Trends in Web design today
Web programmer and engineering student Christian Montoya wrote a summary of the design trends he saw in CSS Reboot 2006, a collection of newly redesigned Web sites from a large number of different sources.
- Sites are now intended for a width of 1024 pixels. We used to design for a width of 800, but more people today have higher resolution monitors. Few of these are flexible layouts. (My favorite recent example of a flexible layout has a third column that gracefully drops down to the bottom of the second column if your screen is not wide enough.)
- The free icons from Mark James (Silk Icons) are rampant. Personally, I like the icons at Maxpower.
- Light text on a dark background is making a comeback, probably in response to the huge number of white sites we’ve seen in the past couple of years.
- “Beefy footers” — this means that there is a whole lot of stuff below the main content on the page. Montoya says this is “great for things like photo feeds, links, blogrolls, recent posts, etc.”
News Web sites are mostly still caught in a time warp of HTML table-based designs, which load slowly and are a nightmare to maintain. There are many reasons for this, but I think the main one is that news organizations are big — and so are their archives of content. News organizations are very, very slow to adapt and change, so we see sites that do not validate for proper HTML or CSS.
Recently I looked at a site designed for a news-related project. It was not affiliated with a newspaper, so it could have been designed properly. I mean, all you have to do is hire a competent designer! But the site had been designed by someone who built the whole thing in tables, with embedded font tags all over the place. As a result, the markup was an unsightly mess. There’s just no excuse for that today.
If you hire someone to design a Web site for you, for heaven’s sake, check their work in the W3C’s free validators.
And all you educators out there — teach the students to use a validator! They need to know what proper design practices are, and that ought to be part of their course work.
I found Montoya’s post by way of Digg.
Technorati tags: design | usability | online media
One of the great joys I had this semester was turning a student of mine on to the joys of CSS. He had been doing his own freelance web design for a several years with dreamweaver, but he was still stuck in the font tags and tables way of doing things. I spent two class periods (three hours at a time) having students work through some Eric Meyer stuff, and his eyes lit up.
The ironic part of it is, he’s a real whiz with Flash and Photoshop, he’d just never bothered to figure out what CSS meant, since the way he was doing things had worked for him.
May 6, 2006 at 11:51 pmHi, Bryan. I know exactly what you mean — I have seen that same kind of thing a couple of times. Some students are really good with image software, but they do not realize how much they are missing. We all need to talk more about Web standards and why they matter so much.
May 7, 2006 at 5:03 pmVery good commentary on the proper method of Web site construction and design!
As an online producer with The Roanoke Times, I’ve pushed hard for a standards-based approach evident in our recent redesign. This was a HUGE jump from our previous effort (tag soup, tables, you name it).
Fortunately, more and more newspaper Web sites are discovering the proper way to code (Sacbee.com, nytimes.com being the best of the bunch IMHO). But, as stated, we have a long way to go.
May 9, 2006 at 6:26 pmif you need even more stock icons, may I recommend http://www.orangeicons.com - not exactly free but really really cheap(you can buy icons one by one there not sets)
May 30, 2006 at 1:27 amHey, Patrick, you guys in Roanoke are doing some nice stuff!
June 20, 2006 at 9:46 pm