Design Considerations:

From "Interface Design for Sun's WWW Site": http://www.sun.com/sun-on-net/uidesign/

• "People have very little patience for poorly designed WWW sites."
• "Users don't want to scroll: information that is not on the top screen when a page comes up is only read by very interested users."
• "Users don't want to read: reading speeds are more than 25% slower from computer screens than from paper."

Cliches to live by:

Don't hide your light under a bushel:

Put your key information at the top: who you are, the purpose of your page...
Identify yourself, both author and institution.
Don't make mystery links. Use clear, concise, descriptive terms and phrases. No "Click here" links.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket:

Avoid the temptation to put everything on the home page.
White space is good.
When everything is highlighted, nothing's highlighted.

Actions speak louder than words:

People look for the links.
Minimize the text in lists.

The Client is always right:

Your page will look different to every person who sees it.
Design with a text-only alternative.

• ALT options for images.
• Limited use of image maps.

Test your colors and backgrounds on different monitors.

• Poor resolution can make a subtle background overwhelming -- or cause it to disappear.

Courses of action:

View Source.

Look for Web pages you like. View the source. See how they did it.

Figure out why you like a page.

Put it into words: "this page uses contrast effectively," "I like the way they've aligned their images."

Sketch a draft.

Put something on paper, even if it's just blocks where the text and images will be. Does the outline look busy? Does the text jump around the page?

Test your pages.

Ask people to look at draft pages and make suggestions. Having someone around who will tell you when something stinks is the best design aid possible.

Tools for Design:

Books:

Williams, Robin. The Non-designer's design book: design and typographic principles for the visual novice. Berkeley, Cal.: Peachpit Press, 1994.

An excellent "short-course" in graphic design.

Williams, Robin. The Non-designer's Web book: an easy guide to creating, designing, and posting your own web site. Berkeley, Cal.: Peachpit Press, 1998.

A fun and useful counterpart to the above.

Web sites:

The Alertbox

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/
Read it. Live it.

Yale C/AIM WWW Style Guide.

http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/
A net classic.

Berners-Lee, Tim. "Style Guide for Online Hypertext,"

http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Provider/Style/All.html
The Father of the Web lays down the law.

Morgan, Eric Lease. "World Wide Web Publishing,"

http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/morgan/eric-binds-some-ties.html
Eric emphasizes readability, browsability, searchability.

Back to the Index