Web Design
Producing a web page is easy, designing a good web page is not. It is similar to designing other media, but with greater restrictions on what is possible. However, the general principles of good design apply to World Wide Web information equally well. The disadvantage is that careful design takes time and effort, but hopefully it is worth while!
Who is your audience?
- Think carefully about who your target audience is?
- What do they want to know?
- How are they going to find out about your web site?
Think carefully about what you want to convey
The information content is most important but don't forget the impression that your design creates.
Plan your work out in advance
Remember to think about your possible audience, and plan it with this in mind.
Stick to a simple layout
In general, the most successful designs are the simplest.
- Decide upon a clean and simple 'style', and stick to it.
- Avoid cluttering a page with too many images, lines and mixtures of bold and italic text.
Granularity
- Try to keep your information in sensible sized chunks.
- For example, just because you have to put a book onto the Gateway, and you receive it as a single word processed document doesn't mean that this is the best way to do it! Books come split into chapters, with contents pages and indexes for very good reasons.
Maintenance
- How often are you going to update your pages?
- How often do you need to update your pages?
- Web sites age very quickly. Plan your maintenance
Producing Good and Bad web pages
Many users of the web have highlighted the worst features of design. Here are a selection:
Ten Good Deeds in Web Design From The Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability. Jakob Nielsen provides fortnightly articles on web usability
The top 15 mistakes of web design
World Wide Web Consortium Checklist
Technical Issues
It is often easy to forget the technical problems which users will have with your information. However, with a little thought it is possible to alleviate them to a great extent. Mostly these are related to the speed of network being used, and to the physical computer in use. A distant user, or one on a slow network will find that information is slow to retrieve. They are therefore likely to give up more quickly than most users. Not everyone has a high resolution colour monitor! Many people only have textual access to the network, with no pictures. Others may be able to get pictures, but only in black and white. A little thought on your part can help them enormously.
-
Size of documents
Large documents will need to be split into manageable chunks. As a rough guide, more than 2 or 3 A4 pages, or say 4 screens full of information is likely to become unwieldy. Large documents are also much slower to download, especially annoying for users browsing hoping to find some information.
-
Images
Images are a considerable problem for most users. The golden rule for graphics is only include a picture when it provides useful information which cannot be imparted easily in other forms. More detailed guidelines are: Provide alternative text which can be displayed instead of the picture on text only browsers. You will need to read one of the guides on HTML to find out how to do this. If you are going to include a picture, keep it small! This reduces transfer times and ensures that they will display properly on smaller screens. If you are designing a graphic image, try to choose colours which will provide sufficient contrast in black and white. Carelessly chosen combinations of red, green and blue can easily look a uniform shade of grey!
Copyright
It is important that you respect other people's intellectual property. In other words you can't copy other sites' content and pass it off as your own. Most importantly you cannot use images on the internet unless you have the right to reproduce them electronically.
