Design the site
Now finally comes the fun part. Some of this won't apply if you are using a page generator.
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I like to start by selecting a color scheme. If you are never sure what color goes with what, there are lots of palette generators available. If you have a photo that will figure prominently in your home page, Degraeve's color palette generator is a slick service that will generate a palette from your photo. You will need to be able to supply a url to your picture. Another pallete generator, at wellstyled.com is my favorite.
- Design a basic page layout. Some designers start by sketching a design on paper or using a graphics program to decide how they want their site to look. You can get dummy content at lipsum.com.
- One of the most important things about designing a site is providing a consistent look and feel through out the site. Visitors should never wonder if they are still on your site or not.
- If your church building has a distinctive feature that your members or people in the community will recognize, it is a good idea to include that element in your basic design in some way.
- Remember that, on the web, "Content is King". Your design should complement, not overpower your content.
- Use text for page and section headings and menu items. If you must use images, make sure you use your alt text and title attributes.
Graphics
Most of the photos and graphics you use on your site will be photos that you have taken around your church. If you need additional graphics, there are a couple of sites where you can get free, royalty free photos:
Be sure to follow the terms of use for each photo.
Markup the design
Remember that you cannot control exactly what a user sees. His monitor may be bigger or smaller than yours. He probably has different fonts installed on his system than you do. He may be running at a different screen resolution than you are. Different browsers display the same markup differently. Unless you design your entire site in flash, you cannot control exactly what the user sees.
With that in mind:
- Think very carefully about how you specify font sizes. I recommend percentages or ems. These are easiest for the user to resize. I know how to resize your fonts so I can read them even if you don't use percentages or ems. But my mother doesn't. If she can't read your site she just leaves. If you must specify font sizes in pt, don't use micro fonts. There's too much stuff on the web to spend a lot of time trying to force your site into a format I can read.
- Test your site in different browsers at different resolutions. I don't think you need to design for netscape 4 anymore, but you'd be surprised at how many people still show up with Internet Explorer 5. You'd be even more surprised at the number of people who show up in Konquerer. And don't forget Safari. There is a Safari for Windows that you can download for browsing and for testing your site.
- Eyecandy is fine, but provide an alternative to that nifty javascript or flash menu for people who have javascript turned off or don't have a flash player. This is becoming common again with the latest round of ecard spams.
- Consider validating your site at w3c, especially if you are having trouble getting it to display properly cross browser. It may not be possible to get your site to validate if you are using external elements like ads or a yahoo group signup form. Try commenting those elements out before validating. Validating will help you find unclosed tags and other markup problems. It can really mess up a site when you for get to close a list, for example.
- Use alt text and title attributes on images. This is good for blind users who are using a screen reader, and the google bot, who also can't see images.