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Design Issues
Web Page Design Issues
About Design
These are the most important issues.
- The most important thing to keep in mind when creating a page to make
the writing flow naturally. Write the material first and then massage the
text to include natural sounding text to accommodate hyperlinks.
- Never, ever, include link text such as "click here" or "here".
- Your page should not exceed 50K in size, including the html file and
the sum of all images on that page. If you include heavy graphics on
subpages, include some warning in the link (150K).
Placing images on a web page is a tricky business, when considering people
with disabilities who cannot see the image, or people browsing with images
turned off. One of the best resources for this is
ALT text in IMG which includes a thoughtful discussion of the issues
involved. Their General
Principles for ALT text is a terrific table of options. I recommend
you print the table.
- Many people are still using text browsers or running graphics browsers
with images turned off. Be sure to check your page in Lynx to be sure you
are as accessible as possible. Also check your page in a graphics browser
with its graphics turned off. In Netscape, click on the Options menu and
UNcheck "Autoload Images". You can also use Bobby to check how well people with
disabilities can reach your site. One of the wonderful aspects of the
Internet is the freedom it offers to people with disabilities. They can
move and speak in cyberspace as they never could IRL, so this is not an
insignificant issue!
- Be consistent in the use of background, text and link colors,
background images, footer information and navigation (ie, links to return
to the page you were on before, and to your home page). If you are
consistent in your overall design, people will enjoy a comfortable
familiarity in your site and be able to adapt to your structure (where the
links are to return to pages and to your home page, how to get your email
address, etc.)
- Check your pages on a variety of browsers and platforms to see that
they still look good.
- Be ethical in your preparation of pages for search engines. Don't
spam the page in an attempt to trick the spiders into falsely awarding
your page unmerited relevancy.
- Use a source like Dr. HTML to
check the accuracy of your HTML and to make sure all the links on your
pages are still active. Dr. HTML is a great tool for spell checking too!
- Speaking of spelling ... your web site is a global publication. Be
certain your writing is well crafted and your words are spelled correctly
;-)
Helpful Suggestions
If you're using the same body tag layout, with selected bgcolor and text
colors, place the body tag in a separate file (named "body") and just read
that file into a new page in the
pico
editor. (I recommend you print this)
legal Issues in Web Page Design
When is it ok to link other sites? Check out
Searchengine Watch on linking
Cascading Stylesheets (CSS)
Design Assistance
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1994 - 2010
Paula Edmiston
