[Comp
Lab Start Page]
Designing Your Website
Look at lots of websites.
Decide what you like, and what you don't like, and why.
Write it down.
Use these notes to refine your design at every stage.
Don't hesitate to look back at the sites again as your feelings and plans change.
Get your answers clear to these questions:
Who will your viewers be?
What do you expect them to get out of your site?
Is it your aim to entice and entertain, or to inform?
Do you want your viewers to have fun finding things, as in a puzzle?
Or do you want it to be very clear what's where, so users can get straight to any item?
Realize that some viewers will be looking at your site using monitors with lower resolution (640 x 480) and poorer color (256 colors). Decide whether you care if these users get a "good" look at your site. There is a trade-off here: you can design with better graphics and better color if you have at leat 800 x 600 and 16 million colors, but some users with worse systems will see it looking really poor. Or you can design to the worse system and choose colors and resolutions that work OK, and everyone will see the site about the same, but nobody will be seeing as "pretty" a site as if you went hi-res, hi-color. At least DO design so that word-wrap and table dimensions and the like are not total garbage when viewed at 640 x 480, or even any resolution without the browser window maximized.
Decide whether it matters if viewers with slower connections (MANY will have modems, some will have SLOW modems) get impatient waiting for your page to load. Graphics make the download time longer. To speed up your pages, use fewer graphics, smaller graphics files, and re-use the same graphics where feasible. (Dots and buttons and arrows etc. will be cached--avoiding using 6 different kinds of right-arrow when one kind would do will help your speed, etc.).
Decide whether to put all or most of your stuff on one page, or make several pages and divide your stuff up. Too few pages too big make for slower load times and excessibe scrolling. Too many pages too small makes things chopped up and leaves the user guessing where to find stuff.
Decide whether the viewer will need random access to all your pages, or progress sequentially through them all, or progress sequentially through key pages with side branches possible to extra material, or a heirarchical "tree" structure, or what.
Decide (page by page) whether you want your viewers be able to print your page, or only to view it. To print, it's best to have black or dark text on a light background. For reading only, you have more freedom of color choices.
Decide (page by page) which is more important: the ability to read a good
bit of text easily, or getting a strong artistic visual impression. For text readibily,
use a solid, pastel (but not white) background, or very light text on a solid dark
background. Neat background images look pretty, but you can only get away with them if
your text is large and your colors contrast and there's not too much text to be read.