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After reading several articles relating to Best Practices from Information Week, I have made the following observations based on the six successful web sites and the top ten recommended Design Tips (The Art of E-Biz, 2001). |
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Design Tips
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Quoted from our professor, "…find what works, document it, and use it", is simply what one does when developing and maintaining a web site (Tiberino, 2001). While developing my current website at http://nova.umuc.edu/~ca498i04/index.html, I am currently making every attempt to implement many of the above design tips and practices. |
The recommended six sites in Information Week used a navigation bar on the top of the page. One site did use frames. However, most sites were very simple in design, and all the sites used the color white as the background color. These sites represent many of the rules and design tips for what is considered Best practices. After reviewing the six sites and several other articles from Information Week, I was able to provide a comparison and analysis of my own site in the following categories. Colors, Frames,Images, Links, Scrollbars, Splash/Pages, Web Content Colors Colors, styles and consistency either enhance a site or leave one with a dizzy feeling in their stomach. One must think about colors that are pleasing and viewable by the majority of people, including those individuals that are color-blind. For this reason I feel Browser safe colors are the only way to keep your site appealing to everyone. As a client or user roams through your site, the image and experience he/she observes should be one of consistency in style and design. I have tried to maintain this style and consistency in my own site by using simple headers and footers on each page. Frames Information Week's article recommends against using frames, which can be difficult to navigate and take too long to download (The Art of E-Biz, 2001). I'm aware of the negative aspects of frames, but chose to use frames for their positive management advantage over conventional single web pages. Designed correctly and validated, they become an easy medium to modify by adding or deleting pages on one's site. Today's browsers are capable to detect and work well with frames, this not being the case several years ago. The second advantage is designing within frames keeps your web pages from extending past the readable area and encourages consistency in design. Images All graphic images need to be a small as possible in size, to accomplish the desired effect. One fallacy is to design your pages on a memory rich high speed CPU, not observing the loading characteristics on a dialup connection. I test all my code on a 28.8-baud dialup connection. If I can make the web pages load reasonably fast on this configuration, anything faster will be excellent. At the same time, when it is necessary to show a large image, let the user see a thumbnail version prior to loading the full image. This gives the user a choice, whether or not to click the larger image. As a guideline, I try to minimize images to less than 10k in size on any page. Links In keeping with protocol is the use of internal and external links. One of the best practices I know is making sure things work. Links are notorious for being overlooked. when finishing a new page or modifying an existing page. It pays to go back with multiple browsers and verify all links and pages. One needs to ask: Does the link take the user where I expect he/she to be directed? Can the user get back to my site from the link clicking the home key or any designed key to previous page? If the user gets put into a new page, can they close the new page and be back in the site? All these questions have to be answered and addressed all the time, not just when you first design your site. Changes to one's site may cause hidden linking problems, not seen at initial testing. Any site that does not work may only be viewed once, and then forgotten. It pays to continually validate your site time and time again Scrollbars I have used scrollbars for some time on my site, but recently found a strong desire to shorten the length of my pages, and instead internally link pages together, rather than on long endless page. The user does not have to wade back and forth through pages of material to read a single document. Splash Pages Splash pages, Flash pages and gimmicks are great for effect, but the user should always have a way to cancel out and move on. Forcing a user to view or listen to what you make think is so cool, may indeed turn them away from a great site, while at the front door. I always try to put myself in the user's place. This equates to very little patience in waiting, watching or listening for some undetermined amount of time. This is not a smart design technique. Anyone should have a quick entrance to your site, independent of your graphical prowess in design Web Content This is a topic that is many times overlooked, but is vitally important to users coming back to your site. Having outdated material, incorrect links, multiple version of the same material, will silently kill interest in a web site. Today there exist software tools that can help automate the collection of data, and manage the data as application data with version control. This new effort is now being used on many sites that recognize their own fallacies. The leading companies in this type of software are BroadVision, Interwoven, and Vignette (Get a Handle of Web Content, 2001). Here the object of the software tools is to let the computers manage the content, helping to keep the sites consistent, fresh and correct. Another company called FutureTense has databases full of content, and then manages the Web-page content within templates. The data is dumped into the templates and pushed to the web site. This task is larger than one Webmaster can expect to manage and control, hence let the computer manage the computer (Get a Handle on Web Content, 2001). The most important goal thing in web design is to keep things simple.&nsbp; If the site is hard to use or navigate, it won't get used (Simplicity Pays for Business-To-Business Sites, 2001). |
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References Used Get a Handle on Web Content. (2001, Jul). 1-6 Retrieved on July 11, 2001 from the
World Wide Web:
http://www.informationweek.com
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