Design Principles

CLAMCO's design principles embody both technical and aesthetic concerns. Aesthetic considerations include functional qualities like ease of navigation.

Aesthetic

• Your site should have a look that suits you and your company, using colors and graphical elements consistent with your existing printed promotional materials if possible.
• Navigation systems must be simple, attractive, easy to use and consistent throughout the site
• Liquid layouts, which adjust themselves to fit the size of the visitor’s browser window, to minimize the need for horizontal scrolling while maintaining an "edge to edge" look. (Try adjusting the size of your window now, and see how the text re-wraps itself and graphical elements realign to fit the new size.)
• Animation and/or sound is used only if it makes sense in the context of the site and enhances the visitor’s experience, and even then, only sparingly.
• Traditional typographical practices are followed. Things like line-spacing, paragraph spacing and font sizes are carefully styled to assure readability. (Compare this site to some others you have seen, with dense blocks of text that are difficult to read.)
• Simpler is almost always better

Note: Some of the above principles may be thrown right out the window depending on the customer and the audience we are trying to reach. This is web design. Nothing is written in stone.

Technical

• Lean code for fast download times
• Styling of text and other elements is done using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead of font tags. This allows us to change font styles and sizes throughout an entire site by editing just one file.
• Did you know that different web browsers can and will display the same pages differently? Sometimes this can produce disastrous results. We code and test to ensure compatibility with common browsers, including Netscape 4.x through 7 and Internet Explorer 4.x through 6, with consideration given also to more esoteric browsers such as Opera, Mozilla and Safari
• Adherence to HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) standards as established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

What This All Means to You

What it means, basically, is that your site will look good to virtually all visitors. It will work properly, be easy to navigate and easy to read. Your message will get through.