Page Structure

Page structure is one of the most valuable things in web design, this may decide if you are good enough to be a professional noob web designer who could rise to the top of the entire industry or if you are another one of those wannabes sitting at home playing 'League of Legends' all day. Like Jeffrey Zeldman said, "The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have footers and columns and footers. Her job is not to shine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging." -Jeffrey Zeldman- Along with the look of your website, if your navigation sucks, try not to take offense when I say this, your website sucks. As important as your design is if you forget something else, people start to hate the web site and avoid using it. Don't let it become an Orphan Annie and don't make it bad to start off. People decide whether they like your site or not, through experience not trying to find some way to trick the search engines. Site design is simply the structure of your page, the headers, footers, columns, rows, horizontal rules, fonts and sizes, basically the entire look of your website. Make it something people want to see, not something that they click on then click the back button because it bores or freaks them out. Put the common controls in the common places, but make them look good, and choose good fonts and colors unlike what I am typing now. Make navigational controls easy to find and make it look good in general or I will never visit your site for more than half a second without laughing.

What makes a good Logo

Good Logos. Of course you want them to be cool, but the problem comes when you over do anything. It loses peoples' attention, causes them to question it, and makes it so no one can remember the logo, and especially can't remember the company associated with. If this ends up the case what was the use of the logo in the first place? Just for someone to look and say, "Wow, that is a cool logo" and then forget it in another 10 minutes? Sometime in your life whether it be for your website, your company, just to show off to your friends, eventually you will probably need a good logo, I might as well give you some tips so that when you make it, it doesn't absolutely suck and be forgotten quickly.

• First, it needs to be simple, not complicated in any way, make it unique but not overdrawn. Stick to basic shapes and simple colors, and it is recommended to include your name in it, but in a simple font people can read at 80 mph on the freeway and remember. Use the K.I.S.S. principle, the Keep It Simple Stupid Principle. Keeping them simple makes them more recognizable, incredibly memorable and of course the most effective.
• Second, KEEP IT MEMORABLE, without memorability your logo is useless, trampled under feet and tossed in the trash, that isn't what you want to happen to your logo at any time. One easy tip on doing this is keep it simple, yet appropriate. If you want to see any bad examples look at these, then see how many you remember tomorrow: http://logodesignerblog.com/bad-ugly-worst-logo-designs/ . The subject matter of the log is actually mostly useless the main thing you need is that it is distinctive, memorable, and clear.
• Third is Timeless. Will it last years? 10, 20, 50? Think about the Coca Cola logo, it has always been remembered and I don't think it has ever changed at all makes it easier to remember the logo throughout all time. Can you think up all 11 logos for Pepsi since 1898 to 2008? Well can you? Probably not.
• I'm running out of time but the last two are versatility and apropriateness, the logo should be funtional, make it in a vector format, and ask these: Can you print it in one color? On something the size of a postage stamp? On something the size of a billboard? Reversed (white logo black background to white background, black logo) ? last of all make it appropriate for the intended purpose. period.

Linking and Navigation in Adobe Dreamweaver

One way of linking and navigating easily and having fun while using the site is an image map. An image map is simply an image divided into or covered in hotspots, causing the ability to link to many different places on the same images (like a map). This can be useful in many different settings and helps the user feel more welcome and enjoy their experience while using your website (maybe you will even see someone brag about how cool your site is because of this :D). It is an easy way to navigate and organize info on your site and a pretty ingenious way to do it too. Another is jump menus, both of these are my favorite to ways to navigate a web page personally. A jump menu is simply a menu that can open more options within an option by clicking or hovering over it. This is turn can give your users a few main options, then suboptions, then maybe even more options, then linking to wherever is needed. This requires a list of linked menu items, and optionally a menu selection prompt or instruction, and a go button. These are both extremely welcoming and exciting ways for people to navigate your site. Changing Navigation Settings or how you navigation bar works or is placed can boost your web page exponentially and make it fun to use, not just another web site someone anonymous created. So if you are going to make a webpage to post on the internet please please please use a fun navigation tool, and maybe I will even use your site :D.

Cookies and their function.

Cookies...:D
Ah, How can you see that word and not be happy, whether you like the taste of cookies or not. But everyone knows the function of cookies right? To eat and bring joy. Get ready. I am going to rather change the way you see cookies or add on to it. Ready? See I even changed the text to look like a link :D. But back to the topic, Cookies are simply tiny bits on info stored on your computer if enabled, helping websites remember simple but necessary stuff like accounts, settings, etc. This allows websites to be more user friendly and not restart everything you do, every time you visit it. That would suck, I think most of us would agree to that. Cookies remember everything allowing you to save what you have in your shopping carts, advertise what you don't mind seeing, and prefer certain settings and products. Cookies aren't just useful to you, they are useful to nearly everyone who uses the web.

Search Engine Optimization

One of the most important things to do with your web page especially if you are going to make profit from your web pages in any way is making it easy to find to all search engines, including the not too popular ones... But for the most part trying to trick search engines usually backfire, Don't jam as many words in as you can, especially repetitively, for one thing that is plain dirty, two it usually won't work. Though it is true that search engines pick partially because of matching the search words, it is made to be able to tell when you jam it all in to try to make the top of the list. Trust me... It will back fire on you if you use this common technique. Buying links and piece of crap user experience (too many ads, to hard to get around, etc.) will also get the search engines to intentionally ignore you. Trust me again, you would be stupid to try to win a super computer built for chess at it's own game, you would also be stupid to try to trick search engines at their own game... The people who program search engines intentionally find all these little tricks and make them backfire on you, they may be jerks in a way (when people try to trick their search engines), but they protect all the users out there trying to get a good experience, they do an amazing job at that. Instead try to have good content, performance, user experience, and are you more of your own site, or are you more of a reference to other sites?

Here is a link to an article with more information: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2259693/SEO-Basics-8-Essentials-When-Optimizing-Your-Site

Plug Ins

Back when the world wide web just barely began, about the only things you could send or use was text, links, and pictures, but no one likes limitations most of the time, so people created plug-ins. Plug-ins are simply software like Adobe Flash Player, allowing you to do stuff, like chat rooms with multiple friends, even face to face, videos, games, more interactions. In fact your web browser doesn't interface with a plug-in nearly at all, in a sense it gives it a corner and steps aside a little bit, causing the plug-in to work with most browsers and create a risk for you browser security. This can create huge problems... really big problems especially if you are running plug-ins that aren't up to date. If you use and old plug-in, anyone out there can see what extra security they added in the last update, then make loop holes into your security through the missing security features in your plug-in. But the risk is lowering, some browsers even automatically update some for you, for example Google Chrome worked with Adobe Flash Player to allow Adobe Flash Player to automatically update itself while you run Google Chrome, but even as they are starting to find ways to updated themselves, it would definitely be a good idea, just to see if you are running the most updated versions.

The Reason For Updating Your Browser

Ok... One thing to start out: Please Don't Take This Too Offensively, but if it applies to you I suggest you take this advice: UPDATE YOUR FREAKIN' BROWSER NOW!!! YOU ARE RUINING NOT JUST YOURS BUT EVERYONE'S LIFE INCLUDING ME, IF YOU AREN'T RUNNING THE MOST UPDATED VERSIONS YOU CAN GET!!!! Well Anyway, the point is you need to update your browser as often as you can... Using an old browser is one of the worst decisions you can make for your computer almost as bad as downloading a Trojan virus by accepting an obviously fake rogue anti-virus program (for more info and a quiz on rogues go to microsoft's website, it is actually pretty cool and interesting) but anyway having an old updated browser opens your security and passwords to all of those hackers and viruses out there... You often become a target of identity theft, malware, viruses, and even broken computers and hard drives, so really UPDATE IT OR DIE!!! (Just FYI the or die part is probably just to add emotion). Not updating it is an extremely easy thing to do, but usually updating it is too... If you don't update it, it not only effects your identity, computer, and security to everything on your computer or internet, but it also makes all of the web designers, programmers, and computer engineers lives ALOT harder... So go, stop reading this, make sure your browser is updated! GO!