Week 03 
Crimes Against Humanity
In this weeks lecture we went through the top 20 crimes against humanity in web design. Most of these were no brainers I thought but some made me think. A few points that were made I've never thought of before, for example links that open in a new window. Thinking about this made me realise that this actually is extremely annoying. Very quickly any target="_blank" tags were removed from my web site. Hopefully they are all gone now, so if you find any please feel free to punch me in the face until they are removed. Another point that got me thinking was the use of JPEGs for every image. I have to admit that I do over use JPEGs when really another format such as GIF or PNG would really be better. So it's now time to convert any images that are JPEG and should be another format to the correct format.
With all this talk of crimes against humanity and defensive design I'm going to spend this week researching other web sites, specifically blogs, so that I can get a feel for how my web site should be. I even bought a book:
This is a great book that teaches a lot about "Contingency Design" which is design for when things go wrong. One thing that interests me a lot (it was also mentioned as the number one crime against humanity in last weeks lectures) is 404 pages. Firstly I'm going to have to check all my links to ensure that they are all working and secondly I am going to have to create a 404 page so that if any errors do occur a page consistent with the rest of my web site design is displayed to point users in the right direction. This book has some great pointers on how to design a good 404 page and I found a tutorial to help me with the setting up of the 404 error page.
404 Error Page
So I've read some of the Defensive Design book and I've designed my own 404 error page. Here it is on the right. From reading the book and a few other web pages I looked at I found a few interesting points about 404 error pages. For example links to images and other web pages need to be the full URL's and not relative links. Not using the full URL could give the user a broken link or image. As the 404 Error Page could be loaded either from the main directory or from a subdirectory relative links will not work.
Now all I have to do is get it to work, hopefully the tutorial I mentioned earlier will help and it won't be too hard to do! While searching for some help on a 404 error page I found this hilarious link, enjoy.
Update
It's now the end of the semester and I had completely forgotten about my 404 page up until now. I've been trying to get it to work but apparently 404 pages do not work on our IMD servers, so there's that idea gone. I will however attempt to get it working on my own web space and update the design to the new blog layout.
Other Web Sites
I want to take a look a some other web sites for ideas on how best to design my web site. I need to figure out how best to display my navigation, weather or not I should include a sidebar, what are the best widths and heights to use to best display my web site on all browsers / screens, etc. Below are some of the web sites I found:
I've chosen to look at three very different blogs each with very different content. Firstly I looked at the Dilbert Blog, i.e. the famous cartoon strip. This is a very simple blog, slightly ruined by the advertisements on the right and at the top of the page (I purposely scrolled down a bit in the screen shot to get rid of the advertisement at the top). These advertisements knock the main content slightly off center and I think it takes the good look of the page as a whole. The advertisements are probably an essential part to the blog but for purposes of researching for my own web site I am going to pretend they are not there. This brings me onto my first point of the main content being centered. I think that this makes a web page look a lot better. One of the web sites that I looked at last week, DubLinks.com, has all of its content aligned to the left of the screen. I don't like the way this looks because usually when I am looking at web sites my eye automatically goes to the center of the screen and if all the content is aligned to the left it is not as aesthetically pleasing to look at. The only other point I want to make about this web site is the position of the sidebar / navigation. As can be seen from the screen shot the is a sidebar on the left of the screen containing links and other content. I quite like the look of a sidebar but I am still debating weather or not to include it in my web site. To justify having one I need to have content to put in it, not just a useless joke or something. Currently the navigation between weeks of my design diary is at the top of this page and I think it is quite boring looking but I am thinking this could be incorporated well with some other small amount of content in a sidebar.
The second web site I looked at was CultOfMac.com. As I'm sure you can tell by the name it is an Apple Mac blog, originally a blog on Wired.com, it has now moved to its own domain. Bit of a different design from the last blog, not just as simplistic but I think it works well. Their use of opacity interests me. There is sort of a bit of a running theme with it, they have their logo and profile pictures set at a lower opacity and I think it works really well. This can be used to take the users attention off less important things and keep it on the more important things, i.e. the main content. The content on this web site runs most of the way across the screen, which is fine on the 17" monitor that I am using but I would be interested to see it on a small screen such as a small laptop. Making users scroll from left to right is pointless, it makes it very hard for the user to take in all the information on the page. This is one point that I definitely try to avoid if at all possible. I think that their big RSS logo is a bit over the top and really doesn't need to be that big. RSS feeds is something that I have never done before and I think now that I have a weekly updated blog it is the perfect time to try them out. So over the next few weeks I am going to try and incorporate them into my web site as a test to see if I can get it to work or not. The last thing that I noted about this web site was their very narrow sidebar on the right side of the content. It is only about 130 pixels across but I like how it is wide enough to contain content such as writer profiles, search bar and links but not so wide that it takes away from the main content of the web page. I think I might try and incorporate something like this into this page to see how it looks.
The last web page that I looked at was BigRedCats.Blogspot.com. Here is a not very up to date blog containing information on a catskiing company in Canada. Catskiing is a form of skiing where a cat (not the animal) takes you up a mountain to find fresh untouched powder. Again this is a very simple blog with the main focus on the blog itself. I think the sidebar on the right is very effective, giving information about the writers of the blog and links as well. I also noticed that this web site (and the other two actually) have rounded corner layouts. I think this is quite nice and I have been looking into it but apparently it's not that easy done. Here is a link to a list of solutions for this problem. I think I am going to give this a go and see what the outcome is like.
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Jonathan is an enthusiastic web designer with a great passion for all things technical, extreme sports, photography and the church he attends. After spending almost 18 months in Dublin Jonathan has returned with his sights set on making his mark in the multimedia industry.
