Hi 5: Part 4

Creating the look and feel of a website is a factor that most web developers put their whole heart and soul into. Everyone wants a website to grab the users attention and keep the viewer interested. But, before this is considered a website must have an identity. This is due to the fact that there are many web sites out there and you want to have a logo visible to the viewer so they can remember it.

When it comes to a corporate identity, try to remember the rule of KISS. That is the acronym for “Keep It Simple Stupid”. Look at the following successful companies - Nike, Mercedes Benz, Microsoft, Sun and Hewitt Packard. All of these companies have simplistic corporate identities that are not difficult to remember. Notice that DevArticles logo is a series of dots representing the letter d.

The team should work out a colour scheme and target audience when the logo is developed. The colour scheme should be consistent throughout the web site unless the web site is broken up into other sections that each have a colour associated with them. Then the colour must be consistent throughout that section to avoid confusion.

The target audience should only affect the content of the site, if the colour scheme is subtle. With a content driven site, the way the words are presented to the viewer become more vital. The content will be looked at more in the following phase.

What are the key players that contribute in providing a successful web site in terms of its attractiveness to the viewer?

The web developers in this phase should sit down and look over some design ideas from each member of the design group. It is a great idea to look at sites that offer free templates like MyFreeTemplates, so that you can see some more designs. This could possibly trigger a creative spark and assist in energizing the left hand side of their brains ;)

In talking to fellow web developers Mitchell Harper, the creator of DevArticles and Frank Manno, in charge of our weekly newsletter DevXPress, I felt that the use of templates are definitely the way of the future for web site design. The reason that templates play an important role is because they set up consistency within the entire website. Nothing is worse than navigating throughout a site and finding that the pages do not fit in with one another, varying in designs and resulting in a confused mess. Consistency is necessary for successful web site design.

Testing of a template is imperative. The team should test it so that the load up time is hasty. It is no good having lots of graphical features if the load up time is enormous. To cut down on upload time, try using text based CSS for rollovers opposed to images and make sure that the images or movies that you use have been optimized by use of compression.

A point that should be raised is how the templates are to be produced. Upon a further discussion with Frank, he stated that,

 “… with the standards movement making way, a template that complies to standards as well as achieves a quality aesthetic look is an advantage over the traditional table-based templates.”

This is a great comment that was made because it underlines the importance of the web sites flexibility. The traditional HTML tables are restrictive and lack the flexibility that is available in today’s browsers.

If one of your team members has worked with print previously, perhaps they are familiar with the term white space, otherwise known as “negative space“. For a content driven site like DevArticles, and even with the DevXPress newsletter, white space can be used effectively so that the space can guide the viewer from one visual element on a page to another.

Note that if there is not enough space between text and graphical elements, it can actually put a strain on the viewer’s eyes and hence, the viewer may not absorb all the information required or the effect that an image is meant to portray.

Typography is an issue that is raised quite often in graphic design. The history of typography dates back to the period of 10,000 BC to 15,000 BC, where the first form of visual communication was developed in the caves of Lascaux, but that is ancient history :) 

Today, the use of a type font can make or break a web site. With a website like DevArticles, a font face like verdana with size 2 is great since it is a content driven site and so every character is legible and easy on the eye.

Perhaps the development team could discuss using CSS instead of the old-fashioned FONT tags when is comes to implementing the font types. This issue will also be discussed in the implementation and evaluation phase.

Once the team has decided on a basic template design, they can now commence the final phase of this development cycle, which is the implementation and testing.