Understanding Web Design - Thailand Web Design Perspective

We get better design when we understand our medium. Yet even at this late cultural hour, many people don’t understand web design. Among them can be found some of our most distinguished business and cultural leaders, including a few who possess a profound grasp of design—except as it relates to the web.

Some who don’t understand Thailand web design nevertheless have the job of creating websites or supervising web designers and developers. Others who don’t understand web design are nevertheless professionally charged with evaluating it on behalf of the rest of us. Those who understand the least make the most noise. They are the ones leading charges, slamming doors, and throwing money—at all the wrong people and things.

If we want better sites, better work, and better-informed clients, the need to educate begins with us.

Preferring real estate to architecture
It’s hard to understand web design when you don’t understand the web. And it’s hard to understand the web when those who are paid to explain it either don’t get it themselves, or are obliged for commercial reasons to suppress some of what they know, emphasizing the Barnumesque over the brilliant.

The news media too often gets it wrong. Too much internet journalism follows the money; too little covers art and ideas. Driven by editors pressured by publishers worried about vanishing advertisers, even journalists who understand the web spend most of their time writing about deals and quoting dealmakers. Many do this even when the statement they’re quoting is patently self-serving and ludicrous—like Zuckerberg’s Law.


It’s not that Zuckerberg’s not news; and it’s not that business isn’t some journalists’ beat. But focusing on business to the exclusion of all else is like reporting on real estate deals while ignoring architecture.

And one tires of the news narrative’s one-dimensionalism. In 1994, the web was weird and wild, they told us. In ‘99 it was a kingmaker; in ‘01, a bust. In ‘02, news folk discovered blogs; in ‘04, perspiring guest bloggers on CNN explained how citizen journalists were reinventing news and democracy and would determine who won that year’s presidential election. I forget how that one turned out. Look at these Thailand websites

When absurd predictions die ridiculous deaths, nobody resigns from the newsroom, they just throw a new line into the water—like marketers replacing a slogan that tanked. After decades of news commoditization, what’s amazing is how many good reporters there still are, and how hard many try to lay accurate information before the public. Sometimes you can almost hear it beneath the roar of the grotesque and the exceptional. Check out the Thailand web design and SEO professionals at Back9clicks.com

THE SUSTAINABLE CIRCLE OF SELF-REGARD
News media are not the only ones getting it wrong. Professional associations get it wrong every day, and commemorate their wrongness with an annual festival. Each year, advertising and design magazines and professional organizations hold contests for “new media design” judged by the winners of last year’s competitions. That they call it “new media design” tells them nothing and you and me everything.

Although there are exceptions, for the most part the creators of winning entries see the web as a vehicle for advertising and marketing campaigns in which the user passively experiences Flash and video content. For the active user, there is gaming—but what you and I think of as active web use is limited to clicking a “Digg this page” button.

The winning sites look fabulous as screen shots in glossy design annuals. When the winners become judges, they reward work like their own. Thus sites that behave like TV and look good between covers continue to be created, and a generation of clients and art directors thinks that stuff is the cream of web design.


DESIGN CRITICS GET IT WRONG, TOO
People who are smart about print can be less bright about the web. Their critical faculties, honed to perfection during the Kerning Wars, smash to bits against the barricades of our profession.

The less sophisticated lament on our behalf that we are stuck with ugly fonts. They wonder aloud how we can enjoy working in a medium that offers us less than absolute control over every atom of the visual experience. What they are secretly asking is whether or not we are real designers. (They suspect that we are not.) But these are the juniors, the design students and future critics. Their opinions are chiefly of interest to their professors, and one prays they have good ones.

More sophisticated critics understand that the web is not print and that limitations are part of every design discipline. Yet even these eggheads will sometimes succumb to fallacious comparatives. (I’ve done it myself, although long ago and strictly for giggles.) Where are the masterpieces of web design, these critics cry. That Google Maps might be as representative of our age as the Mona Lisa was of Leonardo’s—and as brilliant, in its way—satisfies many of us as an answer, but might not satisfy the design critic in search of a direct parallel to, oh, I don’t know, let’s say Milton Glaser’s iconic Bob Dylan poster.

Typography, architecture, and Thailand web design
The trouble is, web design, although it employs elements of graphic design and illustration, does not map to them. If one must compare the web to other media, typography would be a better choice. For a web design, like a typeface, is an environment for someone else’s expression. Stick around and I’ll tell you which site design is like Helvetica.

Architecture (the kind that uses steel and glass and stone) is also an apt comparison—or at least, more apt than poster design. The architect creates planes and grids that facilitate the dynamic behavior of people. Having designed, the architect relinquishes control. Over time, the people who use the building bring out and add to the meaning of the architect’s design.

Of course, all comparisons are gnarly by nature. What is the “London Calling” of television? Who is the Jane Austen of automotive design? Madame Butterfly is not less beautiful for having no car chase sequence, peanut butter no less tasty because it cannot dance.

SO WHAT IS WEB DESIGN?
Web design is not book design, it is not poster design, it is not illustration, and the highest achievements of those disciplines are not what web design aims for. Although websites can be delivery systems for games and videos, and although those delivery systems can be lovely to look at, such sites are exemplars of game design and video storytelling, not of web design. So what is web design?

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

Let’s repeat that, with emphasis:


Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY
Great web designs are like great typefaces: some, like Rosewood, impose a personality on whatever content is applied to them. Others, like Helvetica, fade into the background (or try to), magically supporting whatever tone the content provides. (We can argue tomorrow whether Helvetica is really as neutral as water.)

Which web design is like that? For one, Douglas Bowman’s white “Minima” layout for Blogger, used by literally millions of writers—and it feels like it was designed for each of them individually. That is great design.

Great web designs are like great buildings. All office buildings, however distinctive, have lobbies and bathrooms and staircases. Websites, too, share commonalities.

Although a great site design is completely individual, it is also a great deal like other site designs that perform similar functions. The same is true of great magazine and newspaper layouts, which differ from banal magazine and newspaper layouts in a hundred subtle details. Few celebrate great magazine layouts, yet millions consciously or unconsciously appreciate them, and nobody laments that they are not posters.


The inexperienced or insufficiently thoughtful Thailand web designer complains that too many websites use grids, too many sites use columns, too many sites are “boxy.” Efforts to avoid boxiness have been around since 1995; while occasionally successful, they have most often produced aesthetically wretched and needlessly unusable designs.

The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.

If she achieves all that and sweats the details, her work will be beautiful. If not everyone appreciates this beauty—if not everyone understands web design—then let us not cry for web design, but for those who cannot see.

See more great articles like this at: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/understandingwebdesign/

Or visit www.back9clicks.com for the very best of Thailand Web Design

Do you really know what your Website Really Looks Like?

Do you really know what your website looks like?

Sounds like a silly question doesn't it.

Maybe the question needs to be what do your customers see when they look at your website designed by Thailand's web design professionals.

If you want the fancy web developer term, what I am talking about is 'cross browser compatibility'.

What that means is the same website will look different depending on what browser your customer uses to look at it.

Sometimes the differences might be just subtle. But sometimes certain elements of your website might not work at all!!


The difficult part of testing this is having access to different computers running different versions of the different internet browsers so that you can see what your website looks like on the different browsers.

Well, the good thing is you don't have to worry.

Head across to browsershots and you can have a look and see what your website looks like in the different browsers.

Enter the URL for your website designed by Bangkok web design professionals www.back9clicks.com and the browsers that you want to check and away you go.

You can also specify the screen size (not everyone has the biggest screen in the world), javascript, flash and colors.

This will allow you to see what your customers really see when they look at your website.

What browsers should you check?

If you have Google analytics installed on your website you will be able to see from your stats what browsers people are using to look at your website. This is the first place to start. Check these ones first.

W3Schools will also give you stats about the browsers people are using to surf the internet.

For March 2009, 17% of people on the internet are still using Internet Explorer 6. 25% are using IE7 and only 1.4% are using the most current version IE8.

Nearly 50% of people are using Firefox. Test the latest version of Firefox and the next to latest. As a general rule, people that use Firefox keep their browser up to date because Firefox tells you when there is a new version available.


A little over 4% are using the new Google Chrome browser and a small percentage use Safari and Opera.

What do your customers really see when they look at your website designed by Bangkok SEO and Website Professionals?

If you would like a list of the browsers that I check please send me an email and I will send you the list that I use.

If you find you have issues with how your website looks in the different browsers drop me a line and I will help you sort it out.

Do it By Hand

Back9clicks web designers code all their sites by hand.

Although there are some excellent tools around for building web sites, such as Adobe GoLive and Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Dreamweaver, professional code monkeys prefer to code by hand. Are they crazy masochists? Quite possibly.

There’s only one way to learn HTML, and that’s to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty with some actual code. But fear not: HTML has one of the easiest learning curves you’ll ever come across and you can create a basic web page with only a couple of lines. Writing code by hand also ensures that you write the leanest code possible, which is the ultimate aim of all HTML geeks.


Don’t throw out that copy of GoLive or Dreamweaver just yet. Both applications have excellent code writing environments, and have useful features, such as collapsable blocks of code and split views so you can code and see the results at the same time. If you want to try the code-only route, then any text editor that can save in the basic .txt format should do, but Mac users might want to check out Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit, and Windows users should give the freeware AceHTML editor from Visicome Media a whirl.

Check out the Thailand Web Design Professionals

55 SEO Tips for Website Design in Thailand

Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 55 quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most folks with some Bangkok web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem.

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches. Thailand web design.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Check for canonicalization issues - www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem - you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in Thailand web site design at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.

29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.

30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.

31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.

32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.

36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!

37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.

38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.

39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.

40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.

41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:

(1) Log out of Google

(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar

42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.

45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.

47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.

48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.

51. Add viral components to your web site or blog - reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.

53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.

54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

Richard V. Burckhardt, also known as The Web Optimist, is an SEO trainer based in Palm Springs, CA with over 10 years experience in search engine optimization, web development and marketing.

Original article can be found here

Fix Your Site with the Right DOCTYPE!

Original article at:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/doctype/

You’ve done all the right stuff, but your site doesn’t look or work as it should in the latest browsers.

You’ve written valid XHTML and CSS. You’ve used the W3C standard Document Object Model (DOM) to manipulate dynamic page elements. Yet, in browsers designed to support these very standards, your site is failing. A faulty DOCTYPE is likely to blame.

This little article will provide you with DOCTYPEs that work, and explain the practical, real–world effect of these seemingly abstract tags.

WHY A DOCTYPE for Thailand web designers?
Per HTML and XHTML standards, a DOCTYPE (short for “document type declaration”) informs the validator which version of (X)HTML you’re using, and must appear at the very top of every web page. DOCTYPEs are a key component of compliant web pages: your markup and CSS won’t validate without them.

As mentioned in previous ALA articles (and in other interesting places), DOCTYPES are also essential to the proper rendering and functioning of web documents in compliant browsers like Mozilla, IE5/Mac, and IE6/Win.

A recent DOCTYPE that includes a full URI (a complete Thailand web design address) tells these browsers to render your page in standards–compliant mode, treating your (X)HTML, CSS, and DOM as you expect them to be treated.

Using an incomplete or outdated DOCTYPE—or no DOCTYPE at all—throws these same browsers into “Quirks” mode, where the browser assumes you’ve written old-fashioned, invalid markup and code per the depressing industry norms of the late 1990s.


Clearly, this is not what you want. But it is often what you’ll get, due to the preponderance of incorrect or incomplete DOCTYPE information this article hopes to correct.

(Note: The Opera browser does not play by these rules; it always attempts to render pages in standards–compliant mode. Go, Opera! On the other hand, Opera does not yet offer solid support for the W3C DOM. But they’re working on it.) {Ed: Since this article was first published, Opera has delivered the DOM-compliant Opera 7 browser.}

WHERE HAVE ALL THE DOCTYPES GONE?
Since DOCTYPES are vital to the proper functioning of web standards in browsers, and since W3C is a leading creator of web standards, you might expect W3C’s website to provide a listing of proper DOCTYPEs, and you might also expect to be able to find this information quickly and easily in a single location. But as of this writing, you can’t. {Ed. Prompted in part by this article, the W3C now lists standard DOCTYPEs on its site. You will find the listing a few screens into the W3C tutorial, “My Thailand Web site design is standard. And yours?”}

W3.org is not A List Apart, WebReference, or Webmonkey. It’s not intended to help web designers, developers, and content folks get up to speed on the latest technological recommendations and practices. That’s not its job.

W3C does publish a series of tutorials, though most Thailand web developers are unaware of it. Mainly, though, W3C’s site houses a collection of proposals, drafts, and Recommendations, written by geeks for geeks. And when I say geeks, I don’t mean ordinary web professionals like you and me. I mean geeks who make the rest of us look like Grandma on the first day She’s Got Mail.™

You can search for DOCTYPEs all day at w3.org without finding one page that lists them all. And when you do hunt down a DOCTYPE (generally in relation to a particular Recommendation or Working Draft), it’s often one that won’t work on your site.

Scattered throughout W3C’s site are DOCTYPEs with missing URIs, and DOCTYPEs with relative URIs that point to documents on W3C’s own site. Once removed from W3C’s site and used on your web pages, these URIs point to non–existent documents, thus fouling up your best efforts and the browser’s Thailand web design.

For instance, many sites sport this DOCTYPE, copied and pasted directly from w3.org:

"DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
If you look at the last part of the DOCTYPE (“DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”), you’ll see that it is a relative link to a document on W3C’s site. Since that document is on W3C’s site but not yours, the URI is useless to the browser.


In this setting, the browser will attempt to parse your page in backward–compatible fashion, rendering your CSS as it might have looked in IE4, and reverting to a proprietary, browser–specific DOM. (IE reverts to the IE DOM; Mozilla and Netscape 6 revert to who knows what.)
The DOCTYPE you’d actually want to use is:


"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
Notice that the latter DOCTYPE includes a complete URI at the end of the tag. Since the tag provides a valid location on the web, the browser knows where to find it, and will render your document in standards–compliant mode.

DOCTYPES THAT WORK
So what DOCTYPEs should we use? Glad you asked. The following complete DOCTYPEs are the ones we need:

HTML 4.01 STRICT, TRANSITIONAL, FRAMESET
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">


"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">


"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
XHTML 1.0 STRICT, TRANSITIONAL, FRAMESET
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">


"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">


"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">
XHTML 1.1 DTD
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
NEXT STEPS
How can you help improve support for standards on the web? Besides bookmarking this page (and copying and pasting these DOCTYPEs for your own use), if your web editor inserts DOCTYPEs, you might want to check them out and compare them to the list above.

Many well–intentioned software makers have cut and pasted incomplete DOCTYPEs from W3C into their software. Result: when you use these programs’ built–in functionality to insert DOCTYPEs in your pages, the browsers go into Quirks mode, undoing all your hard work.

It’s worth contacting the folks who make your favorite authoring package, showing them the proper DOCTYPEs, and politely requesting them to address this issue in an incremental upgrade. (In some cases, you may also be able to modify your editor yourself.) Go to Thailand website design and development.

COMING SOON
We have every reason to believe that W3C’s site will soon sport a handy listing of accurate, usable DOCTYPES and other essential information in an easy–to–find location. In fact, Karl Dubost, Conformance Manager of W3C’s Quality Assurance team, contributed to the information in this little article.

Likewise, when The Thailand Web Design Standards Project relaunches (real soon), it will also provide this information. {Ed. note: The Web Standards Project relaunched in late 2002.}

But sites are being designed and built every day, and you need this information now—so there it is.

Happy authoring and rendering!

For the very best in Thailand web design see www.back9clicks.com

The Elegance of Imperfection in Thailand Web Design

Everything I know about the elegance of imperfection, I learned from the white porcelain plate I bought in Kyoto.

What’s so special about this plate? Before it was fired, it was perfectly round, but the artist intentionally roughed up the edges. It’s elegant, enhanced by anything that touches its surface: a bright green pear, roughly chopped chocolate, a pile of toasted almonds. Today, this plate sits on the desk in my home office. It symbolizes a crucial lesson about craft: utility is not contingent on perfection of form. In fact, the lessons I’ve learned about crafting elegant experiences—from the creative brief to user interface design—involve abandoning the desire for perfection entirely.

There is an anecdote, told and retold through translated Japanese literature, of a Zen master who is staying with a priest at a temple close to Kyoto. The priest is having guests over that evening, and he has spent much of the day in the garden—shaping the moss, plucking weeds, and gathering up the leaves in tidy arrangements, all in order to achieve the state of perfection the temple builders had originally designed.


Read the original article at http://www.alistapart.com/articles/theeleganceofimperfection
Wabi-sabi and making thailand websites
When I try to think of a paradigm for pursuing elegance through imperfection, the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi comes to mind.

Leonard Koren, in his book Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Bangkok Designers, Poets & Philosophers, describes the following material qualities of wabi-sabi: asymmetry, asperity, simplicity, modesty, intimacy, and the suggestion of a natural process.

These attributes may seem only to describe the aesthetics of a design. However, the most successful designs infuse these considerations at every stage, from idea to finished product. As Koren has written:

The simplicity of wabi-sabi is best described as the state of grace arrived at by a sober, modest, heartfelt intelligence. The main strategy of this intelligence is economy of means. Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered, but don’t sterilize. (Things that are wabi-sabi are emotionally warm, never cold.) Usually this implies a limited palette of materials. It also means keeping conspicuous features to a minimum. But it doesn’t mean removing the invisible connective tissue that somehow binds the elements into a meaningful whole.

Bringing heart to web experiences can be difficult, since websites and applications are fundamentally a construct of logic (via code). While you can’t create a website that functions as a pure expression of wabi-sabi, finding ways to infuse our creations with a hint of wabi-sabi adds a new dimension to our work. It forces us to consider how the natural order of our physical world should inform the virtual worlds of information that we create. One way this natural order finds expression in the Thailand web design world is through the notion of elegance.

A taxonomy of elegance
Jeremy Alexis, of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Thailand web design Design, asks us to consider three types of elegance when we face a design problem: logical elegance, systemic elegance, and aesthetic elegance.


Logical elegance stems from a clearly expressed reason for a website’s existence. Crafting an elegant, logical idea for a website brings clarity to a complex set of user needs and business requirements.

I recently saw Luke Wroblewski speak on the beta redesign of Yahoo’s home page. Luke described the redesign’s core idea: Yahoo would be “[t]he dashboard for what you love on the web.” The whole redesign team embraced both this statement and the complexity of their design task, and created a more meaningful experience for their users.

Systemic elegance arises from the scaffolding that supports a site’s core idea. In a website or web application, this scaffolding includes information architecture, user experience, and interaction design as well as content strategy and the flow of information through the system.

Netflix provides an excellent example of both logical and systemic elegance. The company’s undiluted focus on providing affordable access to movies, combined with an ever-evolving user experience rooted in an elegant site architecture, allows visitors to easily use social networking features and view movies online—while, simultaneously, their choices enhance the site’s referral engine.

Formal or aesthetic elegance involves a bangkok website’s visual form. This includes user interface design and the brand qualities that suffuse the site’s visual language, content, and user interactions.

Any site design that focuses on clarity can be considered formally elegant—even if the site is also goofy, such as National Geographic Kids. A more obvious example might be the Luigi Bormoli website, which uses AJAX to produce an elegant presentation of glassware. Like a print catalog, the site encourages users to sift and explore products, while eliminating needless page refreshes. Take out the AJAX-enabled aesthetic elements, however, and it isn’t quite as elegant.

I’d like to add one more variety of elegance to Alexis’ list. Natural elegance deals with the “feel” a website or application expresses through its behavior over time, and which is rooted in the rules of order that govern nature.

I’m not just talking about grid systems and earthy screen designs. Natural elegance refers to the ways websites and applications can function more powerfully by weaving natural imperfection into their design at every level. This sensitivity to feel should suffuse the whole endeavor, from the foundational user experience work to the final UI.

It’s possible to create perfectly pleasing websites by focusing only on formal, structural, and logical elegance. But those sites that embrace this fourth type of elegance feel to users like living beings who speak meaningful words; they are the marriage of form, function, pleasing content, and personal feeling.

Where wabi-sabi meets user interface design
Recall the attributes of wabi-sabi: asymmetry, asperity, simplicity, modesty, intimacy, and the suggestion of a natural process. You can probably imagine where these characteristics can be expressed through the visual design of your website. Consider the following possibilities:


WEBSITE AS BOOK—THE PAGE MODEL:
Visual exceptions create variety, forcing the eye to focus on priority content (asymmetry),
Enlivened by surface texture to create an illusion of dimensionality, (asperity),
Thailand website Design tension born of a grid system on a 2D plane (simplicity) or an organic arrangement that can’t be readily made into a system (suggestion of a natural process),
Typography is styled in a controlled manner (modesty), and
The design, from its governing idea through to the finer details, conveys emotion (intimacy).
Craigslist is a prominent, though somewhat rudimentary example of a website that exhibits this design model in a naturally elegant way. While the result may not be visually stunning, the site directly reflects the ways in which we view and share information as a community. Craigslist has evolved in its own organic way over time while staying true to a kind of human expression that mimics a real-world community bulletin board.

The rules change, however, when you’re talking about websites that move beyond the page model to mimic our physical world in its organization and behavior. There is a fine balance between order and chaos when designing the following types of websites:



WEBSITE AS GARDEN—THE PHYSICAL WORLD MODEL:
Design tension born of figure/ground relationships on a 2D plane (asymmetry) with an illusion of a third dimension on a z-axis,
Surface textures are mapped onto objects, simulating reality, and
Visual exceptions, if they don’t conform to the simulation, break the illusion.
The Eco Zoo takes natural elegance and makes it physical. On this site, you can “climb” a tree and read stories in a pop-up book about creatures such as Yagi-Chan, a goat that wears sheep’s clothing.

WEBSITE AS PETRI DISH—THE MOLECULAR MODEL:
Design tension born of the gravitational pull between page elements,
Objects can’t express a high level of detail, otherwise the UI is all noise, and
The site is the visual exception, tending from disorganization (exploratory) to organization (sorted) with a click.
WeFeelFine.org—a site that harvests and visualizes data about human feeling from blogs around the world—demonstrates the ease, flexibility, and fluidity characteristic of natural elegance.

A koan for the web designer
Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality.

–Shunryu Suzuki

We’ve explored a number of threads that, when properly woven into a well-thought-out website, can infuse it with heartfelt intelligence beyond mere aesthetics. In small doses, wabi-sabi thinking can provide a counterpoint to our modernist tendency to refine things within an inch of their life, bringing a measure of grace to what would otherwise be a conglomeration of rigidly spaced pixels on a screen.

Beware that the pursuit of Thailand website design and development perfection is always a denial of the perfection that exists within ourselves in the physical world. Perceiving even a whisper of our own “perfect reality” is the very experience that our users and clients have hired us to capture, mindfully, through our work.