You may have noticed that www.kalkran.com redirects to kalkran.com, I did this out of a silent protest against the uselessness of www. But I found out I'm not the only one.. And I got a tag for it! :-)
Just wanted to share ;)
Today, on Kalkran.COM: The fifteen (+one!) sins to designing a webpage.
- Animated GIFs
Animated GIFs are soo 1990's. I remember using them on my geocities website! And that, my dear reader, is almost prehistorical. - Slow download times
Nothing makes me stop browsing a website as slow load times. Waiting for the server to respond, takes up valuable time of your reader. Nobody likes waiting.
Change the background colour
Ever wondered if you could get rid of the boring gray colour behind your canvas in photoshop? Of course you can! Ever since PS 4 you're able to change the background-colour:
- Select your paint bucket tool
- Pick a nice foreground colour
- SHIFT+Click on the background to change it's colour.
Oh, and this might be useful.. At least it is to me!
Hide the toolbar, layer palette and all other windows
Ever tried pressing TAB? It hides all the windows.. They always get in my way when I'm messing around in photoshop.
Since this seems such a "hot" topic these days, I figured I might as well spend a couple of minutes and write a quick tutorial on what they are and how to make them work.
The finished result will look like this Arrow
Read More...
What do you think, when I say Web 2.0? That's right, you're thinking new "flashy" graphics and web layouts. You're thinking 'scanlines' and website badges. But that's not all that's new with Web 2.0... The biggest changes are below the surface, things you have to keep in mind when writing the html-code of the site.
Web standards
If you're using Internet Explorer, please click the little X in the top right of your browser right now. Internet Explorer has long since made it's own rules for showing webpages. It doesn't listen to any of the conventional rules.
Changes to HTML
HTML is no longer seen as a way to markup your site, but rather as a way to structure it. Marking up the layout is what CSS is for. This renders some basic tags, that are being used all around the web, deprecated. Tags, such as: <b>, <i>, <u> & <s>. You may wonder, why they are deprecated. Let me explain.
I just said, HTML is a way to structure your site. Not a way to style it. The tags mentioned above describe the visual change, not the structural change (emphasizing something). So these tags, could and should be avoided, in favor of <strong> (strong emphasis) and <em> (normal emphasis), or bold and italic respectively in most browsers.
DOCTYPE's
Then, there's the !DOCTYPE on the top of each document. Oh, wait.. It's not specified on every page. Not having a DOCTYPE lets the browser render your website in Quirks mode, I personally remember this by thinking Queer mode, since Firefox will, most likely, render your page correctly. But open it up in Internet Explorer and you'll begin to cry.
What the DOCTYPE does, is trigger a standard parsing mode for the browser. Thus, rendering your pages correctly, and flawlessly. Also, it defines what kind of (X)HTML your website is actually using, which is a critical piece of information for every program that tries to process your page.
Usability & Participation
A critical part of Web 2.0 would be participation. Why so? Because since Web 2.0, a lot of people have started blogs, registered to things like Digg, etc. It's all about participation, user interaction, usability. If a site is a nightmare to navigate, or a nightmare to read. What are the odds someone will linger? (the odds that someone will ever read this post are subzero). The new Web 2.0 design is great! It's big buttons, clear and smooth interfaces. Big hyperlinks and so forth.
I had so much more, but this is all I could save. (Or now I can make a second part! Woohoo). You may have noticed that my website has been down yesterday, they had to revert the databases to that morning, so I lost a lot of work :-(.
Posted in Miscellaneous at April 13th, 2008. 2 Comments.