I realise you have been denied my wisdom for a while. This is an unfortunate, but not unexpected, occurrence. I can only apologise and promise to try and make up for it in the coming weeks.
I have been looking, for a number of months, at the general design of websites and trends in website design – what works, what doesn’t, the ‘in’ things to try. You may have noticed my site redesign earlier in the year – that was really just a case of me playing around with a few things. It didn’t ever get finished; eventually, I may get round to finishing the job. The most amusing thing about it has to be the green, one of my least favourite colours, but there you go…
Anyway, I’ve been working over the last few weeks on the new BUSY website, which isn’t yet finished, but has made some great progress this week. I’m definitely coming round to the idea that less is definitely more – that space is a virtue rather than cluttering people’s screens up with everything you can fit in. Social media integration is interesting – the ability to retweet an article on Twitter is a common staple on many sites, and Twitter is a great medium for sharing links. Some websites try and integrate Facebook into their sites by allowing people to ‘like’ their articles, or comment on them by logging in via Facebook, but neither of these approaches seems to have taken off. I also haven’t really seen AJAX taking off very much either. It’s obvious on some big sites, like Twitter and Facebook, but outside of that, there is very little implementation of AJAX, aside from the odd AJAX-enabled comments box.
As sites become more interactive, potentially pulling information from third parties more and more, the issue on clean coding becomes more and more an issue, especially when using iframes, as you have no control over the external code. Even with things like WordPress plug-ins, going through the code, checking it and integrating it into your site can be very time consuming – and then they upgrade…
I have been very impressed with this redesign from the point of browser compatibility. I work to make sure that a website is compatible with Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) , as well as the latest versions of Safari, Chrome and Firefox. With this redesign, there was only one slight problem with IE8, but this was solved by one explicit declaration in my CSS file. This is fantastic – in the past, it’s been a dog’s dinner to get them all to work. IE8 doesn’t support rounded corners (a CSS3 feature), but this is the only difference between the display of the website in any of the browsers.
So anyway, if you are interested in web design, here are a few links to look at on the design and structure of websites:
- Your HTML Source – by Ross Shannon. Covers the basics, covers them fantastically well, concisely, clearly, no jargon. An absolute gem of a website.
- Design Meltdown – by Patrick McNeil. It’s fantastic, full of links to other sites, and he’s even published a couple of beautiful books on trends in web design. He doesn’t tell you how to do it, but he points you to people with fantastic ideas, and that’s all you need sometimes!
- CSS Play – by a guy called Stu Nicholls. Not the prettiest site you’ll see, but has some wonderful CSS tips – the ones on styling forms are very good.
And now, here are some links to some of the tools I use when putting the actual websites together:
- WordPress – Quite frankly, there’s not much WordPress can’t do. It’s often seen as a “blogging” system. It’s WAY more than that. It’s simple and scalable, but if you scratch underneath the surface, it’s incredibly powerful too.
- GIMP – It’s an image manipulation programme really, but you can use it to make backgrounds for websites too.
- Notepad2 – This is where I write and edit my code. I’ve never come across a better editor.
- Filezilla – The best FTP client out there.
I should also add, I always use Linux hosting with cPanel. I’ve never used anything else, probably couldn’t either. As for hosting, I use Valcato.