What makes you go 'WOW THAT'S COOL' when looking at websites?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Check out this page. It shows general web user stats that will help you make design decisions. The links in the right column further break down those stats, such as operating systems, browsers, resolutions, etc. (I’m designing a site too, and I was amazed at how many people are still using 800 x 600 resolution. It made me rethink my design.)

Also, a standard two- or three-column layout ROCKS. (Unless you use frames, which suck.) Nothing is cooler than being able to find what you want easily and quickly.

Also, everything Dogface said. (Except for the part about 1024 x 768 resolution. As you can see from the above site, plenty o’ people still use 800 x 600, prob’ly because they’re using their original Windows settings. To be fair to Dogface, that really shocked me; I thought most people had moved beyond 800 x 600.)

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It sort of came as a surprise to me, too, but a lot of people still use 800x600 - including my girlfriend, a professional html programmer (her eyesight isn’t the best). When I used a laptop stuck at 800x600, I was always very annoyed when I couldn’t view the entire width of a site at once because the designer didn’t think to test the site on lower resolutions.

23

Start from the bottom. Write your page and code it in (X)HTML. Make sure that validates and that you use the right tag to designate the right thing (use tables exclusively for tabular data, headers for actual headers and not just to resize the text, lists instead of line breaks when it makes more sense, etc.).

Then add a style sheet. I recommend designing this in Mozilla because it’s more strict (i.e., if you design in Mozilla, it’ll work in both the strict and the lenient browsers, but if you just design in IE, it might not look right in the strict ones). Remember that the internet looks different for everybody; if you separate the content and the style properly, the information will be viewable in any browser, from Opera to a Braille reader to a cell phone (it’s hard to even predict what screen resolution a user is running these days; you don’t know if he’s running Windows 95 at 640x480 or Mac OS X at 1440x900).

Good copy-editing skills help too. The Elements of Typographic Style and The Chicago Manual of Style are recommended.

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I’ll do it for $50/hour. :slight_smile: That’s cheap considering the skillset. :smiley:

25

Ok, so there’s some things here I have an issue with and others I agree with.

I agree that flash is bad, because not everyone has it. If used for menus and the like, you can make a very small, yet complex, menu system that takes less time to download than a pure HTML one. However, not everyone has flash, so you have to make an HTML and Flash version, which is a problem.

Javascript can be bad, but not always. It’s pretty useful in form validation. It can save the end user a bit of time when inputing things, if it tells them they’ve typed a date or something wrong. Yes you can turn it off, so it’s not a security measure, but it’s nice for users.

How do you make a good site? You find all the information you’re going to have on it. Everything. Once you have all that, figure out what goes together and make yourself a structure, what pages link where, what information is on what page.

Once you’ve done that and know what info you want on each page, look at the info and figure out where it should be for ease of use, ease of reading and ease of navigation.

I think one of the best things to do is make a design that can contain all of your data, so you don’t have to learn a new layout each page.

Once you do all that, then you can look at how to make the site look good and where you can put little things that make people think it’s cool. Mouse rollovers (gasp, javascript) and subtle animation can make a normal website look very professional. If you over-do it, then it’ll look bad.

Oh, sound is always bad. Always. Remember that. So are artsy splash screens.

As for the protection on the pictures, just watermark them by putting a semi-transparent logo on the pictures themselves. That way, even if they take your picture, it’ll still have your logo on it.

26

I also don’t agree that flash or Javascript or popups or banners are bad per se-- they’re just poorly used. I believe any technology can be implemented in such a way that it’s not annoying or detracting from your site. Where I think people go wrong is that they don’t put themselves in their viewer’s shoes. They don’t see how awful neon green text looks on a speckled-lavendar background or how annoying a pointless, poorly done animated gif can be.

I notice that my favorite sites have a few things in common:

  1. No popups or auto-playing sound files
  2. No flashing, attention-stealing graphics (including banners)
  3. Design elements (backgrounds, clickable buttons) that do not distract from content.
  4. Content, and not just fluff disguised as content.
  5. Harmony between color, layout, and content. Things just flow together well and look good.

I think you should start off by making a list of websites whose design you admire. Maybe you like Amazon’s tight but efficient layout, or Apple’s clean lines and simplicity. Once you know what you want, you have something to inspire you.

A few other general tips:

  1. Stick with technologies you’re familiar and comfortable with. If you don’t know XHTML or haven’t used style sheets before, don’t force yourself to learn it just to make this site. Once you learn more about web design, you can always make more advanced pages and upload them later.

  2. Test your site before you upload it, and test it every time you update it.

  3. Get feedback on your site from a variety of people. Find out what elements work for them and which don’t. Remember that ultimately the site is for your audience and not you-- given a choice between what your viewers like and what you like, go with what your viewers like.

On a related note, if you find that most web surfers surf using Windows 3.11 and Netscape 3.0 at a resolution of 800x600, don’t design with the insistence that they use Windows XP, IE 7, and 1440x900. Nothing makes me leave a site faster than a web designer who thinks he can dictate to me how I surf the Internet.

  1. Don’t put anything that’s unnecessary for the content of your site. A gif might look cool, but if it’s distracting, or unrelated to the purpose of the page, or only under consideration because it’s neat, take it out.
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Oh yeah, about preventing image theft:

Art Gems’ website has Javascript mousover code that prevents you from clicking on an image in order to download it to your computer. (Except for the main page.) When your mouse pointer goes over an image, the image changes to a blank, outlined image with a copyright statement on it. Maybe something similar will work for you?

28

From an old copy of Sam’s Teach Yourself HTML, I remember this:

Sound advice, I think.

Don’t be scared of having lots of white space, and make sure you have a link back to the home page on all your other pages, just in case somebody lands directly on one from a search engine.

Also, some people might find this annoying, but I favour having links open in a new window, as the SDMB does.

29

Hire a proofreader.

http://dymarine.com/aboutus.htm
(look at the second bullet point)

30

Looking back at my post, I see that it might not be clear. That the things I was suggesting would in fact make a site cool to me. I.e., “Wow, what a simple, functional web site. I like it!”

31

I thought the OP was

Which is not exactly the same is “how do I make a good website which is easy to read, etc, etc, etc”

A website that makes me go “WOW” definately needs to have some kind of effects to them (like my posted link above). However, this does not mean that such sites are “good” per se, they may just be neat to look at - but contain nothing of importance, and may or may not be a b*tch to navigate. But was that really the point?

32

I hate sound on webpages…but I like a good splash page if I’m looking at something art or design related. When I look at people’s art/design pages and I see nothing that’s spashy and artsy, I’m usually unimpressed. It could be the world’s cleanest, most organized page in the world, but if it’s lacking a well designed color scheme and interesting graphics and design, I often don’t see it as a very high quality page. Maybe it’s because I have a short attention span and will pass it off as boring a lot of the time or because I think that a good designer should have a good design…I’m not sure. This is for art or design related pages though…I wouldn’t want to read the news with a bunch of that crap everywhere! I don’t, however, like those long stupid flash intros…don’t make anyone sit through that just to get to the content.

33

Good point, Laurasia. If a site showcases artwork, graphics and design is very important, and Flash on those types of pages can be really cool. A lot depends on what type of site it is. For instance, I’m working on a website for a tropical fish hobbyists’ club, and it’s going to be a little more fun and graphically intense than, say, a business’s web page. Because the site will be providing lots of information, though, it will still have a standard, easily navigated, text-based layout.

One more thing that is bad, bad, bad: Mystery Meat Navigation as described here. (MMN is when you have to mouse over a rollover to find out what it links to.) In fact, be wary of any design technique that is intended mainly to provide a warm and fuzzy ego boost to the designer. I’m not saying you should avoid all snazzy techniques, just make sure they’re as cool to the user as they are to you. A page taking 15 seconds to load using a cable or DSL connection is NOT cool.

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… graphics and design are very important …

:smack: It’s early, it’s Friday. These are my excuses.