Gaining some site design experience, I can say that one of the most important things I learnt when working on my sites, is the fact that it’s very difficult (if possible?) to find a balance between coolness of the design and accessibility of web pages. Whether it is a personal blog or corporate portal, accessibility is important. It’s widely accepted that Accessibility in virtual spaces refers to making your place on the Web accessible to a wide audience. For example, many visitors have less-than-perfect vision etc.

The problem is that when you make cool design - accessibility suffers and vice versa. Many of you will agree that sticking with big, easy readable fonts and not using at all italic styles will make site boring. Bigger fonts are space hungry, leaving little room for page design bells and whistles and content also. Graphic headers and navigation buttons are cool but this adds loading time and traffic. Every single step I made when working with themes and templates was struggle between wish to make something cool and understanding that this is not reasonable in terms of web accessibility. You also need to keep in mind that your pages should be search engines friendly. Thanks to Wordpress - it is friendly to search engines from the core.

You will find many articles covering these issues on the web. So, I just resume my experiences:

(a) Good text/background contrast - very important (I myself just canceled my visits to one site because of the poor contrast.)

(b) Font sizes - I googled for that and there are some good articles on this issue. This one, for example -Text Font Readability Study. It is better to make fonts fixed size - do not think that all people know how to make them bigger through browser menu or will wish to do this before leaving your page.

(c) Colors - I prefer to stick with 2-3 colors for content and links. Overall design palette better play around those 3 colors. There is a site VisCheck.com which lets you see your page as a color-blind person would. It’s actually fun.

(d) Fixed page width - At the beginning I was hunting for flexible/all browsers compatible page design. There is no real need for that except your ambition to have cool page effect. The only question here is what width to choose? My General conclusion is - if big portal with lot of content: stick with full window width. Otherwise, better centered, 70-80 percent of monitor width page.

I also find very useful those small tips validator say you when validating your page through http://validator.w3.org/check/referer .

One of the good places to visit is Zen Garden - The Beaty of CSS design – cool themes and templates show place. For those who did not know about this site: it is just 2 years old but already became classic resource. Although most of them are made by professional designers, you may notice many themes which are cool but hardly suitable for live web site.

This entry was posted by Tash on February 1, 2006 and is filed under Web Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.