Web Design Philosophy
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There is no one right way to do a web site or HTML page design; everyone has his or her own opinion about how they should look. Also, everyone has at least a few idiosyncratic, arbritary
pet peeves that have no rhyme or reason to most of the rest of the world. For instance, the person
who selects the High Five site of the week states that he will never give the
award to any site that "has even one table border turned on" (but look at the tables off of this page and see if
you agree that table borders are always bad design). So here is my own, personal web design philosophy, followed by some generally good advice by other webmasters.
My Web Design PhilosophyOther Web Design Philosophies
My Web Design Philosophy
First, glance at my Glossary of Personal Web Terms.
Web Server DesignIf you want to use a graphic, put it on your own server. Do not merely link to it on another server. This is both courtesy and common sense: (1) it is bad web manners to increase the load on someone else's server for the puprose of displaying your pages; (2) web browser performance can be significantly reduced by having to pull in a graphic from a remote server; and (3) if the other server, over which you probably have no control or oversight, is down, YOUR page will have an error on it in place of the graphic you intended.
Web Site DesignIt can probably go without saying that the pages on your web site are under construction---in most cases the web is (or should be) in a constant state of change. However, if there is a page on your web that contains no information, do not link it in. Visitors can be quite frustrated if they follow a link to a page that they think contains something they're interested in and are instead confronted with a "This Page Under Construction" message or graphic, no matter how nifty. Also, keep in mind that some folks pay for their internet access by the hour, or have only a limited number of hours available for connection a month. They can waste a LOT of time (and hence money) following undead links (especially if the visitor has a slow modem, there's a hefty-sized "Under Construction" graphic on the page, and the visitor has to wait for it to download). Web it! Establish links between information, especially between information on different pages on your own web, whenever possible. Take full advantage of the capabilities of the hypertext medium. Data pretty much has to be organized on your web in a heirarchy, especially if you are password-protecting certain information areas, but the visitor must be able to use it as a web as well as as a tree heirarchy. Maintain your links. Check your pages periodically for dead, undead, and lame links, and fix them right away. Keep the information on your site and pages up-to-date and accurate. Cobweb pages are worse than useless because they supply misinformation. Put a mailto link or a comment form somewhere on the site so that people who find linking or other problems on your site will be able to tell you about them. Have some original content at your site as well as lists of useful or interesting links. However, also keep in mind that a collection of selected links can be of content-type value if the collection as a whole draws comparisons or parallels that were not obvious before or if the collection is a truly comprehensive listing of some new resource category. Pay attention to the size of the graphic content of each page. Images are wonderful, but they generally cannot stand alone, and long download times will cause visitors to simply cancel on your page and go elsewhere. Also keep in mind that some people habitually surf with the graphics option in their browser disabled. Place the date that the page or site was last updated somewhere on the page or site. If you're American, use the "January 12, 1996," format for dates. Why not use 1/12/96? Well, for starters, in some parts of Europe "1/12/96" means "December 1, 1996." And Europeans do surf pages in North America! Annotate links that are not self-evident. It would be hard to guess what some of the links in the "Neat Web Utilities" section on the on the Internet and Computing Tools page are for if they were not accompanied by an explanatory description.
Web Page DesignYou can control the relative placement of grapics and text on your web pages, no matter what the font and window size settings a visitor may be using, by placing them inside a table set to a certain width (obviously, this applies only when your pages are viewed with a table-capable browser). This site uses that trick to see that the text never spreads out past the edges of the top and bottom graphic bars. If you set the background color of a page, you MUST also set the text, link, vlink, and alink colors to hues that will show up well against the background color. If a visitor's browser's default text color (for instance) is black and he or she surfs to a page on which the background color has been set to black but the text color has not been set, the visitor is not going to be able to read any of the text on that page. Likewise, if you set a background image on a page, you MUST also set the text, link, vlink, and alink colors to hues that will show up well against the background. If a visitor's browser's default text, link, alink, or vlink color is set to a color that is prevalent in the background image and the default text and link, alink, and vlink colors have not been set to something that will show up well against the background image, the visitor is going to have trouble reading and using anything on that page. Graphics should serve a useful purpose, either to get appropriate attention, set a specific mood, or illustrate information. Graphics for the sake of graphics, except in an art gallery type display, is a waste of storage, bandwidth, and visitor time. I like to use backgrounds (with their carefully selected text and link colors) to establish consistency in pages of similar types of information. Thus, Nightstar's Internet and Computing Tools page, and all pages that fall under it in an information heirarchy, have the same "1010" background image. Similarly, the Daily Do's page, and all pages that fall under it in an information heirarchy, have the same background image. The consistent look of the pages for each information area helps the visitor intuitively grasp information area connections. Also, once the visitor has browsed around the site a bit, the consistent look of each information area gives him or her a visual /graphic (rather than textual) clue to where he or she is. Keep pages of text fairly short and use links to point to chunks of information rather than having many screenfuls of information all on one page. I like to try to limit the size of my HTML files to roughly two screenfuls at most (though of course a "screenful" will vary a little depending on each visitor's setup). Much "conventional" web "wisdom" aside, remember that it is usually easier to click a few times than to scroll. If you really want to put more than a couple of screenfuls on a web page, put a clickable "index" type listing at the top of the page. This page is an example of that strategy. Place at least a few standard navigation buttons on each page to help visitors move easily around your site. Each page should have a button that goes to the site's home page and also buttons that go to the site's major information areas. The Nightstar site is designed so that there is a button on each page (except the site's home page) for every level down in the information heirarchy that page is. In addition, the buttons are always in the same place (the bottom, right below the cut-off bar) and are always in a certain order: they go, left to right, from lowest-level in the information heirarchy to highest level in the information heirarchy. Internal-site navigation buttons are vital when a visitor does not come into your site through your front door. Someone may go directly to a page on your site that is several layers deep because, for instance, a search they were doing recognized that page as a hit. In that case, they might want to see more of your site, but there would be no path recorded in their browser---clicking on the back arrow would take them back to their search, not to the page on your site that preceeds (in the information heirarchy) the page they found with their search. Internal-site navigation buttons make it easy to explore your site, no matter how your visitor entered. Be considerate of visitors who might be accessing your page using a slow modem. Use thumbnails in place of really large GIFs. Do not say "Click Here," though a "here" might be acceptable. In general, let the existence of links, like pages that can be turned in a book, speak for itself. Don't publish information in substandard format on the web. It may be a transient medium, but the text on your web pages should use correct grammar and spelling. Also, don't use casual abbreviations unless you are using them specifically to make a point or set a mood (e.g., use "and" instead of "&" unless you are making a stylistic point).
Other Web Design Philosophies
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