Screen resolution.

[Andy_1984]

need a better layout m8, ive been into building websites for many years and i hate to say it but people are usualy turned down by websites that look like yours some reasons are that it looks amaturish the menu would be better suited on the left of the page and the rest of the page should look almost like your navigation. id like to help you come up with a design you like. a pro looking website will attract you more cusotmers as they will stay in your site longer looking at things, your gallery could be doing with a work over its very very slow but as for the way you have given the information its great, right to the point

[Guest jay_con]

Hi Andy,

 

This good design thing really eludes me. I see some great looking websites but struggle to produce anything similer, How to switch from amaturish to professional??? I keep trying but just dont seem to make it. Any suggestions welcome!!!!!!

[Andy_1984]

its hard for me to explain how you make a good design quikly but if you add me to msn ill give you a hand when ever you need it and show you examples of how to work with tables and have it all look realy neat and tidy

 

o0x0o_overload_o0x0o@hotmail.co.uk

 

give people some eye candy and features and they will come back every time, also helps to have it updated alot, worse thing that ever happens to a site is when it is no longer updated, like mines. i havnt updated in a while and there isnt much going on and its dead, im lucky if i get 10 visitors a day

 

[ 16. August 2005, 01:57 PM: Message edited by: Andy_1984 ]

[JackPike]

thats the problem i had just could,nt be happy with any design I thought of . The screen resolution is a pain to keep everyone happy . The worst fishing site I,ve seen is really bad I hav,nt got the heart to post the addie on here but will PM if you want to see it. I,ve just got new hosting for my site a lot faster download but I ,ve still got a lot of bugs in there though just sorting through them.

www.southportangling.co.uk

[Andy_1984]

the thing with keeping it resolution safe is to use percentages and not pixels, say you have a table and you need it a certain size, insted of using pixel size use percentages. say i wanted a a table half the size of my screen(browser) i could easily do it like, say my resolution was 500x500, i could easily make my width: width="250" but say someone visits the website and they have a res of 1000x1000 its not going to be half the size of their screen anymore so to fix this we make the width: width="50%" this makes it 50% of their current resolution and thats on all resolutions. just experement with percentages till you get the right one thats the size you want it and you want have any resoultion problems again

 

edit: dont use theis percentage method on images it doesnt work the same way

 

[ 16. August 2005, 06:22 PM: Message edited by: Andy_1984 ]

[Ian FG]

@SUMMER@,

 

I think you are doing fine, If I was looking to charter a fishing boat and found a nice, simple home-made web site with all the information I needed right in front of me, that would suit me fine. After all, your business is charter fishing not web design. Probably more important than design is to make sure the search engines show your site.

 

Sea Otter 2 is a good site.

 

But to answer your question, find a site you admire and pinch their design

[Gillies]

Im still quite happy developing to suit 800x600 resolutions - the main body of my pages are usually around 760 pixels wide ... and come up just fine on an 1024x768, and above.

 

Im sitting working on web sites day in day out, surrounded by 4 computers humming away in my ear (slowly driving me round the twist) - Ive developed simple static content sites (just html pages) to full e-commerce web sites and pretty complex web page based applications for Citi Bank over in the states .... but the hardest part of a web site for me when starting it from scratch is always designing the look and layout of the thing.

 

The main reasons I develop still to suit 800x600 is mainly for usability, user-friendliness and I take pitty on the 800x600 resolutions and like to save them the big no no of having to use the left to right scroll bar.

 

I could type for ages about usability and userfriendlieness (or HCI Human Computer Interaction as some geeks would call it) - a lot of it is just plain common sense though, have a look at a number of popular web sites and you will notice a number of common design characteristics for how text, images, links etc are layed out.

 

For the screen resolution ... of the top of my head things I'd keep in mind are:

 

- Table widths (carefull when using percentages)

- Image alignment if using percentages in tables

- Font size (be carefull - to big looks nasty on a smaller resolution ie 800x600)

- Number of words in a paragraph going across the screen ("they" say its easier to read 9-15 words across, then go onto the next line down ... rather than reading 30-40 words plus across and going onto the next line) ---- this is one reason I still develop to suit 800x600 resolutions.

- Text alightment (again percentage values in text boxes may make the text alignment look odd)

- Empty space can be a good thing for emphasizing content on a page

 

Are loads more issues, but its to late for me to think of them right now

 

Next you have printing the page issues ... but thats another story (and where making a printable version of each page can come in handy)

 

One of the most user friendly sites I look at is the BBC web site ... ie

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/s...rem/4143512.stm

 

their site is a good starting point for ideas on layout and usability. It may not look the prettiest of sites (infact pretty boring looks wise), but how its layed out for a person to read and navigate is pretty good I think.

 

I would maybe look at frist making your site as user friendly as posible first, then work on how it looks ... always keep in mind though, not everyone has broadband ... so try to keep download times realistic.

 

Thats my 2 pence worth

 

Gillies

[UK-Fishing-Tackle.co.uk]

I agree site design is important (I operate several websites both as my own companies and as employees of others, and as a contractor for even more).

 

However, just my 2 cents is that people read left to right, so menus are 'generally' better on the left. The Adsense is probably overkill and detrimental to the sites content (not at least because tonight it was showing Lake Michigan Charters - not really that relevant).

 

For this kind of site, people really want two things namely good information (and to a certain extent pricing is probably a huge plus - many people are put off by having to contact firms for further information WHEN the first stumbling block is the money!!). Secondly people want to know you are a good, reputable company i.e. good pictures of a nice, well equipped clean boat, tackle (hire gear etc). Links to any news reports or websites that may report on your boat in competitions etc (we all want to catch fish!!), you know that kind of thing....

 

Don't worry too much about design in terms of prettiness. It impresses some people, but really those that are likely to be serious customers will 'generally' read anything that looks promising - however - make sure they get the info they want quickly.

[UK-Fishing-Tackle.co.uk]

Try making the site 80% width - it always looks cleaner in my experience - and generally easier to read (monitors are rather large and people sit rather close) - 80% gives you just the right amount of 'comfortable' reading space usually!

[Steve Walker]

Gillies:

 

The main reasons I develop still to suit 800x600 is mainly for usability, user-friendliness and I take pitty on the 800x600 resolutions and like to save them the big no no of having to use the left to right scroll bar.      

It can be a difficult compromise to reach, sometimes. The sites I run are information services for financial services professionals, and we have a minimum screen res of 1024x768. Many of these people have twin or quad monitor setups, with big monitors, and from their point of view, they'd like to see more data presented per-screen. OF course we can't do that on a screen which also supports the guy with a single 1024x768 monitor.

 

The solution (which I will implement when I get chance) has to be to give them a choice of how many columns of data they see, I think. We also log all users' resolutions, so once everyone has gone beyond 1024x768, we'll ramp it up to the next standard.