2010 Web design trends

I always like these sorts of things - they're like go to ideas to help initiate a website design, but supposedly "in" for the year.

Here's 2010's web design trends. (Apparently).

I'm pleased to read that large headers, images and typography are amongst those. These three are personal favourites of mine to implement and see online.

An interesting one that I have often considered exploring is the perspective one. (see picture above) To have an image and then the web text slotted into the photo somewhere is quite inventive and it's uniqueness online draws the user's attention.

http://webdesignledger.com/tips/web-design-trends-for-2010

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Live client - hosting package #3

The last of the hosting packages I think suitable for my client comes from Catalyst2.

Advantages:

Price - again, with my client's company being a start up and with a limited customer-base, it would be appreciated if the cost for the hosting could be kept down. The small package on offer from Catalyst2 comes in at £12 a year. Very competitive.

For this, you get 250MB of storage space, and again, as the site will be largely HTML and with only a few images, it would be unlikely to exceed this amount.

There is database support, phone support and a popular, but useful web tool - online chat support.

Downsides:

Again this host fails to provide a service level agreement, declaring how much you can expect the service to be online. But for £12 you can't expect everything.

You would have to purchase a separate domain at an extra cost, but as previously acknowledged, these are quite cheap at around £5 or £6 for two years.

In terms of traffic, there is always the worry that the site could become oversubscribed, shutting down activity for the rest of that month. The Catalyst2 package provides 2GB of traffic, which is a feasible amount for a site of this sort. The PDFs would likely pull the most on the server, but as these in themselves will be optimised and condensed it should prove adequate.

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Overall, Catalyst2 proves itself as another viable solution for Footworks by Sue. I will tender the 3 hosting packages I have blogged, to the client at our first meeting. The choice will then be taken and the online service purchased.

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Live client - hosting package #2

The next host I've looked up is OVH.co.uk. This information comes courtesy of .Net magazine which gives a phone number to purchase the packages.

On their '60gp' plan, my client would get a package that serves her needs adequately:

Price: £0.90 per month, working out to be £10.80 a year. For the domain: footworksbysue.com it is listed available at £4.99, likewise for the .co.uk. Total incurred price would be around £20 a year then.

Storage: The online server will hold 600MB (which is actually appropriate as she will not be hosting video or music etc) and can serve 20GB of traffic each month. Even with the PDF downloads, it will never come close to reaching the maximum limit.

Email: 5 accounts available. This again would prove enough for my client, who would at a push utilise two.

Elsewhere in the package, a database facility is provided - this will be a necessity in light of wanting to install Wordpress, requiring one database.

Support comes in the form of email and phone, along with a web control panel. Although not always necessary, this would come in as a handy safeguard should a FTP or WYSIWYG program be available.

Importantly however, OVH.co.uk fail to provide a service level agreement. Bearing in mind the type of site my client will be offering, this isn't too major a problem, yet it would be reassuring to know how well this host has performed in the past with their online and offline status.

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Live client - hosting package #1

I found this hosting package out myself, about a year and a half ago, when searching for the package to serve my online portfolio.

One.com

Advantages -

- Price

There are three packages available. The cheapest offers 3GB of storage and for the first year including VAT works out to be an incredibly cheap £10.45.

Typically, .coms are expensive on their own, yet one.com will include these in the cheap first year fee. Repeat subscriptions for the following year is around £18. Still very cheap.

- Customer service

The support team online are available via a live chat format. Just as you would on MSN, you type in your question and within seconds a response comes.

This is much better than having to wait on a premium rate phone-line or awaiting responses via email which can take days at a time. There are several encouraging testimonials from customers all over Europe, featuring a wide range of clientele - personal, business.

- Reliability

In the time I have had the package I have not experienced any system failure. Saying that, with it being a global company, serving people across Europe and America, these could occur out of office hours for us in Britain? Nonetheless, a definite plus is that should it be down, you can just get live chat support straight away.

Drawbacks -

- You can only have one domain name on your account. You could always buy any other domains with another provider and choose to automatically forward all traffic through to the one.com site.

- One database. Some like to hold and organize a lot of data, so may rule out one.com as a suitable host provider. All is not lost however as by using table prefixes you can get around having just the one database. Wordpress, a likely user of a database fits fine though, only needing the one.

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Live client project: Footworks by Sue

Over the next few months, the website requested by my live client is a reflexology and foot health site.

Footworks by Sue is a start up business, and so company branding, spanning from logo creation through to their online presence is required. A custom typeface will likely assist in developing a unique brand image, so implementing sIFR will be a consideration for presenting this online.

The site itself will be roughly 5 pages, consisting of the home page, about, contact, eBay, and services, all updatable by a CMS. The eBay feed will pull items from her existing shop and display a sample of what is on offer on her own site. The communication methods will be involve utilising a PHP contact form.

I intend to add Search Engine Optimisation so to give the site the best chances when launched, and also code in HTML 5, which offers an element of future-proofing when revisions are made in the future.

The first step from here will be sourcing and assessing various domain and host packages, finding something that is competitively price but caters for all of Footworks by Sue's needs.

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Testing for IE - no longer a problem*

On Vista and 7 in the least, once you upgrade your version of Internet Explorer to the latest, in this case, currently being IE8, you then lose the capability to have any other version installed. Sure, people have hacked it for XP to install previous versions such as IE5.5 and 6, but it doesn't answer the problem for all.

An alternative is browsershots, however anyone trying that will know that there is a lot of unticking boxes to specify what you want your site tested in, and also, it takes a long time to get the browser shots back. Sometimes, they don't come back at all!

Enter a great application I've found: IETester. Using the new Microsoft Ribbon style for the user interface, it allows you to view any site, through the eyes of IE 5.5, 6, 7, 8. You simply open a tab in whichever version you prefer and type in the address. Perfect.

*Although on testing in IE6 etc you then open up a whole new can of worms - IE's poor conformance to standards.

IETester

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