Design Issues

Decide on a structure
How will visitors get around your site? If you decide on an easy, simple approach which leads visitors where you want them easily before you start the design then you life will be easier later. Do you want all pages to be found from the home page? Is the menu going to be vertical, horizontal, both? Where is the menu going to sit?

These questions have no definitive answers. Less clutter on a page and smaller snippets of information will make pages more manageable for visitors. Try to keep menus visible 'above the crease' - i.e. in view in a browser window where the screen is set to 800 x 600 pixels - which is STILL used by over 20% of Internet users (figures December 2005).

Start with a design idea
A graphic design is a good place to start. Bear in mind how you want to lay out information on your pages and then design based around this. Keep designs simple if you want to set information out clearly.

Chop the design up into manageable pieces
Once you have your graphic design complete, chop the graphic into manageable pieces, replacing large areas of block colour with a background image, tiled in the background (this can use a small image rather than the whole) or by choosing a background colour for the table cell. Save images at 72dpi and keep them as small as possible in terms of file size.

In broad terms, photographs should be saved as Jpegs and block colour, drawings or sketches as gifs. These will generally make best use of file size for the best quality graphics. Remember, even if someone is using broadband, the smaller the page and associated graphic file size, the faster it will load.

Keep it simple - Make sure it is browser compatible
Simple designs are more likely to work in different browsers. Avoid nesting tables too deeply, use tables and not frames wherever possible. Make pages expand to fit the screen resolution being used but also fit the 800 x 600 screen size that over 20+% of users see. If you use a larger screen mode, try changing this to 800 x 600. Scrolling left to right on your web page is a bad thing, but up and down is perfectly acceptable - 800 x 600 is very small so up and down scrolling is expected. In general, I define pages no wider than 750 pixels and allow them to expand to 100% of the page.