First Impressions Last a Lifetime

When considering any kind of website, particularly educational sites, if initial impressions are as important as the (3) main articles lead us to think, then the Wyke-Smith book might not be immediately considered to be relevant, as his ridiculous haircut and goofy title may deflect potential readers from the incredible useful coding instruction he provides.

The lessons that I took away from the readings were (2) pronged: that design elements are solely responsible for attracting the user’s attention, and that they can enable us to construct a narrative that we are design for the user to discover.  Of course, the colors, layout, images and typefaces are unable singlehandedly make a page interesting or attractive.  What needs to be addressed (as I hope that it will be over the semester) is how to construct an attractive layout through organization.  Unlike the common fear, coding might not be my greatest problem: but rather the ability to plan a logical and well designed website.

Still alluding to the common fear that unless we know these basics of web design, it is entirely possible that our intricately designed layouts will be useless.  Unless every page was a .pdf of something we designed in Photoshop, or by hand there is a great amount of value to coding with CSS.  No longer are the standards for web design as low as they used to be (especially during the era of Web 1.0). The continued lack of unified web interpretation standards means that pages have to be designed in a flexible manner.

If we are going to entice user’s to enter and learn from our sites, it is necessary to know how to design the websites in a manner that can be universally accessed and understood.  That is where the importance of the CSS coding lies, in my opinion.  The fact that we can construct flexible webpage’s that are uniformly displayed on multiple browsers (even on mobile phones) is something that web designers would only have dreamed about only a few years ago.  I think that if we are to make an immediate impression on potential users, then we need to be master’s of our (web) domain, ensuring that we have put thought and work into every aspect of the webpage.