OT: Web design! What's hip nowadays?

Yeah, so my old website (option42.com) was uncerimoniously removed from the Intarweb by the tards at my hosting service. They botched my support account, took down my website, and refused to log me in. This wasn't the first time. Oh, and they also deleted all of my mailboxes. And deleted all the files I had on there for backup.

As an end to this rant, don't use www.stargateinc.com for anything but target practice.

Anyways, I bought a new domain on a new provider, and I was just wondering, seeing as aesthetics in the textual dimension isn't my strong suit:

What's a good web design look like?

I took a class for it in college, but I spent it mostly photoshopping kittens attacking Paris.

Anyways, any helpful tips to make it not look like a traffic accident would be groovy.

Danke

LF

Lots and lots of images and graphics and use nothing but flash animation and javascript.

All kidding aside, do the exact opposite of above, you can use a lil bit of the above, but I personaly usualy go with something simple, easy to navigate but looks somewhat nice.

I would use CSS instead of stuff like tables and such, CSS lets you do alot neat stuff.

I like to go with simple, basic, avoiding alot of graphics and flash where possible and very little java.

My website is http://www.freewebs.com/oz11 (gogo freewebs! meh)

Hardly a masterfull achievement but still. I'd look at websites that *you* consider usefull and nice to use, then rip them off.

Edit: Oh and also, you'll notice I have stuff on my website validated and standardized, I personaly like to do this so that it works on most (IE is a biach) browsers. www.w3.org is the place to go for all of this.

1and1.com is a pretty cheap webhost. It works for most of my small projects.

Nice site, Oz!

Lordfly, if you want some help creating a new website for Option 42, I could help. I can code HTML and CSS by hand (valid I might note) and use Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, and Freehand. If you want any help, drop me an im.

You can get a site for 1.95 at www.scenicnet.com. Easy easy.

Midphase. I run three sites with them no problems whatsoever. Knock on wood.

Reliable

Unmetered Bandwidth
Unmetered Email Accounts
1.5 GB Storage
Free Domain for life

All this in their starter package for $7.95 a month.

You can run up to three domains off their $11.95 a month package. And you get 1.9GB storage.

http://www.midphase.com/aff/cgi-bin/clickthru.cgi?id=sanoja

As far as design, I guess it really depends what is the purpose of your site. There are still a lot of people on dialup, so image heavy sites are a drag.

The sites I run are PHP, MySQL based (PHP Nuke).

tito

site designs I find appealing (opinions vary of course):

www.tokyoplastic.com
www.bellefree.com
www.tribalchicken.com
www.idolminds.com
www.radium.com
www.digitaldomain.com
www.artsource.com
www.lip-service.com
www.ilm.com
www.ananova.com
www.nafii.com/neil


best of luck, hope you find some good ideas!

Fantastic animation on that site. Really cool flash stuff... but... HORRIBLE site design! That site embodies all the things I hate the most about flash sites. I've always found it incredibly pretentious and arrogant when designers make sites that require you to hunt and peck and fumble your away around trying to find anything... is this a button? nope. This? nope...oh, and please wait for another 30 seconds of spiffy animation before you finally get to see that you're not interested in where that link leads. Gah!!! No descriptions on anything either, because obviously you have nothing better to do then click through every annoyingly animated link. It takes about two minutes just to get to the menu! *bangs head on table* Kudos to the animator, but I skipped most of the content in protest

Oh, did I mention I hate flash sites?

Hosting - we just got out of the hosting business because dealing with support and late night hardware failures was just sucky So I'd recommend Lamphost, which is where all our sites are moving to.

Design:

CSS - YES! If you haven't delved into it, do so now.

Accessible design - YES! Make sure your site is useable even when your pretty pictures, flash and javascript is all turned off. People use Lynx and JAWS too.

Make sure the color scheme is easy on the eyes. Avoid a totally white background, give it a one hex number off white shade. Text should have good contrast, and don't over ride the useful variant color for viewed links. Use the CSS :hover element where it is useful - not javascript mouse over images!

Consider using server side scripting where you need dynamic pages - with varying browsers, javascript cannot be relied on, and it's too easy to fake results on the client end. Almost all hosts support PHP and it is easier to learn than LSL!

Use short paragraphs, bulleted lists and descriptive images to hold your audience's attention. Design for the cognitively disabled as well as the rest of the world!

Give your visitor a reason to come back. A weekly updated opinion column, a quote of the day etc. A static site looks like an abandoned site.

Always, always, ALWAYS separate content from presentation - using CSS if possible. Why on earth some people would use <p><font size="7"><b> when <h1> would do it beyond me....

Validate your final code at http://validator.w3.org/ - it also offers a structural summary so you can ensure your headings are nested neatly.

Oh, this is turning out to be way too long. Web Design 101 at USL, anyone?

Chip, I think I love you

What's "hip" isnt always whats best.

Decide on your content, map it out and then worry about dressing it up later.

Worry the most about content and ease of navigation.

I'm no Web designer myself, and am usually connected to projects needing an emphasis on content and not appealing design - like news portals or sites for promoting international advertising campaigns. All of these usually have a million-month hit rate a day and need a minimalist design for best performance. Trading off a "heavy design" (usually appelative, but too slow and cumbersome for million-hits-per-month sites) for something lighter which still "looks good" is a challenge! Usually CNN.com is given as a reference for a good tradeoff (some may disagree, of course, there is always a degree of subjectiveness envolved). This means trying to get the pages under a 100 KByte limit at all costs. It's possible (with work you can get reasonable JPEG images compressed to 4 to 8 KBytes!) but it's not easy. 100 KBytes will load in 15 seconds or so for a 56 Kbps modem user which is inside the "tolerable limit" (Intel specified in 1999 that ALL sites should load in LESS than 4 seconds!). A good trick is to make sure that ALL image placeholders (and tables) have size information. Modern browsers will get a decent job in positioning all elements before actually downloading the page - users will be able to read content quickly while waiting for the images to download.

It's usually accepted that you should keep navigation with Javascript and Flash menus at a minimum or get rid of them completely. CSS tricks may give you interesting menus for much less bandwidth consumption AND work well on ALL browsers, even text-based ones. If your site targets users with disabilities, you must take double care on how you present your layouts. Usually a good way to deal with it is multiple navigation cues - say, simple images for an appealing graphical menu/navigation bar, but repeating the navigation bar in text mode at the top or the bottom of the site.

Make sure you give visual cues on where the user currently is on your site and where he can go to other areas. Power users almost always prefer searching for keywords than getting entangled in many-layered hierarchical sites. SL's site is a bad example on how navigation should NOT be done - unless you know the site's layout very well, it's not always obvious where you should look for information. Many sites of a certain type start to have similar navigation layouts - for instance, almost all computer-related hardware sites use "Support" for downloading drivers

Make also sure that the user reaches all information on your site with few clicks. Compare Apple's online store with the (new) ones from Dell and Gateway. At Apple's, with three clicks you have selected the equipment you want to buy and are filling in the details on an online form with shopping cart. The (new) sites of Dell and Gateway present so much information and have such a complex structure, with lots of extra information, comparision tables, user reviews and comments, etc. that the other day I took 2 hours (!!!) just to make sure there were no bi-Pentium motherboards available for sale. That's an awful shopping experience!

For a "simple" homepage, where you will probably have much less information and visitors, you can be more "creative" and add lots of funky graphics, animations, and special effects However, remember your target audience. SL users all have broadband, but we are a minority here

Now for some shameless plug... PHP-Nuke is more than adequate for simple web management (like a homepage). If you want another open-source content management tool, give Siteseed a try. It has an outdated backoffice interface (no fancy graphics there) and is not easy to install, but is tremendously powerful for its lightness. It's displacing Vignette in the country I live - it scales wonderfully well (Apache is the limitation factor, Siteseed can be tuned to give 99.9% performance of an Apache server just handling static pages) and uses PHP and MySQL. You don't need to be a programmer or advanced web designer to use it, and design and content are clearly separated (you just copy & paste your HTML into templates and let the tool do the rest). There are no limitations on what you can do with it (ie. you're NOT limited to pre-defined structures/templates but you can use whatever you wish, and you're NOT limited to HTML) and you certainly can add new functionality with additional programming. Adding content can be learned by a non-computer user in perhaps one hour

Ah, it´s open source and completely free, but, like MySQL, it has a company behind it to get the core functionality straightened out, and relies on the open source community for new features and bug tracking.

/shameless plug off

Keep It Simple, Stupid!
I hate cluttery labyrinths.

I've made a few web pages in my time. When I want inspiration I go here. http://www.coolhomepages.com

Just flip through the design categories. I usually find the "very clean" section most appealing.

For a good guide on making your site accessible and using CSS you can read this site. http://diveintoaccessibility.org/

Mark Pilgrim is a smart guy. At least I think he is, I don't really understand half the stuff he talks about, but his web page information is good.

His regular site is pretty funny. Currently he is basing all future technology decisions on which kills more kittens. (he is allergic to cats) http://diveintomark.org/

I love this site. Lots of info. Easy to navigate.
http://www.thebanmappingproject.com/

If this can be of help: http://www.project09.com/articles/webmasters/35-deadly-website-sins/

I found this list pretty accurate. It may not be the most helpful thing regarding what you can do, but it at least tells you what to NOT do

Nah. That's what Web Pages That Suck is for.

Mark is a great guy. I refer people to his site all the time.

One of my CSS heroes is Minz Meyer http://researchkitchen.de/blog/ who does just stunning things using stylesheets.

The web site for the book CSS in 24 hours http://www.css24.com/ is also a good example of what can be done when you stretch the limits (Disclaimer: my hubby's book!)

Golly chip. sorry. didnt mean to make your arse twitch so violently first thing in the morning- just thought the black/white/grey/red thing was neat.

None of those suggestions are based on content or navigation. LF asked about aesthetic suggestions, thats what those are. pretty eye candy.