Design Issues for Web Sites
What do you want to accomplish through your Web page? Some examples are to provide information, describe a concept or process, serve as a gateway to other information, sell a product, or advocate a cause. Take a look at other sites or pages that have a similar purpose.
Here's a list of some purposes along with the URL for Web pages designed to fulfill that purpose:
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Personal Home Page |
"Welcome to Ernest Ackermann's home page" |
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Explain a topic or concept |
"The Trail You Leave On the Web" |
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Explain a process |
"Basic Search Strategy: The Ten Steps" |
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Provide information about a topic |
"Directories and Virtual Libraries" |
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Support a cause |
"Support Our Effort to Stop Spam!" |
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Persuade the reader |
"Clean Water & Wetlands" |
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Sell a product |
"Amazon.com" |
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Give information about an organization |
"About IFJ" |
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Give information about an event |
"Fredericksburg Songwriters Showcase" |
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Provide a service |
"Actual Car Information " |
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Serve as a gateway to other information |
"HTML with Style " |
There’s no substitute for planning and design. Take the time to think about what you want to do and how you can accomplish it.
Focus on content
The HTML presented in the text can be interpreted by most browsers, but other HTML tags such as those for centering text, creating tables, and background colors, aren’t interpreted correctly by all Web browsers. So the HTML you use in a Web page ought to be chosen to give the page the format you’d like and be viewable in that format by most Web browsers; not everyone will be using Netscape Navigator. Try viewing a Web page with different browsers to learn what works best.
The difficulty with long documents is that they may take a long time to transfer before they can be viewed, and it’s more time consuming to scroll or page through to find appropriate information. It’s generally better to divide a long Web page into several smaller ones, and provide a contents page, making the items in the table of contents hyperlinks to the appropriate sections.
The issue here is the amount of time it will take to retrieve the Web page. Think about the type of equipment your reader's will be using to view your Web page.
You want your page to be effective and well received. Grammatical or spelling errors don’t give a good impression of you and can turn off a reader pretty quickly.
Let the spacing reflect the organization of the text and content of the Web page. If the page has several distinct sections, separate them with a shaded bar (<HR>) or blank spaces. Use bold or italic font appropriately. Section headings ought to be emphasized as well as important subsections or words. On the other hand, you need not overdo the use of spacing, shaded bars, and emphasized text. Because something can be done, doesn’t mean it has to be done.
These items are usually placed at the end of the Web page. Web pages ought to contain the name(s) of the person(s) responsible for developing the Web page. It gives credit and responsibility where they are due. The URL for the page is included so that someone reading it will know how to reach it on the Web in case the page is printed or reproduced in some other manner. Knowing when something was changed last is helpful for readers to keep track of the most recent version of a document, and it also gives an indication of how timely the content of the Web page is. When you give the date, it’s a good idea to spell out or abbreviate the month since 5/4/99 means May 4, 1999 in the United States but April 5, 1999 in Europe.