The same mantra applies across all aspects of your design, from colour schemes to text. Content is the absolute king of your webpage and needs to be kept as simple as possible, remaining jargon-free and concise to ensure your visitors read what you want them to.

With colours, pick a two or three colour scheme and stick to it. Over-egging the palette of your website can result in a messy and unreadable design which makes visitors want to click off quickly. Excessive colour schemes can confuse and disorientate viewers, making navigation of the site harder and ultimately costing you sales.

Navigation is one of the most vital areas in which to stay simple. The norm for navigation bars is either at the top or the left of the site, with pages easily identified through their home titles. Don’t be afraid to use ‘standard text’ for these links. People searching websites are used to looking for FAQs, so you’re more likely to get a hit than if you headed it ‘Things people often ask us’ or even ‘Popular Questions’. It can also help to repeat your navigation bar at the bottom to save people scrolling up and down.

Even though technology is improving all the time, simplicity is still the number one aim for all websites. So don’t be afraid to rein in your design a little.

If you are designing your own website using a programme such as Dreamweaver or our own NS Builder you there will be many points that you have to take into consideration. You want the design to stand out, but at the same time clear, concise and easy to manage. The most important fact to remember is what you are trying to achieve. If you are selling products, make sure the shop and pay facilities are straightforward while if you are an information portal, make sure your site is easy to navigate.

If you are new to web design but are looking to create your own site, your web design programme should be very simple to use. You need to be able to update your website regularly, efficiently and trouble-free. Having a helpdesk available to you should you need it will be very important; especially in the early stages.

One of the most important points to remember is that your website needs to be accessible to everyone. Again, this is something we can help you with should you need it.

Finally, it’s important to remember that you don’t need to be an expert designer to create a good, basic website. Look at it constructively, get friends and family to test it with feedback and don’t be afraid to change things if they’re not working. If you are having problems reading a certain font, then it is not right. If your friends/family can’t find the links or pages they’re looking for then it is too difficult to navigate. Once you are happy with the overall look, content and navigation you will be ready to go live.  However, this will not be the end, you will have to closely monitor it and update it when necessary.

Easy to navigate: check.

Displays full contact details: check.

There’s one point that’s often missing from many business’s web design checklists, and that’s accessibility. By law, all publicly accessed websites must comply with Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines, specifically Section 19 which makes it unlawful for a provider of services to discriminate against a disabled person. Websites fall under this law, as they constitute a service, and they must be accessible to visually impaired people who use software to view websites.

Not only is accessibility a legal requirement – and the right thing to do morally – it’s also an important part of SEO. Search engine robots operate in the same way as the software that a visually impaired person would use.

Many websites overlook the WAI guidelines and do not prioritise accessibility, but there are actually a lot of benefits to designing a website to meet accessibility standards. Search engines will look more favourably on your site, as mentioned, and you will probably find it loads more quickly too. By making sure your website is designed in such a way that disabled people can use it, you will be expanding your audience reach and this is likely to result in increased sales.

Accessible: check.

- The inability to alter kerning of the characters.

- Flash has often been criticised for its poor anti-aliasing and this can sometimes show on the rendered text.

- Sifr can be tricky to setup and get working correctly.

- Sifr fonts cannot be scaled when you change the size of font in the browser. It only changes when the page is reloaded. Some consider this quite a serious usability problem, though because Sifr is mostly used on headers and large areas of text that probably wont require scaling, this is debatable.

- It requires the user to have Flash though nowadays almost 95% of web users have this.

A convincing alternative to Sifr which I came across recently is Cufon developed by Simo Kinnunen . The aim of Cufon was to achieve the same effect as Sifr without the need for additional software. Some specific requirements were set out when it was being developed. These were:

- No plug-ins required – The font should be able to be displayed without flash and using only the users standard browser. Cufon uses javascript to render the font.

- Compatibility – It had to work on all browsers. This has been achieved with Cufon displaying correctly on IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox and Safari.

- Ease of use – configuration and setup for Cufon is minimal compared to Sifr.

- Cufon loads faster than Sifr with no flickering, even for larger areas of type.

Cufon works as an interface to Fontforge so it creates an SVG font based on the source font, converts it to VML(as IE only supports this), then is rendered using an engine written in javascript. The rendering engine outputs two versions of the font, one in VML shapes and one using the new HTML5 canvas tag. The font can be loaded into the file easily using the normal <script> tag. The font compresses well also for a minimal file size. The advantages are convincing, however little study has yet been done on accessibility of Cufon and scaling etc yet. Also until the issue of distributing copyrighted fonts is resolved it could be a while till custom fonts become common practice.

http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/

CSS3

Css3 has been in development for a few years but is now beginning have some of its features supported better. There a number of interesting features which have been developed to meet design trends, so as to make the implementation of these stylings easier, though many of them are still currently unsupported by browsers, especially Internet Explorer. Some of the features include:

- Multi column allows the developer to position blocks of text in several columns similar to print.

- Rounded corners can be achieved on elements by setting a radius on the corner.

- Border images allow the developer to create custom shaped elements by setting graphics for each corner and sides of an element.These 3 features are only currently supported in Firefox and Safari 3.

- Border color allows gradient borders to be used though are currently only supported by Firefox.

- HSL colors have been introduced, which aswell as setting the colour also allows you to set the hue, saturation and lightness of colours, providing a lot more flexibility in colour schemes. So far this is supported by Opera 9.5, Safari 3, Konqueror and Mozilla.

- One of the most popular features of css3 is opacity. This can be set on different elements allowing a gradient effect to be achieved. This is supported by most browsers except Internet Explorer.

- Box sizing is an interesting one as previously padding and borders were always added to the width of an element but now can be added inside a div. Firefox and Safari support this with the prefix -moz- and -webkit- respectively though Opera simply works with box-sizing.

- Font-face was included in css2 but was only supported by Internet Explorer if an .eot font format was used but Safari 3.1 now allows Truetype or Opentype font to be implemented in designs.

Flash accessibility.

Flash has always been a blessing and curse to both developers and users. It can achieve unique interactive experiences for users and bring a site to life but with search engines unable to extract text or links from the file, it has made flash sites often inaccessible and difficult to index. In the last 6 months it was announced by Google and Adobe that the algorithm Google uses is dramatically changing which will allow text and links from flash files to be read and allow sites to be indexed better in search results. Adobe is developing a flash reader for search engines which will allows the files to be read. Another technology which employs Flash and provides developers with more flexibility in terms of typefaces on the web in Sifr. This is a type replacement technology which allows any typeface to be employed in a website. Its fully accessible with all major browsers and can be read by screen readers.

The awards themselves are essentially about making the internet a better more accessible place, and so it’s a great pleasure for us simply being shortlisted among other giants within the industry.  Accessibility has always been at the forefront of what we do at NSDesign, so to gain some recognition for this (and other initiatives we get involved in) is fantastic.

Talking of accessibility – the European Union has just published a public survey on accessiblity, which aims to gauge the current situation with regard accessible websites, the costs/efforts associated with building them, and the affects (and improvements) they give to disabled users.  The research will all be used to determine if a broader EU law on accessibility (rather than a country by country implementation of different laws) is a better approach to take than what we currently have.  Pretty interesting stuff, and I’d encourage everyone to complete it.  It’s just a shame their own survey doesn’t meet accessibility guidelines!

Using an adapted version of Safari, browsing websites is intuitive and on the whole fairly easy.  It’s instantly obvious that some websites “work” better than others, and it’s fair to say that websites built to standards (xhtml, css and semantic markup) perform better than the usual (non-accessible) tables-based layout sites. 

We’re really quite excited about this, and will be doing some more research in the new year to identify the “best practice” for optimising a website for the touch, and of course the iPhone.  With some clever browser detection and customised CSS, it should be possible to get any website (especially the ones we develop!) to format perfectly for the smaller ipod screen, with a few automatic extras to make browsing that bit easier…  watch this space!!