With the myriad of browsers nowadays and the myriad of problems that come with the incompetency, or perhaps cunning monopolization ideals, of these browser developers, designing a website has never been harder. No one follows the standards that were set to exact specifications, leading designers and programmers to find solutions that merely sleaze past the small differences that will make the websites work.
Designers were never meant to do what programmers did – hacking, until now.
To be the best, and create the most functional websites that will still remain within the scope of the original plan requires genuine experience and skill in the design languages. Yes, you heard that right. There is no easy way out; especially if you want to be the absolute best and solve any problems that the clients’ specifications bring to the table.
If you are offering your services as a professional to companies, you should start getting more knowledge on the topics of CSS, XHTML and JavaScript, if it applies. These are businesses that look at a return on investment – meaning they want the website because they think it will generate enough revenues to cover the cost of your services in addition to making them a profit. If you deliver, they are likely to come back for more and even give you referrals that will help your business boom. If you do not, they would probably think that the internet is not a good place to invest in and even though the blame will not be on you, it still is not the better choice.
The brutal truth – study how everything works from ground up because a deep understanding of all the mechanics will allow you to implement the subtleties that will impact the website largely as a whole.
However, here are some of the important fundamentals you should take into account that will improve usability of the website – one of the most important factors since it deals with the visitors that are the blood supply of a successful public website. This does not require you to be over-experienced and you can apply these right now.
1- Bandwidth
Users will leave the website if it does not load fast enough. The limit is surprisingly low; at mere seconds, even the smallest changes can mean the difference between a loyal visitor and one who will never experience what the website offers at all.
Remember, even spaces and line breaks that make your code look neat can make up a massive amount of unnecessary bandwidth. You will be surprised at how much smaller your files will be after removing these seemingly insignificant spaces. Have two copies of the website – one for editing and one for publishing.
There are a few ways you can achieve this.
a- Create Your Own Optimization Tool
This is less likely since you are probably just a designer and not a programmer. However, you may have connections that you can get favours out of and it is a fairly simply application to create. All it needs to do is remove all the unnecessary whitespaces and line breaks.
b- HTML Compressors
There are a set of tools known as HTML compressors that optimizes your pages via various methods that will reduce it by large amounts. Simply do a search for the term ‘HTML Compressor’ without the quotes in any of the search engines and you should get a couple that you will be able to use for your projects.
This tool will allow you to optimize your pages as well, but it can only do so one page at a time – which means it will be a pain when you have a whole website to do. This is great if you cannot use any of the above alternatives.
2- Connection Instances
This is a tricky one – since you will need to know about the mechanics of how browsers work at quite a deep level.
Reducing the number of frames and images in a page will reduce the amount of connections the browser will make to the server. Every single image on a website sends a request to the server which has overhead and increases the overall loading time of the website, and this applies to frames as well.
The all-so-popular AJAX is a very good solution to this problem. However, this requires knowledge of JavaScript, something which many designers may not possess. For those who do not know how to create an AJAX website, reducing the number of images is the best way to improve this area of the website. Note that this method is not about reducing image size, but the number of images.
A website with one 10 kilobyte image will load faster than a page with two images that are 5 kilobytes each.
Here, we have covered a very important aspect of designing websites – one which has the potential to impact the effectiveness of the website and bring more profits to the business that it was created for. In the professional career, this is pretty much a need to thrive. Hardly anyone, if anyone at all, will invest tens of thousands on a website if it cannot make a profit – and those who pay that much are the clients you would want to have.
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