Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates, Fourth Edition

Knowing the Seven Rules of Web Design 5
For example, in Figure 1.3, the color and line to the left of the cow repeat
vertically no matter how long the page runs, while the photos stay in their respective
positions. This allows the original look and feel of the initial screen area
to remain the same no matter how much content is added. The site also makes
use of images in their most optimal formats and compression, which keeps the
file sizes small and the download times fast.
Knowing the Seven Rules of Web Design
There are seven basic rules that, if followed, will help a beginning or intermediate
designer become a professional:
1. Just because you can does not mean you should. Web technology offers
many options and tools to build Web sites; however, just because the
technology is there does not mean a designer should use that technology
just for the sake of using it. Many times, adding technology can impede the
performance of a site or irritate users into leaving the site. An example of
this is using Flash to animate a logo of a site. While the company may want
to show off its new logo, the user, most likely, probably does not care
or want to see it move every time she hits a page. When using a new
technology, the important question a designer should ask is, ‘‘Does the
technology add value to the site or is it being added strictly as a novelty?’’
2. There is almost always an exception. There rarely are absolutes in Web
design. A designer should be careful of ruling out a technology or design
method simply because it did not work for another site. Take, for example,
the rotating logo. While it’s not going to work for 99 percent of the world’s
Web sites, a corporation that is running an extremely expensive global
rebranding campaign may want to use animation to show off its new logo
for a month or two. It may even elect to show the animation on the
homepage, which probably is a better approach to showing the new image
without forcing it on the user too frequently.
3. Users are the ultimate judges. Opinions are never lacking when a site is in
the design process. While an experienced designer may think a site should
function or appear a certain way, the designer’s boss may think differently.
The bottom line is that the users are the bottom line. The site needs to make
sense to them, so the site should be designed with them in mind.