Notes on a Web Design Makeover

Well, I am well along on the first web design makeover on my web design portfolio and guide in over six years. The design is more colorful, and graphics intensive. Yet the coding is very efficient. I wanted to prove to myself and others that an attractive web design could be achieved with an economy of code and graphics. It supports my belief that simple and stylish can be synonymous.



On the home page, only one graphic is used for the design layout. Text is placed within the design with CSS. I have finally abandoned my beloved table based layout! I used the overflow feature to generate an automatic scrolling effect for lengthy text in the bottom paragraph of text on the home page. I think this is a pretty nifty feature that allows my layout to feel very clean and spare while housing a few paragraphs of text.

Let me know your thoughts on the makeover. Is it a hot or a miss? thanks!

We Are Re-Designing Our Site!

This web design makeover has been long overdue, some would argue . . . After clinging to the last web design of newark1.com for more than six years, we have decided to do a renovation. It will not be easy. The homepage has been completed (see above) using 100% standards compliant CSS/XHTML. The resulting code is much cleaner, and the graphics are simpler. Gone is the need to cut graphics up into slices that are fed into tables based layouts.

The conversion of the content pages will take longer. I will need to edit each of more than 300 pages by hand to update the code and design. So you will not see changes to those pages as quickly.

What I find gratifying is the advancement in my personal skills when comparing the old and new design. I've grown as a designer, and still have quite a bit of fun developing a new web design. Enough writing for now . . . time to get back to work!

Learning the Fundamentals of Color

I wrote an article regarding the value of web designers learning color usage from a fine arts perspective. That age-old body of wisdom shared by fine artists can help any web designer to craft work that taps into the emotions and needs of consumers. Read the article here. Let me know your thoughts on the article!

A New Web Design Is Born!

We are excited about the premiere of our latest web design for a Life Coach in Foxboro, MA. In fact, we have designed a number of websites for life coaches. Our approach to web design has an emotional appeal that is important to our clients. This new web design will be live very soon. We'll keep you posted!

Color Restraint in Web Design

Good taste in web design often means keeping things simple. Avoiding visual clutter can be achieved by limiting the number of colors used used in web design as well. We discuss the benefits of this approach in our web design guide here.

Boutique Web Design from Our Portfolio

We recently updated the Boutique Web Design page in our portfolio. This website was created for one of our first paying customers ten years ago! It is amazing to consider how fast Internet technology has advanced in a decade. Do you remember the limitations of the 256 color palette and dithered colors on VGA computer screens? The garish colors of early websites set a trend in bad taste that still afflicts the Web. Also, the slow speed of early modems also limited the graphic potential of early websites.

The boutique web design we developed is a good example of how pioneering web designers used creative means of getting around the technical limitations of early web technology to create good design!