Today I am going to veer a little off of web marketing and focus on a three part series called ‘Designing for the Web’. Today I will be focusing on the challenges designers face when starting a new website project.

The main technical/design challenges that a web designer faces when a new project comes across their desk are:

Screen Resolution and Size
Color
Browsers
Operating Systems
Typography

Screen Resolution and Sizes
The current trend is that more and more computers are using a screen size of 1024×768 pixels or more. This needs to be taken into account and decisions are made by the designer based on demographics. For instance if I knew the target market of the business or organization was ages 65 and up, than I may make the decision to gear the site to the lowest browser of 640×480. If the site is for a Gaming company than it would be safe to make the decision to go with 1024×768 or higher.

Colors
Web safe colors are not such a large issue these days with modern displays. The “web-safe” color palette consists of 216 color values and was developed at a time when many computer displays were only capable of displaying 256 color. If you want to stay on the safe side of design, stick to this color palette.

Browsers
Not only do users have different sized monitors and resolutions, there are currently sever major browsers that need to be supported:

Internet Explorer 7
Internet Explorer 6
Internet Explorer 5
Firefox
Mozilla
Safari
Opera

They all treat web code completely different, so we must code and design carefully in order to make the website look and feel similar in each browser.

Operating Systems
WinXP
W2000
Win98
Vista
W2003
Linux
Mac

These will also affect web code and decisions need to be made by the designer based on demographics.

Typography
Web typography is very limited compared to what a tradition print graphic designer has to work with. Generally a web designer has about six or so fonts that are loaded on most Macs and PCs. Through the use of CSS, you can start to make you web typography look very nice these days, but was not always the case.

Most of the current stats from the above can be viewed on The W3 Schools website by clicking on the left column.

As you can see, there are many considerations a designer has when making decisions on how large a site they will design, what colors, what fonts they will use. All of this while making sure the website works properly on all browsers and platforms…not an easy task. Next week I will start the design from plain white paper and black marker and bring it into a design program for composition. As always - If you ever have any questions on the article, feel free to contact me or post comments below.