Category Archives: Web design

Website design rule 3: use a colour scheme

After the assertiveness of my first two rules, this one might seem a bit obvious and tame. Anything but. Not every set of colours is a colour scheme, as I propose it. So what makes a set of colours a … Continue reading

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Website designer breaks own rules

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 … Continue reading

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Web site development: between rules

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 … Continue reading

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Website design rule 2: design for 1024×768

You can see that once again I am being assertive. Why design for just this one monitor resolution? And, accepting my rule 1, exactly what fixed width ‘page’ does this imply? The facts of monitor resolution are worth being aware … Continue reading

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Website design rule 1: use a fixed-width layout

I can imagine your response. Isn’t this a bit arbitrary? Might we not restrict our creativity this way? Hasn’t there been a long debate in the Web design community about the merits of fixed and fluid designs—and isn’t it still … Continue reading

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Alt text (revisited)

An end-of-year apology to my readers. I don’t post as often as I mean to. One reason is that my posts are becoming too measured—and too all-inclusive. So here is a quick tip for all my readers who are designing … Continue reading

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Visual Display IS Content (ii)

In what I take to be a modern classic in graphic design education, Making and Breaking the Grid (Rockport, 2002), Timothy Samara makes the obvious preliminary point. “Pictures and symbols, fields of text, headlines, tabular data: all these pieces must … Continue reading

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Visual Display IS Content (i)

As should be clear from my last few posts, I am a big fan of what has come to called “the semantic Web.” Part of this movement is about making it easier for machines (computers, or computer software) to read … Continue reading

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IDs and classes

My last couple of posts have been about freeing HTML. One aspect of this is making the right sort of use of the attributes id and class. You can assign an id or class attribute to just about any HTML … Continue reading

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Rarely used HTML tags

I know, I know. This really is train spotting or bird spotting stuff. (Why are there so few entries in Google for “HTML anorak”?) But it’s also a kind of confession. In my last post, I wanted to emphasise that … Continue reading

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