New to Web Design

?

That the thing 'what is the audience' i have to produce a website for a plumber, just to promote his service, i want to use the fireworks programme to make the site so what is the size i start with ? i dont know?

 

I would say that your audience is definitely UK then. Using that link it would appear that most people in the UK have a 1280*768 resolution. Using this info 1280*768 should be reasonable, or you could drop the resolution to 1024*768 for maximum compatibility (realistically virtually nobody uses 800*600 now). If you then make your canvas 975*700 it will fill a 1024*768 page nicely and not be too small on 1280*768.

Of course you could do individual canvas’ for various resolutions and check the resolution when people navigate to the site. You could then redirect them to various versions of your site designed for specific resolutions, or specific ranges of resolution.

All depends on how much work you want to do really.

 

Sorry, meant to reply to this earlier. Ardesco is right that not many people use 800x600 any more so not worth cramping a site just to accommodate them.

The link he posted is fair but I found it a tad confusing, especially if you are only making the site for a UK audience. I tend to use this as a reference:
Browser Display Statistics

Shows 54% of people on a 1024 x 768 display. Due to this I always make sure a design is no wider than 950 pixels and have seen this shown on a few sites as well. Leaves a nice bit of room for people with odd monitor set ups that may knock a few pixels off etc.

At this resolution users on 800 wide screens will see most of the design too. 14% still at 800 x 600 shows this is still quite a large amount so I am not yet ready to go as wide as Ardesco!

This is just another opinion - you need to get used to this as a web designer. You will be asked all manner of questions as to why you do something a particular way. As long as you can back up what you do with good reasons then you will be fine as by the time you have rattled out a few lines most customers' eyes glaze over...

 

Beat me to it Ardesco!

Yeah, 975 or 950 sounds perfect to me these days.

 

Ah, dummy mode. A wonderful thing!!

Yes it needs to be that resolution to prevent incorrectly configured static routes on the corerouters, after all we wouldn't want the browser's cookie to get corrupted because someone's been nibbling on it!

 

help

im studying the lynca.com fireworks file of importing text, i having trouble with it when i play around as follows:

Im making a word document and saving it in rich text format (RTF) when i go to import it fireworks comes up with the box COULD NOT IMPORT THE FILE UNKNOWN FILE TYPE. ?

I cannot understand why as the word doc was saved in RTF help

 

help

with above?

 

i dont kniw if thet are in use or not... but i myself sometimes use it...
and they are great tools for a newbie...

 

My advice would be simply this:

• forget XHTML just now, modern browsers just parse it as HTML so there's no point in using in at all right now
• avoid WYSIWYG applications at all cost (dreamweaver falls under this category but you can simply use code only mode) as they'll cause you nightmares with cross browser compatibility
• learn to write valid HTML4.0 code, this will ensure that your code is future proof and will be compatible with future browsers
• learn to write semantic code, this basically means use appropriate elements for certain bits of content eg <h1> is for your main page header, this will help search engines and screen readers understand the structure and meaning of your content
• learn to use CSS to control the layout and design elements of your site, instead of depreciated (eg font tags) and incorrect (eg table tags) elements
• try not to alienate any of your users by keeping font usage to the generic system fonts, making sure you've designed the site to fit within a resolution that the majority of your target audience will be using (or a fluid width layout) and keeping technologies like javascript and flash to a minimum making sure that your site is fully usable without these things first

I might add to this later, but right now my fingers are bloody knackered!

Hope this helps you!


Cheers,
Robert