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Design for the disabled
Not every user of your site will be able to take advantage of the graphics you offer on your pages, and a number of users may be visually impaired. One of the beauties of the Web and HTML is the ability to build in "alternate" messages ("ALT" tags in HTML) so that users without graphics capabilities can still understand the function of graphics on your pages. Using specially designed software, blind users can hear (via synthesized speech) the alternate messages you supply along with your graphics, and so will not completely miss the content of your pictures and graphic navigation buttons. If you will be using graphic menu systems for navigation, these text-based alternate menus will be an especially important aid to users without the ability to see your graphics.
Navigation
Providing a rich set of graphic navigation and interactivity links within
your Web pages will pull the user's attention down the page, weaning them
away from the general-purpose browser links, and drawing them further
into your content. By providing your own consistent and predictable set
of navigation buttons you also help give the user a sense of your site's
organization, and makes the logic and order of your site visually explicit.
Provide context or lose the reader
Readers need a sense of context, of their place within an organization
of information. In paper documents this sense of "where you are"
is a mixture of graphic and editorial organizational cues supplied by
the graphic design of the book, the organization of the text, and the
physical sensation of the book as an object. Electronic documents provide
none of the physical cues we take for granted in assessing information.
When we see a Web hypertext link on the page we have few cues to where
we will be led, how much information is at the other end of the link,
and exactly how the linked information relates to the current page. Even
the view of individual Web pages is restricted for most users.
Naming conventions and file structures
Should all of the HTML files go in one folder and all images in another?
If you have a small site and only a handful of each, this could be a simple
way to go. But as your site grows, so will the number of files, and sorting
them into subcategories will make them simpler to locate and change. Think
about alternatives that make sense for your particular setup. What about
grouping the files by model, so each product has its own folder? Or you
could organize everything by date, if you are constantly adding new content.
There is no right or wrong way to organize this stuff. It's all up to
you. But if you're in charge of maintaining the site, you'll want the
structure to make sense to you. Just think about the type of content you'll
be dealing with and map out the backend accordingly.
You should also be mindful of the names of your files and directories
(directory is another word for folder — basically, it's just a container
for files). When you're first building a site, you probably don't give
a whole lot of thought to that type of stuff — you just name everything
something that's intuitive to you so you don't need to sit and remember
what each file or folder contains. But the people who visit your site
may find your nicknames and shorthand a little baffling.
"But, hey," you might say. "We're just talking about filenames.
Users will never see any of that stuff, except in the URLs, and who pays
attention to that garbage anyway?" But users often do look at URLs,
and some use them to navigate. Somebody could do a search and end up at
a page deep within your site, and then he or she might get back to the
root level by erasing all the extra stuff from the URL. For example, a
user might cut http://www.stapler-co.com/guns/themonster.html down to
http://www.stapler-co.com/guns/, hoping to see a complete list of stapler
guns. If the URLs are nonintuitive, then that is just one more barrier
between visitors and the content they want — and such barriers are
to be avoided whenever possible.
It's also better to have short, memorable names, resulting in URLs that
roll off the tongue, than names leading to URLs that have to be scrawled
on two or three pieces of paper. Remember to pay attention to case too.
Depending on what type of server your site is on, "a" can be
an entirely different animal than "A".
To keep things consistent and simple, use lowercase letters for all folder
and filenames. Servers tend to get confused by strange filenames, so be
kind to them. Don't use spaces or questionable characters (like |, &,
*, %, etc.). Only use periods before the extension (like .html or .gif),
and don't include more than one extension in your filename:
OK: deluxe_model_stapler.gif
Not OK: deluxe.model.stapler.map.gif
