Combining Web Design with Original Art
Planning Your Website
art4arts8 will work closely with you in the planning phase and will recommend ideas to create a functional website for you. It will be important that your website loads quickly, is easy to navigate and is search engine friendly. You will be all too aware from browsing the internet that there are too many websites that do not match these criteria.
Layout
Layout is how the website looks on the browser. The positioning of your logo, banner, navigation buttons, content, links and so on are all important. In 2009, there is a small minority of internet users who still use a computer screen resolution of 800 x 600 pixels, whereas 93 per cent use a screen resolution 1024 x 768 or higher.* The layout of this website, for example, has been designed to include the 800 x 600 community. Otherwise they would have to use the horrible horizontal scroll bar to see the whole page. *W3School Figures.
Text Tips
Internet users are lazy and you will have less that 15 seconds to capture their attention. Therefore writing a website needs to be short and concise. Here are some top tips:
Be concise. Keep most sentences under 20 words long. If a print version is 200 words long, the web version should be 100 words.
Break it up. A large block of text is hard to read on screen. Use short paragraphs of no more than 5 sentences.
Use headings to help your visitors find the right information.
Use links and describe what the visitor will find at each link.
Images
Images break up a text-based web page and make it more attractive. High quality images will give your website a professional look. Depending on the purpose of your website, images should be used sparingly. Otherwise the page may be slow to load and overwhelming to browse. If you use art4arts8 to design your website, you will need to supply images, saved as .jpg files, that are a minimum of 800 pixels wide.