Wow! This amazing piece of work belongs on a canvas hanging on a wall somewhere with a $3,000 frame around it. The beautiful castle, with the under water workings, the vibrant colors, the detail. It’s just not often you find a design that just grabs your attention, stuns and amazes you that the only thing you can say is Wow! These guys have talent.
Source: CoolBrushDesign.com
The information superhighway spans across the globe, people who access your website come from all corners of the word and from various cultural influences. It is important to consider this when designing your web pages to ensure that the appeal of your objective speaks to the worldwide population and not one specific demographic.
Consider the following; you have no knowledge of how a user was able to access your page or their previous experiences in dealing with your company its products services and affiliations. There is no assurance of the path that the user took to arrive at the page, which links he used to arrive at the website or which search tool he utilized to research your information. These factors are helpful to consider when generating a design that is culturally neutral and is pleasing to all.
There is a chance that the user will connect at lower than ideal speeds. Sometimes users will even have a connection of .5kb for mobile phone access. It’s not just the nominal connection speed that is a modifier in the users transfer rate. A typical consumer on a standard modem will get a 3kb transfer rate but will even get slower as lines become busy. Minimizing the overall schematic of the web design and its size will greatly improve the access experience and speeds up loading time for pages.
Using ideas such as CSS will lower the render time. Building your pages in sequential chunks and avoiding pages wrapped in large tables will also help with loading time. It’s ideal to save imagery for content whenever possible and remember that important content should be CSS based and not image based. These factors which tell users where they are, what the functions are and where the site can direct them need to load first to maximize the user experience.
Computers will always have different fonts that they use. PC’s will have a different font list than a Mac. Some of the fonts that you think are universal might not be available for a lot of people. To be on the safe side, it is a wise option to design your website with a globally utilized font such as Verdana for windows based computers. Sans Serif or Helvetica, Arial are some other options that you can use to set the general body font of your design content. For aspects of your design that do not require mass readability such as headers you can use fixed-pitch fonts like Courier for snippet code.
Take into consideration that some computers will have less capacity in displaying full spectrum color. Some PC’s are so ancient out there that they can only display 256 colors. Remember that the color scheme can be different on a Mac compared to your regular PC. It is a wise practice to use white for background and choose universally present colors found in all color schemes. Use web safe colors for large portions of your content and accept the fact that the coloration will always be compromised for a small percentage of your users; this is a limitation of their machine.
If you plan to use the latest coding then provide links for browsers that can easily be downloaded to maximize the viewing capacity of your users. Some websites post recommendations of which browser will be compatible for the web content. There are numerous freeware browsers that identify and are updated to read and maximize the usage of current programming, it is advisable to provide a download link or mention the platform so that your users can take full advantage of your design.
The Freshbeat website is definitely fresh looking. Very nice and airy, lots of space to breath. Nice green and blue colors used. Love the clean nav buttons with a little leaf hover effect. Just an excellent website design!
Source: http://www.freshbeat.co.uk/
This one-page website looks like it has multiple pages but actually it’s all one, looks like the content scrolls behind the graphical page template to go to different sections of the page. Also, I want to mention the nice looking design. I think it’s because it has sushi incorporated in it, even though this is an iPhone app site and has nothing to do with sushi. Sushi sites get me every time ;), doesn’t everyone love sushi? Can’t go wrong with that.
Source: http://www.taptaptap.com
Tanya Merone’s website is definitely inspirational. It sits all on one page and uses the A NAME tags for navigation. The design is very clean, simple and beautiful. I love the simplicity of the some-what narrow column, the nice little navigation buttons at the top and the section separators with the small details like the small arrow at the right side. The light blue floral background is cute and along with the logo, the colors on the website and the photo of Tanya, sets up the simple, professional and easy to work with attitude of the person behind the site.
See Tanya’s site here: Tanya Merone
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