10 Principles Essential to Making Your Website Not Suck

While being introduced to web design in Year 2 Cyberarts, the first thing that we learned were the 10 principle that are essential to having a good website.

The 10 principles essential to having a good website are:

1. Don't make users think
2. Don't squander the user's patience
3. Manage to focus the user's attention
4. Strive for feature exposure
5. Make use of effective writing
6. Strive for simplicity
7. Dont be afraid of white space

8. Communicate effectively with a visible language

9. Conventions are our friends
10. Test early, test often

The best way to learn how to make a good website is to start off with looking at a bad website.

This is a great example of a bad website because it does not follow any of 10 principles that make up a good website. The website is complicated and requires the user to read and think to navigate throughout the website. While visiting the website I became very impatient and could not focus because the images and text were placed randomly and were very unorganized. As you can see, this website sucks! It does not get its message through and I for one would not even bother trying to navigate through this website.

To relieve you of the disappointment from that horrible website, I have posted a screenshot of what a good website looks like.

The website is very simple and easy to use. The large use of white space allows the user to look at the options available without using much thought. Also the website designer added images with lots of colour to interest the website users attention. This website is a great example of what a good website looks like and if you do not want your website to completely suck, I suggest you follow the 10 simple principles posted above.

Realistic Sketching

Realistic sketching involves a lot of focus and patience. For the past 3 weeks in our year 2 Cyber Arts class we practiced sketching various skulls and poses. We received a project in which we draw still-life as realistic as possible. A method that i learned to make sketches realistic was to lightly do a contour sketch and add very light shades till it goes as dark as possible from a HB pencil to a 6B. This method is hard because it involves a lot of time and patience. You have to be precise with your movements in order to prevent yourself from smudging the graphite on the paper. The goal was to make a clean realistic sketch and i feel that my work could have been improved. If i had to redo it, i would have focused more on the light shades and the proportions of the images. In the end I feel that i had done a pretty good job and was impressed with how realistic i could make an image look like.