Library: Web Design

Topping the list of important elements is perhaps the most unlikely design element of all: nothing. Well, we don’t mean nothing exactly, but rather, the empty space between the elements on your page—often referred to in design circles as white space or negative space. This space serves to separate your content and is the backbone of an accessible and visually pleasing website.

The benefits of negative space
In design, negative space has a number of benefits for the audience reading your text:
• It provides contrast between your page background and the other elements in your layout, as well as a resting point for the reader’s eye

When you’re designing an animated banner ad, a great way to produce the maximum impact is to design the last frame first. You might think it’s crazy not to start at the beginning, but it’s precisely the way to get a solid ending. There are a number of reasons for this technique:

• Your ad probably won’t loop for more than a few rotations, so inevitably, it will wind up being static on the last frame at some point.

• While the page is loading, the viewer is probably looking for a search button or quick information on the page he intended to visit, rather than digesting your ad. It’s likely he’ll miss the first few frames or even the first full rotation of your ad.

• When the ad stops, the viewer won’t see it replayed unless he refreshes the page.

• If your ad is only one in a multi-ad rotation, chances are slim that the viewer will see it replay at all.

The bottom line is that the last frame has the most impact. It’s the one that remains onscreen and will get the most visibility. When creating your animation, if you start by compiling the final frame with the elements of the ad that are most important, it’s easy to go back to the beginning to add the lead-in frames.

Have you ever completed an online form—perhaps a survey of some sort—that included check box after check box after check box? If so, you may have wished for a way to select all of those check boxes with a single click. (Or you may have moved on without giving accurate information simply because you didn’t want to take the time to select all those little boxes.)
There’s nothing you can do about this situation on other people�

Getting good search-engine placement is a major goal for most webmasters. After all, if people can’t find your site, they can’t buy your products, support your cause, or marvel at your innovative page designs. But sometimes your site isn’t ready for the world to see yet. Maybe you’re still testing the site, or perhaps you have a certain directory that you don’t need to catalog. A robotexclusion file (robots.txt) ensures that you don’t reveal your site until you’re good and ready.

A cautionary note: Well-behaved robots check for a robot-exclusion file before cataloging a site. Not all robots are well behaved, however, so excluded pages or directories can still appear in search results. You should never publish content that you don’t want to be made public unless it�

When you’re working on the web, it’s important to make text stand out. After all, that’s what the viewer is usually looking for—content. And while it’s easy to create contrasting text elements on a solid background, you’re often asked to include text on a photo or other illustration that contains a number of colors. That can be a problem. As you can see from the example in Figure A, the text doesn’t contrast well against the rock surface and gets washed out against the background

If you’ve ever spent hours in the paint aisle at your favorite hardware store trying to pick colors for your bedroom walls, you probably have trouble picking attractive colors for your websites. Fortunately, several sites can help you take the guesswork out of creating color palettes. One of the most popular is ColorMatch 5K http://colormatch.dk. All you have to do is adjust three sliders (for red, green, and blue); ColorMatch then creates a 5-color palette depending on what color scheme you choose from the dropdown list based on the one you mixed with the sliders. Each color’s hexadecimal value—e.g., #81A364—appears below it. If five colors aren’t enough for you, visit Colormixers online at http://colormixers.com/mixers/cmr. This site, developed by Kim Jensen, is based on ColorMatch 5K but creates nine-color palettes. For more on color palette options that pack a punch, check out the July 2007’s article, “Captivate your users with a visually appealing color palette” You can view it online at, www.elijournals.com /premier/showArticle.asp?aid=25052.

With the concern for online privacy these days, it’s important that your customers feel comfortable visiting your site. Without that comfortable feeling, they may only be one-time customers instead of repeat customers. When establishing a custom

Recently, I’ve acquired a new client. Whenever the company name appears in print, the first part of the name is supposed to be bold, while the second part is supposed to be extra-bold. Is there a trick I can use to achieve this effect?

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) appears to offer a solution to your problem in the form of the font-weight property. By assigning this property to text, you specify the w

Many times in the web design you’ll be asked to design for a non-profit organization such as a church, or a school that can’t afford to spend a lot on web services, much less a h