OUGD504 - Design For Web: Web Standards Research

Research for web designing

Web standard fonts

The fonts that are most safe to use are:

• Arial / Helvetica
• Times New Roman / Times
• Courier New / Courier

Other options that usually work cross-platform are:

• Palatino
• Garamond
• Bookman
• Avant Garde

Fonts that work on Windows and MacOS are:

• Verdana
• Georgia
• Comic Sans MS
• Trebuchet MS
• Arial Black
• Impact

Image formats

Web-safe colours

Colours may be specified as an RGB triplet or in hexadecimal format.A hex triplet is a six-digit, three-byte hexadecimal number used in HTML, CSS, SVG, and other computing applications, to represent colors. 

The bytes represent the red, green and blue components of the colour. 

One byte represents a number in the range 00 to FF (in hexadecimal notation), or 0 to 255 in decimal notation. This represents the least (0) to the most (255) intensity of each of the color components. Thus web colors specify colors in the Truecolour (24-bit RGB) color scheme. 

The hex triplet is formed by concatenating three bytes in hexadecimal notation, in the following order:

Byte 1: red value (colour type red)

Byte 2: green value (colour type green)

Byte 3: blue value (colour type blue)

For example, consider the color where the red/green/blue values are decimal numbers: red=36, green=104, blue=160 (a greyish-blue color). 

The decimal numbers 36, 104 and 160 are equivalent to the hexadecimal numbers 24, 68 and A0 respectively. 

The hex triplet is obtained by concatenating the 6 hexadecimal digits together, 2468A0 in this example.

Note that if any one of the three colour values is less than 16 (decimal) or 10 (hex), it must be represented with a leading zero so that the triplet always has exactly six digits. 

For example, the decimal triplet 4, 8, 16 would be represented by the hex digits 04, 08, 10, forming the hex triplet 040810.

The number of colours that can be represented by this system is 256³ or 2²⁴ = 16,777,216.

http://www.color-hex.com

http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html

Screen sizes

iPad screen sizes:

 iPhone screen sizes:

Standard computer screen sizes:

2880 X 1800

2560 X 1600

2560 X 1440

1920 X 1080

1680 X 1050

1440 X 900

1280 X 800 

1152 X 720

1024 X 640 

800 X 600

http://www.websitedimensions.com/pixel/index.html

Web image formats

• The PNG, JPEG, and GIF formats are most often used to display images on the Internet.

JPEG

• JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) is a compression method 
• The JPEG/JFIF filename extension is JPG or JPEG. 
• Nearly every digital camera can save images in the JPEG/JFIF format, which supports 8-bit grayscale images and 24-bit color images (8 bits each for red, green, and blue). 
• JPEG applies lossy compression to images, which can result in a significant reduction of the file size. 
• The amount of compression can be specified, and the amount of compression affects the visual quality of the result. When not too great, the compression does not noticeably detract from the image's quality, but JPEG files suffer generational degradation when repeatedly edited and saved. (JPEG also provides lossless image storage, but the lossless version is not widely supported.)

GIF

• GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is limited to an 8-bit palette, or 256 colors. 
• This makes the GIF format suitable for storing graphics with relatively few colors such as simple diagrams, shapes, logos and cartoon style images. 
• The GIF format supports animation and is still widely used to provide image animation effects. 
• It also uses a lossless compression that is more effective when large areas have a single color, and ineffective for detailed images or dithered images.

PNG

• The PNG (Portable Network Graphics) file format was created as the free, open-source successor to GIF. 
• The PNG file format supports 8 bit paletted images (with optional transparency for all palette colors) and 24 bit truecolor (16 million colors) or 48 bit truecolor with and without alpha channel - while GIF supports only 256 colors and a single transparent colour. 
• Compared to JPEG, PNG excels when the image has large, uniformly coloured areas. 
• PNG provides a patent-free replacement for GIF and can also replace many common uses of TIFF. I
• ndexed-color, grayscale, and truecolor images are supported, plus an optional alpha channel.
• PNG is designed to work well in online viewing applications like web browsers so it is fully streamable with a progressive display option. 

Hosting fees

A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data centre. Web hosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for other servers located in their data centre.

Types of hosting:

Free web hosting service

• Offered by different companies with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.

Shared web hosting service 

• One's website is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. 
• Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources. 
• The features available with this type of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often sell shared web hosting and web companies often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.

Reseller web hosting 

• Allows clients to become web hosts themselves. 
• Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. 
• Many resellers provide a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the technical support themselves.

Virtual Dedicated Server

• This divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. 
• The users may have root access to their own virtual space. 
• Customers are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server.

Dedicated hosting service 

• The user gets his or her own Web server and gains full control over it 
• However, the user typically does not own the server.

Managed hosting service

• The user gets his or her own Web server but is not allowed full control over it.
• However, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. 
• The user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server. 
• The user typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.

Colocation web hosting service

• Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colo server.
• The hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server.
• This is the most powerful and expensive type of web hosting service. 
• In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, Internet access, and storage facilities for the server. 
• In most cases for colo, the client would have his own administrator visit the data center on site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. 

Cloud hosting

• A new type of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. 
• A cloud hosted website may be more reliable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware goes down.
• Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the user, rather than a flat fee for the amount the user expects they will use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. 

Clustered hosting

having multiple servers hosting the same content for better resource utilisation  

Clustered Servers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting solution. 

A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Usually Web hosts use Clustered Hosting for their Shared hosting plans, as there are multiple benefits to the mass managing of clients).

Grid hosting

• This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.

Home server

• Usually a single machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection.

An example of hosting costs:

http://www.34sp.com/website-hosting-prices