Projects vary in scope and size, and the challenges they entail vary likewise. As a lone web designer, the biggest job I am responsible for is FlashDen. Along with thousands of active members all chatting, uploading and buying, the site processes large amounts of money and large amounts of traffic.
Designing, redesigning, maintaining and working with developer team has given me some useful insights and tips for making life easier. And since today we've launched my latest redesign of the site, it seems like a good time to write up my top 7 tips!
1. Design and Code for Maintainability
The first and biggest tip I can give, is to design the site so that it's easy to maintain. Often times when designing a site you might sacrifice things for aesthetics. For example you might use images where text or styles would suffice. Or you might deliberately choose a menu structure that has no room to grow. When the site is large, this becomes a really bad idea.
When I built the very first version of FlashDen almost two years ago, I used images for buttons. They looked really nice, but I wound up with a library of 100 different button images, not to mention rollovers. Then in the next couple of months every time a developer needed a new button they had to ask me to create an image. Needless to say I learnt that lesson pretty quick and we switched to a single button class that maybe doesn't look as good, but is much better for peace of mind.
Another aspect of maintainability is thinking about how the site is going to grow and change. For example, as new pages get added on, where do they go? Early on I wanted to have a horizontal navigation, but this is really limited After some experimenting, we wound up using a vertical nav, allowing for submenu items, and then on top of that, added a tab structure into pages to allow for related pages to be grouped together. I'm not saying it's the best navigation in the world, but it certainly means we're not redesigning every time a new section is added to the site!
So in designing for a large site, look for ways to make life simpler later, because you'll be glad you did!
2. Figure out your User Groups and Tasks
One of the biggest differences between a large site and a small one, is the number of different user types who might be using the site. For example on FlashDen, there are buyers, authors, visitors, admins, and members. Each group has a different set of aims and tasks they have to carry out. Sometimes these tasks overlap, but sometime they are quite different.
The best example of a place where user tasks are at odds with each other is on a homepage. Nowhere else on a site does every user group converge, and nowhere else is it so vital to make sure everyone gets what they want. And of course you have to be careful that in serving one user group you aren't ignoring another.
In this latest redesign of FlashDen, the biggest area that I worked on was the homepage. The first thing I did was list out to myself all the things that each user group needs to do:
- Buyers - People who are on FlashDen to purchase files
Start browsing items, start searching, access their personal homepage, deposit money, learn how the site works (for newer buyers) - Authors - People who are selling goods on FlashDen
Chat with other members, get featured on the homepage to push their items, find out about site news, quickly get to their portfolio & earnings - New Visitors - Potential Buyers/Authors/Members, who have just arrived
Learn what the site is/does very quickly, get started, find out types of files and prices - Members - People who aren't really buyers or authors, but just participate in the community
Chat with other members, see site news, browse files - Admins / Reviewers - Our staff who manage file approvals, moderate forums, and generally participate
Get quickly to file approvals, see the latest forum threads, hear site news
When you know what different user groups want to do, then you can design a page that solves all their needs. Needless to say this is a task that gets exponentially harder the more groups and tasks there are. On other pages in the site, you will often get a subset of user groups to worry about, but on the homepage they all converge. Not coincidentally, the homepage is the most important bit of design work you have to do on a site.
Before you can solve the different needs though, you need to prioritize the user groups, and in order to do that, you'll need to understand what the site is trying to achieve.
3. Understand the Site Goals
Although every user group naturally feels they are the most important, it is up to you to prioritize them according to what the site itself is trying to achieve. For example on FlashDen after sitting down with the team we drew a few conclusions as follows:
- The top priority for the site is to serve buyers. When buyers are served well they keep buying bringing income and simultaneously serving the authors.
- It's vital to get new visitors to quickly learn about the site and hopefully become members. FlashDen is still in a relatively new market, and new competitors are still appearing, so that makes it more important to capture visitors and convert them to buyers or authors or members.
- Authors are important because at its heart FlashDen is really about her authors, but out of all the user groups they are the most committed to the site.
- Members are not as important as Authors and Buyers, but do contribute to the community surrounding the site.
- Admins / Reviewers are the least important as they are a paid group.
So following from this, it's possible to conclude that the homepage needs to server users in this order: Visitors > Buyers > Authors > Members > Admins.
Understanding what your site is trying to achieve is the final thread that sews your user tasks together and tells you what you should be trying to put on the page. Ideally on every key page you should identify the user groups, tasks and priorities. For a vital page like the homepage I do this formally on paper, and for lesser pages I will often just do it in my head while designing.
4. Design, Refine, Refine, Refine ...
It's only after you've figured out user groups, tasks, site goals, priorities and so on, that it's time to design! It is really vital that you do this first, because on a practical level, it dramatically lowers the odds that you are going to have go back and redo your design. Whenever I have just started designing a big site, without really analysing first, I have inevitably had to rework lots of screens or even whole interfaces.
Lots of designers like to use wireframes at this point - that is to simply lay out a bunch of lines and boxes indicating roughly where things should go. Personally I prefer to work in Photoshop from the start because I'm quick enough and it lets me really see what's going to happen. I also think that there is more to information design than where something appears on a page. Simply altering colours and background colours can make a page element further down the page suddenly seem more important.
Once you do have a rough idea of how the information needs to work together, you should come up with a working design that is generally OK, and then refine, refine, refine. I often will wind up with 5 or 6 versions of the same look, where I've tried varying different things like type sizes, images, layout alterations, backgrounds, and so on, to see how it affects the information you're presenting.
No matter how good you think the first layout is, I can guarantee that after spending more time and coming up with more versions you'll have discovered that your original wasn't quite as good as you first thought. Sometimes you wind up throwing out the whole design and starting again, but if you do have a good base, then refining should get you to a great finish.
5. Get Others' Opinions, but Make the Final Calls
In any large job you are going to have a lot of other opinions involved. In most cases these will be the opinions of your client. Prior to starting FlashDen, I used to work with all sorts of companies building websites. Among them I did have the misfortune to design for several large insurance companies and a few governmental organisations. I say misfortune because when you get to that size of client you are dealing with a lot of stakeholders, and in many situations it isn't clear where the real power to make decisions lies. This can result in endless meetings, endless changes and a high degree of difficulty for carrying through your vision.
Whatever the client, it's really important to get their opinions. Aside from anything else in most cases they know a lot more about the business than you do. Hopefully they also know more about the users than you do, and with this knowledge will be able to give constructive advice.
It's also important to get the opinion of the development team you are working with. At FlashDen we're fortunate to have two devs who have a lot of skill in user interface design and usability. And their input, along with the rest of the team, made a lot of difference to the end product.
But in the end, it's up to you as the expert designer to come up with the final call. If you have a tough client this can be tricky, because a client often believes they should make the final calls. If that is the case, you need to (a) find ways to explain, educate and show the client that your choices are for their benefit; and (b) sometimes bite the bullet and accept the client's directives as a further constraint in your project, and find ways to make it work.
6. Organise for the Future
When you are coding up a design for a big site, it's really important to again think about the future. How you manage your files and folders will impact you greatly later. For example recently we have decided to build a sister site to FlashDen that focuses on audio only called AudioJungle. To make things simpler the site is going to run the same HTML, with just stylesheets to make it look like a different site. A development like that throws up all sorts of new challenges to my file and folder structures, my stylesheets and my HTML. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Organise yourself into a good folder structure
Scripts, stylesheets, interface images, content images, and so on, all need to be kept separately. With a small site you might be able to just dump things together, but the bigger you get the more important it is to be able to find what you need.
- Use a coherent and intelligent naming system for your files
There's nothing worse than looking at a pile of images with names like "gd_l3.jpg". How you do it is largely a personal matter, but I find naming using common prefixes and descriptive file names helps a lot. So for example I might start every image going in the header with the word 'header_', every background with 'bg_' and then a menu background from the header would be called 'header_bg_menu.jpg'. Prefixes have the advantage that when your files are sorted by name, they all appear together.
- Use Subversion
This was forced on me by our developers, but thank goodness it was! Subversion tracks files and file changes and stops you from overwriting other designers/deveopers working on the same project. Also importantly it helps you roll back to old versions of things. It takes some getting used to, but even minus all the reasons developers use it, it's worthwhile for HTML/CSS designers. Don't know about Subversion? Check out Subversion for Designers
- Be thoughtful about how you write your HTML and CSS
It's really easy to make a mess with your HTML and CSS files, and it's really hard to clean them back up. After four redesigns, I'm still using many of the same CSS files and it is a mission cleaning up classes that aren't used any more or finding obscure definitions wrapped in lots of layers. Use lots of comments, possibly even multiple stylesheets, and make sure you name your styles well!
- Get Browser Compatibility working EARLY
This is an area I went really wrong with FlashDen and we've been paying for it ever since. My initial layout worked in IE7 and I ignored IE6 until after we'd finished building the whole site. Ever since we've been adding IE conditionals, and hacks and workarounds. It's much easier to make something compatible when there are only a few elements on the page than when you've built a massive site, so don't follow my foolishness!
7. Make it Easy to Develop With Your Stylesheet
The bigger the site, the less likely a designer will get to see or modify every single page. If you're a single designer on a big site - like me - then you also might not want to be called in for every thing. So it pays to make a stylesheet that can almost by default makes things look nice. For example:
- Make sure you style default elements like <input>, <strong>, and so on.
That way the page will automatically present well. If you rely on people doing things like <strong class="my_bold"> then inevitably you'll wind up with variance on pages. - Create reusable elements that developers can use.
For example on FlashDen we have a table class called "general_table", that makes a good fall-back style for data. When I have a chance to style a page I can do more specific types of tables and data highlighting, but at the very least a developer putting together a page has a good all-round table style to use. - Make sure your page layout has a structure that looks nice even when it's just got text in it.
Inevitably there will be pages which you haven't had a chance to add images to, and which may look a little boring. By using things like heading styles, sidebars, and so on, you can make sure that they still look pleasant and have some visual style. For example on FlashDen we wrap most text blocks in:
<fieldset>
<legend>Heading</legend>
Content
</fieldset>
And this by default wraps the text up with a nice little border around it and a heading. It's easy for a developer to work with and does a good job of separating text up and making it look more readable. We also have a sidebar component which is just another package for extra text content, but that again makes the page look more visual.
Naturally it's optimal if every page does go through a designer, but it's also much less stressful knowing that even if they don't, it'll still look professional and uniform.
What's your opinion?
So those are my tips, if you have some of your own from working on bigger sites, leave a comment!
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User Comments
( ADD YOURS )Ben Griffiths May 2nd
Some great tips there - however I always get bogged down in the refine stage. I can never stop, and sometimes it’ll take much longer to complete. When refining, its definately good to know when to stop too
( )Arun May 2nd
Great pointers here. This will definitely be of help, now that I’m working on a large scale site.
( )TPN WEB DESIGN INC. May 2nd
FLASHDEN ROCKS…AND COLLIS YOUR A GENIUS
( )Alex Eckermann May 2nd
Another great Collis article
Im a big fan of your work but the best is the FreelanceSwitch Podcast.
Keep up the great work.
( )Hyder May 2nd
I’ve actually sold one file on FlashDen
I hardly do flash anymore, more into XHTML/CSS now and WordPress themes.
From building dozens of sites myself I always cringe when I have to redo a few things on my older ones that weren’t designed from the inside so well. Some even used tables!! OMG, I’m so glad those days are over.
@Ben - Yes, it is good to know when to stop. Design is an incomplete word.
( )elipsoid May 2nd
Great tip with the button styling! Thanks!
( )I was surprised the logo on FlashDen doesn’t take you to the homepage. Otherwise nice and clean design.
Qbrushes May 2nd
same here, use to play around with flash here and there but now its just photoshop/ some xhtml/css and wordpress.
( )Joefrey Mahusay May 2nd
Yeah! Ive always visited Flashden since before. I like that site.
( )iamconnected May 2nd
I am still looking for a simple and helful and great text editor for coding on Mac.
( )What do you suggest me ?
Ben Griffiths May 2nd
@iamconnected, try textmate: http://macromates.com/
( )Andrei Potorac May 2nd
Thanks for all the work you guys did. FlashDen is the best there is!
( )Hanush May 2nd
cool css button on fileden.
( )Hanush May 2nd
ping back http://designerzweb.wordpress.com/2008/05/02/cool-flash-digital-handwriting/
( )Ewout May 2nd
Seriously, this is a must read! Thanks for sharing your knowledge and tips with other developers!
( )Nick May 2nd
This is a great list. You have great reminders and a great workflow.
( )rjleaman May 2nd
This post is a useful basis for a workflow / checklist for any size of site, I think - and a reminder that ‘design’ is a verb as well as (more than?) a noun… It’s always fascinating to be given a glimpse behind the scenes of a newly launched site. Thanks!
( )james May 2nd
this is perfect for a project that i’m working on - nettuts is potentially going to be the best tutorial site on the internet! i dont know of any other that firstly goes into such detail about useful things such as this instead of being just copy+paste code.
great work!
( )Tim Kadlec May 2nd
Nice list. I agree that getting browser compatibility taken care of early is a huge one. Trying to wade through pages of code and styles to find out what is causing your design to look different in IE6 is a pain. But if you are constantly checking it throughout the process, then you can pinpoint a section of code as being what caused the problem, and your troubleshooting becomes much easier.
( )Jen May 2nd
this is very relevant my current project (5,000 pages! yikes!) we haven’t had a major redesign in close to 5 years so i’ll be glad to get rid of all these tables!
( )Ali May 2nd
Honestly, this is the type of tutorial Im always looking for but never seem to find on other sites.
Request: You see how this was a tutorial about ‘Designing & Maintaing’ a big sites (HTML, CSS & Designing tips). Can you give us tips on ‘Creating and Developming’ big sites. (coding techniques, PHP file structures on general sites like Flashden.net, types of oop, mod re-write…) and standard development techniques big sites use. Like how did you create Flashden.net development wise, e.i is it better to keep as much code in a few files or little code in alot of files.
sorry for the long comment, great work though Collis!
( )D. Carreira May 2nd
I LOVE THIS TUTORIALS!! Thanks! The web would be better if every web designer follow these tutorials
David Carreira
( )JPH May 2nd
Great advice — good things to keep in mind. Thanks for another great tutorial/article.
( )Francois Faubert May 2nd
It’s amazing how similar things are between different jobs. I would have suggested mostly the same steps but with putting even more emphasis on using reusable elements.
I haven’t taken the time to populate my stylesheet with these on a new project with impossible deadlines where I work and programmers are accumulating bad design decisions and bloating the html just because they can’t easily have 2 columns or because so-and-so label isn’t the good color.
Don’t make your programmers think! (Just like they don’t force you to understand the object inheritance and table relationships)
( )David Zemens May 2nd
Organization is the key, isn’t it?
Thank you for once again reminding us of that fact. It’s far too easy to get moving on the project and forget about organizing things; we have all learned the hard way what a mistake that is!
( )Ariful Khan May 2nd
great article
( )stfalx May 2nd
Very nice tips indeed. Respect Collins! You’re 100% true. Not everybody applies the tips you’ve just listed. Although they’re still many more. Like perfect css generalization, that’s important too in future development. Some people forget to define focus styles and resizing (ugly stuff on safari) and lot’s more. Well good luck with everything Collins, you’ve got my respect.
( )Nate May 2nd
Nice right up Collis, Thanks!
( )Panadero May 2nd
I can’t emphasize how much I agree with tip number five. I’ve been on a three-man team working with a couple very large clients for a couple years now, and all of them have had occasional ambiguities with regards to who was in charge when it came to additions and modifications. There have also been dozens of occasions where we’d just looked at each other and couldn’t fathom exactly why certain changes were requested, but most of the time we’ve just had to accept them given that they’re the client. I have a really hard time dealing with some of the requests I consider stupid, but as the author correctly pointed out, while there are times you have to put your foot down and refuse, most of the time your client takes precedence.
( )The Dude May 2nd
As for text editors for the Mac? Coda from panic.com. Use it in conjunction with CSS Edit and you are off to the races (+ it is only getting better). Last time I looked at TextMate it was a mess… but then again I still use Homesite.
( )Phodana May 2nd
cool Tips and advice…
( )L2 May 2nd
The picture that acompanies point 4 gets in IE7 out side of the box.
Nice tutorial, although I don’t see the tip “don’t re-invent the wheel” (should I call it like that?). I personnaly learned how to structure my files from looking at how most open source CMS make there file structure.
And love to see that flashdan uses Ruby, as far as I know it’s one of the nicest languages out there but so underrated.
( )Marc May 2nd
these are excellent guidelines, i have seen large scale sites get soo out of control….
keeping things simple and organized from the start is a MUST
the slightest of changes or updates when having to applied to thousands of pages becomes a massive undertaking
( )Daniel May 2nd
very useful! thanks a lot for sharing these nice ressources !
( )Eric May 2nd
Great tutorial!
I see you’re using Textmate for the screenshots - what is that SVN plugin that will allow you to commit from the drawer??? I would love to start using that plugin!
( )Collis Ta'eed May 2nd
Thanks all for the feedback!
Eric, I’m not sure, I’ll ask Ryan our developer as he set me up with everything. All i know is i press ctrl-shift-a in the drawer and get that little menu appear. When I was working on PC I used to use TortoiseSVN which was pretty neat and got me used to having a GUI. Anyhow i’ll see if I can find out!
( )Nico May 2nd
dugg! Great advice! Thanks Collis!
( )Neil May 3rd
Great post, Collis. I only wish you posted it when I first took an interest in making sites.
I’m a fan of getting a grid set up in FireWorks (usually 8 x 120px) and then applying wireframes and objects to a page (and that’s after writing down the required functionality in a text document). I even add the grid to a #wrapper placeholder style (which would be the #container for NetTuts) and write the functional xhtml/css with a grid/wireframe as a base. Colour and styling are pretty much the last thing I add; I like to know I have everything functioning correctly first, otherwise I go crazy worrying about the possibility of chasing form over function. Admittedly I haven’t yet launched a site which completely adheres to this design approach - but there’s one in the works. And I was considering writing a similar post to this one if the site is well received - but now I don’t need to!
Also, I was wondering why you would use a ‘general_table’ style - couldn’t you just style the table tag in the same way and drop the class?!
( )Collis Ta'eed May 3rd
Hey Neil! I wondered if someone might ask about the general_table comment. The reason I didn’t style the default table is that now and again I need to use a table for something other than listing data - e.g. on our top sellers page we have a special table of thumbnails and sales numbers. So rather than have other table definitions undoing all the default class, it’s easier to just have a class of table.
( )Harry May 3rd
Some Great tips and dugg it for you
( )Rodrigo May 3rd
Great article!
( )I work for one of the biggest website in the US and I have to emphasize the “Be thoughtful about how you write your HTML and CSS” topic.
It’s very important to have multiple CSS files and good markup. We are re-designing the whole website and we have more than 400 developers working on it, one of the biggest problems is the lack of consistency through out the website and we can identify 2 major points: bad HTML and bad CSS.
Since not every developer cares about web standards we had to make sure to create guidelines and discipline POSH when writing HTML.
Multiple css files have played one of the most important role for us, since our site gives the user a chance to change the look and feel on personal pages, we structured our CSS files like:
“base.css” (common layout position),
“typography.css”
“skin.css” (color and images)
That gives us the ability to add a new “skin.css” every time we add new website skins and take us less than 3 days to QA and implement it comparing to 2 weeks when we had just one file for all our styles.
Jim Darwin May 3rd
Thanks for the tutorial. I am just a newbie, and trying to figure out how to do the best site, and best first niche.
( )David Sparks May 3rd
@ 6.5
Couldn’t agree more here.
Once my xhtml is done and i start working on the CSS, I work from the top down and check in FF, IE7 & 6 non stop as I go.
I find thats the best way to keep things from breaking.
top down browser to browser.
dont start working on your footer if you still havent finalized your navigation thats up in the header. you never know what you’ll have to change that wills screw something up
( )Anna Bramble May 3rd
Awesome post. I think this is my first time commenting here or at PSDTUTS. I have been a lurker for quite some time but I just had to say good job on this tut, Collis. Really great advice! This gets me excited about the great things that I’m sure are around the corner for NETTUTS.
I agree with Ali up there that it would be great to see some more detail on how you developed/coded the site.
I love the button class tip - how does it work exactly? Do you have it as display: block; with a horizontally repeating background image? If so, and it can be at any length, how does it have edges/borders on the sides?
I should really know this stuff, being a web developer.
I think I have a lot to learn from this site, seeing I have never used a frameset tag or a legend tag.
( )Jamie Souef May 3rd
Some great tips here, but i agree with Ben Griffiths, sometimes the refinement can become the thing that bogs a big project down.. i’m still trying to figure out when to stop
( )Aminur RAHMAN May 3rd
very good structure of advice. cheers
( )Eric Orr May 3rd
Great post. Thanks!
( )Mark Provan May 4th
Thanks, just what I was looking for.
( )Joel Then May 4th
NETTUTS should do an in-depth Ruby on Rails tutorial….
( ).11 May 4th
I am curious, I wanna know how many members flashden had before it was posted on nettuts and psdtuts D:
( )Ryan Allen May 4th
@Ali: The honest answer is nobody really has a single reliable way of developing software, so what people do is often what works with a given group of people. Though there is some agreement what constitutes ‘best practices’ in software development, and one of these is writing an automated suite of tests for your application. And by that, I mean a program that tests things in your application automatically, so you don’t have to. Pick up “Test Driven Development - By Example” by Kent Beck, it’s a classic. As for how to put your applications together, I’d recommend learning a bunch of different frameworks (i.e. CakePHP, Ruby on Rails, Django) to get an understanding of how other people put their applications together, and by the time you’ve worked with a few frameworks you’ll have developed (and borrowed) some ideas of your own. I had the same issue with PHP that I wasn’t quite sure where to put things, as nothing was enforced, to working with Ruby on Rails (which is very specific about where you put things). I’m biased, but I’ll say try out Ruby on Rails. FlashDen is a Rails app.
@Eric: The subversion plugin comes with TextMate by default. Hit Control-Escape and you’ll find the commands under subversion. Though I’d highly recommend getting comfortable with it in Terminal if you’re using it a lot, because then you can use it with any program!
( )Zair Abbas May 5th
very nice tips!
( )thanks!
Blue Buffalo May 5th
Good advice and tips for sites. I couldn’t agree more.
( )Melek May 5th
would love to see the CSS for that button style
as for the file naming conventions, that’s HUGE! i can’t tell you how many times i’ve worked on a site started by another designer, and they named all their images 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg….man, how frustrating!
great article!
( )Tor Løvskogen May 5th
Nice tutorial, but the fieldset/legend-”tip” is not best practice for regular content, it’s for forms only, even if it gives you a nice look. HTML is not about looks, CSS is.
( )Wilbur May 5th
Can’t wait to start using this site more regularly
Keep it up!
( )Nima May 6th
Awesome
( )keep it up
Danny May 6th
This is a great post, thanks for the explanation on Subversion… I’ve always been fearful of it
( )Steve May 7th
I like your style. This article demonstrates your down to earth tone.
What I like about you is that you speak after you’ve created. You get down to work, make it happen, and then look back on what you’ve accomplished. The biggest struggle for web pros these days is getting things done. Kudos to you and your dedication.
( )Mike Maxson May 8th
What great timing for me to StumbleUpon your site. Am just getting ready to redo my site on the island of Nevis http://www.nevis1.com The site has grown to over 450 pages since I first put it up way back in 1994.
It has been an absolute nightmare to maintain. Seems like I am constantly putting one band-aid on top of another to keep it going
Your tips will save me a lot of time…now I am off to read and bookmark this page.
Cheers….another one man web design team
( )Belfast Web Desgin May 9th
You don’t see too many articles like this - good work!
Planning for the future is definitely a good one - a little bit of extra planning at the start can save you manys a headache down the line!
( )James May 9th
Very good tips Collis, and well done on FlashDen - it’s a beautiful accomplishment and a great concept.
An addition to your tips, although perhaps fairly contentious, is a CSS framework:
I work full-time on a large site that has several third party add-ons such as a CRM site for customer FAQ’s, a different third-party sub-domain for careers/online recruitment and a third party search engine, several international variations, as well as the imminent addition of eCommerce bolt-ons - all with different developers trying to make each application look like it’s part of one site. There are naturally arguments for and against, but with this kind of situation, a solid CSS framework is a must. After examining some pre-existing framworks such as YUI and Blueprint, I decided that the only sensible way forward is to ‘bake your own’ to allow for maximum flexibility.
Oh, and just to echo Tor’s point above, I’m sure you already realise that abusing fieldset and legend to simulate headings is semantically very dodgy…
cheers,
( )James
mathew May 9th
Thank you so much. This is a great list that any beginning or even moderately skilled webdesigner should read when he or she is starting major projects!
( )Joy Sebastian May 10th
These tips are good and I can see where I am going wrong.
( )Tom May 12th
Tips and suggestions everyone should follow. To organize your work looking at the future is essential.
( )PIXEAM May 12th
I really liked this tutorial.A lot of good tips and a thorough explanation on everything required.Thanks buddy and hoping to read more of your articles!!!!
( )Gina May 13th
“Design the site so that it’s easy to maintain. Often times when designing a site you might sacrifice things for aesthetics.” Good point! Good looking sites that are hard to use are a royal pain! Have you looked as CMS systems that offer design and usability? One example that has a new version is Bitrix: http://www.bitrixsoft.com/sitemanager/demo.php.
( )chuck b. May 14th
thanks so much for this experiential knowledge…we are already doing many things you have suggested, but also have made some of the same mistakes you have mentioned at well…
I guess my question is when you have a social network attached to your product site…how do you balance the two so you don’t alienate the users, but at the same time don’t let them go without seeing the products as something they should buy
( )Raj May 16th
wow absolutely great tips.. Thanx Collis.
( )D. Carreira May 17th
I had take a look to Flashden.net, and I think it’s much more interactive than before. You have done a great work Collis!
David Carreira
( )sam May 18th
its a very well organized and clean design , pretty cool and user friendly.
( )But i personally believe flashden got to do something for the support, they have got a very poor support.
i bought a xml menu and having many problems with it when i posted comment i never get a reply which might take away the user, we are buying things which cost us, nothing for free and we also do expect some support any way from your part you have done a excellent job. Keep it up.
Javier May 18th
NetTuts is great! thanks
( )David May 21st
Thanks for this post! This is so important, and also a lesson I have learned (and in some ways am still learning) the hard way.
( )funkyboy May 23rd
Awesome post. I always try to stick with “intelligent labeling”, something similar to Ruby’s conventions over configuration. This way, you can put hand on a ten years old project and you don’t get lost.
( )serhat May 24th
thanks you so much.it is great article.
( )eod May 29th
wow great ressource, thanks for sharing, very helpful all your advices & demos
( )Taylor Satula July 14th
Cool i dont have a large site. But if i did
( )Windows Themes September 5th
Some really nice tips. Thanks for sharing
( )Moksha October 24th
really helpful thanks for it
( )Christian Dalsvaag October 25th
Very helpful tips!
I reacted to one thing though, doesn’t the site fill in Name, Email and URL anymore? Or is it my browser maybe? xD
( )Nokadota January 23rd
Everything on this page, from the actual article itself to the user commentary has been nothing short of awesome. Bookmarked!
( )Julicious May 27th
I really appreciated all these tips. Thank you so much!
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