Design Specification

“Comfort, Location & Privacy”

These were the three qualities that David, my client wanted to convey with his website. In addition to this, I wanted the website to come across as friendly and simple – both visually and navigation wise. With these considerations in mind, I went about looking for an appropriate design solution.

The first issue I tackled was that of colour. Colour affects the mood of any site dramatically and I did not want the site to look drab or clinical, yet at the same time, not too unrestrained. Eventually I settled on a sandy earthy palette that would form the basis of my site. The two main colours from this palette are

C8B38C

E0D5BE

While neither of these colours are considered web safe, I did some research into this issue before I commenced the design of the site.

Lynda Weinman (2003) believes that the use of the standard 216 web palette is redundant as only a small minority of internet users have computers capable only of displaying 8-bit colour. Not entirely convinced, I researched further. I then found a WebMonkey (2000) article that stated that there are in fact only 22 web safe colours - with the majority of these being a lurid shade of green!

Furthermore, according to StatMarket (2003) only 6% of users have computers limited to displaying 256 colours. People using 16-bit colour were placed at 56%, while 32-bit colour users were placed at 38%.

This was enough proof for me that I did not have to design using the web safe palette. Throughout the design process I have checked my website in a 16-bit colour environment and have found the results to be satisfactory. Even then however, I have endeavoured to make the colours between hypertext, text and images of high contrast in the event that they don’t display properly on someone’s computer. With this I can be sure that the content of the website is still accessible regardless of the user’s colour settings

My next design consideration was screen resolution. Effectively, I have optimised this site for 800*600 resolution. Even then, it scales to as low as 500 pixels wide – though at resolutions lower than this, I believe readability will become adversely affected (Thomason, 2001). This leads onto my next big issue – text legibility.

Text legibility was a big issue that I had when laying out my site. For example, I did not want the text to go all the way across the page at 1024*768 as this made it too hard to read. I couldn’t however have fixed table widths set to fit inside 800*600 resolution, so I had to come up with a compromise. My solution was to insert a graphic on each page onto the left hand side. This limited the span of the text, while also adding visual interest to each page.

With this solved I went about designing the banner and navigational structure. For the banner, I decided that handwritten text would best convey friendliness. For the navigational bar, I decided on a dark grey with white text that would stand out against all the other page elements – the navigation bar is after all, one of the most central parts of any webpage

The hyperlinks on this navigational bar have been carefully chosen as to maintain high contrast as mentioned above. They are also designed to alert the user to the fact that they are ‘selectable’. I have done this by making all links underlined as per the convention (Thomason, 2001). Visited links are also given a colour so as to enable a user to retrace their steps through a site.

So with all these issues considered and resolved, it is hoped that not only does the site come across as friendly and informative, but is simple and easy to use.

- Duc-Thanh Vu (2003)

References

Lehn D., Stern H., 2000, 'Death of the Websafe Color Palette?',
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/37/index2a.html?tw=design
[accessed 06/11/03]

Thomason L., 2001, 'Usability Tip: Screen Resolution And Page Design',
http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol4/accessibility_no24.htm
[accessed 07/11/03]

Thomason L., 2001, 'Usability Tip: Use Standard Link Colors',
http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol3/usability_no6.htm
[accessed 07/11/03]

Weinman L., 2003, 'The browser-safe web palette',
http://www.lynda.com/hex.html
[accessed 07/11/03]