1. Best web design : Part I
Article Directory Website Design: Understanding the Essential Basics
If you have done any article directory surfing, you have probably noticed all types of article directory
designs. You may have run across those that are visually impressive and enjoyable to look at it. They
make you stop and ask yourself the following questions: "How can I make an attractive design like
that?" Then you have probably run across those site that have inflicted pain onto your eyeballs and you
have probably questioned yourself, "How do I avoid that?" So many people do not understand the
essential basics to creating a visually pleasing website design. Let us take a look at these four important
and basic subjects of design.
*Contrast
Most of us understand the concept of contrast, yet when you look at different website designs, we often
see this concept ignored. Contrast needs to be highly considered when creating any type of website.
Ultimately, you want the visitor to come in contact with the content and information of the website.
Your visitor does not want to have *dig* through your website to find the information for which he or
she is looking. If your content is hidden, people will miss the purpose of your website and simply give up
trying to find the information or article they need. Reader's eyes want a visible and clear presentation.
To put contrast in exercise, highly and carefully consider the colors you are using for your website
design. The type of contrast you are looking for is black text on a white background. While that may
seem boring, it is most important that your background contrasts with your text so your text is clearly
visible and seen. Another mistake you will often see is the overuse of graphics and images. Use
graphics wisely! Too many graphics can clutter your website and make your content buried. A graphic-
laden page does not necessarily mean it will be more visually pleasing.
Contrast is a simple and effective way to visually enhance your website. Remember, that you want to
bring the content to your reader. You do not want your reader to have todig for it.
*Alignment

2. The second concept, alignment, is also extremely vital to the website presentation. Good alignment
brings about unity and order. Bad alignment brings about chaos and disorder. Knowing that we want to
bring content and contextual components to our visitor, we need to present that content in an orderly
fashion. The basic principle for alignment is this: do not mix alignment styles. For example, if you have
left aligned text, do not create a centered heading. You want your design to flow. That brings us to our
next concept, repetition.
*Repetition
While providing your website visitor with clear, visible orderly content, you can also create a stronger
sense of unity in the website through repetition. Repetition on a website basically means that you use
the same design elements throughout the design. That means you want to use the same logo, graphics,
bullets, fonts, and colors. A common misconception by amateur designers is that the more color on the
page you have, the more visually pleasing it is. Experience and good judgement show that this is simply
not true. Stick to four similar contrasting colors. Stay consistent with your fonts. Stay consistent with
your graphics. Repetition will further the sense of the unity in your document.
*Proximity
Proximity ties in with presenting easy-to-find content to your website visitor. Proximity is not a hard
principle to follow and it will greatly increase your website's readability. To follow the concept of
proximity, put elements together that should be together. For example, if you are talking about a book,
you do not want to have the book title at the top of the page, the author at the bottom of the page, and
the publisher of the book on a completely different page. To re-emphasize, you want your visitor to find
what they are looking for easily. Proximity best assists your viewers in finding exactly what they need,
when they need it.
Following these basic design principles will allow you to make a sharp and attractive website.
Remember, you want the content to find the visitor. You do not want the visitor to have to dig through
the design to find the content that they need. When the content finds the visitor, you want it to be
unified, clear, and visible. Exercise these four basic concepts, and you will have yourself a very visually
pleasing design.

3. Hiring a web designer to come up with the custom solution that you need can set you back a few
thousand bucks. But you can do the whole thing yourself and make it drag and drop simple for mere
pennies with a tool like Breezy Websites. See http://breezywebsites.com for details!
Best web design : End of Part I
ASP vs. PHP
When building web sites, ASP and PHP are very popular languages. Here’s my opinion on whether ASP
or PHP is best
ASP v. PHP
Both ASP and PHP are languages used to build Dynamic Web sites that can interact with Databases and
exchange information. ASP (Active Server Pages) is from Microsoft and is used with IIS (Internet
Information Server) that runs on Microsoft Servers. PHP (Personal Home Pages) is from Rasmus Lerdorf,
who originally designed this parsing language which was later modified by different people. It runs on
Unix and Linux servers and it also has an NT server version.
There are a lot of differences between ASP and PHP.
Cost
To run ASP programs one needs IIS installed on a Windows platform server, which is not free. PHP
programs run on Linux, which is free. Even the connectivity of the database is expensive in the case of
ASP as MS-SQL is a product of Microsoft that needs to be purchased. PHP generally uses MySQL, which
is freely available.
Speed

4. If we compare the speed of ASP and PHP then PHP has an upper hand. PHP code runs faster than ASP.
ASP is built on COM based architecture, which is an overhead for the server whereas PHP code runs in
its own memory space.
Platform Compatibility
PHP programs can run on various platforms like Linux, Unix, Windows and Solaris whereas ASP is mainly
associated with Windows platforms. However, ASP can run on a Linux platform with ASP-Apache
installed on the server.
Additional Costs
Many of the tools used in PHP are free of cost and since PHP is open source a lot of code can be found in
open source forums. PHP has inbuilt features like ftp, email from a web page or even encryption
mechanisms but in ASP such features are not built in and some additional components are required.
Therefore an additional cost is incurred for such components.
Base Language
PHP is based on C++ language and the syntax used in PHP is quite similar to C/C++. C/C++ is still
considered the best programming language by many programmers and people who love this language
would surely feel more comfortable with the syntax of PHP. ASP on the other hand has a more Visual
Basic kind of syntax that again is closely related to only Microsoft products. So, it depends on a person-
to-person which language he or she is comfortable
Database Connectivity
PHP, being extremely flexible, can connect to various databases, the most popular being MySQL. ASP
mainly uses MS-SQL.

5. Conclusion
Both languages have their advantages specific to users. Some would argue that both the languages have
their own importance and depending on the user's requirements the language and the platform can be
chosen. If we talk about developing a discussion board then ASP is equally capable but many feel the
best discussion boards are developed in PHP. If a user is looking for some e-commerce application
development then many would call ASP the ideal choice. This does not mean that PHP cannot provide e-
commerce solutions, only that many people choose ASP.
From my perspective, PHP is an all around better choice than ASP.
Hiring a web designer to come up with the custom solution that you need can set you back a few
thousand bucks. But you can do the whole thing yourself and make it drag and drop simple for mere
pennies with a tool like Breezy Websites. See http://breezywebsites.com for details!
Best web design : End of Part II
Avoid Graphical Overload
When designing a website, it's easy to start loading it up with graphics. While tempting, you have to
resist -- otherwise, you'll end up with graphical overload.
Why is that a bad thing? Here's why.
It Takes Too Long to Download
The first reason to cut down on graphics is that the more there are, and the larger they are, the longer it
will take each of your pages to download. People are impatient when waiting for pages to download --
you only have around 5 seconds before your visitor hits the Back button.
What can you do about this? Apart from using fewer pictures, you can also make sure that you resize
your images in a graphics editor. This actually makes their file sizes smaller. If you just resize images by

6. specifying a width and height in HTML or CSS, they will still be slow to download because the full file size
is being used.
You should consider turning on compression in your image editor. JPEG files can often be compressed by
up to 25% before there's a noticeable difference in quality. Try different formats and compression levels
to see what works.
It Gets Too Busy
If you use a site with more than 4 images on the page at once, your eyes are being pulled all over the
page. They're not sure where to focus because the page simply has too much going on.
Look at the front pages of newspapers, and notice how they lead on 1 picture. Putting 2 pictures on a
front page is considered to be poor: the reader doesn't know where to look.
That goes double for websites, where the viewable area is much smaller than a newspaper page. Even if
you have more than 1 thing to say, it's better to 'go large' with 1 picture and then explain the other
things in text, next to or below it.
It Distracts from the Content
Users visit your site to get information, not to look at your graphics. Too many graphics will distract from
your content, or, worse, force readers to search for it. Any time your graphics get in the way of people
readily using your site, you're suffering from graphical overload. And that is a bad thing.
What's the solution? Simply decide which of all those graphics are really necessary. Remember, don't
add graphics just to look nice, each graphic must have a specific purpose.
An Exception: Photo Galleries

7. If the purpose of your site is photo presentation, then clearly multiple images are appropriate. However,
don't just stick up several large photographs -- provide thumbnails: smaller versions of each image. If
interested, the visitor can click on 1 to make it larger.
This fits more pictures on each page, and avoids wasting user download time and your bandwidth.
Keep in mind that in all web design, the images are there strictly to support the content. Even when the
content is graphical.
Hiring a web designer to come up with the custom solution that you need can set you back a few
thousand bucks. But you can do the whole thing yourself and make it drag and drop simple for mere
pennies with a tool like Breezy Websites. See http://breezywebsites.com for details!
Best web design : End of Part III