OUGD504 - Design Production - Design For Web - Briefing

Considerations

When looking at Web Design there are many factors that you have to consider;-

- Are you looking to promote to or selling to an audience?
- Inform, sell, or sway an opinion?
- Don't design a website for yourself! You've got to consider your target audience.
- All websites are interactive, just by containing buttons and pages makes it interactive.
- Is the information going to be more effective as text or as and infographic? You have also got to consider if the text is going to be copied into another document and how the text  is going to be used by other people.
- What is already out there? how can you react to that? Do you want your website to stand out from the crowd and be unique, or fit the web standards and the theme of current websites in the field and the market.
- Audience & Content
- Technology will dictact how you design the website (restrictive areas)
- The Best way to say something is most often the most simplest. For example if  the page is going to be about the business then simply name it 'About Us'.
- Always design for the lowest denominator. Really old PC. This way you know your website can work across a whole range of computers.

We then looked at Bad and Good Web design and pooled out thoughts that we all agreed on...

Bad Web Design

- Use of garish colours, backgrounds and fonts.
- Blue Hyperlinks (Purple when clicked) and Underlined.
- Animated Gifs, Competative Attention, Flashing, Pixelation, Size and Compression.
- Images overcrowded
- Edgy Layout
- Long Loading
- Messy
- Navigation, Visability, Interlinking, Confusing Layout, Images used for Links, Broken Links,

Good Web Design

- Fluid Layout.
- Really Simple.
- Easy to Navigate.
- Few Colours (maximum of 3 generally)
- Simple B&W always works well.
- Good Imagery.
- Unique Imagery.
- Designing for Ipad and Iphone.
- Unique Layouts, Scrolling to the right, etc.
- Inoffensive or Standard Typography
- You don't realise it's good because it's web standard and works like it should!