Platinum Edition Using HTML 4, XML, and Java 1.2
(Publisher: Macmillan Computer Publishing)
Author(s): Eric Ladd
ISBN: 078971759x
Publication Date: 11/01/98

Part I
Design

CHAPTER 1
Web Site Design

by Eric Ladd

In this chapter

The Many Facets of Web Design 12

Know Your Audience 12

Considering Your Own Objectives 17

Structuring Information 17

Developing a Look 19

Desirable Site Elements 23

Testing Your Design 31

Trends in Web Site Design 32

The Many Facets of Web Design

Designing Web sites is both a complex and rewarding activity. Hours of careful thought are needed at the planning stage. You need to take the time to think about who will be reading your pages—how they see and understand information, what types of computers they use, what browser software they have, and how fast their connections are. After you have profiled your audience, you must then consider the message you want to communicate via the Web site and how best to convey that message to your target audience. Finally, you need to consider the possibilities and limitations of Web publishing to determine how you will actually create the site. Web site design is a struggle among these competing forces. As a designer, you must decide how you will meet the requirements of each one.

This chapter and the following chapter give you some things to think about during the planning stages both for entire sites and for individual pages. After you have a good handle on site and page planning, you will be ready to move on to later chapters. These later chapters introduce you to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the document description language used to author Web pages. With knowledge of HTML and intelligent design, you can create sites that are accessible to the broadest audience possible and that effectively communicate what you have to say.

Know Your Audience

Web site design should be driven by audience considerations. It doesn’t matter how powerful a server you have, how skilled a Java programmer you are, or how flashy your graphics are if your message is lost on the end user. If you gain just one concept from this chapter, let it be that you keep your audience uppermost in your mind during the design process.

Audience characteristics can fall into many categories. Because most sites have to be designed to provide maximum audience appeal, this chapter looks at two broad, yet important, categories:

•  How will users move through the information? A Web site is different from a single Web page in that a user can visit many major sections within a site. By developing an awareness of how people think about the information you’re presenting, you can design a structure that is intuitive and that harnesses the natural associations your audience members are likely to make.

•  What technologies do your users have? The primary reason that many sites avoid the high-end stuff, such as Java applets or ActiveX controls, is because end users don’t have a machine, a browser, or a connection to support them. With all the diversity in Web-surfing technology, you should take some time to learn about the tools your audience is using. This enables you to create a more accessible design.

How Will Users Move Through the Information?

You can’t know how all your users think, but you can usually make some valid generalizations that can guide you during the design process. As you assess different cognitive characteristics of your audience, think about how you can use those characteristics to achieve the following design objectives:

•  Make use of association. Association is a mental process in which one concept is paired with another. People in general are prone to making certain associations, whereas other associations may be particular to a specific user group. Identify whatever associations between informational items you think your audience will make. After you identify the associations, you can express them on your site through the use of hypertext links. A hypertext link is highlighted text on a page that, when clicked by the user, instructs the browser to load a new document. Presumably, the new document is related to the hypertext link that the user clicked to load it.

•  Make use of consistency. A consistent approach to the many aspects of your site—look and feel, navigation, presentation of information, and so on—reduces the amount of mental effort the user must make to get around. Introduce your approaches to these things as early as you can and carry it through the entire site. Borders makes consistent use of graphics, navigation bars, and its Quick Search box to produce an easy-to-use shopping interface (see Figure 1.1).

FIGURE 1.1  Consistent use of graphics, navigation options, and content structure helps visitors get around your site.

•  Make use of context. Provide users with a context to which they can relate. Make sure they can get to all the important sections of your site from any other section (see Figure 1.2). This is critical because you can never predict on which page a user will enter your site. If you provide context only on the home page, users entering the site at a subordinate page will be unaware of the available options.

FIGURE 1.2  Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com site has a colored bar across the top of every page that shows where you are in the site hierarchy and provides links to other parts of the site.

What Technologies Do Your Users Have?

The equipment your audience has access to is another key characteristic you must assess. Thankfully, HTML is platform independent, and so the type of machines your audience is using should be largely irrelevant. As long as your audience can run some type of browser program, they should be able to view your pages.