Building Social Web Applications

Chapter 4. Creating a Visual Impact

Your audience will not see the code behind your website. They will see the user interface to your application through the web pages on your site. The goal of this chapter is to help you understand the difference between the visual approach to creating a web page and the visual approach to building a web application.

Before we explore how application design is changing, let me make an admission first: I’m not a visual designer. I can pick colors for the interior design of my house, but I know the final visual look of a website is best left to others. I know typography, copy, whitespace, and layout are critical to the understanding and emotional appeal of a website, but this book won’t tell you how to create fantastic visual designs for the Web. For that, see Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke (New Riders Press) or CSS Mastery by Andy Budd (Friends of Ed).

Note

Jesse James Garrett distinguishes the code and the visual elements as the skeleton and surface planes in his book, The Elements of User Experience (Peachpit Press).

Instead, I will examine the uppermost layers of a web application and how they interact with the underlying code. So, I’ll be talking about the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS that get delivered to the browser your reader is using, as opposed to the code that gets executed on your web server. This chapter serves as the introduction to Chapter 7, where we’ll look more closely at what is actually going to happen in your application. This chapter ...