are there accepted standards for web design?
It used to be important to try and only use the web-safe colour palette, but it’s essentially redundant now that everyone has 16-bit or better displays. As of the middle of last year, Jakob Nielsen recommends that you optimize your layout for 1024×768, but try and create a liquid layout that’ll work on 800×600 and scale well to larger monitors. However, experience suggests that the majority of websites these days have abandoned attempting to fit things into an 800-pixel width, and generally design for 1024 and up. Probably the most important ‘accepted standard’ is the move towards using web standards when designing your site and writing your HTML and CSS. From a design point of view, this can mean giving up the idea that you have pixel-perfect control over your layout and font, and being willing to put as much as possible of the
If you want a reliable yardstick, figure out who your users are. Your audience must determine your standards. No, I’m not kidding. If you went full-on SEO-friendly, WAI-guidelines, blind-people-love-it, usable by people who have been smacked in the head with a shovel, navigable by people who are clutching a pencil in their teeth, you will have the most boring possible website and your clients will not accept it. It will be about three pages of Very Large Text with one decorative graphic. There, I’ve said it – total heresy. The W3C fanboys will come to burn me momentarily, so let me type fast … Suppose your site is a website about classic Macintosh games – target older Macs. Test on Internet Explorer 5.2 for Mac, plus Safari and Firefox. Suppose your site is for an AARP affiliate. Assume older hardware (both the users and the computer). That means target a lower resolution and avoid CPU-sucking flash. Give your imagemaps a lot of room, as older people tend to have more trouble clickin
