Design Techniques/Great sites....

www.hotasmustard.com

*This is a fantastic site that works really, really well. It completely enforces my theory that simple is best. The site is displayed on a background that is a mixture between chocolate brown and yellow, or somewhere inbetween & in the centre of the page, always an eye-catcher, there are two words, that's right, two words. One is "cool" and one is "hot". But these aren't just random words, oh no, there is a clever use of rollovers here. Once the mouse cursor comes any where near either of the words another of two words pops up just alongside the aforementioned. These are "HTML" after "cool" and "Flash" after "hot", implying that this is a site for "techie web-designers" bent on taking over the world with their knowledge of coding. Nevertheless, it looks damn smart!

*Once the site has drawn you well into it's belly it begins to demonstrate some quite impressive flash technology. The optional links dance round each other and draw your eyes in, in order to make them more appealing. It only last for a few seconds as the designers know as well as we do-any longer is just boring and can detract from the content of the page. The one thing i can't instill enough on you budding designers is...

*...Don't sacrafice content for design. Your site MUST be

1) user-friendly

2) able to allow for quick download

3) easy on the eye

4) easy to navigate

5) able to "sing-the-same-song" / maintain consistency.

www.speedfreak.com

*The second site i reviewed was a personal home-page from an obviously wealthy man with the money to purchase such an expensive domain-name and then post a picture of his $185,000 Ferrari on it! The site has a number of rather interesting features on it that work really well. The majority of the site is blue, i know the MOST used colour in Web Design, but this one really stands out.

*There's a real clever use of graphics on this site. As you can see by the link on the previous page (1) they used somewhat pixelated graphics and text to make it look like a personal home-page and not a corporate site. But they knew exactly what they were doing and that is evident! They have even gone to the trouble of changing the windows scroll bar skin on the right hand side to match the blue of the site. It is ALWAYS little details that stand out and definately individuality.

*If you are having large amounts of traffic to your site you escpecially want to concentrate on individuality as you will want your audience to return to your site again, and again. You have to offer something different!

*In this site i was also astonished to see a link to an image that didn't open a seperate page it loaded up the image in a matching window skin that sat as a layer on the original page. This looked extremely smart and also added to the consistent feel of the site!

*REMEMBER chickens - Don't sacrafice content for design! Your site copuld look great but it has to be useable