Web Design Critique: Consistency and Homogeneity of the Blog Layout

February 19th • 9 Comments • Under: Design Suggetions, Web Critique • Tags: critique, suggestion, web design

Blogherald.com is a blog featuring news from all around the blogosphere since 2003, and is run by a dozen of contributors and writers. It was founded by Duncan Riley from Australia and is now owned by Splashpress Media. The Blog Herald has gone through multiple design and layout variations, including the latest one made by Brian Gardner.

Web design and design in general should never be judged from the aesthetic viewpoint or by how much one likes/dislikes a particular color scheme, typeface or the layout of different content elements. The purpose of design is to make the content organized and accessible to the widest target audience possible. Design should be the information highway without traffic jams and clearly marked road labels which don’t require any Design Positioning System (DPS) in order to navigate. Read more »

Good and Bad CSS Identifiers

October 17th • 4 Comments • Under: Design Suggetions • Tags: analysis, css, web design

Seeing a <div class="left green">...</div> block in HTML code might hurt the eyes of a lot of web designers. To identify good and bad id and class names, it is important to understand the idea of the CSS.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines CSS2 as:

a style sheet language that allows authors and users to attach style (e.g., fonts, spacing, and aural cues) to structured documents (e.g., HTML documents and XML applications). By separating the presentation style of documents from the content of documents, CSS2 simplifies Web authoring and site maintenance.

Therefore class names left, green or largetext are theoretically good according to the first part of the CSS definition, but very very bad according to the second part, which can be illustrated with the following example. Read more »

Optimize for search engines or users?

September 20th • 2 Comments • Under: Understanding Web • Tags: semantics, seo, web design

Search engine optimization companies are spreading all over the web. They claim to optimize your website so that it comes first in the search results for whatever the people might be looking for. Well, not everything really, but for whatever you make, produce, sell or do.

Who uses their services? Those who initially hired a bad web design company to build their website. You may wonder which are those bad agencies, that make bad websites and don’t know how to put your site high in the search results. But you may also wonder, why not a single agency advertises itself as we don’t know how to design proper websites but can do one for you company. Read more »