Three Websites

“YII!... ERR!... YII!... ERR!...” I suddenly woke up to the voice of a crude sounding middle-aged man counting in Mandarin. It has been a while since I last heard those folks practicing “tai-chi” in the terrace right outside my window. Irregular sleep and video game addiction means that you sleep when people go to work and wake up when people go to sleep. After a while, you don’t quite know what’s going on in the world anymore.

With the voice still resonating in my head, I opened my eyes and saw myself lying on my chair with my head on the bed and my feet on the table. It’s surprising even to myself how I manage to sleep in such an acrobatic position.

It was already 7am.

As I pulled myself up, memories of what I did last night came back. I remember sitting in front of my laptop, pen and paper on the table, wondering how in the world I was supposed to start my assignment. I thought it would just come to me. It never came. Finally my will gave up as I succumbed to the power of the Sandman.

I’d have learnt most of hypertext mark-up language (html) and cascading style sheets (css) by now but it’s one thing to learn them and another to look at websites and say how they implemented css or how good they are. In fact, the best websites I’ve ever visited either made use of java scripting or flash or both.

I probably visited over 200 websites in the past few days. There was this website which looked nice but which caused my browser to hang and there was also another one which was equally good but animations made it so slow that it became a pain to navigate. Well I came to the conclusion that if I was looking for a perfect website, this would never end. In my eyes, there’s no perfect website (other than Google.com). So here’s my 3 shortlisted websites for evaluation:


1. www.templar.com

This website is all about experience. At first glance, it looks like some video game (I must admit that gamers like me have a certain weakspot for anything game-like) but don’t be fooled! This is a pure corporate website! Clicking on the different parts of the castle will open up the different pages and if you look close enough you can even see people in the castle and hear the sounds they make when eating!

Well I must say that this website strikes me as it’s not the usual black background neon colors fade in fade out animations kindof websites (the other type of fancy websites). Suffice to say that the layout is neat with equal-width scrolls. It’s perhaps the overall design (gestalt) that makes it look good without necessitating grids. But this does not mean that they can do without grids completely.

In terms of colors, it’s in harmony with a natural theme – lots of brown in the pages and the walls, green in the trees and blue in the water which provides color balance and makes it easy for the eyes.

Now the same reason that made the above website so awesome is the same that makes it impossible for me to replicate. Frankly speaking, it’s not something that you can do solo. Plus, it would be hard to showcase my projects and that’s exactly why no. 2 exists.


2. http://www.cas-p.net

This website wins over the others because it loads a lot faster and it is not as simple as you think it is. The artist used a lot of techniques which are seemingly trivial but very effective. The use of the right colors and shadows creates an illusion of depth. He also uses a technique to make as if the pictures stack over one another making it seem less “flat” than other websites.

In terms of grids, everything is in order. Using slanted words and graphics was also very creative in this case because it makes the page look less “squarey” and rigid. Color scheme also follows a “nature” palette with brown and green. Lastly, needless to say, he used css to style the page.

http://www.gangoeditions.com/designlab/?paged=2

3. http://who-is-erin-smith.com/blogger-vs-wordpress
 


Now before you start getting the idea that I like all nature color websites and hate box designs, here’s another website that I found to be quite appealing. A classical blog at first glance – a blog about blogs. It’s almost similar to those marketing pages where people desperately try to sell you a product and use all kinds of popups to make you stay, but fret not this one doesn’t.

There is something about it that makes it look nice (I’m sure others will disagree with me however). If you looked carefully, you’d notice that the designer paid extreme attention to the layout.

The comments section look impeccable. Blogs usually look good until the comments section but not this one.
The other thing that makes this website appealing is the use of high contract colors. The use of dark purple on a beige background makes it stand out.

http://realcolorwheel.com/tubecolors.htm

Now this website may not look as impressive as the first 2 but there’s a reason I put it here and that reason is it’s extensive use of css. The author defines the styles for her entire website in one external file (http://who-is-erin-smith.com/wp-content/themes/flexibility3/style.css).

Basically, all the pages in her website follow the format which saves a lot of work considering the number of pages she has and also the number of times she jumps from one style to another throughout the blog.