Web Log Costa Blanca

Well, I’ve only got two rules out, and my most recently published website is breaking them.

The site is for a laser stop-smoking technician here in Calpe: Laser Stop-Smoking.

Well, it’s not actually breaking them. It has a fixed-size display ‘page,’ just as I recommend. But it’s not 960 pixels wide.

Why not? Because the client gave me just three images she wanted to use on her site, one of which was her logo, and they were all three of them 730 pixels wide. I guess I could have put them to left and right of a wider page, but they would have looked odd, even—as my poor dead brother Paul would have said—‘daft.’ (He used to say this in the accent he picked up from kids he taught in Liverpool. It was telling.)

I experimented for days and days (as I do) and eventually decided that the only way to work with such beautiful striking images was to go with them. So the page is 732 pixels wide (a pixel of padding on either side, since that looked better to me after many alternative tries).

The cross-page photos are so eye-catching that I can’t really put more photos between them. On the other hand, there are now areas of unbroken text. (Well, again, not really. See rule N about tight headings, and rule N+1 about how many words to spread across a page. I’ll get to them before long.) They still need a bit of livening up.

Feel free to go back to the site in a week or two and see if I’ve worked out anything inventive.

Just in case anyone misunderstood, the Web site design rules that I am making up as I go along are visual design rules.

When I said, a couple of weeks ago, that “this is where we start,” I didn’t mean that this was the beginning of serious Web site design. Obviously, we start with goals and objectives and users and scenarios (lots of stuff about this earlier in this blog—I won’t insult you by saying where). I am assuming now that this stuff is done, and we are at this moment looking at a white screen on a monitor, and working out a visual design.

These are the rules we need.