Adobe Contribute CS5 Tutorials
Website Tips / Design Tips pt. 3
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Contribute CS5 / Website Tips / Design Tips pt. 3)
Let's keep looking at some sites and let's look at Menus. Now you need to have Menus on every page so people can easily navigate your site. Right here you'll see I've got this little sub menu for the movies and TV area. If I wanted to, I could still hit this, shop all departments, and go to any department that I wanted to that was on the home page. Notice when I go on the logo, I can go to the home page. All these are little shortcut links or menus to get me where I need to be. Same thing with CNN, it's got that big menu bar at the top. If I click on one of them, see that how that menu does not change. It's very consistent, that's what people like, so if you're going to change your menu's, do it with very specific intentions, but don't do it all the time. People want consistency if they've been to your site before, they don't want those menu's changing every week. Make it consistent, make it good. Get those menu's on all the pages, make sure they're not lost. Now if you have a page like a PDF open up in a whole new window, you could do that, take out all the browsing elements, that way when they close the PDF, there just right back to your site. Image files like this one over here, make sure they're compressed, don't make somebody wait for five minutes to see an image, don't do that, they'll leave. If your going to have Flash areas like these are, make sure it's consistent, means equal across there, make sure it's clean, but make sure it's not obnoxious. Make sure it actually has something to do with your site. The next thing you want to do is make sure your page is not too wide. Notice I don't have to scroll here, I don't have to scroll on Amazon dot com, don't have to on CNN. I don't have to scroll left and right horizontally. Now most people have there 1024 by 768 setting on their monitors so basically maybe 1000 pixels wide, so you don't want to go beyond that. There's also if you buy templates or something like that, you can them adjust to different settings, so just make sure your pages aren't obnoxiously wide for a huge screen if you've got one. Now if people are reading text on your site, you want to make sure that you're using easy on the eye contrasting colors. Like I've told you before, that people are used to a white page with the black text on it. Very easy to read. Now this you can see they've got the red background with the white text. Again that's pretty darn easy to read, you want to make sure whatever it is, it's easy, but again most of their site is the white background with the black text. This is opposite right here, and again they've got some blue in there. But keep consistency, make sure your site has consistent coloring of your text also. The coloring of the text too is going to depend upon the audience their trying to reach. If they're trying to reach maybe a teenage group, or some special population group, they may have some weird colors on there, but if there trying to reach an adult population, or a seniors population, there typically going to use this regular set up. The white page with the black text. The other thing you want to think of with text is make sure that it's big enough to read. Notice Amazon dot com made this huge, so you know exactly what product you're looking at, but this other text is a little bit smaller, they don't consider this as important because it is smaller than the title of the item. Make sure you think about the audience that you're reaching, based upon the text size you use. If you're reaching a senior audience, make sure the text size is a little bit larger. Same thing with a more of an adult audience. If you're going for kids and teens it's not that big of a deal to have a little bit of a smaller text, you just want to make sure you're coloring makes it easy to read. The other deal with your text is, see all this white space in here, you have decent white space in order to read the text. It's not squished together, so you want to make sure you have that spacing so that way people can easily rest their eye and then move to the other line. If they have no place to rest their eye, they're going to have a hard time reading it, because their reading it on a screen and their going to move on if they can't read it, their going to go Google somebody else, and try to find that same information or that same product. So make sure you leave enough white space, even though you have a lot of text and information to give people, make sure you make it easy on the eye, and they've got places to rest their eye.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Contribute CS5 |
| Author: | Melanie Hedgespeth |
| SKU: | 34192 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-73-9 |
| Release Date: | 2011-01-18 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 133 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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