Kevin Mikles

000774328

11/12/02

ENGL328: Site Revamping

http://www.geocities.com/gvsboy

 

Out of all the things I learned this year, the knowledge that impacted me the most was how to design a user-friendly website.  Any idiot can piece together a few pages and call it a home, but certain design information and implementation can keep readers from becoming annoyed, lost, and generally unhappy when surfing your site.

The easier your site is to read and navigate, the more likely visitors will explore it.  The more likely visitors explore it, the more likely you get your information across, which is the whole point of having a web page in the first place.  My starter page was a scary domain, indeed; I’m sure a few visitors were scared off by the design and content.

Changes to my site were inevitable; “Our Dark Lord’s Ethereal Den of Deception” hardly sounds professional, so I revamped it per my college English class’ requirements.  What you see here is about as professional as I can possibly be.

            Basically, everything I previously created had to go.  The animal skull backgrounds were disgusting, and made the important text difficult to read.  The content was all made up; I’m really not the “Dark Lord” I claimed to be.  I’m just a boy.  I mean a man.  A grown man.

            Despite all the ritualistic images and gross text found on in my original site, the scariest thing still remained – hands down – the huge picture of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen posted on my main page.  They had to go.

            Virtually starting from scratch, I decided to follow the simple route.  I refrained from using tons of huge images and distracting backgrounds, sticking to blue text on a plain white backing.  A picture of Morrigan, my mistress of the night, replaced the Olsen twins.  A page dedicated to her was added, explaining her origin and my attraction to her.

            According to SpiderPro’s 100 Web Do’s and Don’ts, you should use small pages and split up your information.  To make my site easy to navigate, I made each page the same length – exactly one screen – and let the user know what screen resolution my site works best on.  At the bottom of each page, I implemented a menu for easy access to the rest of my pages.

            Another useful piece of information I learned from SpiderPro was to comment on any links you provide.  It made sense, so I wrote a phrase under each one of my “special links” so people would not enter the sites completely blind.  I did, however, use vague speech so the visitor would still be surprised.

            My site was finally ready for some real content.  My brief biography had titled sections, making it easy to skim through to get to the juicy parts of my exciting life.  I included large, bold headings on top of each of my pages, letting the user know exactly where he or she currently is.  I’m aiming for a lost-surfer count of zero.  Hopefully I created precautions to achieve this number.