|
|
 |
Welcome to frequently asked questions on web design. To us good usability is the absolute cornerstone of good design but other questions are addressed as well. If there's something else that you would like to hear about please send us an Email, We're always interested in adding more.
Design FAQs in brief:
What does it mean when a website has good usability?
Screen resolutions and website dimensions
Difference between a .gif and a .jpg image
Q. What does it mean when a site has good usability?
A. Usability primarily refers to how easy it is to do something someone wants at your website: for a website to be highly usable there should be a minimum amount of obstacles to retrieving desired information, making a purchase or other transaction, communicating with website's company and other activities. Good usability is determined by several elements such as logical site structure, clearly labeled pages, easy to use navigation, information and navigation appearing in expected areas of the page, good contrast, fresh content, sharp images with easily recognizable features, large enough type and clear, well written language. Sites that have good usability tend to have satisfied users that come back repeatedly, not really aware of its usable quality. Sites that have poor usability are painfully obvious.
Q. I see web pages in so many different widths, which one's the best?
A. There's two obvious things that you want to avoid when designing your website pages: first, you don't want a page that's to big and scrolls horizontally with even a small percentage of your users ... people might have to scroll repeatedly just to complete every line of text or to find and important link, and second you don't want a page that's too small ... you'll miss out on valuable real estate for a large portion of your users. Content, navigation and other valuable marketing devices & links will suffer or be under represented, especially on your top page.
Here in 2008 the fact is that anyone who surfs the web with a screen resolution of 640 X 480 or lower will be basically scrolling on almost every page and will be compelled to adjust their setting and/or get a newer graphic card or monitor. A few years ago 640 X 480 was the absolute standard for websites but now 800 X 600 has become the minimum and most sites will look reasonably well at this resolution. However the significant majority of users now have (by default) their screen resolution set to 1024 X 768 and people who work on computers often have it set even higher. Ideally a website should be usable at 800 X 600 but look best at 1024 X 768. There are several ways to approach this: first you can create a page that just barely won't scroll at 800 X 600 but is centered. This can include an interesting (non-competing) outer background that looks good at higher resolutions. That's basically the design behind the site you're looking right now. Designing a page this way is simple, put all your content in a centered table that's 750 pixels wide (50 pixels is used by your browser), and create (optionally) an interesting background graphic that's placed in the body tag of your HTML. Other ways to approach the minimum versus the majority screen sizes is to design a page that's features expand or contract with the browser size and the text just wraps more or less. There are design limitations here but with heavy text sites it can be a great solution. Also, creating a page that works at 800 X 600 but contains an additional column that looks good at 1024 X 768. There are also ways to detect screen resolution when a page/URL is requested and dynamically have the server stream HTML for additional right or left hand columns of a web page if user has the higher resolution. Bottom line: don't build fixed pages at 640 X 480, shoot for one that looks best at 1024 X 768 but still works at 800 X 600. In a couple more years the minimum will probably go up.
Q. Why is it important to know the difference between a .gif and .jpg images?
A.
JPG or JPEG which is short for Joint Photographic Experts Group. They developed a standard image compression algorithm for full color or gray scale images that can have thousands to millions of simultaneous colors: the amount needed to emulate photography. GIF which means Graphics Interchange Format was a digital compression format developed earlier by Compuserve in 1987. It has a maximum of 255 simultaneous colors and can still emulate photography when near the maximum colors used however the file size becomes pretty large for anything over a thumbnail size. At lower color settings or color indexes this format can achieve much smaller file sizes and has great advantages when dealing with typography, line art or simple blocks/shapes of color.
Comparison of uses: JPG's are ideal for anything photographic or "real world" because the tremendous depth of colors allows for extremely smooth transitions from one area to another creating realistic color modulations. It's also great for the web because these complex set of colors can be highly compressed allowing even larger pictures to be downloaded relatively fast. Because JPG's have so many colors they can also be a poor choice for some images such as text and drawings where too many colors will allow the edges to "bleed" in a way that is less appealing and readable.
GIF's on the other hand are ideal to create clear, crisp lines for typography, line art, animations and other abstract forms including simpler background designs. Depending on the need the colors can be indexed down to a single color and the file size can become incredibly small, much smaller than a JPG at 32 colors or lower. Text can still look great at only 16 colors. Bottom line: JPG's = photos, GIF's = Images with typography and other low-color-count design elements.
|
|
|