Back to Basics
Have you ever wondered why reading most web sites is often a deeply inimical experience? There are three main reasons...
> Too much "web" and not enough "design". Most internet material is written or prepared by techies - who know how compwters work, but not how people perceive and assimilate information. One major flaw is an excess of content on each page. Often the viewer is presented with huge graphical images, a riot of colour, and multiple typefaces. Reading stuff like this is just hard work.
> Distracting errors. Did you notice the spelling mistake in the previous paragraph? Even if you didn't register that "computers" was spelt incorrectly, your subconscious mind paused at that point, saying "Hey! thats not right, is it...?. My websites do not contain spelling mistakes (except on purpose), punctuation or layout errors - so you don't lose your clients' attention.
> Incompatibility. There's a story about this elsewhere on the site, but the main point is: a website is worse than useless if the people you want to read it, can't read it. My sites are 100% CSS2 and XHTML 1.1 browser-compatible, and conform to current W3C 508 standards. The layouts are usable at most screen resolutions, including 800x600.
Website criteriaThis page typfies my design philosphy. There are five main pictures here, and yet each is carefully optimised so that their total bandwidth burden is less than the background image on many other sites. It scales to fit different screen sizes, its layout is simple and yet is content-rich. It's easy to navigate and - most importantly - it's written in English. |
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Some tech details
This page uses cascading style sheets to control the text placement and effects. The layout is based on a design by Andreas Viklund of Sweden.
Fonts are designated with fallbacks, and only two different explicit typefaces are used. The pictures are individually optimised GIF images with an average file size of less than 15Kb.