Housely home

This is a website i had to make up using div tags and using css styles to lay them out to make a decent looking webpage

Activity 2: Webdesign issues

In this task i'm going to be looking at the differant issues seen in differant websites to do with standards and layouts.

• Aesthetic qualities - This covers mainly how the website looks and what will keep you looking through a certain site for what you need, from what has been gathered there are two main types of aesthetics in web designing; Classical, and Expressive the differance being is that classic will use things that have been seen alot and what people are used to where as Expressive uses things that have been made up by the designer for the site or perhaps has only been seen in the last year or so. There are however four core aspects that should always be taken into account and these are: Diversity, Simplicity, Colours and Craftsmanship.

          Google is an example of a site with Classical aesthetics where as wow-europe.com has lots of new aged elements about thier site

• Access Speed - This determines how long it will take for someone trying to access your site to load everything up and usually depends on bandwidth or the internet speed of the server from which the site is being ran.

• Content is king - This is pretty self explainitry, mean to have the content on your site that you say you do, for example dont post that you have a video of a new game being released when infact you dont as this will annoy people and you will get a bad reputation for your site. Also if you do have something someone wants to see then you don't want to make it too hard for them to find that information so try not to send them through too many hyper-links and label things clearly.

• Web Standards - This is concerning the language in which the site are written, there was a dispute between browsers and languages where people kept making new codes and new programmes to run them so eventually the "Web Consortium" made web standards to keep everyone along the same guidlines.

• websafe colours - There was a time when colours could not be used on a website but then Netscape designed a fixed colour pallet of 216 to be used on all platforms and they are used with tags such as #CC0000 = red

• Image formats - There are only 3 types of image file and they are allocated for websites as they are optimised for low size, so in set sizes they would look fine but if you tried stretching the pic it would become pixlated and start to lose focus. The formats are known as GIF's, JPEG's and PNG's

• Font Families - When the internet was first made there was only one font that everyone could use when making websites until netscape came along and added the <font> tab which was then standardised in HTML 2 adding the option to change your font, however you can change it to any old font it has to be pre programmed unless you Embed your font which saves it instead of loading it from a tag

• Fluid vs Fixed - A fluid website allows the fonts and picture to be reshaped depending on what opens them (browsers, ect) for example if you were resize your browser size the site will componsate for it a move images and text boxes around where as a fixed wesite will not. The images and text boxes are set and will not move in resizing meaning you have to move around the screen after losing sight of info after resizing.

• Layout eg HTML, tables, layers, CSS
• readability - This basically means that you shouldn't have your font too small or too close together and you should always use a easily readable font.
• Usability - This means how "simple" your site is to use... You don't have to have simple site to make it usable, you just have to have clear markings and links to other sections of your site. If it is not usable then the viewer will take an average of 5 secounds looking at you site before getting bored.
• Consistency - You have to have a sence of conistency on your site as if you try to branch out to
• Navigation
• accessibility eg colours, navigation, target audience, fonts
• Validity

Unit 44 - Web Design

Activity 1 - Research Website Design technologies

Describe a minimum of 3 differant website technologies:

HTML - (Hypertext markup language) Is essentially the main language format used for the building up a website and comunicates with your web browser, you can use this code with many programs which can be as simple as notepad or something more complex such as Adobe Dreamweaver. There are differant versions of the coding with the latest being HTML 5 but they all still work on the same programs. The code itself uses tags rather than long continuing scripts for example to make a header in HTML you use a simple tag such as <h1> then right your header and close with </h1>.

Java Script - Java Script is an addition to HTML to add dynamics and more enhanced user interfaces, the code is put directly into HTML and is used as a client side script (which means that you need this in page to take the input from your side, exmaples buttons or videos). However being an Internet code doesn't just mean it can be used on the sites, you can use Java Script on offline in PDF files or desktop widgets. Java Script is also an implication of another form of code known as ECMA and you must know that JAVA is different from Java Script.

FLV - Flash video is used with HTML to contain a video and then deliver it over the internet using Adobe Flash Player, where as HTML can be seen straight from the browser without anything added you much download a plugin to see these videos. FLV is usually the default video script used in the internet today, for example hundreds of video sites will use it including: Youtube, Metacafe and Vevo.