Week 7 Design Issues

Week 7!! At this point I was excited about this course, learning new tricks and appreciating the importance of youtube tutorials and PRACTICE!! Week 7 looks at design issues that affect specific parts of pages such as text, menus, tables, and forms. In week 7 I learnt how to make my page look even more awesome and available to potential viewers.

Text

  You should always give your text space to breath-A page that is too cramped is not only hard to read, it also looks less attractive, whereas a page with space between navigation, text, images, and other items on the page will be easier to read and more attractive. This space between the elements of a page is what designers refer to as whitespace. There are two key terms which help to create whitespace on your page: padding and margins. Funny enough prior to reading week 7 notes when I first heard of “whitespace” I cam to the conclusion that it was white in color however this was not so. Whitespace need not be white; it just refers to the space between elements of a page such as writing, images, form controls, table borders, and links.-It is usually the same color as the background of the page.

  How you align your text determines how readable it is. Most commonly, text is left-aligned. However, you can also center text, have it right-aligned or justified, or it can be put out of line by other elements on the page. In general a paragraph of text will be much easier to read if it is left-aligned although many individuals think it looks better centered it will be harder to read. Centered text is best left for headings and sometimes short paragraphs. Most people find it hard to read long lines of text on a computer screen. As the lines of text become wider it becomes harder for the user to follow onto the correct line—and this problem is exacerbated when users are scanning a page rather than carefully reading it. Therefore it can help to limit the width of your columns of text. You can control the width of text using the width attribute on a table or table cell or you can use the CSS width property on any block level element—the

element. Another factor is the use of background images- photos tend to make poor choices of background images because they have varying contrasts across the picture, which makes the text harder to read. If you must use an image for a background it should be low in contrast—for example a texture rather than a photo. It should be noted that background images should be small files; otherwise they will take longer to load and also set a background color similar to the main color of the photo in case the background color shows while the page loads.   Fonts, Fonts, Fonts!!! Choosing the right font for your website is never the easiest task but is very important!! When choosing which fonts (or typefaces) to use on a page, you should make sure that users will have some of the fonts you expect them to have; if users don’t have your desired font installed on their computers then the typed content of your website will not be displayed. There are fonts you can bet your life on that the potential viewer will have namely- Arial, Verdana, Courier or Courier New, and Times or Times New Roman apart from that it is best you double check.Lastly, as stated at the beginning of my blog, we touched on menus. We basically ran through the importance of the menu being quick and easy to read, achieve what visitors want t read, MUST be clearly separated from the content so as to allow users to effectively navigate the site.