Chapter 13 gave some great tips on how to enhance a web site. Tables can assist in breaking-up the site into sections, and it allows you to format the text and pictures into the way you want. A great use of tables it to use “sliced” graphics as menu selections on the site. Slicing the graphics and adding animation really gives a nice visual effect and adds to the “coolness” to your site. Making minor adjustments to hue, saturation, and lightness is also a nice way to make your pictures stand out. I think that I will try to incorporate these features into my web site.
A common problem that people run into is the pixilation of smaller fonts because of anti-aliasing. To correct this, one can play around with the anti-aliasing settings in photoshop, just use an aliased font, retouch the fonts after they’ve been converted to a .jpg, or don’t even use the anti-aliasing feature.
I found it quite interesting on how to use the low-source proxy to show a lower resolution image quickly, and then to load a higher resolution picture for people with slower Internet connections. Another nice feature that I learned about in chapter 13 is the ability to add rollovers and image swaps to a site. A roller is when an image changes when mousing-over a menu item, whereas an image swap is when a new image is displayed when mousing-over a certain area on the web page. Both of these are pretty cool features to enhance a web site.
Another way to enhance a web site, but requires a lot more experience, is to use flash. Flash is used to add multimedia animation to a site. It uses a vector format to display the animation, and its steaming capability makes it much quicker to view animations. Flash animations are also much cleaner and sharper than raster format animations – which are used with gif animations. Flash is more scalable when it comes to adjusting the images, as they don’t lose much quality when changing the size of the image.
Chapter 14 went over how important it is to properly manage your web site – especially if it’s going to grow in size. Many of the web design applications such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver, and GoLive already have site management as a built-in product. Site management software really helps keep your files, images, and folder structure in order.
Another part of having a good web site is to properly test it. It should be checked for any broken links, for missing images, and it needs to be tested on some of the most common browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. It’s good practice to test it by copying the folder structure of the site to another location on your hard drive.
When testing on different browsers, it’s common to find problems with spacing, how tables are displayed, graphics that are not appearing, and with broken links. When dealing with spacing problems and alignment problems, the use of CSS line spacing and adding transparent gifs can be very helpful. Another neat trick is to add characters to an area that needs spacing, and then to change the font color to match the background.
Before starting a web page, it is critical to ensure that you plan your site very carefully. And storyboarding is a valuable tool to use to plan your site. This will ensure that the web site meets your expectations, and the expectations of the visitors. Storyboarding makes sure you know who your audience is, what content is needed for the site, and it helps you build the structure of your web site. It helps you organize “chunks of data” into a structure that makes sense. A flowchart should be used in this process to assist in the overall design of the site.
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