Everyone has heard of HTML (HyperText Markup Language), its a relatively easy to learn language that allows for the quick creation of web sites. That description is clear, to the point and no one will ever dispute it. But then, along comes HTML5 to rock the boat a little bit and that description is both vague and very far from the point. So, what is HTML5? HTML5 is HTMLs latest major revision, with a lot of added features and exciting attributes. To most, understanding all of these new features may be a little bit overwhelming and at first glance may seem a little bit unnecessary, but when you dig deeper into it a new and exciting world will open up to you, not just as developers and designers but for users as well. Recently, focus.com published an infographic that has been designed for the uninitiated to get a better understanding of HTML5 and to be a quick reference for developers, you can view the infographic below (click the image for the source and to view it full-size). [Source] By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).WTF is HTML5 and Why Should we Care?
I’d like to look at three approaches to redesigning a website: These approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. Let’s consider them in reference to a large, content-rich website. Keeps your site looking consistent. On one day your whole site simply changes from one design to another. Easily understood by your visitors. Whether or not they like it, your visitors will be familiar with this traditional method of redesigning. Messaging around the redesign is not about what is going on but more about why it was undertaken. Easy to sell this approach internally. It’s easier for stakeholders to understand the concept of moving completely from one design to another than an approach that involves interim steps where more than one theme may be viewable to visitors. Keeps your web analytics clean. Having a single cutover date makes it easy to immediately start measuring the effectiveness of the new design and comparing it to the previous one. It can take a long time. You need to migrate all of your pages over to the new design in order to launch and cannot gain any of the benefits of the new design until you do. While you’re doing the project, you also have to maintain the live site and so are likely managing content in two places. It can create a jarring user experience. No matter how well you advertise the upcoming redesign in advance, the changeover is still going to catch many visitors by surprise. Suddenly they have to relearn how to use the website, and many of them won’t be happy about it. Keeps your site static. Redesigning a website in this way is such a large endeavor that it is only undertaken infrequently. This can lead to your site design being static for longer than it should be based on changes in business conditions, your knowledge of your visitors, etc. An increasingly popular approach is to launch a site redesign in stages, starting with the most popular pages or even just the home page. This approach has become quite common with news sites, which may just start with a home page redesign and go from there. Easier to implement the redesign. For large, content-rich sites, it’s easier to move smaller sections of the site over to a new design than to do it all at once. You can also control the pace of the redesign so that the web team can keep up with maintaining the live site as well. Shorter time to launch. If you’re starting with, say, your home page, you can be up-and-running with a site redesign in a much shorter timeframe than if you were going to switch over the whole site. This provides an opportunity to gather feedback from your visitors much earlier and to apply it as you redesign the rest of the website. More gentle introduction to the new design. Most people dislike change, and so introducing it at a more gradual rate will make it easier for your visitors to get used to it and adapt the way they use your site. Can be complex to do. If the redesign involves information architecture changes, it can be difficult to introduce the new IA gradually while still maintaining the old one. Extensive use of redirects may be necessary in order to avoid broken internal links. The same challenge is true for sitewide features like a new search tool. Harder to sell to stakeholders. This approach is harder to sell internally as there will be concern that the site looks broken. Most stakeholders don’t understand how task-focused web users are and instead focus on keeping the look of the site consistent above all else. A third method, the ‘evolutionary’ approach, tries to avoid the need for a redesign altogether. Rather than change the overall design of the site, the pages, content, features and functionality within it evolve according to changing visitor and organizational needs. Netflix is a good example of this. Although the overall theme of the site has not changed substantially for years, the pages within it (particularly the home page) are constantly changing as the team tests out new ideas with their users. Avoids the pain of redesigning. Large website redesigns are very challenging to do and will tax the resources of most web teams. They are often very political (especially what goes on the home page) and can be subject to the whims of higher level executives. Frees up time to work on something useful. Time spent not redesigning can be spent on something more relevant to the bottom line, such as A/B testing of checkout flows, refreshing old content, or improving the conversion rate of a signup page. Keeps your visitors happy. As I mentioned before, people hate change and website redesigns are generally received negatively. Unless your website is in desperate need of an overhaul, you may be better off leaving it as is for as long as possible. Better to direct your focus instead on ensuring that visitor tasks can be easily completed. We’re bored with the old site. The teams responsible for the website will become bored with the current design and will want to update it. Redesigning a website is also a very obvious way of showing ‘progress’ to internal decision makers when it comes to annual review time. It’s often harder to sell less tangible improvements made to a website unless they have more obvious visible components.Big Bang Approach
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Gradual Approach
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Evolutionary Approach
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Further Reading
In webdesign there are certain key elements you need to employ in your web development to assure maximum visibility and best impact upon your niche. I have assembled these ten keys so you can have your own personal checklist next time you need to create a website, a sales letter online or when you need to edit a template for your own blog. I will elaborate on each of these to help you achieve the best results with your projects. You might be surprised of how well your page will perform once you implement these keys in your webdesign, and I ask you to read very attentively so you can gain the full benefit from these ten keys. 1. Make sure you are unique You need to make sure your design is unique. Nothing is as big a turn-off as arriving to a site that looks like a boring old template just revamped with a few keywords and some graphics from a public domain folder. People leave such sites before you know it. They won’t come back to you at any time, and first impressions stick with people. I remember some names in Internet Marketing just because they market a product I didn’t like. When I reinstalled my system I quickly added new filters in my Thunderbird e-mail client to send it directly to the waste bin. If such people were decent, you could have unsubscribed, but with some of these people even that isn’t followed because spam penalty fines are too low. Don’t let the same bad impression come from bad design. 2. Separate your HTML from your CSS Some people use web design programs very erroneously. They embed their styles into the same file as their separate webpages. That will make it far more difficult to change details and get them to match other pages at a later date. If you use proper etiquette and run external stylesheets, editing becomes far easier. It was actually the entire idea behind webdesign, originally. But at a time when coding by hand became less popular many of these ideals were thrown out with the bathwater. If you want to be a decent webdesigner you will want your coding to be pure and the idea behind it to be easy to edit in the future. You’re actually helping yourself since you can edit details in design in one file and see the changes straight away. 3. Make sure your site validates You need to check your HTML with a HTML validator since it will give you hints as to whether your coding obeys the rules set up by the World Wide Web Consortium. It will help you find errors that, if overlooked, could make your site look wrong in some browsers. If you are running Windows, it can be quite difficult to know how a site appears in Konqueror under Linux or in Safari for Macs. You can test the Windows version of Safari but there might still be differences in appearance if you have an error in your coding. This brings me to the next point. 4. Check your site in several browsers You need to have several different browsers. For Windows users Internet Explorer is usually available by standard, but you need Opera, Safari and Mozilla Firefox also to be sure your site is seen well in all browsers. 5. Use proper code for headings, subheadings etc You need to use the right codes to separate headings from subheadings, and that is the main reason we operate with codes such as H1 (headings), H2 (subheadings), H3 (subheadings to subheadings) etc. If you use that type of coding, you will put better emphasis on your content, and the strategy becomes readable by search engines also. When you define the appearance of your codes correctly in your external CSS file, everything becomes better styled. 6. Avoid bad color combinations You want to have good contrast between backgrounds and content so your design is easy to read in browsers. When you use a dark grey text color with a light grey background things will be difficult to read. Just as yellow and black send signals of being somewhat “discount”. Red text color on a blue background will make text appear as though it’s jumping around. You will no doubt appreciate checking out this site: http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html to get a better understanding of design colors. 7. Implement presentations with care – avoid Flash I know some will be offended by this, but Flash requires a Flash player at the receiving end. You probably don’t want your customers to leave your site because they don’t want to install a plugin. You have other opportunities. If you need to show a video, upload it to YouTube, and link to it on your website. No need to use Flash, if you think creatively, and you avoid losing visitors who don’t want to install the Flash player plugin. 8. Implement banners and ads with care Jumping banners all over the place will take away from your content. It will distract people, and you don’t want that to happen. Use banners with care and concern for your visitors. You will actually get more clicks by doing it in a professional way. Furthermore, it’s very important that banners are relevant for the content on your page. When your site deals with dogs an ad for cat food is hardly the right thing – although some might have both a cat and a dog. It is something you should test to get your own best results. Niches are all different and what works well on one site might not work on another. 9. Get others to proofread your texts When you write texts, make sure you remove spelling errors. It makes your site look less professional when it’s filled with lots of spelling errors. You might not see it yourself, but visitors get ticked off when they spot tons of mistakes. Be professional and check your material. It makes it far more credible. 10. Use manual additions to indexes, and avoid automatic systems When you have options to add your sites to search indexes, you should avoid automatic systems. It works far better when you add these places manually. Search engines can spot automatic additions due to timestamps, and it would be far more effective to write comments referring back to your site than ever relying upon automatic systems. Concluding Words If you use all 10 keys in your webdesign, you will see that you can create some very good sites using proper coding, and following all aspects of professional webdesign. If HTML and CSS is new to you, I would recommend you check out Sitepoint’s website because they have some very good books on this subject. Good luck with your webdesign. Henrik Blunck administers numerous blogs. He has lectured people about communication through distance learning, and enjoys social networks. “Mingling gives new ideas, and I like that. Even disagreements can teach us something new when we are willing to listen and learn from one another” he says. Author: Henrik Blunck
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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