A good web design is one which is easy to use, easy to navigate, easy to understand and read, and also attractive. By attractive we don't imply that you need to put in lots of graphics and animations. The vital point to keep in mind is that the site should not be cluttered with too many things as it can take the focus away from your content which is what you are trying to convey. The question of which is more important, web design or content is a hot topic. Some people think that the content is the most important, while others think it is the design. In reality, they both play a big role in the success of the website.

If the web design isn't appealing, then the people who visit the site will not take the time to read the content; if the content isn't interesting, it will drive away your visitors for good. An attractive website design is what makes your visitors pay attention to what you're communicating and it will influence how people think about your site.

Planning of a website design before starting up your web project is highly important. The target audience and scope of the website content should be taken into account before deciding on a website template.

Consider that a site promoting executives should be designed in a streamlined, professional, and organized fashion. However, a site targeted towards children is ideally one that is more entertaining - full of colors, images, and perhaps accompanied by music.

You must take into account the importance of design and browser settings when you are building your site. A website that uses horizontal scrolling is difficult to view and will be avoided by most users, limiting your traffic. Browser compatibility across different browsers is also important and should be addressed in the planning stages. Another important aspect is consistent design throughout all pages in your site.

Carefully incorporate colors and pictures or drawings in the design of your website. Background colors and color palettes can have a subtle effect on the attractiveness and utility of your web site. For example, using a neutral or white background lends a somewhat more professional appeal for business websites and allows for experimentation with various multi-hued designs. SEO and search engine submissions considerations are also paramount.

Superior web design is always user friendly, easily comprehensible, eminently readable, and appealing to the eye. However, it's crucial that your website be uncluttered so as not to draw the reader's attention from the text, your most important means of getting your message across. Search engines play an important role, too, specifically search engine marketing and search engine submissions. You must take into account the importance of design and browser settings when you are building your site. Browser compatibility across different browsers is also important and should be addressed in the planning stages. Another important aspect is consistent design throughout all pages in your site.

Listed below are some useful and rather important tips for designing a professional and high quality web site:

• Neat and Easy Navigation: Navigation of links on your site plays a big role in determining the stickiness of your site (how long your visitor stays and explores your site). Ask yourself this, What do visitors do as soon as they open your site? They would probably read the content of the present page and then look around to find any other page that interests them. Read our article on Web site Navigation Tips.
• Clean Layout Design: A clean layout that uses a lot of white space enhances a site's looks. Try to keep the focus on your content, use a template for this. Use fonts that will be available on all computers to prevent your site looking messed up.
• Optimum Load Time: Make sure your load time is low. For this you must:
  Minimize Graphics, Flash and scripts: They hugely increase your file size.
  Optimize your HTML & script code: Make sure that your site doesn't have any unwanted tags or unused scripts.
  Use Server Side Include (SSI) files where ever possible. SSI files once called from the web server reside in its cache so on subsequent requests they load faster.
  Read our article Tips for a Fast Loading Site for more.
• Design for all Screen Resolutions: A site that is easy-to-use always encourages visitors to stay and read your content. For site with long pages of content this is very crucial as the amount of scrolling required is reduced. Suppose your site doesn't look good for a particular resolution it is very probable that the visitor will close the browser window feeling that the web page is not for their viewing. Designing stretch layouts that fit any screen resolution ensures that you know all your visitors see a visually appealing and professional site.
  Read our article Designing for all Screen Resolutions for more.
• Ensure Web site scalability: Make sure your code and design is scalable. As technology advances and configuration of computers & their monitors keep increasing and varying it is impossible to test your site in all screen sizes and platforms.
• Cross Browser Compatible: Make sure you check your site for Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla Firefox 1.0, Opera 7.0 and Netscape Navigator 6+ as they constitute 95% of the worlds browsers.

Recent visitors to my site will notice that it's received a pretty substantial overhaul in the past week or so. I tore up the old template and started from scratch, revamping both form and content to produce what I think is a much improved experience. The visuals are bolder, cleaner, and more light-hearted, which matches the 'house style' that I've adopted for the various blurbs and introductory sections. I have always appreciated design and copy with a human touch, and it's an easily identifiable thread within that collection of internet trends that some like to call web2.0. Paradigmatic online examples include Google and flickr, while Innocent Smoothies do it best outside the inter-ether.

Better still, I'm pretty sure I've solved the longest-standing problem that this website has presented - displaying the images themselves. My eventual salvation was found in a Flash application called Pictobrowser. This incredible programme displays images from a flickr account (filtered by tag, category, or whatever else you like), along with titles captions (at last!) and thumbnails of the other images in the set along the bottom . It's also customisable to some extent, which can be handy for displaying more awkwardly sized images.

In earlier times I might have been wary of using a Flash app, but since the advent of flash-encoded streaming video sites like YouTube, it's become almost ubiquitous, particularly among the sorts of people that are likely to be viewing the site.

It's not quite perfect yet (it has particular trouble with portrait format images), but it's better than anything I've come across before by several orders of magnitude, so I'm going to stick with it and keep an eye open for updates.

As for other updates, I'm working to improve accessibility, and want to spruce up the visuals a little more. Once I've got a better handle on it, I want to use scriptaculous (another great utility) to animate the main menu images to reveal sub-menus when you roll over them. Not sure if that makes sense, but it looks great in my head.

Anyway, the site is still very much a work in progress at the moment, and I'd really appreciate some constructive criticism. Let me know what you reckon!

Visually impaired people are now increasingly able to join in the video gaming fun thanks to an ever-expanding range of audio games.

They even have the potential to turn into new gaming genres in their own right which could start to appeal to sighted gamers.

But, compared with the millions of copies of PC and console games sold every year, the market for audio games is still relatively tiny.

"My guess is that about 3,000 audio or blind-accessible games are sold a year," said Richard van Tol who jointly runs Audio Games.Net, an information site for fans and developers.

"Loads of blind people have computers but not many of them know about audio games."

Ambient effects

There are currently about 50 commercially available titles on the market, with perhaps three times as many freeware and shareware options.

Like their graphics-based cousins, the games come in many varieties - adventure, arcade and so on.

But certain elements are essential according to Canadian Kelly Sapergia, who regularly reviews audio games for ACB Radio - a dedicated service for blind listeners.

"They need to have really distinctive sounds so that you can easily tell where you are," he said.

"This can be achieved using different ambient music and having the footsteps change depending on whether you're on grass or mud."

Mr Sapergia also thinks that good dialogue is necessary to guide players through the game.

"First and foremost, it must be fun," said Richard van Tol. "Secondly, it must be understandable because you don't have any visual references."

And both agree that good games need sufficient elements of competition and have to be attractive enough to make players come back for more.

Out the box

One of the first commercial companies in the marketplace was Bavisoft, a small US-based developer which has two titles to its credit and a third due for release in 2005.

"The idea for creating audio games came from our president, Jeff Gibbons, who is colour-blind," said Bavisoft sales and marketing director Russ Byer.

Mr Gibbons had always experienced problems playing video games because of the lack of proper contrast. For him certain things were completely invisible.

"As he's a musician, he had the idea of making a game just based on sound and the idea grew from there," said Mr Byer.

Bavisoft says its main focus is not on people being unable to see, but more on what would be a fun thing to do.

"If it's impossible to make the activity audio-based, we have to re-think the idea or think outside the box," said Mr Byer.

The company's second title, Chillingham, is an adventure set in a haunted village.

Players have to solve puzzles and, on the way, need to defend themselves from attacks by vampires, witches and werewolves.

Fending them off requires either excellent stereo speakers or a good pair of headphones in order to locate them in the stereo picture.

Games on the move

Mr Byer said that he and Mr Gibbons had grown up playing text adventure games but they also loved the arcade variety.

"Our games have the feel of the old text adventures but then, at times, there will be action sequences which are like mini arcade games," he said.

"The result is hopefully more than just a text adventure made for sound."

The games have developed to such an extent that some people are predicting they could soon be popular among sighted players.

But Richard van Tol thinks platforms like PCs and games consoles are so inherently graphics-orientated that sound-only games are unlikely to break through.

On the other hand, small, handheld devices - mobile phones, PDAs and the latest portable games devices - could be ideal for furthering the audio game genre.

"Maybe people will use them on the move a bit like personal music players," said Mr van Tol.

He thinks another limiting factor is the lack of good quality audio engines.

"The current 3D engines only use the X-Y axis. The sound's either in front of you or behind, there's no above or below."

While it may be some time before the majority of gamers talk of developing good "hand-ear co-ordination", visually impaired people can now look forward to a brighter gaming future.

If you're looking for information about HTML, XHTML, CSS, or Web Design, you've come to the right place. This document provides you with everything you need to learn HTML, XHTML, CSS, and Web Design - all in one handy place.

HTML References / CSS References / Web Design References:

• HTML 4.01
• XHTML 1.0
• HTML Frames
• HTML Tables
• HTML Forms
• CSS 1
• CSS 2
• CSS 3
• HTML Codes
• ASCII Codes
• Web Safe Colors
• CSS 2 Color Keywords
• Named Colors

Validation:

• HTML Validator
• CSS Validator
• XHTML Validator
• RSS Feed Validator
• Atom Feed Validator
• P3P Policy Validator
• Accessibility Validator
• Check Links

HTML Tutorials / CSS Tutorials / Web Design Tutorials:

• HTML Tutorial
• XHTML Tutorial
• CSS Tutorial
• Web Design Tutorial
• XML Tutorial

HTML Classes / CSS Classes / Web Design Classes:

• HTML Class
• XHTML Class
• Web Design Class
• CSS Class
• HTML Forms Class
• XML Class
• JavaScript Class
• Photoshop Class

HTML Editors / Web Design Editors / Web Page Editors:

• Find the Right Web Page Editor
• Dreamweaver Help
• FrontPage Help
• BBEdit Help
• GoLive Help
• HomeSite Help
• TextEdit Help
• Notepad Help
• Help for Other Web Editors

Search Engine Optimization:

• Search Engine Optimization Made Simple
• Search Engine Optimization Step-by-Step
• Improving Your Web Site for Higher Google Rankings
• Meta Tag Generator
• Tips to Promote Your Site
• SEO Tips

HTTP / Web Hosting / Web Servers / Web Analytics / Password Protection:

• Web Analytics
• Web Hosting
• Web Servers
• Web Security
• SSI Help
• Password Protection
• HTTP

HTML Jobs / Web Design Jobs / XML Jobs:

• Salaries
• Pricing
• Legal Issues
• Copyright
• Web Job Banks

Graphics / Photos / Images:

• When to Use GIF, JPG, and PNG
• Free Images
• Protect Photos
• Taking Great Web Photos
• Optimizing Images
• GIF Images
• JPEG / JPG Images
• PNG Images
• Image Maps
• Anti-aliasing

HTML References / Web Design References

• HTML 4.01 Tags / XHTML 1.0 ElementsCSS 1 and CSS 2 PropertiesHTML Codes

HTML Tutorials / Web Design Tutorials / CSS Tutorials

• HTML 4.01 Tutorial / XHTML 1.0 TutorialCSS 1 and CSS 2 TutorialXML Tutorial

Editing Web Sites / Managing Web Sites

• Find the Right Web Page EditorSearch Engine Optimization Step-by-StepWeb Site Analytics

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I've decided that Amazon Web Services is the only (currently) sane way do develop a web site today, especially if one expects/hopes that the site might generate high traffic.

If you haven't heard about it, check it out at aws.amazon.com. Essentially, Amazon.com is leveraging their $2 Billion investment in infrastructure by making it available to the world. It's called cloud computing. For very reasonable rates (it isn't free, but darn near), you can get data storage, a database, and servers. The data storage and database scale automatically, and you can add servers on demand.

So what does this mean? It really evens the playing field. Using AWS (and apparently Google and Microsoft are working on similar platforms), you can build a web application that can easily expand to handle as much traffic as you like, all without you having to invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a data center. No hardware to buy, no maintenance staff for it, no physical location required -- all that stuff required to build a web application that requires a huge upfront investment. It will take a very long time before it would have been cheaper to do it yourself - if ever - than to pay Amazon.

And you don't have to use all the Amazon features at once - you could use the database and storage and run the app on your own servers, for example. For the applications I build, storage, data base, and servers are the main components. AWS also has some other services such as message queuing.

But what about using an ISP or other web-hosting service? Well, for smallish apps, that is probably OK. But as soon as you start getting thousands or more hits per hour, that solution will start to have problems. This is where the three-part solution might help. If you think there ever is a possibility of getting lots of traffic (or moderate traffic that views lots of data like videos or music), then you could start with your own server or a hosting company, but use Amazon's storage and data base solutions.

If you are hoping to build a high-traffic site, no matter what platform you use, I've discovered there is one secret to designing your application's architecture. As you get high loads, the solutions available end up spreading the computation and storage issues over many individual servers. Each page you serve to the user will likely come from a single server, but the next page served is likely to come from a completely different server. What that means is that your applications have to be essentially stateless. Whatever state you need from page to page must be kept in cookies on the client computer (hopefully in a secure manner). As long as you remember this basic principle, you application can likely be ported to a cloud environment.

But whatever the details, cloud computing as a service changes everything. Startups no longer need a big upfront investment in server hardware and software. If you can invest some sweat equity in your project, you can easily get going with a few thousand dollars (development machines, usage of AWS, etc.), and not tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As a designer, and an artist, I get asked all the time to critique other people's work.  I enjoy doing it.  But the one thing I have learned over the years... if you ask someone for a critique.. do yourself a favor and ACTUALLY listen to what they have to say.  Now that doesn't mean that a critique should be taken as gold... it is an opinion.  The best way to handle critiques.. listen, don't argue and don't offer excuses.  Thank the person who's advice you were given and go home or take a break and filter through it.  If they offered you 5 things to fix.. that doesn't mean you need to fix all 5 things, but you should at least TRY to consider 1 or two..especially if you're hearing the same critiques from multiple people.

I can't tell you the amount of times i've had people offer excuses, arguments etc etc.  Now of course there is a fine line to this... as artists, we all have our own style, and maybe the person who's just critiqued you doesn't have the same style or taste as your own.  So keep that in mind.  When you're looking for someone to critique your work, make sure to look at their own work, figure out what styles they like.  I am not a pink fan.. so anyone coming to me with a pink project they want critiqued will probably get less enthusiasm than if it were another color.

I hope you all have been healthy, happy and well.... will probably post up some of our latest works in a little bit.

Have a good one!

Jen
JW Design Center
www.jwdesigncenter.com