When designing a website, there are many important things you have to take into account. Today, I’m going to touch on three of the biggest things you should concern yourself with when creating a website for everyone to see.

Number one: screen size/resolution. Up until a few years ago the standard was to design for a screen resolution of 800 by 600 pixels. But, it seems as though the standard has moved up to 1024 by 768 pixels, since you rarely see anyone using 800×600 anymore. Personally I try to keep the width of my design at or around 1000 pixels, just to accommodate scrollbars as well. If you want a fixed height without scrolling, it is best to design for about 550-600 pixels high, since a lot of people seem to have a bunch of those junky toolbars at the top and they really limit the window space in the browser. So, as a general rule, try to keep it within 1000×600 and you should be OK.

Number two: cross-browser capability. When designing and testing a website, I ALWAYS check it on both Mac and PC. Since I design on a Mac but most of the population still uses PC, it is imperative that the website I’m designing displays properly for all users. For some reason, Internet Explorer on the PC does some really strange things with certain pieces of code that display perfectly fine on both Safari and Firefox for Mac, and Firefox for PC. So, you must take this into account when programming a website and be sure to test across many browsers!

Number three: plugins. Not all people have many of the plugins installed that we take for granted. If people have to download a plugin to make your site work properly, chances are they will just get up and leave. The biggest one being Flash. Don’t get me wrong, I love Flash. It’s great for animations, it’s consistent throughout all browsers, and it’s generally pretty to look at. However, not everyone has it installed on their computers, it can be pretty resource-heavy, and it can drastically bump up the loading time of your website. This is where you have to really take into account WHO your target audience is. For example, if you’re creating a website for a retirement home, you have to realize that most of the people that are going to be viewing it aren’t going to be as computer-savvy as you or I. They probably won’t have all the fancy equipment or fast connection that are necessary for running a site that’s programmed entirely in Flash, so in this case it would be best to keep things simple.

Well folks, that’s it for today. Until next time.

Your beloved Scapegoat,

Mike Schumann, Owner/Operator

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 11:15 am and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.