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Top 10 Articles Web Developer's Virtual Library: Encyclopedia of Web Design Tutorials, Articles and Discussions JavaScript Tutorial for Programmers Design JavaScript Tutorial for Programmers - Objects JavaScript Tutorial for Programmers - JavaScript Grammar JavaScript Tutorial for Programmers - Versions of JavaScript Cascading Style Sheets JavaScript Tutorial for Programmers - Embedding JavaScript JavaScript Tutorial for Programmers - Functions Authoring JavaScript

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From the publisher:
Go beyond the mechanics of CSS to how to think in the language of web design, and avoid the common pitfalls. Full of examples and deconstruction's to aid in understanding CSS and its application. The ability to use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is fast becoming a vital tool in the web professional's toolkit. But understanding how to use CSS is not intuitive--it requires a new way of thinking when it comes to building web pages. This book encourages web designers to look at the perceived limitations of the web as a new challenge to their design skills--without relying on HTML for presentation of pages. The overall theme is to instruct readers to build pages by using relative design techniques: understanding the relationship within the dynamic space of the web rather than the fixed-design "old-school" notions that have been in use for so long. The web site will include all of the files needed for the exercises and additional information of interest to web professionals including, but not limited to, recommended readings (suggested books, web sites and online articles), full-length interviews and a listing of CSS tools

Buy this book	Title: Designing CSS Web Pages
	Author: Christopher Schmitt
	ISBN: 0735712638
	US: $29.99
	Publication Date: September 20, 2002
	Pages: 384
	© 2002 New Riders

Chapter 1: Planning and Structuring Content

Sometimes, people and businesses get lucky on the Web. They create a Web presence that garners exposure and a high volume of traffic. Their Web presence then goes beyond log files or hit meters to connect with people. A site becomes a destination when it connects others with personal stories—a respectable place for instant social commentary or the most respected brand for online shopping for everything under the sun and then some.

However, without proper planning, any site that does become successful will not be able to leverage that kind of luck for long. In fact, you are more likely to achieve the success you want online through hard work, planning, and structuring of your message than a lottery ticket of a Web site. To ensure that your Web site meets its goals to become a success, it's important to strategize as to the rationale behind its existence.

In this chapter, we will look at factors that will help you reach your intended audience with your message before you put pen to paper for sketching out designs or code markup between a body element. Afterward, we will look into how to get your content ready for Web delivery and the application of design, the presentation of your message, through Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Know Your Audience

Design consists of more than visuals, graphics image formats, sound files, and typography. Design requires planning, and one rule binds print designers, architects, movie directors, car manufacturers, politicians, and Web designers. That rule is: "Know your audience." Because one kind of person doesn't make up the millions of Web surfers, not one manner of Web site design can reach this audience.

When a client hires you to build a Web site, you should solidify the goals the client has for their site. Determine the site's intended functionality—the client's needs against his wants—so that you can examine your client's competitors. Examining competitor sites in this context is an expected exercise of design strategy. Exploring how a client's competition reaches its audience is a good way of determining the status quo for doing business in your client's industry. However, if you apply a similar design to a client's site as a competitor, you are shortchanging the client. Doing so means that you are failing to differentiate the client's brand and to attract the competition's customers. In addition, you might just be adding to the stockpile of bland Web sites. In essence, you are wasting money and time instead of approaching the Web site's design from the audience's point of view.

People make judgments in the way they communicate with others, from wrongful discrimination to giving genuine courtesy. Their perceptions of whom they are talking to dictate interactions, such as conversations (or the lack of conversations) in every part of social life. First impressions are important in every occasion from job interviews to blind dates. The same can be said for how you craft the message for your Web site. If the design does not reach out and inform at the start, it's not effectively doing its job. To quote Jan V. White's Color for Impact: How Color Can Get Your Message Across or Get in the Way (Strathmoor Press, 1997), "'First-glance value' is not just a catch phrase. It is the very kernel of functional communication, given today's frantic competition for attention... Content and form are one. Design is a lubricant for ideas."

Print designers, architects, film directors, and Web designers, for example, work through a design problem like a consummate negotiator who is trying to create paths for understanding the material. By negotiating a compromise between art, function, and experience, designers and developers work on the visuals, content, and backend portions of a Web site, which make up the inherent experience of surfing the Web site. (This isn't your father's graphic design job.) The kinds of visuals and tools that designers use to successfully bring that experience to users depend on with whom they are going to communicate on behalf of their clients.

Customer Types: Toma-to or Tomäto - Page 2