Colour testing your design

Picking colour schemes for web sites is something I’m notoriously bad at. I’m not artistic and struggle to get beyond safe Blue, White and Yellow as a design scheme (must be a link to a certain footy team there). Adobe Kuler is great for picking a nice setup and I have a couple of themes posted up there – but I’m still not sure about my taste…

It is interesting to consider the effect of colour choices on colour-blind users. There are a few different flavours of colour-blindness with various forms of red-green colour blindness being the most common. I have in the past pointed people to the Well Styled Colour Scheme Generator which lets you pick colour schemes much like Kuler, but then simulates the effects of colour-blindness on your palette. It is a nice tool, but I’ve just discovered something even better… Vischeck accepts the URL of a published web site and then generates a snapshot of the actual page with a colour shift to simulate colour-blindness. Sadly you can’t use this on any intranet sites, but they also offer a downloadable version.

Not a numpty language after all

It is probably unfair to call PHP a numpty language anyway. Programmers always have their biases and tend to favour one language over another. I’m as guilty as the next man in this respect.

I’ve always found PHP a little uncomfortable to use. Much of it seems bolted on to me. I did find this article on the Register which shows how you can use PHP for some bigger scale applications. This is way beyond what you need for a year 1 assignment anyway, but do read if you are interested.

Put some MVC in your PHP | Reg Developer

By all means flame me if PHP is your passion. I will respectfully ignore you.
PHP doing model 2, they’ll be telling me you can build application in JavaScript next and run them client-side.

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Tags: PHP, MVC

Some advanced JS + CSS

If you visit digg.com, they use a nice effect to show or hide comments. Rather than abruptly disappearing (like we do with the tabbed interface tutorial) they open and close using an animated effect.

This one if fairly advanced for year 1, but have a look.

Harry Maugans » How to Create an Animated, Sliding, Collapsible DIV with Javascript and CSS

technorati tags:CSS, JavaScript, DHTML

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Colour-tastic

Damien pointed me to a clever new tool on the adobe website. They have a colour picker called Kuler which lets you experiment with colour schemes for your website (or your bedroom wall for that matter).

It is always a good idea to limit your web site to a few well-chosen colours – rather than go crazy a make a big mess. The site lets you look at swatches that have been defined by other people or play around and make your own. The Complementary and Compound tools in particular can create some interesting collections.

Once you have created colours you are happy with, you can download them into recent versions of the Adobe Creative Suite, or failing that the RGB, CMYK or Hex values are on screen.

Update

The Adobe tool must be hot this week (admittedly they publicised it in their monthly newsletter). Other sites are commenting on it too. There’s an excellent discussion about colour theory available at:

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/color-harmony/

The theory is well explained, and there are plenty of links to other tools. No excuse for ugly assignments now

Combining PHP and RSS

The following link is from IBM’s developer web site. You can use it to learn how to generate RSS feeds from a data source using PHP, or how to incorporate a feed in your pages.

• >PHP and RSS: Getting it together

This is probably too late for assignment two, but worth a bookmark perhaps. Post a comment if you have similar developer resources which would help.

technorati tags:PHP, RSS, Internet_1

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BBC Design Process

I mentioned this document in the lecture this week. The Beeb redesigned their web site in 2002. There’s a large (8 MB) pdf file floating around on various web sites which documents the design process they went through. This is a lot more involved than the methodology we cover in the lecture, but they had a much bigger problem.

The document is called “The Glass Wall”, but rather than link to it directly, I’ve linked to a Google search instead. It is a big read, but worth the effort if you are into web design.

the glass wall bbc web redesign – Google Search

I promise that this one will not be in an exam question!

technorati tags:bbc, redesign, Glass Wall

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F-Shaped Browsing?

I don’t want to sound like a Nielsen disciple, but he’s got a recent study tracking how users’ eyes move around web pages which agrees with the lecture about navigation and user behaviour.

From the Alert Box web site read: F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content. There is an archive of previous columns.

I’ll try really hard to post something else next time.