| 10 designs of Web design | ||
|---|---|---|
| Audience Targeting | Download Speed | Style |
| A critical element in effectively presenting ideas and content is planning your site with your targeted audience in mind. Who will be viewing the site? What will those people find useful and interesting? Whatever the purpose of your site, that purpose should be recognized from the moment the page begins to appear, creating the intended mood. | Your pages should appear quickly. While new surfers might be impressed with snazzy graphics, experienced net-people are more likely to bookmark and revisit or recommend a site which is content rich and lets them locate the information they are seeking efficiently. | Does download speed mean that web sites must be dull and boring? No way. Simplicity can have a tremendous degree of style. Your personal touch and the care you exercise in choosing graphics, colors, and layout, in writing text, in providing navigation aids are the elements which will bring your web site to life. |
| Purpose | Consider white-space balance | Make sure your links work |
| What do you intend to have your pages do? They might entertain, sell, inform, or report. They might keep records, impress clients (though they won't if the design is bad!), recruit members, gain customers or provide services. Each of these should help dictate your design process. Entertainment implies glitz and glamour - pizzazz. Entertainment pages would be much differently designed from pages that are for reporting of information. | As in art, balance between objects, between dark and light, is necessary. Look at the page from a moderate distance - do you mostly see dark or light? If the former, consider modifying the page to lighten it up. Information is easier to absorb if it doesn't saturate the page. | This will prevent disappointed readers. The best way to make sure this doesn't happen is to test the pages several times - from different domains if possible, at minimum from different machines. Then check the error logs on a regular basis to make sure others aren't finding bad links on your pages that you missed. |
| Avoid dead-end links | Make titles very descriptive | Put important info at the top of the page |
| Give your readers a "way out" of your pages that is to your advantage. Don't make them dependent on the back button to see more. Perhaps after reading one section of your information the next logical place to go would be to another section, and not necessarily back to the top. Give them a choice to take either path. | Titles show up at the top of browsers, get saved on bookmark lists and hotlists - they need to say more than "stuff" for them to be a good reference back to your pages. | It should be visible when the page first appears. If someone needs to scroll to see it they may miss it. This is particularly true with What's New links and chronological listings - the latest information should be first. |
| Maintain style with the graphics | Limit number of links in a paragraph | Bibliography |
| This is just a common sense design approach - continuity of design elements. Carry it throughout your pages. Another way to say this is that buttons and icons should look like they were created by the same artist. | There are some paragraphs where there is a link on every other word. This is very distracting to read! First the color change is annoying and second, one has a tendency to follow the link and get distracted from the initial intent of the paragraph - particularly if the link is off to some other site full of lots of neat stuff on its own. Better to reserve those links for beneath the paragraph unless they add clarity to what is being said. | Stanford University Dream Link Html Help Graphics/Design Builder Site Building |
