By mark brading
The web is a relatively new medium, in fact it's often referred to as just that, 'new media', and practical graphic design on the web is still less than ten years old, by all accounts. This fact means that plenty of so-called web designers are really just print graphic designers trying to transfer their old ways onto a computer screen. What you have to remember though, is that the web is not paper.
Scrolling is the New Page Turning
If you design a site as if it had to fit entirely onto one sheet of paper, you're doing your visitors a disservice. Text on the web has a potential infinite amount of space. Why make me press a button to go to your next page? Are you just trying to increase your page views and ad views, or what? A better way is to keep an article on one page. Unless your article is so long that it would take a chapter in a book.
Don’t Overuse Graphics
You can cover a sheet of paper in all the pretty pictures and backgrounds you like, and it still doesn't take any longer to pick it up and read it. That's just not true on the web. There are plenty of people out there who still have a dial-up Internet connection; you may be one of them. If you overload your page with graphics you can loose them before your page finishes downloading.
Keep Your Work Centered
Columns work in newspapers, people are used to them and all newspapers use them. But look at how wide newspapers are. You really can't do columns on the web. The average computer screen is much narrower then a newspaper, in fact most TV's are to, so to think columns will work is foolish. If you tried to put as many columns on your web page as tree is in a newspaper your columns would be maybe one word wide. Try reading that.
Link and Link Again
One of the easiest ways to spot a site designed by a print guy is by looking for the links. If there aren't any, the chances are the designer used to do paper layouts. Even more so if they've added notes like 'go to our downloads page to see...' – you can link to it, you know! Don't be afraid to link far more than you'd think is sensible. Linking is what the web is all about.
See Through Your Customers Eyes
When a paper is printed, that's it. No matter who see's it they will see it on the paper it was printed on. Web pages, on the other hand, will be seen in a variety of web browsers, at all sorts of sizes, in lots of different fonts, the list goes on. To a large degree you can control the way your web page will look to your visitors, but what you're doing is offering a set of guidelines, for their browser to interpret the way it thinks it should be, but not always the way you want. If they choose to make all their fonts massive because they have trouble seeing, who are you to set your page to override that? Yet many designers do.
Never forget that your role isn't to make sure that everyone sees the design exactly as you intended. What you're trying to do really, is let as many people as possible see the site, and make it look as close to the intended design as possible. If it doesn't interfere with their wishes. That's the difference between a user-hostile website and a user-friendly one. If you're not a print designer, you're probably nodding your head – and if you are then, well, I suggest you take some time to think it over.
The End of Books?
Paper and the web aren't adversaries by any means; the web is highly unlikely to destroy paper layouts, as we know them, no matter how many 'technologists' might predict it. The important thing though, is that paper and the web are different, and you need to realize that their differences are something to be celebrated, not worked around. The best layout for the same content will be very different on the web to the way it is on paper but, in the end, why is that bad?
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