punch to your design.

Another great use for this is with in a content management application so that you could use CSS and SWFIR to dynamically alter all images with a give tag very quickly and unobtrusively to the editor.

Over all I really like this application. I think that this is a great addition to any web designers arsenal .

Well now old news I thought that I would write a bit on my take on the iphone from a web designers perspective. As I am sure you know Apple has released the iPhone its next generation devise that they are looking to hit a home run with. So why should we as web designers care other then now we don’t have to to carry both a smart phone and an iPod around.

One of the best features it boast (in a web designers eye) is the safari based web browser. The thing that makes this a bit different from other web browsers on mobile devices is that it is a fully featured web browser and can display the pages as a whole. Now I know your probably saying well that is no good because who the heck can read it . That leads me into why it is so different. It allows the user to be able to select a region of the web page and zoom in and view just that section. the user can then pan and scan around.

So what does this mean to us as web designers. First off this does make for slightly easier development for the iphone. The main thing that this technology does which is why I am excited is that it pushes the envelope of the mobile web. By doing this I see other mobile companies following suit and delivering more rubust support for there devices and a renewed interest in high speed connection. It also brings the mobile web back to the forefront of the consumers eye.

You have probably heard the terms CSS, Cascading Style Sheet, web standards, accessability thrown around by designers and developers alike, so what does it all mean. I thought that I would write up a quick cheat sheet to get you initiated into the world of semantic based markup.

First lets learn some of the terms what they are about and why you should be using them. First on the list CSS also known as “cascading style sheet”. Wikipedia defines CSS as:

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL. The CSS specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

so why do we want to use it. well what css is great for is separating design from content. This serves many functions from a design aspect it allows the designer much more control over the layout. Also it allows the code to remain clear of layout and design based markup. All design and layout based markup is stored in a CSS file and is linked to on the pages that want to use this stylesheet. This allows the designer to completely control the look and feel of all linked pages from one location.

Another reason why web owners should be pushing the designer to code using web standards is that since all of the design and layout markup is stored off in a separate file and is only has to load once the over all time it takes a user to load the page is decreased. Search engines also prefer css based websites marked up with semantic code because it makes it easier to determine what is important on your site.