Varlund
|
  |
| Joined: 25 Nov 2011 |
| Total Posts: 219 |
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 12:38 AM |
You can make your website however you want, the design is 100% up to you. The thing is, there are certain things users look for, are used to, and expect on each website you make.
I am currently learning design principals for Websites, and I was wondering if I could get some tips on it.
Ex: Using auto margin compared to set margins, div widths, colors, layouts, and link appearance.. What are the things that people expect MOST in a site, and that you default for every website you design?
I know CSS, HTML, Javascript, HTML5(A little), MySQL, and PhP as my website design base.
Thanks in advance,
I really appreciate your help.
- Varlund |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
Varlund
|
  |
| Joined: 25 Nov 2011 |
| Total Posts: 219 |
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 12:40 AM |
| And correction on the word "Principals" I did mean "Priciples". Sorry for my english language failure. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 12:54 AM |
| Always make your site fluid, avoid fixed widths. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 01:01 AM |
Just an advice...
If you ever need to make a login system for anything...
Please, please don't use usernames and .sdrowssap
Seriously, I don't understand why people still use these. It seems obvious to me that users are tired of logging in on 500 websites everyday and tired of typing a pw every 5 minutes...
Just use something like OpenId or BrowserId or another such service. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 01:02 AM |
| Also, don't ever use fixed widths. Only use fixed widths for borders. For every single other thing, and I mean EVERY SINGLE OTHER THING, use proportional widths, either proportional on the font or on the page's size. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 01:06 AM |
Also, please do me a favor and don't specify any font for your text. Just let the user set the font he wants in his browser's parameters.
You don't need to choose a font, just let the user choose the font he wants.
Also, don't give any specific appearance to the links, just let the browser decide, once more.
Personally, I hate seeing underlined links, and that is why I configured my browser to not underline them. Some other people, for some reason, like them underlined and they have probably configured their browser to underline them.
Just let the user's settings choose how the page shows.
Also, always try to make your website as accessible as possible.
That means you should make sure to use divs and not tables for layout (I shouldn't even have to say this...), make sure to give alternate text for every image and every object, etc. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
myrkos
|
  |
| Joined: 06 Sep 2010 |
| Total Posts: 8072 |
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 01:09 AM |
| ^ Not everyone bothers to change their browser settings, and they don't want to see plain ugly sites. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 01:13 AM |
@myrkos
The default settings chosen by browsers aren't usually ugly, you know...
They just try to choose settings that are common as the default settings, the difference being that the users can change it.
The website authors choose settings that are common and the browsers do the same, the difference being that the browser has settings that the user can change, which is not the case of the website. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
myrkos
|
  |
| Joined: 06 Sep 2010 |
| Total Posts: 8072 |
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 01:15 AM |
>The default settings chosen by browsers aren't usually ugly, you know...
How is 12-pont Times New Roman on a white background with no formatting NOT ugly? |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 01:19 AM |
I've never said you should leave the ewhite background there...
I said you should let whether links are underlined or not to the user, same with the font. However, you can change anything else, including the font size, the background and everything else.
Just please leave the default font family and the default appearance for links (color them if you want, though). |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 01:21 AM |
"How is 12-pont Times New Roman on a white background with no formatting NOT ugly?"
Actually, that's exactly how my school wants me to format stuff...
And not only my school, actually...
*cough* Looks like some people don't find it ugly... *cough*
But it does look ugly for everything that isn't a document.
It looks perfect for anything that is a document, but, you see, on the web, most things aren't documents. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 01:23 AM |
The internet was originally created for documents, though...
So that might explain the default appearance of most stuff on most browser, which is generally the same.
After all, isn't it logical to give a white background to pages by default? What else would you expect, purple?!?
And what about the titles? You'd expect them to color h3s in blue with underline, to put a line through h2s and to make h1s be smaller than h4s??? |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
myrkos
|
  |
| Joined: 06 Sep 2010 |
| Total Posts: 8072 |
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 01:29 AM |
| But people tend to like to make their sites with unique looks that go well together. Putting the choice of the font upon the user will likely not give good results. Imagine the whole Roblox website, everything in it, being in Times New Roman. Imagine Google being in Times New Roman. Does that look nice? Not really. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 01:57 AM |
I'm going to try it.
*goes in firefox's settings and changes them to force websites to use the fonts defined in the settings*
*goes on ROBLOX* |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
SN0X
|
  |
| Joined: 24 Oct 2011 |
| Total Posts: 7277 |
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 01:58 AM |
I always colour my webpages dark grey, and the font light grey, and I use Verdana or Arial. It looks very nice. I put a <.h.r./.> before anything, and a <.h.r./.> after all the content. Lots of websites do this, and the background and text colours make it look nice.
But I may be wrong...not on my opinion, of course, but I only started HTML a couple of weeks ago, and I spend hardly any time developing websites, I just play Roblox :P
By the way, once you've got your website, a server, and a domain name, how do you put your website on the web? |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 01:59 AM |
Eeeh, it looks weird, but.. Actually, it looks quite good.
I wouldn't be able to easily say which looks better. The one with my browser's font looks a little weird compared to what I'm used to, since everything is different, but I could get used to it in about 3 days and then, I would find it completely normal.
Actually, the website looks a lot different, but still looks good.
I'm not saying you should completely disable CSS from your website, I'm just saying you should leave the choice of the font for text to the default. You can change the font of things like menus or other things like that if you want, but just leave the default font for normal text.
Of course, you can change the font size of whatever you want, I'm just talking about the font family. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 02:03 AM |
I've just tried something...
I've made every single font be forced to be Verdana. EVERY SINGLE FONT. Even the monospaced one. The only font that is now displayed in my browser is Verdana.
And I am looking at THIS thread, right now.
It looks awesome. Just awesome. Other than the Help button going out of the page and falling on another line, the whole page looks completely normal (except the font stuff, of course), and it also looks awesome.
Actually, I really think I'm going to leave it like this for some days and then choose if I decide to keep it like this or not. Of course, I'm going to use a default theme so it only applies to ROBLOX's website, not to every website.
But it looks good. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 02:23 AM |
As has been said, it's best to leave your webpages fluid, but if you want to have a fixed width, it's generally 900 px.
Personally I encourage formatting links and such, but I always let the browser decide on the font. (Unless I'm using a special font for something, of course)
Haters gonn' hate. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 02:28 AM |
Of course, there are some cases where you should format links.
I'm just talking about links you find in text, in running text. Of course, there are some cases where links must not be formatted otherwise making it look ugly. For example, look at the links at the top of this page (the unread messages, friends requests, robux and tickets one, near the logout button). These would look ugly if they were underlined. Of course, you should force these to not be underlined.
When I said to leave the links underlining to the browser, I was talking about links in text, in paragraphs, in sentences. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 02:30 AM |
Using fixed widths will not only cause you problems and restrict your website to certain devices, but will, sooner or later, end up in you needing to make a mobile version of your site or remaking the whole website.
And you don't want to do either of these.
So, if I was you, I'd just make it use only proportional widths before you realize you have to remake it all. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
NXTBoy
|
  |
| Joined: 25 Aug 2008 |
| Total Posts: 4533 |
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 03:40 AM |
> Also, don't ever use fixed widths. Only use fixed widths for borders. For every single other thing, and I mean EVERY SINGLE OTHER THING, use proportional widths, either proportional on the font or on the page's size.
Not sure I agree with this. If you're gonna make borders fixed width, you may as well extend to padding and margin. Obviously, the actual width of the elements should be elastic or fluid. Whatever you do, don't assume that your two 49% width boxes plus their 5px borders, 98% + 20px, are guaranteed to exactly fill the width of the page. That will fail on smaller screens or windows. If the widths, margins, borders and padding don't add up to exactly 100%, you're doing it wrong. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
NXTBoy
|
  |
| Joined: 25 Aug 2008 |
| Total Posts: 4533 |
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 03:45 AM |
> Also, please do me a favor and don't specify any font for your text.
This isn't the whole story. You don't need to specify the _font_, but you should specify the font _family_. If you have a code snippet, make sure to set the CSS as `font-family: monospace`. You should really set the font-family for everything else to _sans-serif_, ie not Times New Roman - serif fonts are for print, sans-serif are for screen.
At the end of the day though, people who want to choose their fonts can force it, so there isn't really anything wrong with picking your own font. For people who dislike it, well that's what user stylesheets and the CSS `!important` directive are for. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 05:27 AM |
| Eww, openID sounds like an evil plan to prevent me from making 50 accounts because the website was badly made and i accidentally permanent change i cant undo. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 06:03 AM |
I'd personally use fixed widths for:
Padding Margin Border Actual page width (as in, the page wrapper) |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
SQLi
|
  |
| Joined: 10 Jul 2011 |
| Total Posts: 1597 |
|
|
| 22 Apr 2012 08:19 AM |
I try to avoid fixed-width when creating a website. Making sure the website looks good on various devices, and browsers is something I don't take lightly. I'd prefer the user to feel as though the website "moves" to his/her screen, rather than feeling that it is "stuck".
I can't say I'm for letting the users browser decide the displayed font. It does seem like a good idea, and I've never actually tried it. But wouldn't it be a matter of opinion as to whether the font looks good? I would rather set a specific font, and if the users wanted to change it, then they can. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|