Designing Dos & Donts

Can you design a professional-looking web page even if you are not a graphics designer? Yes, if you can take a little advice. Keep it simple, and clean. Don't add blinking text or a hit counter just because you can. Many beginners make the mistake of adding every "cool" feature they learn to use, and end up with a mess. Careful attention to detail is important too. You don't want pages with missing pictures or links that go nowhere. Here are a few pointers for the beginning web designer.

COLOR

Use browser-safe colors

Keep number of colors in palette to a fairly small number, and use them consistently. Use the same color for all body text, or headings, or page titles, or navigation buttons.

Text and background should have sufficient contrast for easy readability.

Link colors should coordinate with page colors.

LAYOUT

First page and home page should fit into 640 x 460 pixel space. This is the area that shows in the browser without having to scroll down or to the side.

Keep all columns of text fairly narrow to avoid making the user scroll sideways to read text.

Use headings, subheadings, photos, graphs to break up large amounts of text.

Keep navigation simple with clear links to other pages, and not too many frames. Use a consistent navigation scheme on all pages.

For large sites, include a site map or index and a search engine.

TEXT

Use a font that is easy to read, neither too big nor too small.

DON'T WRITE PARAGRAPHS USING ALL UPPERCASE, BOLD, OR ITALIC FONTS, OR USE HARD-TO-READ FONTS (hard to read fonts).

Be careful to ensure that the links in your text actually go somewhere other than a missing page. Use underlining to mark text as a link (and avoid underlining elsewhere in body text).

IMAGES

Graphics should load quickly. Visitors with slow connections won't wait several minutes to load your cool graphic. Remember that you can't just change the appearance of the graphic to a smaller size; the image itself will still load in its entirety before being displayed.

Too many graphics on a page will make the page slow to load.

Be sure the image file is not missing.

Use animations sparingly. Continuous animations can be quite annoying.

Include an alt label and text link for each image. People who don't display graphics, or who can't see them, will appreciate knowing what the image represents.