Online Design

One of the things that I do in my job is teach educators about using websites, blogs, and wikis in their classroom. It is really fun to help teachers and students learn to make a web presence for themselves, but often times design is a problem. The problems can be many, and don't kid yourself if you think it's only students making the following mistakes.

First, you want to make sure there isn't too much "action" happening on the screen at one time. There's nothing wrong with a scrolling banner, or a flash animation, but having more than one of these elements going at once is just too much.

Next, is color which can often be overwhelming. There are a lot of online color scheme tutorials and creators that can help you choose great colors. Usually the problems occur simply because the designer doesn't really understand the concept of contrast: bright on dark and dark on bright. A great site to help you to understand how color can work for your purpose is http://poynterextra.org/cp/index.html.

Here are a few examples I've used as what NOT to do when creating a web presence:

World's Worst Website

Haven Works


These are some great sites for color design:

Color Scheme Generator

4096 Color Wheel