Web Page Design: Best Practices
Your web site should be designed to appeal to your target audience. Follow these recommended design practices with your target audience in mind.
Web Site Organization Techniques
- Hierarchial - characterized by a clearly defined homepage with links to major site sections.
- Linear - used to present a tutorial tour or presentation in a sequence.
- Random - what it says it is, with no clear homepage or discernable structure.
Clearly labeled navigation on every page is helpful. The user should not be lost on your site.
Navigation best practices:
- navagation bars - Bars that make it obvious to the user where they are and where they can go next.
- Bread crumbs- used to follow the way you took to come to the page you are on
- Site map - lays out all the pages on the website so you can find things that are not apparent off the bat
Four Visual Design Principles
- Repetition
using an element repeatedly throught the website to provide a sense of cohesion.
- Contrast
provide contrast to make webpages interesting, such as between the background color and the text.
- proximity
Place related items close to one another, such as navigational links
- Alignment
aligning elements of the webpage vertically or horizontally to one another
Major Components of Web page design and
Three guidelines for each design element
- color and graphics
- contrast with associated text
- graphics serve a clear purpose
- Animated images do not distract from the site and either do not repeate or repeat only a few times.
- Content Presentation
- Common fonts such as arial or times new roman are used
- Content is not outdated
- Alternative text is provided
- Functionality
- All internal hyperlinks work
- All forms function as expected
- No javascript errors are generated
- Accessibility
- If images flash or dhtml is used for navigation, clear text links are provided in the footer section
- Captions are provided for each video or audio file used
- If the site uses frames, use frame titles and place meaningful content in the noframes area