Web Design and elegant simplicity

Where Web design is concerned, there's a lot to be said for the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle. There are just so many things that can go wrong that are beyond your control, why introduce potential problems deliberately?

There are two main areas where over-complication can occur. One is technological, one is visual.

Look at any of the big sites on the Web, the ones that get millions of hits each day. The technology behind them may be awesome, but it's usually tried and tested. When you have the responsibility of catering for a huge audience, you can't afford to take flyers with cool new plug-ins.

Also, big sites don't look complicated. In fact, you might well ask why they don't try a bit harder. Here, simplicity means 'simple to use'. Hand in hand with the negative aspects of 'boring predictability' comes the more positive attribute of 'intuitively familiar'. It's usually novices who 'rush in where angels fear to tread'. The more experience you get, the more likely you are to try to avoid trouble!

This month, I'm going to show how to create Web page drop-down menus that are 'boringly predictable'. They work in exactly the same way that drop-down menus work in just about every operating system and application program you encounter.

What's wrong with that? If you want them to look a little different, that's okay but the functionality isn't to be messed around with. Why complicate matters by trying to reinvent the wheel? Keep it simple! Nobody has every complained about anything being too easy.

Source:http://www.wpdfd.com/

Designing Accessible Tables

Think In Linear Terms

The newer versions of screen readers and text browsers don't have the word wrapping problem. Instead, you're far more likely to encounter problems with linearization. It's a term so new that most webmasters - and spell checkers - have never heard of it.
Linearization is the table rendering process used by screen readers and text browsers to convert table cells into a series of paragraphs that will be read one after the other in the order they're defined in the HTML code. Some Web pages may be almost unintelligible after they've been linearized.

The problem lies in the table's HTML code structure. When the screen reader linearizes the table, it reads all the text in the first cell of row one, the second cell, the third, and so on until it runs out of cells. Then, it reads the first cell of row two, the second, etc. This is a perfect sequence for tabular data - especially if you've optimized the table for accessibility - but it doesn't work as well for layout tables.

That's because the structure of layout tables is usually much more complex - with cells used for banners, navigation, content, images, etc.

Find Linearization Problems

Does your page have a linearization problem? There are several ways to find out:
Check it yourself. Set the table borders to display, print out the page, put a ruler under the first line of the page, and read it aloud, cell by cell.

Whatever method you use, you'll often find that you go through quite a few cells before ever getting to the actual table content - which presumably is what your visitors want to hear the most. Or, if you have navigation links in separate cells, your navigation structure might not make sense at all when read linearly.

Provide Quick Access To Content

If you aren't exactly thrilled with the idea of tearing apart every page in your site to correct linearization problems, then relax. There is a relatively simple workaround that gives disabled people easier access to the content they want without ruining your visual design.
Create anchor tags to mark where page content begins and where your text navigation links begin. Then place links at the top of your page - use a text link or a single-pixel gif - to give visitors the option to skip directly to the main content or navigation sections.

Woes of a Big Site: And How to Prepare Your Site for Growth

1. Traffic (Bandwidth) Problems

It's interesting how everyone faces traffic problems. The small site faces traffic problems - few people visit them. When the site increases in popularity, it too faces traffic problems, albeit a different kind: the expensive kind.

When a site is starting out, the typical data transfer (sometimes loosely, and incorrectly, called "bandwidth") allocation of (say) 5GB seems generous and a distant target that looks impossible to hit. But wait till it becomes popular. Suddenly that 5GB looks very skimpy, and you'll be frantically searching your web host's documentation for how they charge for "overages" (the amount by which you exceed your allocation).

One of thefreecountry.com's previous web hosts had a rather pathetic traffic "overage" policy. If the site exceeded its traffic allocation, it would be shut-down for a month. (Gee, how did I miss that in the fine print?) To prevent that, the owner has to pre-pay for additional blocks of data transfer. The trouble is, the host had no system of warning you in advance when you were nearing your limit, which meant that the webmaster had to monitor the traffic of the site closely. To add insult to injury, the additional data transfer you had to pre-pay for came only in blocks of 10GB. Let's face it: when you initially exceed the "bandwidth" limit, it is unlikely that you'll exceed by 10GB. The initial "overage" is likely to be at most 1 to 2GB (unless of course you had just embarked on an aggressive advertising campaign).

2. Too Many Pages to Update

My suggestion is that even if you think your site is a small site in terms of number of pages, plan for its eventual growth. Put common design elements of your pages in a central location. There are many ways to do this: using Server Side Includes (SSI), using frames, dynamically generating it from a template, etc.

3. Reliability

Usually when a site is new, the owners consider it little more than a hobby horse. As such they tend to simply find a cheap web host to dump it on, since in its infancy, the site is unlikely to generate much income anyway.

Cheap web hosts seldom have the margin they need to hire good, competent help. Now I don't mean technical support that responds to you fast. Anyone can do that - even that cheap host I was on. Their responses each time however display their ignorance. When I say competent help, I mean the kind that knows the server hardware, the various software that run on it, security issues, and how to fix software and hardware problems. You need that kind of competent help so that they can pre-empt (as far as possible) potential problems as well as handle any true crisis that arise (eg fixing new security holes in BIND or Sendmail, etc, or troubleshooting hardware problems).

When your site grows and gains more visitors, the "uptime" of the site becomes increasingly important. If the server goes "down" for a couple of hours when your site is new, you have lost at most a few visitors. But when your site is well established, every hour that your site is down loses you thousands of visitors (and the income associated with them).
If, like me, you placed your site on a cheap host when you started out, you should keep an eye out for good, reputable web hosts so that when your site grows, you'll know where to move it to. Such hosts may cost slightly more than a budget web host, but the stability you get is well worth the extra expense, especially when your site has a lot of traffic.

Planning for Growth

The best time to do that is when your site is young. The changes that you need to make to prepare for the future will be smaller when it is young. Don't wait till your site is too big.

Source:http://www.thesitewizard.com

Design Mistakes: How to Avoid Them

If you can avoid 5 common design mistakes your e-commerce site will drive more sales.

1. Not planning out your web site. Planning is probably the most time consuming function of solid web design. Planning is also the most overlooked step in the design process.
Before you design a graphic or lay out a single html page consider the following: What are your goals for the site? What type of visitors are you likely to attract? What plans do you have for the site navigation? Map out your site logically before designing.

2. Slow load times. Super high-end flash animation looks great, but if it takes more that a few seconds to download you are pushing away potential customers.
How big is too big? Typically if you can keep a page under 40K, you are golden, 60K is not to bad. Over 100K? Try to avoid! Test your site, check the time it takes to load from a dial-up account and remember the majority of your visitors are going to be accessing your site via a dial-up service.

3. Outdated Information. Many e-commerce business owners setup a nice site and then forget to update it for months. Not only will the search engines think you have a dead site, so will your customers!
Plan on adding a page of fresh content to your site as often as possible. GoogleBot shows preference to sites that add or update content daily.

4. Broken Links. You would think this goes without saying. But broken links are everywhere and diminish credibility. Check and re-check your site for broken links.

5. The dreaded horizontal scroll. The horizontal scroll is a usability nightmare. If your site will not fit an 800x600 resolution and your visitors get a scroll bar at the bottom of the page you will loose customers. Be sure that nothing on your page will push the design out past 780 pixels wide (Leave 20 pixels for the vertical scroll).

Change your screen resolution and take a look at the site in all of the available options that you have. Right now 800x600 is the most popular with 1024x768 the next favorite.

Source:http://www.monstersmallbusiness.com