General Web Design Ideas

A web designer's ultimate aim for a website's design is to achieve a balance between its attractiveness(targeted look-and-feel with necessary design effects),load time considerations(optimizing design elements for website size)and user friendliness(easy-to-use navigation and well laid-out easily readable content) - without entirely compromising on either of them.Between the extremes of making bare designs with cluttered content and hard-to-navigate complex designs,a professional web designer needs to learn to expertly create a web design that is impressive, cohesive,well laid out,fast-loading and easy to use.On the programming front,no compromise must be made in creating a well coded and error free website that ensures a uniform user experience - web standards compliant (valid XHTML/CSS),accessible and cross browser compatible.

Websites with interactive applications that work to greatly enhance a website's user experience are the in thing today. You can use either AJAX or Flash (two most popular modes of interactivity on the web) for this or a combination of both (like used in Google Analytics).

AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is basically creation of applications that interact with the server without leaving the displayed browser page.This drastically reducing bandwidth usage and load time.Sections of pages can also be reloaded individually.

Flash is very useful to add great looking yet small sized interactivity to your site.95% of the world's browsers have the Flash Player plug-in,so you don't have to think about compatibility as long as your movie can be played by lower versions of the Flash Player. Animation capabilities combined with interactivity makes Flash cool. Try having both AJAX/HTML and Flash versions of the application to accommodate non-flash browsers.