CHAPTER 15
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This is an
excerpt from Chapter 15.
Adding
a Table into the Design
I'm going to skip over to another page of the
site design that is actually a sub-page, but that has some extra interest to it
because of its overall purpose. This is the Company Services & Request page that
is part of the Company section of the site. I want to move to this page now because
of the various elements that will be added to it and to explain how it is designed
to fit into the overall structure of the site.
Often, with pages like this,
continuity is thrown out the window. It's almost as if the designer is saying
that either the page is kind of a throwaway (so why put a lot of effort into it),
or that the page is so complicated that you have no time to make it relate to
the rest of the site. If a site's background is a solid color (white and black
being most prevalent across the Web), or a texture image that looks like paper
or stucco, it might be used as the background to the page. But all other design
elements for the other pages are thrown out.
In the case of my Company
Services & Request page, I wanted to definitely make sure that people knew that
it was part of the overall design and not just a last minute addition. That's
why the artwork for the page remains the same as all the rest of the pages of
the site, only modified slightly so that it doesn't look as if something is missing.
The most obvious instance of this is the re-moval of the ViewScreenNoText.jpg
on the right side. No reason exists to have it there, so why not get it out of
the way, where it doesn't take up valuable screen real estate? But, to make the
exclusion of this element less glaring, I replaced it with the same image as the
one above it. Again, this is a subliminal aspect to the design-one that says there's
some thought to detail. Take a look at Figure 15.78 to see how the overall feel
of the page changes when the viewer area is simply deleted and not replaced, and
with the replacement image added. It gives a feeling of completeness.
Also,
notice that the Company indicator is visible in the nav bar, just as it will be
in all subpages for this section of the site. Again, this is a small element,
but in the overall design, it is the small details that ultimately determine when
a site truly stands out. It plays on those intangibles that make something great,
rather than merely adequate. Think of a movie that stands out in your mind. What
makes it so good? What makes it so much different than movies with similar storylines
that it comes to mind before the others? It's the intangibles, those subliminal
elements that are hard to qualify; yet without them, you feel that something is
amiss. This is what you need to keep aware of as you build your sites, because
it's this focus on detail that will have people coming to you to build their sites.
With that said, it is now time to move on and look at the design and layout
for this page.
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| Figure 15.78
The difference between simply deleting an unneeded element and using a replacement
figure that gives a less jarring transition between pages. |
