There are innumerable wonderful web designs on the internet, from all over the world. Web designers that are really good a swiftly picked up by the design houses and develop their skills there. Other web designers work for themselves under a contract basis and prefer the freedom afforded by this way of working.
I am not going to tell you who is the best web designer or who is the worst, after all, aren't we all as good as our worst performance, in the eyes of a customer?
What I am going to show you is how to understand websites for what they are. We will look at the aspects of design, how they differ around the world and the different kind of web designs.
I guess the first logical page would to view would be this one, so let us analyse this page before we move onto bigger and better things.
The first thing of note about this page is the black background. Black induces a sense of the unknown, it makes us ask if there is more than the eye can see. A little like finding your way in the dark. The opposite, white, gives us a sense of openness, everything is straight forward and the owner has nothing to hide. Personally, and I must stress this is just a personal preference, I would prefer to spend my hard earned on a site that has a white or at least pale background. I know this because I looked at my credit card statements, and found that although I may have found more than one web site offering the same item, the pale web design got the sale. In fact, as I looked back, I found a navy blue web site that was a little cheaper than the one I spent my money on.
So why is this page dark?
I have used a dark backdrop to introduce mystique to my web design, to intrigue the reader. I am not selling anything, this is my homepage and all I need to achieve is the arousal of the readers curiosity.
The next thing of note is that this web site design utilises a blue-green colour, just a few shades paler than teal. Bright colours are offensive to the eye. Bright colours are offensive to the eye. Do I need to say that again ? Because my web design is "content rich" in other words there is loads to read, I do not want my readers to start squinting at the glaring text. However there is an important factor here, the text must be pale enough to provide contrast with the background as well as not produce to much glare for the reader.
The facts here are that blue is a cool soothing colour and green is a natural relaxing colour, think of mother nature.
Those of us with the Macromedia Flash 5 player plug-in, will no doubt have seen the movie at the top of the page. I am no expert at the arts of movie making, but I wanted to bring the web site alive with a web design that would be a memorable occasion. The Flash 5 movie is a streaming movie, which means that it begins to play as soon as the first frame has loaded, meanwhile the movie begins and the page is still loading, so no waiting for a page to load. The purpose of the movie is to introduce myself slowly to the viewer, whilst enhancing the arousal of curiosity to the web page and the web page design.
Finally, the bottom of this page contains a "footer". It is generally accepted that web designs incorporate a footer at the bottom of the page with useful links that the viewer can use to make contact with the web page's owner. Nothing new or innovative about this idea, but it is a generally accepted format.
From here i am going to take you to one of my favourite sites. This is a flash site so be sure to have the Macromedia Flash 5 plug-in installed.
http://anygivensunday.warnerbros.com
Impressive ? how far into the site did you go? Yes I found this terribly intriguing and had to travel the entire site. Notice the black background again? There is nothing to sell except the story, the background enhances the intrigue, and we want to find out more. The web designer has achieved this perfectly.
The final part of this introduction is to view a popular, "shopping cart" web site
The purpose of this site is to sell their products online. The first thing we notice is the pale background and indeed the whole site has a pale feel to it. Enhancing our trust, nothing hidden. The web designer has gone one better here too, so much information is crammed onto the pages, it reinforces the idea that there is indeed nothing hidden.
This is the end of the introduction to web design and web development. The next stage is to assess "information" web site designs and we'll take a look at how these become either a success or drop into oblivion. The next page in the series is;
https://makrobicz.tripod.com/webdesigns.html
This article was written by makrobicz, web developer for:
A-K strategic business solutions - web design
The work of makrobicz can be seen at http://engineers-international.com possibly his largest project to date where he and another developer, the lovely aninkita, used Microsoft FrontPage, allaire homesite 4.5 and macromedia flash 5 on a Microsoft NT server.
makrobicz can be reached direct via email at
Other excerpts from these articles can be viewed at
As a web developer myself, I found Makrobicz to be something of a breath of fresh air. It was during a web development lecture of his that I had attended in Australia, that it was made clear to me a few things about web design. It did not matter how flashy a website the web developers had made, unless it appeared on the search engines, it may as well sit on a hard drive at home. I knew quite a lot about site submissions and the various software available for the task but here he made his mark with me forever. He had actually studied exactly what was required by the search engines for a listing and then concocted a formula to ensure that every page was search engine friendly. I have no idea how long this took him to work out, but I guess that is why he is a travelling lecturer in his fields. I haven't been to one of his electrical engineering lectures, far too techie for me. One of the most important things he did was explain that the entire site must be complete prior to submission to the search engines Because as all web developers know, the spiders may let an incomplete website slip through but the human editors demand quality websites.
It is no accident that the websites Makrobicz works on are all in the top 1% of searches around the world and I live to see the day when I can rank alongside him.
T Perry (makrobicz fan) (edited text)
I attended one of the makrobicz web developers lectures in Melbourne. The guy is so dynamic, he should lecture on time management. Oh, by the way, it was me who sent over the PINT of Fosters. All the best with your web developers lectures
R McNamara (fan)
web design, web designers, web development and web developers. Specialist topics covered by makrobicz in his usual and successful low level approach. this series covers, web design, web design's web developers, web development from a hands on point of view . web developers that are not web designers and how to differentiate between a web developer and a web designer. the following article covers web designs from an information delivery view point and proceeds to international variations on the typical web designs. the web designs topic covered by makrobicz is available in audio format for the blind and partially sighted and indeed the web designs series has been written with minimal graphics to enable instruction of the web designs and web development series to be readily accessible to Braille readers. makrobicz answers mail personally on his web designs and web developers series and invites comments from all his readers.