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Basic Web Design Aug 20, 07:46

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Forget validation for a minute, just a minute, and focus on more important things, namely semantics and validation; because in the long run validation isn’t all that, presenting your visitor with something that they can read is. I know I’ve talked about font sizes before but that’s really only a small part of what I want to touch on.

Contrast

Legible font sizes are important, say it with me now, but it doesn’t matter how large the font is if the contrast between the text and background is insufficient. In some of the examples here you can see what happens when, even if the font is the proper size, is too close to the background colour (one of the best examples of that would be the third box, light grey text on a white background). So what do you do? You check your colour contrast, of course! Don’t trust your eyes, or your monitor, especially if you see nothing wrong with #999 text on a #444 background, use the colour contrast analyzers.

Weborexia and Padding

Even if you have the right font size and sufficient contrast you can ruin the whole look by smooshing your text and images into a small space. Give your content room to breathe, use at least 500px for the main column and 190px for the sidebar. Unfortunately with most weborexic layouts there’s no room for padding because the text is in too small a space as it is, why add padding and make it all the much smaller? But we need to have padding because it makes it easier to read, imagine a world where books had text lodged right up against the edge of the page, wouldn’t that be hard to read?

Bolded, underline and italics

Should be used sparingly, you don’t place this much emphasis in real life, so why are you doing it online? This is most annoying when the person committing this grave offense dares to style the bold, italic and underline and proceeds to use it as though it were regular text. Imagine if you will a lime green bold, bright orange underline and fuchsia italics used at least once each on every line. Horrific thought isn’t it?

Bad attitudes

Not everyone likes everything, but one of the best ways to get rid of your visitors is to tell them that their opinions don’t matter to you. Every time I see a webmaster shoot themselves in the foot like that I cringe and feel embarrassed for them because your visitors make your site what it is, they make it popular and they make you feel good. Without your visitors you’d be pretty damn lonely.

So I implore you everyone, don’t ban IP ranges (because that results in innocent people being banned from your website), don’t brush off your visitors opinions, don’t tell everyone who will listen that it’s your site and you don’t care and most of all try to be an adult. If you do something stupid own up to it, laugh about it and then move on. If you don’t then it just escalates into drama and while god knows I love drama I know that a lot of it could be prevented by a little bit of maturity and tact on the person in questions part.

Remember guys, we put our content on here for people and irregardless of what you want people are going to form opinions on it. That is their right, if you are bitching about something and someone in turn bitches about you bitching about something then act like an adult and don’t tell them that they can just stop reading it if they don’t agree. Because honestly, if you can’t hold up your end of the argument for something you claim to believe in then why are you here? Why not just pull your articles, blog posts or what-have-you and leave because you’re only going to be made a fool of again and again.

Oh and just so you know: The internet isn’t private, everything you put on here can and will be used against you. If you don’t want that picture of your tits making the rounds on forums then don’t post that picture of your tits. Don’t want people to argue with you because of your pro-life stance? Don’t post your opinion then, because as VA put it “If you don’t have the balls to be hated, then you don’t deserve to be loved.”

css, html, tutorial, web-design

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