Design Terms

Arguably the most important part of any website, good design brings layout and organisation to your website. A good design will hold the web user and allow them to access information in a simple, structured manner. Throughout our design and development phase of a project, our team will liaise with you and provide feedback in the form of images and test pages. This page is aimed to demystify some of the terms we use during the process.

What is a site plan?

One of the first steps in our production process for a new website proposal is the Site Plan or Site Map. Usually taking the form of a network diagram the Site Plan indicates the number of pages that will eventually make up the website and their positions relative to each other. From this simple step it is possible to decide on the type of navigation best suited to your particular design and layout.

What does look and feel mean?

At Cnx we use this phrase to describe in simple terms the overall layout, colouration and style of your website. To reach a decision on the final Look and Feel of your site we take into account all of your ideas, current marketing methods, company logos and target audience. In most cases a visual proposal is prepared to display the look and feel that suits your needs, the visual is then placed on our development server for your approval.

What is a target audience?

When we talk about target audiences we are referring to the type of clients you wish to attract, those that will be more interested in the content, services and products that you provide. For example there is little point in using subdued colour schemes and subtle imagery on a site that is primarily aimed at children, it is well known that children are more responsive to bright colours, punchy graphics and rich media content.

What are the common image formats?

There are currently a large number of formats available in which to save images but only a few of these are suitable for general use on the internet, the most common are listed below:

• JPEG - The Joint Photographic Experts Group format is the format of choice for photographic quality imagery on the web, using complex algorithms to combine and compress image pixels it is possible to reduce filesizes (and consequently download times) without a noticeable loss of image quality and colour depth, it takes a certain amount of skill to get the balance just right and produce an image that is compact but still clear.
• GIF - The Graphics Interchange Format is lossless (does not lose resolution) but has a limited colour palette, though there is no upper limit to the size of the image to be displayed. GIF's are more suited for use in smaller applications such as icons, logos, button roll-overs and tiled backgrounds, essentially anything involving simple, well defined outlines and colouration.
• GIF images have an additional benefit in the fact that they can be animated though file size becomes an issue the longer the animation and therefore number of single frames required.
• PNG - The Portable Network Graphic image format was developed as an alternative to the Gif format which has been subject to copyright issues and is also a lossless format, though able to support up to 48bit colour and 16bit greyscale. With PNG's it is possible to create pleasing blending effects between image elements but this ability is not as yet widely supported.
• SVG - The Scalable Vector Graphics format is relatively new on the scene and has very limited native support in most browsers, it is usually necessary to download small plug-ins or patches to be able to use this format at all. Despite its drawbacks this format has huge potential as images are not stored as a series of coloured pixels but rather mathematically, this has many advantages, primarily vastly reduced filesizes for simple graphics, scalability in the fact that it would be possible to shrink or enlarge the image almost infinitely within the resolution constraints of the users screen. The format is also built up in much the same way as a webpage itself using standard commands and values therefore images can be modified in a simple text editor though as image complexity increases so does the amount of code required to display it.

What do we mean by Rich Media?

Rich media in terms of the internet can include almost any content but more specifically applies to video and audio, much like the image formats outlined above there are a vast range of file formats associated with both media types, the list below describes some of the most useful in web based applications:

• WMV - Stands for Windows Media Video and is a high compression streaming media format allowing video and sound to be viewed directly from the web page, or via the Windows Media Player software. Streaming media has the advantage that larger presentations can be viewed before the entire file has been downloaded.
• MOV - Apple's Quicktime format for storing audio and video work in much the same way as Microsoft's WMV format.
• MIDI - The Musical Instrument Digital Interface format was originally conceived as a means of sending digital sound information between synthesisers and other electronic instruments but the format has uses on the internet. Although the files can be very small relative to the length of the piece of music stored, they are limited by their original use in that they are only able to reproduce differences in a notes pitch, length and volume. There is no accurate way to record other more complex sounds (e.g., spoken language, singing, etc.) and sound reproduction is dependant on the user's hardware and/or software configuration.
• MP3 - To give it its full title Moving Picture Experts Group Layer 3 sound has become a standard method of transporting audio in limited bandwidth situations. The explosion in pocket MP3 players and availability of low cost downloads from some of the larger music outlets has done a great deal to increase the popularity and compatability of this format.
• Wav - Developed by Microsoft and IBM it is the standard way to store sound files on windows based computer systems.
• AVI - Audio Video Interleaved is a high quality video and audio format that can be used in both raw (uncompressed) and compressed versions. Files of this format do tend to be on the large side and we would therefore only recommend them in situations that require highly detailed audio/video representation. In any case the user would have to download the entire file to their computer before they were able to display it.