I seem to always find myself browsing the web in search of great resources that offer tips to help me with my projects. Needless to say I’ve found alot of great information out there and I wanted to offer some valuable info and tips in return to help you build a better website.
- Choosing a Color Scheme - This is a concept that I have always seemed to struggle with in the past. Now I feel as though I’m actually getting much better at being able to choose color schemes for my sites. One of the things that I think helped me out the most in this area was a site that I found called COLOURlovers a great site dedicated to numerous different color trends and palettes submitted by users. Be sure to check it out as it helped me tremendously.
- Find Great Photos - More often then not I find myself looking for photos to use that don’t cost a ton of money. There are a ton of different photo sites out from a variety of different price ranges. Lately I’ve been using Fotolia and I really like it. Their prices range from $1 -$3 per photo depending on the license you choose and they definitely have a great selection of stuff.
- Web Usability - I have to admit that web usability is something that I never paid close attention to until about 6 months ago. Previously when designing I never really took into account what the overall user experience was like and I think this definitely had a negative impact on some of my designs. Well last fall I purchased Don’t Make Me Think
by Steve Krug and it totally changed the way I look at designing my sites now. I highly recommend this book and its definitely worth the money.
Hopefully those 3 tips will help those of you looking to enhance your design skills. I plan on posting more tips like this in the future as well.
On a side note I’ve become quite bored with the design here and I hope to completely redesign it and have it up by sometime in mid June. I think I can do alot better than what I currently have here so be on the look out for that.
5 comments ↓
Great post man! I’ll be looking forward to seeing your new design. I’m going to bet it will be built on Cutline……?
Your blog was the first site I saw that customized Cutline to the extent that it is. That prompted me to customize my Cutline themed site further than I previously had.
All three points in the post are great, especially about the web usability.
Thanks for the tips, Clarke. I know what you mean about colour, and trying to get it right. I appreciate the COLOURlovers suggestion.
I also recently discovered Color Palette Generator which looks like it might be pretty good. You link it to a picture you want to use on your site, and it offers a palette based on the colours in the photo!
I rejigged my site with Cutline. I don’t know whether you fancy popping over there and telling me what you think…
I have a couple of problems, actually. I can’t get IE to show the hover feature on my top menu. The second one is - when I go to the library and use the internet there, my site has the sidebar pushed down under the posts. It doesn’t render that way with IE at home. So, I haven’t a clue about that one.
Anthony,
Yeah, I definitely am going to use Cutline and I’m hoping that I can create something much better than this on my next design. I started drawing some stuff out so it should be fun to start designing here in a few weeks.
Rory,
I think your site looks great, you’ve done a nice job with it so far. I also experience some of the same type of problems most notably with IE6. I ended up adding some different things into my CSS conditional statements for IE.
In my opinion one of the most frustrating aspects of web design is having to deal with different browser issues. Anyways keep up the good work.
Thanks, Clarke. I think you might have hit on the problem. I reckon the library is still running IE6, and that is having difficulty rendering the site. I might use WebDeveloper to gaze into your IE6 CSS settings to get an idea of what you did.
IE7 seems to be getting the hang of things.
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