Most of our customers ask a creative buro to design their website or application whereupon it is forwarded to us to turn it into a working website/application. Now some people think that designing for print is the same as designing for non-print. During my time here I have seen some frequently made mistakes, who would look perfectly normal to a graphic designer.

Here are some things you should and shouldn't do when you're designing a website or application. Use them to (y)our advantage:

- Be careful when using several different fonts. If you use a special font, you have to keep in mind that a developer has to use SIFR to display it properly in a browser. Turning the text into a image is not an option. When using a font for a menu, try to use system fonts as much as possible.

- Be careful with the use of transparency (by using PNG). Although Microsoft removed it's piracy check, which makes it easy to update to IE 7 (HINT!), a fair amount of the visitors on the internet still uses Internet Explorer 6. And IE 6 still doesn't support transparency. To work around that problem you need to use a PNG-fix, which has some consequences for the performance of the site.

- When an object has to be scalable in height, don't use gradients in the background. It is very difficult to repeat a background with a gradient in it.

- The width of your graphic file has to be the screen-resolution width minus the width of the scrollbar. So for a site that has to fit in a 1024px resolution, a width of 1000 px is nice. 980px is even better.

- When your layout is finished and you send your layered file, make sure that you have no rasterized text-layers. Also try to group layers as much as you can. This way you keep your graphic file as tidy as possible.

If you try to keep these things in mind when designing a website or application you will avoid problems in a later stage. And it will keep webdesigners/developers happy.