cheap logo design

Posted by Rick Lecoat on 2008-06-05 06:09:12 Trackback | Report
An okay-looking site -- I've seen worse -- but it does have that 'collection of elements glued together in a WYSIWYG web editor' look about it. For example, the banner sits incongruously at the top of the page with no attempt to blend into the rest of the layout (at least the headings are the same orange-y colour). Having some Google ads on the right hand side and some others scattered inside the main content area breaks up the page's coherence and makes it look bitty. There's a link to another site right at the top of the page below the banner. Is this an ad? A sister site? There's nothing visual to indicate that it is not a part of the page's real content, and its presence (along with the two ads below it) makes the page confusing. I would advise keeping links and ads apart from the core content of the page; intermingling the two creates usability issues IMHO. Of course the biggest problem with this site is that it is built using tables for layout structure, presumably constructed using a drag-and-drop web application like Dreamweaver(?). The copyright notice on the page says 2008 so I'll assume that it was built recently. Any modern web site that isn't restricted by considerations such as an archaic intranet should be built using web standards -- that is separating content from style, using semantic markup and positioning/styling elements using CSS. Tables-based pages are, amongst other problems, difficult to maintain, create enormous accessibility issues for people viewing the internet using assistive technology like screen-readers, and use increased bandwidth. By using a properly structured semantic markup (eg. using H1/H2/H3 headers rather than span class="header" and laying out the structure of the page using externally-referenced CSS rather than tables and spacer GIFs, you can create a site that is more accessible, more search-engine-friendly, easier to maintain, quicker to download, and that will translate more fluidly across different viewing platforms. Eg. try resizing your text in your browser: for starters, if you're using IE on Windows then you won't be able to because you specified your text size in pixels, not a relative unit like ems or keywords -- a serious accessibility problem in itself -- but if you use Firefox (which can resize text sized in pixels) and bump up your text size by one or two stops you'll see that some of your text disappears. I think it's generally ad text so maybe you don't mind that so much, but it's not ideal. I know that there are a million sites out there all using these same old-school methods, but that doesn't make those techniques a good choice, and since your business deals with design then I would think that a more professional build-structure 'under the hood' would be of benefit to you. Sorry if that seems a bit harsh; it's not meant to be, but I truly think that by using out-of-date site construction methods you're unintentionally making things harder for yourself -- and, more importantly, your visitors -- than they need to be. Hope this helps.