Discussion Topic: Layouts

Personally, I like most blue and red layouts. I don't like those really light layouts which I can barely see.

 

I also like making layouts which are fast and simple, since I want everyone to access my site without any problems.
Well, I'm not too good at making professional layouts anyway, but that's a different story^^;
Some sites I've seen might have professional layouts, but sometimes they are just too overloaded, which makes them look kinda ugly.
Style changers are a nice idea, but I can live without them^^

 

Anything that isn't 3 column with links on the left side and affiliates/topsites/other stuff nobody clicks on the right.

 

I like to go for a bright green type. Well a green that's light on the eyes. But i can't really to much about this as I am still struggling with HTML.

 

I like layouts that aren't eye hurting, are easy to use, etc.

Also, it's hard for me to use Horizontal Nav. since I have so many categories, the page stretches. I really have no choice. :l

 

I like simple layouts with a white background and not bright colours that are easy to see, but dark layouts are okay too I guess. I don't like graphics unless they look okay. I don't like frames either.

 

I like layouts with black and red. And similar to Dragonfree's layout (I love that layout)

 

I like dark layouts... and I like it to be slightly image based.

 

Simple, sure seems to be THE style at the moment. It's used very effectively in iPOD style designs etc. I really dislike a page where TOO much is going on. Before you make a layout final, it's always good to look over each element in your site and ask yourself "Do I really need this? And if not will removing it have any type of negative effect on the site?". Of course don't remove too much or the layout will look empty. It often takes alot of fine tuning to get that perfect balance. I (being a bit of a perfectionist) often go through around 20 ever so slightly different versions of a layout before finally getting what I feel to be just right.

The same goes for colour. It sure helps to liven up a site, but you don't want to go overboard with it. Limit your site to a certain colour palette. There may be some cases where you need a bit more colour than usual to for example suit the theme of a certain page, bt generally it's good to stick to a certain palette of colours that not only look good together, but also in some way relate to the theme of your site.

Those are probably the two things I pay closest attention to when either designing my own layout, or criticizing someone elses :>.

 

I tend to favour layouts which complement the site's content and aren't too hard on the eye. I've also got a bit of a "thing" for dark backgrounds and coloured text.

 

Colour:
Light colours. The coulours must be from a similar colour-group (like all shades of green, for example) with maybe 1-2 darker, complementary colours for a contrast and highlighting. I despise dark sites, especially background #000000, text #FFFFFF. This includes varieties like cyan or yellow text and a black background. Goes for forums too, of course.
Light colours give a sense of an expansive, fresh, clean site. It puts the visitor in a better mood too. Be careful with what colours you choose.

Positioning:
3-columned layouts are pretty bad and overused in my opinion. Actually, Serebii.net's one is the only one I've seen and liked so far. This might be because of the site's font, which greatly appeals to me, though.

There are many layout possibilities. A layout I really like is http://www.zymic.com (not the layouts they provide, the actual page layout) probably because the images they used to give table cells a distinct feel. A layout as pleasant as this one is a pretty rare thing to see these days.

My favourite layout-type is several tables, one below the other, with rounded corners. Simple and very attractive if you make it right.

If you ask me, I'd choose standard <table>s over any fancy CSS layout any day. CSS is becoming overused. CSS can be (and probably is) your best friend when planning stuff like how your text will appear, how much of a border your images have, how much padding to put between two blocks of text, etc. But moving a lot of recognising features of a web page (tables, for instance) into their CSS equivalents/near equivalents annoys me. Cascading Style Sheets should serve as an extension of your HTML document to do things which HTML does not allow you to.

Another thing I'll mention (to webmasters-begginers, reading this) that isn't directly what this thread is about: JavaScripts. Use... Them... Sparingly... If you want your page to "seem alive" to your visitors, and you wish to write a script to, say, change and apply options which are members of a <select> tag, fine. But if you have recently been to dynamicdrive.com and want to put snowflakes, bubbles, dancing cursors, embedded music, random earthquakes, alert boxes, etc. on your site... PLEASE DON'T. This goes for disabling right click too. It makes your site messy, to say the least. Unfortunately, JavaScript is quite strongly associated with adverts, spam, confusion, random images, links moving around, anchors not pointing where you as the visitor swear they pointed last time (example of Math.random used where it shouldn't ), etc. - this is because JavaScript is (unfortunately) being used for those purposes. With every <script> tag less that you have, your visitors will have one less headache. [/rant]

Navbars
Having a unique navigation bar of a page is important to me. I hate boring navbars, so I endeavour not to make that mistake with my own. Using something like Flash to make a navbar is a good idea (only if you're good). I saw a navbar once that had been made in MSPaint under 1x zoom with a pencil tool. Unique, but horrible.

When it comes to the navbar's position, I prefer to have a navbar vertically along the top of the page (just one that is not just text spearated by bitwise OR operators [I'm referring to "|" signs]).

To sum it all up, I believe colour and images are the most important things on any site (excluding content). Only in a few cases can the content itself justify the non-existance of a proper page design.

 

Yes indeed. So is there any need to build navbars using just text in a div class/block? Doesn't a navigation bar fit under "page structure"? I'm talking about:

#navbar {
position:absolute;
left:0;
top:0;
width:10em;
border:1 px black solid;
margin:.5em;
}

or something along the lines of that. HTML and CSS were obviously created to give you freedom while making a webpage. You can choose to place what you want where you want. So I'm deifinitely not implying that CSS is inferior to HTML. I'm saying that a people are using CSS to get monotone layouts you see all the time. What I'm specifically referring to is border-left/right/top/bottom being used to construct a quasi-table. That's exactly what I dislike and that's the reason why I decided to note it in this layout discussion.

Fair enough. Tables are being used for waht they are not intended, but I have a feeling you get a wider area of choice using tables. Table-related tags just create the table and it's cells. You could use images to convert that table practically into whatever you want. But I still don't understand why someone would make a page that relies almost entirely on CSS. I don't find CSS to be anything that special.

 

After using CSS extensively, there is no way I could ever go back to using tables. It just takes practice, mostly with trying to figure out how to combat browser bugs.

 

Eh I hate them all... I try to make one, text doesen't center.

 

Are you getting anywhere with that?

I prefer Java menu layouts much more or layouts that are mainly placed in the header. 3 columns is sometimes usefull but don't recommend it to a few people.

 

Embedded Java applets? Incredibly, I can name at least 20 people I know that don't have Java Virtual Machine installed. Lord knows hom many more don't. Important stuff like navbars probably should stay just HTML,otherwise you'll have people scratching their heads when they can't see any links. I used Flash for a while, but people don't even bother installing that either...

 

Are you kidding me? Example of my favorite Type of Menus:

www.pokerealm.net (oh gawd!!!!!!!!!)
www.jkaizer.net(didn't make it but it's still cool)
www.damagedgames.com (sexy flash menu)

I feel like trying alot other ways to stylize layouts to make them more unique.