Webhosting service - provides cheap website hosting for single or multi-domain names.

Web Site Design Considerations

You will be well aware that there are several different browsers available, and may know a little about the differences between Internet Explorer and Netscape... but the browser types are the least of your worries if it is important that you have a web site that works well and looks great for the vast majority of your visitors. Computer type, choice of graphics cards, operating systems and software can also have an impact on the way that your page is displayed on your visitors screen - to be fair, you can never get your page to display exactly as you want it for all your visitors, no matter how hard you try!

Canvas Size

One of the earliest problems you will encounter when designing your page is to know what size screen you should design for. To help you make your decision you should try to find information about the screen resolution of your potential visitors... don't be so naive to think that your visitors will have the same screen settings as yours - because they don't! One of the more common screen resolutions is 480x640 as this is the Windows default and there are many computer users who are unaware that they can change it! However, this resolution can really limit a design if you go for a fixed page size.

It would be fair to say that the majority of visitors are viewing at 800x600 or greater, so if you do want to control the width of your page (useful for controlling the look of the page) you would do well to make sure that it can display at this resolution without producing the horizontal scroll bar. The easiest way to solve the resolution size problem is to use relative values (percentages) instead of actual values or your table and frame dimensions. The main problem with relative sizes however is that your page will look more cramped when viewed at a resolution smaller than that which it was designed, and stretched out when viewing at a larger resolution.

Whether you decide to use absolute or relative sizes in your page design will depend on whether or not you prefer your page to look the same in all resolutions regardless of the size of the browser window.

Color Limitations

This is a problem that is often overlooked, if only because we naturally assume that our perception of color is the same as everyone else's. The truth is, there are many different things that will affect the way that the color on your site is displayed, and that's only on the technological side!

One of the simplest tests you can do to check the accessibility of your color scheme to those with the more common types of color blindness is to print out your web page in black and white. This is a great way to check on the level of contrast, if there are any parts of your site that are unreadable on your black and white copy, or you can't make out the difference between a visited and a non visited link then you should try to tweak your colour scheme to fit.

To prevent dithering on most computer screens, you should try to make use of the web safe color pallet; when a color can't be displayed on a users computer screen, the web safe pallet is used to try and recreate it.

Web Technologies

Technology is moving at a fast pace and there are various weird and wonderful browser plug-ins that can add all sorts of interesting features to web sites. Perhaps the most well known are Flash and Shockwave, but there are others that rely on Java to be able to run properly.

While the more common plug-ins are certainly well supported, you should always make an effort to cater for those that can't (or don't want to) use these plug-ins. Now that Microsoft have officially stopped offering support for Windows 95 other software companies seem to be following the trend; the result is that newer technologies are not always compatible with the older Operating Systems. While there are relatively few of them about, you should consider the impact of using plug-ins to display important information on your site.

Having the latest browser does not always mean that all the technologies are supported by default. Indeed, Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6 does not come with a preinstalled Java Virtual Machine (which is essential for viewing Java in a web page). While the JVM is available as an additional download, it is quite a large download and so those users that are still on a standard dial-up may choose not to download it.