It is only too obvious that many people set up their web site without bothering to think about design. Good sites - whether professional or amateur - only happen when capable design meets memorable content. The rest of the 'About Photography' site is largely concerned with great content in photography, and here I hope to give some pointers on design.

I usually start my course on web design - after the introductions and making sure everyone can log in to the computers - by talking about the most important tool for any web designer. It isn't expensive software - or powerful hardware to run it on - but a thin cylindrical object, about six inches long, often hexagonal in cross-section, costing only a few pence. Here at least, they often have HB engraved on one side, and to make them really useful you also need a good pad of scrap paper or a sketch book.

A good start for page design is to draw a rectangle the same aspect ratio as a computer screen, or at least the usable part of it for your web page. The basic problem in design for the web is that your site will be viewed on all sorts of computers running various operating systems and web browsers around the world, and what displays fine on your system can easily be quite hopeless for many other people. We need to start by considering the problems they may have and the equipment they might be using.

The measurements you will need to get used to working with are pixels, and it's a good start to find out how many your own screen has if you are not sure. In most recent versions of Windows a right mouse click on the screen, then selecting 'Properties' will bring up the 'Display properties', from which the 'Settings' tab will give you the information you need. I find I'm running in 'True Color (24bit)' at '1280x1024 pixels', but you will probably find different settings. Except for WAP phones and various small handheld computers, the minimum figures for most users are probably 256 colours ('True Color' is around 16 million) and 640x480 pixels. To slightly complicate matters, users with screens over 800x600 pixels will often (almost always if they know what they are doing) browse with a window size smaller than their screen.

It is possible to design flexible web pages that will adjust to any window size, but only really at the expense of allowing this to distort your design ideas or making the problem much more complex. Another method is to produce different designs to fit different screen sizes and give the viewer a choice (or make it for them automatically) but again this gives you a lot of extra work. The most recent statistics I can find (obtained privately from a very large commercial web site) show just over 50% of the users accessing it with a screen size of 800x600, with around 20% at each of 640x480 and 1024x768 and small numbers with every other size you can think of.

A good compromise at the moment is to design for 800x600, but to ensure that all really vital content - such as menus and other navigation aids - is towards the top and the left so as to be visible to all. That those with large screens will see some extra space to the right of your content if they browse at full screen is hardly a problem. You can assume that those with screens smaller than this are pretty used to having to scroll to see all of most web sites they visit. I tend to think that people seriously interested in images are likely to have larger screens in any case.

Of course, there are other things that lay claim to their part of the 800x600. Few users bother to hide the browser toolbar, location ands menu bars, and at the bottom of the screen is a status line and probably below that the Windows toolbar. (Other systems may look slightly different, but still have various things taking up space.) At the edges are the window borders and probably a scroll bar at the right. The maximum viewable area on an 800x600 display is probably around 750x500 pixels.

Although this is the window that your site will be viewed through, for many purposes it is acceptable to have content you need to scroll down to see. Sideways scrolling is however to be avoided wherever possible - most find it a pain. The visual impact of your site will in any case come from the initial window of the page that people see. If you want to put lengthy pieces of text on the web together with your pictures - not generally a good idea, as many people won't read it - a good compromise is to put the picture(s) at the top where they appear in the first window and allow people to scroll down to follow the text - or, as I know many do with these articles, to print them out to read.

Source: photography.about.com