has today changed the design of their site (this may be throughout the BBC, or just here, but I actually can't be bothered to even click on the one solitary link and activate that portion of my memory required to cross reference that information. I am that lazy.)
This seems to happen everywhere these days, and I keep on noticing the same trends.
Everyone's becoming fond of airy, spacious layouts. Big gaps between things, and no harsh lines or borders.
I guess the idea is that it's more friendly and inviting. But to my eyes, it just seems less clear, more vauge and less densely informative.
Bear in mind this is a news site we're talking about.
I don't like this trend. It rarely sits right with me, and it seems particularly contrary to the goal of news institutions (assuming they are what they should be, which, having watched JFK last night, I assume they aren't).
Basically, everything's spread out, no longer delineated, and I have to scroll...scroll I say, to get all the information available to me previously.
This is rubbish. I'm not happy.
Home pages like this, I want to be able to flick my eyes over and know whether there's anything of interest to me in about a second. More detailed viewing should reveal slightly more data, but it should all be increasingly esoteric and useless.
This is how my mind works, this is how I absorb data best, and that is what you are there for internet. For quickly dumping information into my already bulging cranium.
Please stop pumping me with vacuous space.
Now, I'm off to buy some fabric to make my room less spacious (or perhaps more cosy).
Funny that. Too much whiteness on my walls, and I'm going to make a bed cave.
Architecture, interior design, and web design. They all of their fashions, but they are also all about the way we live, the way we understand, the way we relate to our world.
You may have noticed some very small clues that something big is happening to BBC News online. Over the weekend, one or two links changed and icons were upgraded. I noticed this with excitement as, with anticipation, I have been waiting to see the direction in which BBC News online goes...
This morning, the BBC News Web site launched its new-look, which has been designed to fit in with the entire BBC network of Web pages and micro sites.
Immediately upon entering the site, you will be aware of the fantastic amount of space that has been lacking in previous builds. The mass increase of 'white space' is a welcome addition to a once cramped and chaotic Web site, with larger headlines, typefaces and images making use of the newly allocated screen real estate, the site becomes easier to read and refreshingly reminiscent of the BBC's remit to appeal to everybody.
I can see more and more young people perhaps taking an interest in current affairs because of something as simple as a more modern-looking and, dare I say it, Web 2.0 feel to the BBC News Web site. The site does, at first appear to be as accessible as the previous builds. Once again, the 'Accessibility help' link at the top of the page is easily spotted. I do worry, however, that as with the new Home page, I have come across one or two links and groups of links which use colour alone to indicate that it is, in fact, a 'clickable' link.
The BBC masthead at the top of every page has undergone a change, too. Sadly, it does take up a lot of space and while this may be acceptable on other parts of BBC Online, I don't think people will have too much trouble realising that they are on BBC News if the black masthead were ditched in favour of the rather nice-looking red banner. It is important to remember that using large mastheads (or in this case, using two mastheads) often pushes too much of the most important content 'below the fold'. That is the point at which a user must scroll down the page and is often left unread. It's also apparent that the BBC logo shows up a few times too many. We have to remember that this can be an annoyance and one of the reasons many people switch from commercial sites and broadcasters to Public Service Providers.
Another design flaw I see, and I may just be being picky and 'Web-designery', but the continued use of the Verdana typeface, even though the font size has increased, was a bad move. While it may be clear that Verdana is an excellent type for smaller font-sizes as it is easier to read and more 'humanist', it is not the most pleasant-looking of fonts when the size is increased. Arial, Helvetica, or even Lucida Sans Unicode would have been a much better choice in terms of a good-looking design.
The articles themselves don't look an awful lot bigge, the sidebars take up more of the available space from previous versions than the articles themselves. That, in itself is a good thing, however. Studies have shown that users tend to lose track of what they are reading if they are forced to read wide bodies of copy on the screen. It is obvious that the articles have increased in width over the years; gone are the days when there was very little on the screen besides the article text and links to other news articles.
Now, however, every single part of the BBC Web site is vying for the most precious screen real estate in the country. This gives a user more choice and makes them stick around much longer, as well as increasing traffic across the board.
The Web site is now beginning to increase the use of embedded video players (part of the BBC's iPlayer system) so that users won't have to open a new window to watch news stories and clips. Images have increased in size in a concious decision by the designers in response to user feedback from the last build.
Finally, the biggest change and perhaps most important (or trendy), is the centralisation of the content. All of the page is aligned to the centre and as such is easier to read. Instead of your eyes being directed to the massive block of white space to the right of every BBC News page, the very short attention span of a Web surfer is quite appropriately burned up where it should be; on the content and images within the page itself.
Overall, I think this redesign is a step in the right direction and, as was mentioned in the BBC News editor's , more changes and design tweaks are on their way over the coming days and months as even throughout the year as more and more functionality is introduced across the board at the BBC online network.
Not everybody is convinced, however, as some of the comments on the BBC Editors' Web logs are evidence of:
I HATE it! Sorry. Too sparse and spread out, too big (cannot see whole front page on screen), text is too light. Yuk!
Here are the portfolies of different web design and web hosting companies providing the best web designing facilities to the users.
1WebSiteDesign Portofolio
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RGB Intractive Portfolio
At RGB Interactive we take great pride in giving each web site design client the best possible custom solution based on your needs. If you can imagine it, we can design it! Please visit these web sites online for more illustration. We have developed web sites for a wide range of industries, businesses, and organizations.
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Sims Design Web Design Portfolio
Sims design portolio shows the skills experience and knowledge the company has in order to design any type of website that your business may require.With your ideas and the company design skills the company had produce a modern,contemprary website design with the fuctionality that you require - all at an affordable price.
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StrateCOMM
StrateCOMM is the company providing proffesional web design and web hosting feature,s with solid reputation and expansive skill-set.The company consistantly dilevers creative web design soloutions that reflect the personality , needs , and vision of the client.The success of your online and offline branding, commmunications and marketing strategy is, and always be, our goal.
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NISA's Web Design Portfolio
You will have the choice of hundreds of predesigned website templates or unique website designs. We can make sure you can have a professional looking website developed in a fraction of the time, and at substantial savings.
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1WebSiteDesign Portofolio
1websitedesign is an uk based company proveding affordable web design and web hosting services featuring professional web design for your own business.With telent oriented designers
1website design makes your website a complete designing soloution for your own business.
Hey pubLISHers, I have a question for you. I got a request today for a recommendation on a Web design class in the Boston area. I’ve never taken one outside of a conference, so I had no advice to give. Do any of you have any experiences, good, bad, or otherwise to share?
Hey everyone,
Episode #11 is up for your listening pleasure. Episode #11 describes the autosummarize feature of MS Word. I realize that the episode is just a quick rundown of how the feature works and I didn't really get into what you'd use it for. I'm trying to keep the tips quick. So, I invite you to tell me how you might use this feature or tell me how you have already used the feature. Your story might just inspire someone else in how they could use it. Please send me an e-mail, record a message and send it to me or post a comment here.
You can find whole tutorials on autosummarize for your version of MS Word here:
Word 2002 :
Word 2003:
Here is a helpful dialogue about the Autosummarize feature in MS 2007: but here is that same basic principle and a brief tutorial:
I hope you enjoyed the show and please feel free to leave a comment down below or drop me a line at
You can access the podcast from here:
Today in class I will be talking about both planning your site and introduce page layout.
Charley Parker has published a series on in 6 parts. It is aimed at illustrators, gallery artists, cartoonists, comics artists, concept artists and other visual artists who want to present online in a professional manner. The coverage is thorough, well written, and easily understood. Start off with and pay attention to .
Who are you designing for?
It is crucial to ask who you are creating a website for. In Chris Garrett discusses pen portraits as a way to visualise who your website is for.
How do we know how people see a site? You will read many designer say this or that works. Their statements are usually based on research. For instance one way we know how users make sense of what they see on screen is through .What is eye tracking? it.
Studies at the Institute, Stanford University use eye tracking equipment to track and record the way online readers’ eyes scan news websites. They analyse the way people pause on areas of the screen in order to absorb information.
Steve Outing and Laura Ruel report the most common eye-movement patterns discovered . Their diagrams reveal on screen zones that are more important than others. See
What not to do when designing a site is highlighted in . Charlie Morris points to busy backgrounds, badly designed navigation, using frames, a table based look, hit counters, “under construction signs”, endorsements to use a particular browser, cluttered pages containing free adds are all tell tale signs
Think about which comes from a series of articles Each article covers a key point such as how people use web pages, how they scan a page, how impatient people are, keeping it simple, communicating rather than decorating, and conventions in web design.
Heidi Adkisson’s has good information and research mainly about navigation best practice.
Smashing Magazine has produced a list of
by Mark Boulton
Jason Beaird has written for Sitepoint. The article is an excerpt from the book of the same name.
Kyle Meyer has published which is an excellent summery of the basics of design. Kyle Meyer applies the elements of balance, proportion, rhythm, emphasis, and unity to web page layout and illustrates these key elements with screen shots of good examples where these principals are applied expertly.
Patrick McNeil regularly reviews well designed websites on . In his Patrick reviews and illustrates with thumbnail screenshots 10 portfolio sites that keep it simple and to the point.
Lorelle VanFossen has written a about the experience of designing a website for artists, musicians, painters, poets, or crafters in as she teases out what issues are important to make a site work.
For various reasons, not least attempting to "Ajaxify" my web design skills, I have embarked upon learning Ruby on Rails. Most, if not all, of this is pretty new to me. I don't know a great deal (OK, make that nothing) about object-oriented (OO) programming, JavaScript I tend to fly by the seat of pants with (but they tell me Rails will do it all for me...), and the concepts of frameworks and model-view-control patterns are about as alien as wee green men. The philosophy, though, I think I'm pretty comfortable with and I tend to get excited about it so that's got to be a good thing. Also I think I've pretty much cracked XHTML and CSS and the whole web standards and usability thing so I reckon I'm on the right track. So what I intend to do here is track my experiences, both for my own benefit and perhaps to help others who find themselves in the same position as me. There's a whole host of guides out there (some of which I'll come to later) but hopefully my insights will add a little flavour to the mix.
So where to start? The thing that struck me at the outset was I didn't actually know what I didn't know. That probably doesn't make sense, but I guess what I mean is I didn't really know how the things that I did know fitted into the overall jigsaw. So what did I know?
There's an object-oriented programming language called Ruby that's supposed to be cool and easy to learn. Hah!
There's a "thing" called Ruby on Rails developed by some genius at which forms the basis of new emerging "web 2.0" type applications. I even use their Highrise and Backpack apps.
Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) makes things even better; the fact that you don't need page reloads is the killer here. I knew too that there was a seminal article about this somewhere...
I had a hunch that my previous attempts at learning PHP, Perl and CGI may just have been a waste of time.
All of this means you can do some really fancy stuff with your web pages (drag and drop anyone?).
Fitting all of this together with my knowledge of (X)HTML, DHTML and CSS was, and still is, the challenge. The first thing I wanted to be clear about was where Ajax fitted into the mix. Jason Cranford Teague's was great for this. I've followed Jason's stuff for many years - back to his columns in The Independent in the late 90s - and always found him easy to read. The initial chapters of the book were going over old ground for me, but that was reassuring as I felt I was hitting Ajax at the right level. After reading this I was pretty happy with the connections between page layout using XHMTL and CSS and dynamically serving the content through the Document Object Model (DOM)/JavaScript and the XMLHttpRequest object: the fundamentals of what we know as Ajax. Heh, I'm getting somewhere.
My next port of call was the official . I skimmed around there for a while looking at site examples etc (I even managed to divert my attention to setting up a site) and trying to get some guidance on what books or tutorials I needed. I found pretty good fun and a good place to start learning the basics of OO programming, however I'm a book kinda person so I headed to Amazon.
The reviews on Amazon can be a pretty good indicator to the usefulness of a book, especially in giving an idea of the "level" it is aimed at. The standard textbook for learning Ruby is known as the , because it has, erm, a pickaxe on the cover, but by Peter Cooper looked a better bet for an OO novice like myself. The pickaxe book is over 3 years old now, too, and I have a general rule of not buying textbooks this old, especially in such a fast-changing environment as web design. So that's Ruby taken care of. Next up was Ruby on Rails, or just Rails as it is often referred to. There's a few books on this but by Scott Raymond had the appeal of killing two birds with one stone. It's an book too: you can't go wrong with O'Reilly.
So these books landed on my doormat the other day and I've pretty much finished reading through both of them and I've even messed around with Ruby itself for a while using the Ruby interactive interpreter ("irb") on my Mac; Ruby is installed by default on Mac OS X. But more of that later. At this point I think I may be missing some deeper understanding of both Rails and Ajax but I kind of want to get dirty with some apps under development and then seek further help where I best need it. and the brand new look favourites at the moment. But for now, I'm going to see where I'm at.
Next time I'll relate my experiences with beginning programming in Ruby and installing Ruby on Rails.
