Posts Tagged ‘web design’

In the field of web design, the opportunities to learn are endless. Whether Adobe releases a new Creative Suite or a new project means you need to learn a new programming language, you will always find reasons to expand your skill-set. The question is, how do you go about it?

You could go to a class, read an online tutorial, watch an instructional video, buy a user guide, experiment and teach yourself , or get one-on-one instruction from other professionals. Sometimes choosing a learning method is about money. After all, you can’t always afford to pay for a class. As you consider methods for learning a new skill, though, you should pay attention to the ways that different methods cater to your strengths and weaknesses as a learner. Do you learn better by reading or by listening? Do you learn better by considering and theorizing or by doing and redoing? Do you prefer to start with an overview or delve right into specific exercises?

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Did you know that most anti-smoking commercials cause smokers to crave cigarettes? Did you know that seeing logos of the brands we’re most loyal to can activate the same parts of our brains as religious symbols? Or how about the fact that product placement without a direct tie to the plot of a movie or show can backfire terribly?1

Using fMRI and PET scans to monitor brain activity, marketers and neuroscientists from around the world are continually uncovering data about our brains’ responses to marketing techniques. The study of these neurological effects is called neuromarketing, and if you work in advertising, it’s essential for you to keep up with the latest discoveries. Moreover, an understanding of the how the brain works—of how and why the brain’s hippocampus chooses just a small portion of what exists in our short-term working memory to transfer to long-term memory—will only help you as you plan future marketing campaigns.2

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One of the variables that web designers have to deal with during the design process is the continually changing screen resolution of Internet users. Not that long ago, an 800px x 600px screen size was the norm. These days, most people have at least a 1024px x 768px screen. Of course, you still have users who are stuck in the dark ages, with screen resolutions of 640px x 480px, and you have some users who connect to the Internet via their HDTVs, giving them a screen resolution of 1920px x 1080px.

So, how do you, as a web designer, deal with this constantly changing landscape? Well, there’s no easy answer to this. Some designers opt to create pages that are scalable, so they always fill the entire web browser. Others hedge their bets by limiting the width of their sites so they fit within the most common browser size. There are upsides and downsides to both of these approaches, but in both cases, there are other factors to consider.

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If you’re relatively new to web design, you’re probably still learning how to get your pages to look the same in all browsers. Even more important, though, is learning how to get your pages to function correctly in all browsers.

The most arduous way of doing this is to open your site in every browser—at least the major ones—and check the functionality of every link, every Flash element, and so on. Of course, even if you’re willing to take the time to do this, you have no guarantee that the invisible elements of your site—your meta tags and doctype tags, for instance—are working correctly.

The only way to ensure that your site has been properly coded is to validate it in order to confirm that it adheres to accepted web standards. So, how do you do this? Well, let me introduce you to your new best friend, the W3C Markup Validation Service.

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Still somewhat new to CSS?  Below are three suggestions to help improve your coding:

1) External, Not Internal

There are three ways to apply CSS styles to your web site:

1. Use Internal CSS
2. Use Inline CSS
3. Use an External Style Sheet

Internal (or “embedded”) CSS is a set of CSS properties specified within the head tags of your page.  For instance, if you want the background of your page to be black, you could do this:

<html>
<head>
<title>My Web Site</title>
<style type="text/css">
body {
          background-color: #000;
}
</style>
</head>

Inline CSS is similar, except that the properties are applied directly to specific elements within the page.  For instance, if you want one paragraph to have a 20px margin above it, you could do this:

<p style="margin-top: 20px">This is my sample paragraph.</p>

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