OUGD504: Design Production - Design For Web Research

In order to meet the criteria for the 'Design For Web' brief we were asked to produce a fully functioning four page website. As web design is something I have not done on previous courses I began by researching into the basic requirements a designer will need to consider when designing for screen.

WEB SAFE FONTS

The most safe fonts are; sans serif typefaces Arial / Helvetica, serif typefaces Times New Roman / Times and slab serif typefaces Courier New / Courier.

Other options for designers which usually work are; Palatino, Garamond, Bookman and Avant Garde.

Fonts that work on Windows and Mac OS are; Verdana, Georgia, Comic Sans, Trebuchet, Arial Black and Impact.

WEB SAFE COLOURS

Web safe colours are the colours used when designing web pages and the methods for describing and specifying those colours as a RGB triplet or in hexadecimal format.

Web colours have an unambiguous calorimetric definition RGB which relates to the chromaticities of a particular phosphor set a given transfer curve adaptive white point and viewing conditions.

SCREEN SIZES

The display resolution of a digital television, computer monitor or display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed it is usually quoted as width x height with the units in pixels.

IMAGE FORMATS

JPEG

• JPEG stands for Joint Photographic experts group 
• The filename extension for JPEG or JFIF is JPG OR JPEG
• It is a compression method
• Most of the digital cameras we use save images in the JPEG / JFIF format
• The format supports 8-bit greyscale images and 24-bit colour images, 8-bit for red, green and blue
• The JPEG format applies lossy compression to images to give a significant reduction of the file size
• The amount of compression can be specified and the amount of compression will affect the visual quality of the image when not too great, the compression does not noticeably detract from the image's quality but JPEG files suffer generational degradation when repeatedly edited and saved (JPEG also provides lossless image storage but the lossless is not supported)

GIF

• GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format is limited to an 8-bit palette or 256 colours.
• This makes the GIF format suitable for storing graphics with relatively few colours e.g. diagrams
• Also uses a lossless compression that is more effective when large areas have a single colour and ineffective for detailed images.

PNG

• PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics
• The PNG file format supports 8-bit paletted images with optional transparency for all palette colours and 24-bit true colour (16 million colours) or 48-bit true colour and without alpha channel while GIF supports only 256 colours and a single transparent colour.
• PNG is very effective when an image has a large uniformly coloured areas.
• PNG provides a patent-free replacement for GIF and can also replace many common uses of TIFF 
• Indexed colour, greyscale and true colour images are supported plus an optional alpha channel
• PNG is designed to work well in online viewing applications like web browsers so it is fully streamable with progressive display option.

WEBSITE HOSTING SERVICE

A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organisations to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data centre.

FREE WEB HOSTING

Free web hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements and often limited when compared to paid hosting.

SHARED WEB HOSTING

Placed on a server with many other sites, which could be up to hundreds or thousands all domains may share a common pool of server resources. The features available are quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates resellers often sell shared web hosting and web companies often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.

VIRTUAL DEDICATED SERVER

Divides server resources into virtual servers where resources can be allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. Users have root access to their own virtual space and customers are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server.

DEDICATING HOSTING SERVICE

User gets his or her own web server and full control over it, however the user does not necessarily own the server.

MANAGED HOSTING SERVICE

The user gets their own web server but not full control over it. They are however allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server.

COLOCATION WEB HOSTING SERVICE

Similar to the dedicated web hosting service but the user owns the Colocation serve. The company provides the physical space that the server takes care of the server. This type of hosting is most powerful and experience. In most cases the Colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their clients machine providing only electrical internet access and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for Colocation, the client would have his or her own administratorvisit the data centre on site to do any hardware upgrades or changes.

CLOUD HOSTING

A new type of hosting platform that allows customers powerful scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud hosted website may be more reliable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware goes down. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the user rather than a flat fee for the amount the user expects they will use or a fixed cost up front hardware investment.

CLUSTERED HOSTING

Having multiple server hosting the same content for better resource utilisation. Clustered servers and a perfect solution for high availability dedicated hosting, creating a scalable web hosting solution a cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability (usually web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans as there are multiple benefits to the mass managing of clients).

GRID

Form of distributed hosting is when a service cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.

HOME SERVER

Usually a single machine places in a private residence can be used to host on or more sites.