Fonts
With Fonts we are limited to a few web safe fonts, which could be a bit boring because we want our page to look good. We have some options however to use fancy fonts in the form of creating images of the font -which takes up too much memory- or using tools which load the fonts as objects and we won't loose download speed.
Some web safe fonts Some Image generated fonts
Arial
Arial Black
Bookman Old Style
Comic Sans
Courier New
Georgia
Impact
Lucinda Console
Lucinda Sans Unicode
Palitino Linotype
Tohoma
Times New Roman
Trebuchet MS
Verdana
With Fonts we are limited to a few web safe fonts, which could be a bit boring because we want our page to look good. We have some options however to use fancy fonts in the form of creating images of the font -which takes up too much memory- or using tools which load the fonts as objects and we won't loose download speed.
Some web safe fonts Some Image generated fonts
Arial
Arial Black
Bookman Old Style
Comic Sans
Courier New
Georgia
Impact
Lucinda Console
Lucinda Sans Unicode
Palitino Linotype
Tohoma
Times New Roman
Trebuchet MS
Verdana
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When designing a website a number of critical points need to be taken into consideration, the size of the page needs to be less than 50Kb and preferably below 20Kb so that the download time is fast. The images must be compressed so that they are still crisp with a small file size. We are slightly limited to the fonts we use and colour selection. Here are some samples and guidelines.
Page size
With different screen sizes and ways that pages are viewed on browsers we design most our sites with an 800 pixel (click here for an example) width or a 1024 pixel (click here for an example) width and length can vary depending on whether you are happy to want your viewer to scroll down the page for more information. As text takes very little space and text content is what we want to give our viewers we can provide a fair amount of text, our recommendation is no less than 500 words on content pages.
Page size
With different screen sizes and ways that pages are viewed on browsers we design most our sites with an 800 pixel (click here for an example) width or a 1024 pixel (click here for an example) width and length can vary depending on whether you are happy to want your viewer to scroll down the page for more information. As text takes very little space and text content is what we want to give our viewers we can provide a fair amount of text, our recommendation is no less than 500 words on content pages.
Images
Images are a crucial part of any website, not just pictures of the products etc. But the whole page design relies on images to make it look good. The navigation buttons and the headers are all images that are loaded when the page is visible the compressed size of the image must be as small as possible.
Here we have some samples of images that are compressed at different levels and their size in Kb's.
Images are a crucial part of any website, not just pictures of the products etc. But the whole page design relies on images to make it look good. The navigation buttons and the headers are all images that are loaded when the page is visible the compressed size of the image must be as small as possible.
Here we have some samples of images that are compressed at different levels and their size in Kb's.
Original Image 32KB
20% Compression 6.57KB
40% Compression 3.77KB
60% Compression 2.25KB
80% Compression 1.67KB
90% Compression 1.36KB
So that we don't loose too much detail we will normally go with between 20 and 40% compression.
If the visitor does not have any of the web safe fonts loaded on their system then the fonts will revert to a system font such as Arial or Times New Roman, however if the image fonts are applied then the font will always be visible because it is an image however the search engines don't see it as text therefore it could be detrimantal for SEO when using images as titles. However we do have the means to convert the fonts to fancy fonts and not loose the SEO benefit but this is limited to 5 fonts only.
Colour schemes
Like fonts there are web safe colours that are recommended but not really cast in stone.
Like fonts there are web safe colours that are recommended but not really cast in stone.
Here we have an example of web safe colours, which doesn't offer the same range but does get close.
Here we have an example of normal colours, which offers a full range of any shade.
We often ask our clients to stick as much as possible to their corporate colours but sometimes they have a new product or service and would like some suggestions on what colour schemes to use. There are a number of websites that assist in creating colour schemes the ones we use are Colour Schemer and Adobe Kuler
Web Design
Navigation
Navigation is how one gets around the website there are many ways and trends that web developers follow when setting up navigation methods it all comes down to taste at the end of the day. Text navigation is the best for SEO and button menus use up bandwidth because each button is an image. We have techniques which make all forms of navigation for for search engine optimization so the method you chosse depends on your personal taste.
Navigation is how one gets around the website there are many ways and trends that web developers follow when setting up navigation methods it all comes down to taste at the end of the day. Text navigation is the best for SEO and button menus use up bandwidth because each button is an image. We have techniques which make all forms of navigation for for search engine optimization so the method you chosse depends on your personal taste.
