Web Site Design
Guidelines
Monday, November 23, 2009 
| Font & Background | Updated -? |
| Uniformity | Guest Book |
| Page Layout | Links |
| Graphics | Quality Control |
| Contact Info | Empathize |
Backgrounds should be light colored with a very fine texture. Backgrounds should never distract from the content or message of the text.INTRODUCTION
These guidelines outline basics for a web site that will be viewed by rural users of the Internet. These web site viewers are in remote, rural, modem dialup circumstances where telephone lines may be a ‘twisted pair’ as long as fifteen miles to the central office. A modern computer with a 56 K modem may ‘fold back’ to 28 K or less in an attempt to reduce data communication errors as a result of long, noisy analog telephone lines. This person is having to deal with very slow communications technology. (Understand that a very significant portion of your viewers will fall into this 'rural' category.)
With this viewer of your website in mind the following guidelines outline an attempt to allow the rural viewer to view the content that they are interested in, and in a fast-load and timely fashion. That means there will be a minimum of graphics, text is just that --- TEXT --- and not a graphic depiction of text.
The basics of web site design for this viewer follows ---
STATEMENT OF INTENTEstablish the reason this web site exists.
A.) Seek agreement with everyone concerned regarding the purpose of this site.
B.) This includes everybody’s expectations of the results of the site.
C.) Define your target viewer and what you expect from them.
D.) Determine exactly what you think your viewer is looking for. This must be done first in order to create the web site with the information that your viewer is looking for.THE BASICS OF WEB SITE PAGES
Both the FONT and the BACKGROUND must promote easy reading.NEVER, ever, use a black or dark background! Dark backgrounds impart an immediate foreboding, depressing / sinister atmosphere to your web site before the viewer has read even the first word of your message.
TEXT FONT should be large, easy to read font with a very high contrast with the background color. Choose a font that you're sure will be available on everybody's PC. This is Courier. Or choose Times New Roman. Or Arial Bold, 12 point: like this entire web page. I have yet to see a computer that couldn't display these fonts.
Uniformity of pages.
Each individual page of a web site should have a uniform and consistent
look. A simple, common banner across the top, uniform background, uniform
text and font, and uniform navigation bars all help to minimize any
distraction from your basic intent: which is to provide content-of-value
to the viewer and without any distraction.
Page layout.
The guys and gals who layout the front page of newspapers know what the
term ‘above the fold’ means. Their question is: of all the news stories
in the paper, where do we put what? And why? Let’s remind ourselves: the
only reason they put anything on the front page is to sell newspapers! The
only reason anyone will pay money to buy a newspaper is to get
information.
Aside from advertisements, subscriptions and the paperboy, a significant outlet for the paper is the news stand and dispensing machines. There is always one folded copy of the paper displayed through the glass door of the newspaper dispensing machine. What the layout people want us to see is the news that will prompt us to put money in the machine and buy a copy of the paper.
Hence:
The most compelling news information is placed on the top
half of the front page --- ‘above the fold’. The same is true of a web
page. Most web pages have content that is longer than the vertical display
of the viewer’s computer. Consequently we want our most compelling
information to be displayed when the page has loaded. If the viewer has to
scroll down to read it all, so be it. But the captivating
information should not be somewhere off the bottom of the
displayed area. This above-the-fold strategy is critically important on
the home page / opening page or the first page the viewer sees. If the
intent is to draw the viewer into the web site and encourage them to view
all of the pages, this 'First Page Layout' is where that will
happen.
The ‘Home’ page must capture the viewer’s interest fast. The home page must tell the viewer what site they are looking at and what they can expect. The page must display this information without delay.
Always put some news of interest on this opening page. (And update this page very frequently!) And, a note here; if you edit or add some new or revised aspect on one or more of the web site’s pages, display a note to that effect (above the fold) on the opening page. I see examples where important news of interest is added to a page somewhere on the web site but the opening page never mentions the new information. That’s tragic! The casual viewer will never see the info unless he stumbles on it. If you add content of value to the site mention it on the opening page.
On the subject of page layout:
The viewer should never have to use the horizontal scroll tab to continue
reading a line of text that goes somewhere off the right hand side of the
display screen. Learn enough about your web page editor to set the text line length so
this doesn't happen. This fault will irritate an otherwise enthusiastic viewer
faster than anything.
Frames and why not!
Frames are those web pages that have a menu for instance on the left side
of the screen. And, as each menu item is clicked the page itself is
displayed on the right side of the screen. Usually the left ‘frame’ is
¼ to 1/3 of the total horizontal display space. Frames do two things;
they take longer to load, and they are a very poor use of your viewers valuable display
area real estate. Frames can include the left side, the top, and the
bottom in addition to the remaining display area.
Obviously the remaining display area is a small fraction of the computer user’s display screen. I have seen sites where the menu is all graphics on the left (slow to load) and, an identical all-text menu in another frame across the top. Redundancy Redundancy, and a poor web page layout.
Over the past several years I’ve noticed that dozens of high profile
web sites have asked viewers to notice their new and improved pages.
Although other things may also have changed, a frequent and familiar
viewer will notice that the Frames are no longer! Web site owners who
watch the results of their web site, and listen to their viewers, are
asking their designers to get rid of whatever is taking up a lot of
viewing space and slowing the page load time. They are getting ‘Frames’
out of their web sites.
Avoid the compelling urge to do cute things on your web page with Frames.
Just don’t.
THE FINE-TUNED DETAILS AND EXTRAS
Of critical importance is the ability to easily navigate the site.
A brief, simple navigation bar should be at the top and bottom of every page. This nav bar should include a few of the most important pages on the site and certainly allow quick return to the home page. (Never force the viewer to use their Back button!)
Now I have to grant you; some graphics are necessary and even desirable. An all-text page is pretty boring. But if we are to have a web site where the individual pages load fast we have to avoid graphics like the plague! If there is one thing that will annoy a viewer severely, it is requiring the viewer to wait while a page full of graphics loads from their Internet server. We see many, many web pages consisting of mostly graphics on the pages. The ‘text’ that we eventually read is not text at all, but rather is a graphic. For your dial-up viewer, trying to extract information from these sites is pure agony due to slow page load times - because of graphics.
Do not create a static opening page.
This is a page with information that never changes but rather requires one to ‘Click HERE to Enter’, or has a frames menu on the left that requires one more click to get to the current information page. These static opening pages usually have elaborate graphics which require extended load times and aggravates an impatient viewer, then further compounds this aggravation by not providing the info the viewer wants, but rather requires the viewer to ‘jump through one more hoop’ to get to what he wants. (Obviously the author of this document is an absolute ‘minimize-the-clicks’ nut.)
See http://www.poncacitynews.com/ for an example of this aggravation.
Contact Information.
Included on all pages should be contact information. If the viewer wants to contact someone who owns or otherwise has information regarding the site’s content, that person’s E-mail address and/or phone number should be displayed. This issue of publishing one's E-mail address on a web page includes problems regarding junk mail. Hackers 'harvest' E-mail addresses from web pages, then sell these to people marketing products on the WWW. The amount of junk mail may skyrocket! Consequently, publish E-mail addresses with caution and don't display a 'clickable' E-mail address.Another viewer aid:
Viewers like to know how recent the information is. Imagine a newspaper that puts out a daily paper but never puts a day or date on the front page? The only reason to not put an ‘Updated’ date on the page is if you’re ashamed of the fact that the page never gets updated! Bad news. Viewers like to know that the stuff they’re reading is current information. In FrontPage always use 'Insert', (Date and Time) somewhere on the page.
A quick and easy avenue of feedback is the ‘GuestBook’. Here is a free service at http://www.e-guestbooks.com/.
This free service allows the Webmaster to maintain the look and feel of his web site. The home site’s background is used in the GuestBook display. The key here is to scan the GuestBook’s entries often (weekly) to see what your viewers have said.
Another tool needed on the pages is a ‘hit counter’. If, indeed, anyone of the owners has any interest in the site’s value they need to know how often the site is being viewed. SiteMeter is a free service that provides a wealth of information regarding the viewers of the individual pages. http://www.sitemeter.com/ . This service can be configured to send a brief weekly E-mail summery report of the pages’ activity.Links.
One other thing. Don’t use links to send your viewers offsite. They’ll probably start surfing other areas of the WWW and never come back to your site! If you must reference an outside URL configure the link to open a new window. This will require them to eventually return to your site just to close the original window. With popup ads everywhere popup stoppers may kill your attempt to open a new browser on their machine. Some stoppers will allow it, some won't. It's a tough one.
Quality control. Test, Test, Test.
Test individual pages on several PC’s, Mac’s, or whatever. We want the pages to load fast, to be easy to read, and to present a layout that displays like we want on all sorts of computers and displays.
"What you see is what you get" is just not true. The web page as displayed on your PC will probably look different on your viewer’s displays. Always check a new page on an old, slow microprocessor with very limited RAM and with a slow hard drive. And check the page on a slow modem dialup network. And see what the page looks like on various displays; small laptop LCD displays, etc.Test the new page with several browsers. I saw a page recently which was created with Microsoft’s FrontPage Editor. Elements of the page did not display properly on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer! (How could that happen if the webmaster tested his work?) Test new pages with IE (on a different PC) then with Netscape Communicator/Mozilla, Opera, Firefox, and any other browser you can find.
Test the new page via 3rd party. Ask viewers to tell you what they see. (Your E-mail address IS at the bottom of each page isn’t it?) Find an editorial critic. Ask them to review the content for spelling errors, grammar, content of value, display appearance and so on. If you are lucky this critic will be a rural viewer using a totally different machine, a MAC for instance on a slow dialup modem. And, listen to what they tell you.
© Floyd G. Cook 2001 ~ 2009.--- The Bottom Line ---
It is important to empathize with your viewer. Try to imagine the circumstances under which he or she is trying to view your web pages and extract information. Do at least the minimum 'market research' to determine just exactly WHAT your viewer is looking for and wants to see, and, determine the Internet access that they may be having to endure; dial up, etc.
Create your web pages to assure an absolute minimum of distractions:
No distracting navigation graphics: no black backgrounds with low contrast text and use any graphic only if it adds to the value of the content.Your rural viewer will be very sensitive to ‘page load times’. Don’t insult your viewer with cute web page novelties that don’t have anything to do with the context of interest that your viewer is looking for.
Empathize !
November 23, 2009