Web Design Support & Assistance
- Determine your audience.
- Determine why your audience will visit your page. What do they need to see? What do they need to do?
- List the content you want to include in your web site. What items belong in the same category or on the same page?
- Make an outline, storyboard, or map of your site to see how the information will be organized and connected before you do any html coding.
- Look at other web sites with a purpose similar to yours to see what kinds of information they have included and how it is organized.
- Keep your audience and the content they need clearly in mind when making any design decisions about your web site.
- Limit the options on a page to no more than ten items. Seven is an optimal number. Viewers have a hard time taking in more options than that. Try to make the options visually distinct.
- Try to limit your web environment to four levels.
- Provide a site map to help visitors see where they are and how to get where they want to be.
- Provide clear and consistent navigation tools, placed in a consistent location on the pages within the site. Include a return-to-home-page option on deeper-level pages.
- Provide some visual indication of where visitors are in the site and a clear way to get to higher levels.
- Keith Instone's Usable Web may be helpful. This site is a collection of links about information architecture, human factors, user interface issues, and usable design specific to the World Wide Web.
- George Mason University Web pages must have: an e-mail contact, date of last update, the visual identity established for the university, the university logo that links back to www.gmu.edu on every page. See Mason's Web Identity Guide.
- Be sure to give your page an HTML title that clearly identifies the content. This title will display in the window header of the page.
- Provide up-to-date information. Always include the date of last revision on each page so your visitors will know how current your information is. Review your content periodically to make sure it is still accurate.
- Include an e-mail contact to the author or maintainer of the page so that visitors can interact with you and provide feedback on your content.
- Include a table of contents or index on the front page of your site telling what the site offers.
- Design pages for little or no scrolling. If possible, limit each page to no more than two screens. Everything important should be seen on the initial screen. If you must present long documents, divide them into sections with internal links among the sections.
- Avoid "under construction" announcements. Don't create links to pages that have no content. Provide content on every page. Make sure every mouse click counts.
- Proofread your web pages carefully. Spelling errors suggest that your content may not be reliable.
You should also be aware that writing for the Web is different than writing for paper publication. The staff at Sun Microsystems has put together an excellent guide to Writing for the Web with many practical suggestions on presenting content effectively.
- Use an easy-to-read font of an appropriate size. Use type styles consistently.
- Make sure the page background colors or patterns (if any) do not interfere with the readability of the text.
- Limit the use of elements that take a long time to load or require special browser add-ins.
- Avoid using "click here" for links to other pages. The link text should inform viewers about the content of the page they will link to. Include information about the size of the file when providing links to downloadable images, sounds, movies, etc.
- Design small for 640 x 480 screens.
- In general, make sure that design enhances content rather than distracts from it.
- Keep graphics file sizes as small as possible. Try not to use more than one large graphic per page. Design pages so that no page is larger than 60 K.
- Limit graphics to 472 pixels wide (the default width for Netscape on a 13-inch screen).
- Scan images for web use at 72 pixels per inch; this is a typical computer monitor display.
- Use a consistent graphic design on all pages within a web site: same buttons, bullets, banners, color scheme, etc.
- Use ALT, HEIGHT, and WIDTH tags in graphics to make your page accessible to more visitors.