While I was on Craigslist looking for a fridge I saw people offering their services in web design.Some were asking as much as 400 dollars for a four page html,css and javascript site.With add-ons like a guestbook costing more.
From my own experiences with web design I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of folks seem to care more about appearance than functionality.
And I ‘ve also realised that for a business site, a guestbook is really not all that important.
It’s even a little unprofessional-because with spam everywhere you are bound to get animal porn posted into your guestbook that other’s will see when they visit. And even the most on top of it site administrator won’t be able to vet all the spam one gets.
I know that when I was designing my dad’s site I thought a guestbook was like the most important thing to get running and I was really proud of the results.But hardly any one ever signed it.It looked good and that was about it.
I think I don’t know what people want from a site, anyway when they go to it.Do they
really just want to be shown what’s for sale and have it easy to buy on line? The Stone Street Press (my dad’s site) web site has gone through all these changes while I tried to make up my mind how to make his user interface clear and clean. But we still get feedback from some less internet savvy types (not everybody on the web is 23) who don’t know what a buy it now button means or how to use the navigational system to get to the other pages.
But I think that 85 percent of his visitors get it .I mean, if you are shopping online it probably isn’t your first day doing so.You’ve probably been to Amazon or Ebay, and you probably have a PayPal account.
And you’ve probably already been introduced to a variety of different types of navigations, horizontal, vertical, vertical drop down and etc. I based mine on one I got from a template and it is a standard sidebar type with a list style.
As I was working on the SSP site I used a few navigational menus. I even tried out the Sons of Suckerfish navbar. I didn’t like the way all the select boxes would drop down over the web page’s content and obscure it,though. To me it looked messy.But I kept it for a couple of pages.
Although I did experiment with a php powered navigation, I stuck with an html and css one because I am a lot more comfortable with those and php is really new to me. I only started working with it a month ago.
You can see the an example of a list style navigation menu
HERE
And the Sons of Suckerfish drop down select style can be seen
HERE
And here is a link to the cool guys from HTMLdog who designed it with tons of html tutorials and downloads:Here
Personally for my own taste I like the tabbed horizontal style navigational bar like this one HERE
That was a page I made using an Ajax powered script I got from Dynamic Drive. I should find that link to them I have it somewhere… Here it is:
But I got a php blog set up instead and even though I really loved the way this script worked and the navbar-we decided a blog was better for sharing photos and stories with the public.
You can see the blog HERE
I got the blog package from These nice folks.
I had a lot of fun researching all these different methods and even though I relied heavily on good old copy and paste I still had to learn some new tricks.Gasp ,yes I actually learned something!
For instance: Htmldog taught me the cool technique of having the first letter of a line of text be bigger than the rest of the text and even a different color,font face and background color.This makes the web page look more intersting design-wise,more graphically pleasing. And as you probably already know using images can slow down a page’s loading time and also be the last thing to load anyway.So if you are relying on images for your message,your message may never get a chance.
I read that most visitors won’t wait longer than 7 seconds for a page to load.
So it’s really important that all your code be as standards compliant as possible because cleaner code means faster loading.