Believe it or not, there are web designs that actually scare people away from the site and keep them from coming back. Doing this is something your web design company and you will have to avoid practically all the time. If you do not want your web design company and you to become tarnished or labeled as one of the "Worst web Designers of the net," you need to watch out for this.
Web Design's Scariest Backgrounds Setting the background on your site is one of the things that you have the liberty of setting or changing.
However, some backgrounds are simply ugly, difficult to read or just plain scary. Here are some sample backgrounds that I am talking about:
1. Pure black background with pale, light or white text. Unless you are a professional web designer who belongs to the best web design company in the world, try to avoid this type of background.
It looks generally pretentious, not to mention how difficult it is to do well. Some browsers print background color, and you definitely will not like angry customers complaining about how much ink it caused them to print the page.
2. Black with dark text. This is simply illegible and unacceptable. Your customers will have to highlight the text first to make it readable, and this can get really annoying.
3. Tiled and busy background images. New web designers find this convenient and amazing, but note that this takes more download time and do not add value to your site on the part of your customers.
Web Design's Scariest Text People visit your site for the content that you offer. If they can not view your text, they will leave immediately and not come back. Your web design company does not want this to happen, so be wary of some of the things that you need to avoid:
1. Text wherein everything is centered. This makes your page awfully hard to read and look really boring.
2. Too much emphasis, headlines, bold, strong or italics. Do not set every line on your page to be highlighted or set as headline. This defeats the web design purpose of setting some text to stand out.
3. Blinking text. Even if they can be attractive to some, they are almost always impossible to read!
Web Design's Scariest Content You should also pay attention to your content as it is what drives visitors into (or out) of your site. The general rule is to make sure that you put in interesting and eye-catching content and to avoid things like these:
1. Content made of pure lists of link. This refers to straight links where every word of every line is a link. (Those that have paragraph explanations to it does not belong to this category.)
2. "Cutesy and fun" content. Try not to add in some tricks to get people to laugh. Chances are they will either not understand your humour and you will need to explain it further, or they will simply not go back to your site anymore.
Web Design's Scariest Multimedia Multimedia oftentimes becomes the scariest tool ever to hit the web. Your web design company will surely appreciate your multimedia talents and you can show it off when you want to. They usually will take you a very long time to build, so that the more you work hard for it, the more it makes you proud. However, note that the page is never just about you or your web design company. It is about the client who you are web designing the pages for. Do them a favor and do not let them have to sacrifice for you to show off your graphical or Flash skills. Try to avoid the following web design no nos as well:
1. Images much too many. These images include those small icons that designed put into their site. The rule of thumb is: if you already have more than two, you now have too many.
2. Unreasonable large images. You do not have to publish the print quality versions of photos right into the page. They take too long to load, and are usually not appreciated anyway. Resizing your photos through HTML simply does NOT count.
3. Sound. Just try your very best not to put sounds and songs. Mp3, wav or whatever format of audio and songs playing on top of the page that is impossible to turn off, those MIDI files - they are all annoying. If you think your web design will be better off with sounds, make sure you give your visitors the controls to turn it on or off.
Your web design company will definitely not be happy about a scary web design. You surely will not. Your web design should encourage readers to view your page and to stay a little longer looking through it, and not the other way around!
Upgrade to Dreamweaver CS3? Or stick with Dreamweaver 8? This is a question that many web designers who own Dreamweaver 8 are asking themselves as they consider whether it would be worth their money or their web design company's money to upgrade their design software. Since it is your job as a web designer to work with the software in question, the onus of deciding whether the new version will improve service and overall work quality or not. Many web designers are also wary of the fact that Macromedia has been acquired by Adobe and are wondering whether the new owners have improved or destroyed this piece of software. It is my opinion that there is no clear choice between the two. The choice you eventually make must be determined by what you require from your design software.
Web design feature #1: Adobe and Dreamweaver Together
Some web design companies may find the integration between the new Dreamweaver software and existing Adobe tools a good enough reason to purchase the Dreamweaver CS3. Images can easily be transferred from one software to another and some designers find this feature very attractive.
Web design feature #2: CSS Support Made Better
Designers will likely find that one of the best new features of Dreamweaver CS3 are the fresh and improved CSS layouts. The software code contains detailed commentaries related to how these layouts function so understanding how to use them is a relatively simple affair. There are currently 32 different layouts to choose from, in 1, 2, or 3-column designs, and in fixed or liquid design layouts. The starting position of the CSS is easily defined and subsequent movement is also simple and easy. Designers can simply style the tag directly into the HTML through a style attribute, then transfer it to their style sheet. In Dreamweaver CS3, ?Convert Inline CSS to Rule? appears on a single right click of the tag and a custom class for that particular style or a full CSS selector is easily created.
Web design feature #3: Mobile Support
The incorporation of Adobe Device Central into Dreamweaver CS3 also makes designing pages for viewing on mobile platforms much easier than before. Although use of the mobile platform to view web pages has become increasingly popular, it was previously a rather challenging task to design pages that are compatible for viewing on both a mobile platform and a web browser one. Dreamweaver CS3 makes those challenges a thing of the past.
Web design feature #4: Ajax Implementation Now Made Possible
Adding Ajax widgets and effects to the web pages that you create is now possible through the incorporation of the Spry framework in to Dreamweaver CS3. A simple drag and drop operation will deposit them into your dataset. Transition effects such as shrinking, growing, highlighting and fading, integration of XML feed data and widgets for tables lists and forms are just some of the features of Spry that have been included in Dreamweaver CS3.
Web design feature #5: XLST Support
XLST support is a major feature of CS3 and both you and your design company will be delighted by the support included through the use of XML files as the database source. Viewing of the XML and integration into any HTML documents are made easy through XLST. Web designers who possess XML files of the same format can easily create a single template for them by using XLST.
Web design feature #6: Support for Mac Intel Processors
CS3 is now also native to the Intel-based Macintosh platform, and load times have been significantly reduced. The company behind CS3 claims that, whereas Dreamweaver 8 previously required four minutes to load, CS3 now accomplishes the same feat in under one minute. However, these claims have yet to be verified by proper testing.
To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade
The question does not have an easy answer. Personally, I chose to upgrade and have not looked back since. The new CSS features, XLST support and Device Central are all wonderful new additions to the software. However, live databases and server side scripts are still difficult to use with Dreamweaver CS3 and this may discourage web design companies from purchasing the software. If, at the end of it all, you choose to upgrade, it is unlikely that you will regret the money spent.