Be Good Not Bad : Web Design :: Brian Warren : Denver, Colorado

After much thought and deliberation, I’ve brought back the “browsing” list on the sidebar (try clicking on that little tab to the left). Initially I left it out of the design for one reason: clutter. I dont like clutter, and I felt like on my last design things were getting cluttered. I looked for ways to cut back, to get rid of stuff, to minimise. As I started putting together my ideas for my redesign I started with a blank page. I added elements only as I found them necessary. Once I added all the main blog elements, I started adding a few extras here and there. The only extra that made the cut, at the time, was the Flickr thumbnails at the bottom.

I rarely had feedback about my links section, and when I did, it was usually from a certain PC zealot friend of mine when I posted pro-mac links. Aside from that, few people mentioned it. After the redesign, nobody mentioned its absence, until I posted about it, and even then few commented. I figured oh well, it wasn’t missed.

But I missed it. …

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Since getting my intel iMac at the office and my MacBook Pro for freelance work, I’ve installed Windows on both, using both BootCamp and Parallels. The process of running both Windows and Mac OS X, going back and forth between the two to test websites, has been stimulating.

The world of web browsing on Windows is a pretty sorry state of affairs.

Over the past five years or so, I have become a total web browser nut. I’m sure this is partly due to the fact that about five years ago I got into web design. Either way, these days, I spend a ton of time in the browser. In some respects, the web browser is my primary tool for web design. So, naturally, I’m a bit sensitive to good and bad web browsers.

Type

As I’ve been doing extensive testing of some of my sites on Windows I’ve noticed one thing across the board that really gets under my skin as a graphic designer. The typography is terrible! I’m not just talking about limited font choices, but the type itself, when rendered on the screen is …

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Whew! That last post, Finding the Con in Contests certainly generated some waves and got some good discussion going. This topic is not nearly as controversial, but it’s one that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit.

One of the core ideas behind developing with web standards is that you design a site with the content separated from the design. There are lots of reasons to do this, including better accessibility, easier on the bandwidth and cross-browser compatibility. From a design perspective, a key reason is that separating content from design makes it easy to redesign your site.

I’d like to talk about a grey area in this topic that has got my brain cooking a bit.

First, a review

When designing a site, there are some obvious no-no’s that can get you into trouble.

 <div class="redbox"> Copyright © 2006 Be Good Not Bad </div> 

This markup is clean, versatile, and standards-compliant, but what happens when I redesign my blog, and want to make my copyright information grey, or polka dotted? I would be wiser to give that div a more semantic class, like “footer” or “copyright”, lest …

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