Html and Css Tutorial

This Blog centers on the design and technology aspects of web design, but close attention
must always be paid to your potential audience. It’s no good forcing design ideas that
result in inappropriate visuals, unusable navigation to all but the most technically minded
of people, and huge download times on your site’s unsuspecting visitors.
Prior to creating a site, you must ascertain what your audience wants and expects in terms
of content, design, and how the site will work (by way of talking to the relevant people,
and also, if your budget allows, by using surveys and focus groups). You don’t have to take
all of your audience’s ideas into account (after all, many will be contradictory), but be
mindful of common themes and ensure they’re not ignored.
Technical considerations must be researched. If you’re targeting designers, you can be
fairly sure that a large proportion of the audience will be using monitors set to a high resolution
and millions of colors, and you can design accordingly. If your site is aimed at business
users, be mindful that much of your potential audience will likely be using laptops (orolder computers, for staff at the lower end of the ladder), with screen resolutions of
10245768 or lower.
Determining the web browsers your audience members use is another important consideration.
Although use of web standards (used throughout this book) is more likely to
result in a highly compatible site, browser quirks still cause unforeseen problems; therefore,
always check to see what browsers are popular with a site’s visitors, and ensure you
test in as many as you can. Sometimes you won’t have access to such statistics, or you may
just be after a “sanity check” regarding what’s generally popular. A couple of useful places
to research global web browser statistics are www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_
stats.asp and www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/. Note, though, that any statistics you see
online are effectively guesswork and are not a definitive representation of the Web as a
whole; still, they do provide a useful, sizeable sample that’s often indicative of current
browser trends.
Although you might be used to checking browser usage, and then, based on the results,
designing for specific browsers, we’ll be adhering closely to web standards throughout this
book. When doing this, an “author once, work anywhere” approach is feasible, as long as
you’re aware of various browser quirks (many of which are explored in Chapter 9). Of
course, you should still always ensure you test sites in as many browsers as possible, just to
make sure everything works as intended.