Web Design Ireland

posted by admin on Jul 12

The Flash Player has been installed on millions of PCs worldwide, making it an attractive way for web developers to present content to their site visitors.

Use Flash, But Don’t Offend Google

As much as site publishers want to present the best possible presence to their visitors, they equally want to stay in the good graces of search engine spiders, and Google’s in particular. It presents a challenge to webmasters: how to use Flash while showing the Googlebot what it needs to see?

The topic comes up enough on Google’s help groups for webmasters that Mark Berghausen of the company’s Search Quality Team wrote more about it on the Google Webmaster Central blog.

“The only hard and fast rule is to show Googlebot the exact same thing as your users. If you don’t, your site risks appearing suspicious to our search algorithms,” he warned.

Berghausen collected some tips from Google engineers regarding the use of Flash. He offered three suggestions to webmasters based on that feedback:

1. Try to use Flash only where it is needed. Many rich media sites such as Google’s YouTube use Flash for rich media but rely on HTML for content and navigation. You can too, by limiting Flash to on-page accents and rich media, not content and navigation. In addition to making your site Googlebot-friendly, this makes you site accessible to a larger audience, including, for example, blind people using screen readers, users of old or non-standard browsers, and those on limited low-bandwidth connections such as on a cell phone or PDA. As a bonus, your visitors can use bookmarks effectively, and can email links to your pages to their friends.
2. sIFR: Some websites use Flash to force the browser to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements in a font that the user may not have installed on their computer. A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML — it’s just displayed by an embedded Flash object.
3. Non-Flash Versions: A common way that we see Flash used is as a front page “splash screen” where the root URL of a website has a Flash intro that links to HTML content deeper into the site. In this case, make sure there is a regular HTML link on that front page to a non-Flash page where a user can navigate throughout your site without the need for Flash.

The nature of spidering a site for indexing purposes doesn’t include an ability to visually parse content like Flash. A proper indexing of a site with Flash doesn’t have to be a challenge, provided developers take Google’s suggestions to heart during the building process.

Source:  www.webpronews.com

posted by admin on May 28

Effects are visual enhancements that you can apply to almost any element on an HTML page. For example, an effect might highlight information, create animated transitions, or visually alter a page element for a certain period of time. Effects are a simple but elegant way of enhancing the look and feel of your website.Effects refer to JavaScript methods and functions that reside on the client, and don’t require any server-side logic or scripting to work. Thus, when a user browses an HTML page and triggers an effect, only the object to which the effect is applied gets updated: there is no need to refresh the entire page.

The Spry framework for AJAX includes these effects:

Fade

Makes an element appear or fade away.

Highlight

Changes the background color of an element.

Blind up/down

Simulates a window blind that moves up or down to hide or reveal the element.

Slide up/down

Moves the element up or down.

Grow

Increases or reduces the size of the element.

Shake

Simulates shaking the element from left to right.

Squish

Makes the element disappear into the upper-left corner of the page.

Adobe designed Spry effects to be easy to implement on the page while letting the framework do the real work. No new tags or strange syntaxes are required. The HTML element to which you apply the effect does not require any custom tags.

Note: Several effects libraries are available and Adobe recognizes the community’s acceptance of Script.aculo.us as a well-written library. With that in mind, Adobe has adopted the their list of effects as well as their nomenclature and has implemented several Script.aculo.us solutions for browser issues related to effects. Adobe acknowledges the work that Thomas Fuchs of Script.aculo.us has done and hopes that the community recognizes both libraries as useful and viable. Additionally, Adobe has worked to make sure that developers can use both libraries on a single page.

Source: www.adobe.com

posted by Robert on May 25

Add multimedia to your Web site, and step up to sound and motion like HTML never dreamed of.

For simple sound files, check out this very cool sound file search engine at www.FindSounds.com. Pick up free sound files from the Web!

The best way to add multimedia to your Web site is with Macromedia Shockwave. This tool plugs into Netscape and allows it to display multimedia files from Director, Freehand, and Authorware. You simply prepare your multimedia presentation in your favorite tool, and Netscape can download and present the file to the viewer.

Download a free copy of Macromedia Shockwave at Macromedia - Shockwave Center, and make your Web site come alive!

posted by admin on May 24

Similar to Paper Layouts - Web Layouts Should be Simple and Clear

When you create a Web design, one of the more overlooked aspects of the design is the layout. Now, many people think about how to do a layout (CSS, tables, frames, etc.), but the basics of Web layout are often completely ignored.

Space and Whitespace

Use the whole space, but don’t be specific in your use. In other words, use relatively sized layout sections on your Web pages, so that they expand and contract to fit the browser window.

Keep screen resolution in mind. While the majority of computer users have moved away from 640×480 resolution, keep that in mind when you’re designing. Having customers leave because all they can see is a logo on their monitor is not good customer service.

Use color to define spaces. If you want to have a page that’s a specific width, why not center it on the browser screen and make the background color of the page a different color? This will help the page appear to resize for different browsers; larger browsers will just have more background color showing, while smaller browsers will have less or none showing.

Images and Graphics

Align your images. One of the most common newbie layout mistakes is to slap images into a page willy-nilly without thought to layout. If you just use an img tag and then write text to follow it, you’ll have the image and then one line of text to the right of it. Using the align attribute will help make your images part of the layout.

Balance the graphics and text on a page. It’s easy to get carried away with lots of images and animations, but they can make a page very hard to read. When you’re considering your layout, remember that images are a major part of the design, not just afterthoughts.

Text Width

Think about text width. This is often called the “scan length”, and refers to how many words are displayed on one line. Most people can comfortably read about 7 to 11 words on a line. Longer than that, and the text is hard to read, shorter than that and it’s disjointed and distracting. When designing your layouts make sure that the major text area displays the text in a readable width.

Centering text is inadvisable. One of the first layout techniques that a new designer learns is the center tag, and they center everything on their pages. However, centering is very difficult to do well and it’s often hard to read.