TAG | Web Design
Most designers would jump at the chance to revisit their work but what is the right motivation for a site redesign and how should the process actually work? .net puts you in the know
Even if you get it right first time, there are plenty of reasons to take a fresh look at an older site. For a start, the web is changing. Again. Consider the web circa 1994 – design didn’t even come into it for those of us struggling to view grey, graphics-free pages using Mosaic. Today’s Web 2.0 revolution promises an epochal shift in user-expectation as significant as that caused by the introduction of streaming media, WYSIWIG web design applications or Flash.
There are other factors, too: accessibility, for one, and, of course, the time-honoured tradition of corporate re-branding, which is as good a reason for redesigning a website as any other.
When it comes to redesigning, there is a clear divide about how websites should be handled: is it better to patch-up any problems and give a quick coat of paint to the original aesthetic or burn the whole thing down and start again from scratch?
Just because it’s at the bottom of the screen doesn’t mean it isn’t vital for creating an informative and stylish homepage. Elliot Jay Stocks shows us how.
In the last tutorial we created a great-looking header for our fictional small business website. It followed an autumnal colour palette, using some elegant typography and some basic photo manipulation to set the theme for the site. We’re going to follow that up this issue by creating the footer to complement it.
If headers are the bold, striking elements that lead a user into a site’s content and give the first impressions, then footers might well be seen as the ‘parting thoughts’ of a website; a graphical bookend to all of the other elements on the page. They might not be very noticeable, but they’re there to do an important job.
Craig Grannell explores some ideas for fine-tuning websites for Apple’s increasingly popular smartphone and its very smart browser, Mobile Safari
When it first appeared, Apple’s iPhone looked like a massive extravagance, and commentators were quick to leap up en masse and sing a rousing chorus of ‘It’ll never work’.
Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer opined: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” He then added another “No chance” just for good measure. John C Dvorak said the iPhone would be passé within months, and that there was “no likelihood” Apple could be successful in the mobile phone marketplace. And marketing expert Laura Ries claimed 18 months ago that: “The iPhone is likely to be the biggest flop of the 21st century.”
Website Basics #1: The Logo
Now, this is not mandatory, you don’t absolutely need a Logo, but it does help a bit. What is this logo? This logo can be something like a nice looking text URL or a graphics image. It will make your website different from the others, setting a part from the competition.
Making a website logo can be done professionally or by yourself. Of course that if you design it yourself it’s cheaper, but doing it professionally is not as expensive as it may seem.