You need to make a set of web design mockups for your client. You’d like to find an easy way to show these mockups in clean XHTML and CSS code, because plain JPGs don’t convey the full sense of the design, and sliced tables are evil. In fact, let’s forget table slices ever existed.
Caveat: This article is for people who need to produce valid, standards-compliant mockups quickly, with the graphics tools they already use. This is not a production technique for people who want to get the most benefit out of (X)HTML by creating structural, semantic markup. Creating structural, semantic markup, as A List Apart and most standardistas recommend, still takes time, thought, and hand-coding.
WYSIWYG graphics editors such as Fireworks, GoLive, and ImageReady allow you to generate HTML code, but the exported code tends to use tables or absolute positioning. That’s so 1999. So what, then, can these programs do in terms of producing valid and useful code? More than you think. I’ll show you an easy way to produce mockups with Photoshop, prepare them for the web with ImageReady, and clean up the code afterward.
It seems strange to be talking about something as basic as “navigation” 11 years into the web era. And yet, if you’re a web designer, chances are you’ve made some mistakes in this fundamental area. I know I have. So let’s go back to basics.
On a website, “navigation” doesn’t mean just links. Navigation is, like most elements of a website, about communicating with the user. Good navigation tells a story, and good stories have a beginning, middle, and end.
Navigation also has three parts, which are used to communicate to the user about their past, present, and future. Any good global navigation scheme should, at a glance, answer the top three questions every user has at the back of their mind on any page:
- Where am I? (Present)
- Where can I go? (Future)
- Where have I been? (Past)
