Web design is more than just creating an eye pleasing display. Sure, that's part of it, but designing for the web has a world of constraints that must be kept in mind.

When designing for the web, our philosophy is to design for the lowest denominator without sacrificing creativity. With that in mind, here are a few topics to keep in mind when designing for the web.

The Web Safe Color Palette
When deciding on a color scheme to use on a web site, your choices become very limited. This is due to the variances between web browsers and among operating systems. What you end up with is the web safe color palette totalling a whopping 212 colors (some even say fewer than that). It doesn't leave you much to choose from. However, as computers and computer monitors continue to fall in price, more and more people are get larger monitors that can produce higher color depths.

Oh, the Monitor Size
Print designers have a hard time adjusting to the possibilities of monitor sizes and resolutions. They are used to the fixed size that paper provides. Monitor resolutions, though, can range from 640x480 up to 1600x1400 and higher. Again, more and more computer owners can afford larger monitors and therefore set higher resolutions, but this is not always the case.

Yawn ...
A very important aspect in capturing your site visitor's attention will be download time. With broadband not quite in the mainstream, the majority of Internet users are still using modems and dial-up connections. This means you'll need to make your web site as lean as possible for your design. This includes optimizing graphics for the Internet and choosing the appropriate amount of content to put on each page. You want to give your site a chance to grab each person's attention and having an overloaded site will turn them away quickly!