Principles of web design

A majority of this site is about how to do various things with various packages and HTML coding. However, if we're talking principles, and if you want a site to be accesssible to as many people make sure that you...

1. acknowledge that the customer pays the bills - make sure their ideas are listened to and included.
   
   
2. know that CONTENT IS KING - make sure you have done a brief, and know what ideas need to be included.
   
   
3. sketch your design on paper first. this prevents hours of "Random Button Clicking (TM)".
   
   
4. use simple ratios and divisions of the page - as with any design, it is best not to visually confuse the user. Use tables for this. Also, don't suddenly switch alignments without reason.
   
   
5. use colour theory to choose colours. simple stuff, like using tints of the same colour, using minor colour variations, using complemetary colors, outlining objects in a neutral colour to prevent colour clashes. Some of the books on tarot provide some of the best insights into colour useage.
   
   
6. try to design the page with the user in mind. If you are designing for useability, put things in the most obvious place. Where do you look first? Most westeners are used to looking in the top left hand corner first - put the most important thing here (there is a whole field of NLP to do with 'eye cues'). Home button? Bottom right.
   
   
7. always provide a way for the site to be "seen" by the user, even though they may not be able to see. This may be by providing alternative text, or in some cases a text only version of the site.
   
   
8. keep the files as small as possible - for low bandwidth users / people with slow modems - web designers tend to live in the city and forget about people stuck out in the country with poor phone lines.
   
   
9. design for an office monitor (800 wide by 600 high). This gives you an approximate working area or 'Maximum Impact Area (TM)' of 760 x 420 pixels to get your most important points accross. People with larger grahics arrays (1024x768, 1280x1024, etc.) tend to run browsers in floating windows so they can run other apps as well, so this still holds. However, design non-repeating background tiles to approx 1500x1200 - you never know (background tiles ALWAYS repeat!)
   
   
10. design all the stuff that you don't mind people hunting around for outside of the initial area. It's ok to let the content go further down the page, but people get miffed if they have to use the bottom scrollbars.
    
    
11. use style sheets for HTML pages - these allow sweeping changes to be made to the whole site. The customer can sometimes be a right pain in the arse.
    
    
12. there are only a few universally available fonts (serif, sans-serif, monospaced) & some others which come with Internet Explorer. Any font that falls outside of these should either have a substitution font listed, or the text should be rendered into a GIF - this allows you to add effects. Try using a transparent background to make the text blend better.
    
    
13. avoid using <blink> or <marquee> or anything that exploits bugs in the browser. A lot of built in HTML effects are just rubbish.
    
    
14. use simple accepeted technology, where possible.
    
    
15. download LOADS of alternative browsers (opera, netscape, mozilla, etc...). HTML is not a well adhered to standard.
    

That should do for now. A few sites break these rules well. Try:

http://www.superbad.com

http://www.requiemforadream.com

also be sure to check out "Creating Killer Web Sites" by David Siegel, or check his web site http://www.killersites.com