The power of empty space

kizinko — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 23:12:50 +0000

As a relatively new web developer I was always looking for ways to add, add, add; whereas if I had just left it alone it would have looked better. More specifically, when I am creating a page I tend to forget that the images I am designing are part of a larger picture. This is especially difficult when designing a dynamic page, as there is no content to fill the page. All I can say is that the padding attribute of CSS is your friend. The more empty space there is in a site the easier it is to look at.

A good comparrison…

Take a look at Yahoo. There is virtually no empty space on the home page, and it is an incredibly busy looking site. Now look at Google. Google is clean, classy, and almost entirely empty. You may have already known that Google has over 85% of the search engine market share. Did you ever think it may be because their site is simply more appealing to the eye?

So to all you new developers out there…

Please, remember to keep it simple.

Replace flash content with image when user does not have flash.

kizinko — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:10:26 +0000

Here is a quick fix that a lot of other sites don’t really mention. This does NOT work if you need to have actual text, links, or content of any kind other than just an image instead of your flash content. The other sites will say you need to include an tag inside your object, but I have had issues with this technique in the past.

So what I did was…

Remove the background color from the JavaScript & CSS of the flash object
Place a
tag around the object with the exact same height & width dimensions as the object
Set the background image of the
to the image you want to replace the flash object.

Here’s what you want to see in your HTML (or you can put it in your CSS file) assuming the dimensions of your Flash object are 200 pixels high & 400 pixels wide:

…

Again, this is not necessarily the best solution…but it certainly saves time and effort if you don’t need text, links, etc.

kizinko.com

The power of empty space

A good comparrison…

So to all you new developers out there…

Replace flash content with image when user does not have flash.