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

CHAPTER 2
Web Page Design

by Eric Ladd

In this chapter

Page Design Follows Site Design 36

Know Your Audience 36

HTML Standards and Browser Compatibility 43

Desirable Page Elements 45

Breaking Up Long Pages 49

Page Design Follows Site Design

Many of the issues that go into designing a Web site also go into the design of a single Web page, but some page design considerations are unique. Ideally, page design should follow site design; and when you get ready to start a page, you should already have a good sense of what the page needs to accomplish, given its place in your site design.

A book this size could be written about all the issues that go into the design of quality Web pages. This chapter summarizes only the major concepts and elements of a good design. By looking at the work of others and doing design yourself, you will build up your own good design sense and the skills you need to implement a first-rate Web site.

	Check out the Usenet comp.infosystems.www.authoring newsgroups to learn about design concepts, approaches, and philosophies used by other Web designers around the world.

Know Your Audience

The cardinal rule for Web site design is also the cardinal rule for page design. Knowing your audience and designing to that audience requires you to gather as much information about them as possible, including

•  Equipment configuration (hardware, software, and Internet connection)

•  Learning characteristics (how to best present information so that they understand it)

•  Motivations for surfing the Web (business, professional, personal, entertainment, or educational reasons)

•  Demographic factors (age, amount of education, geographic location, language)

•  Cultural characteristics (any other factors that could influence how they read a page)

You need to gather all this information before you start designing pages. As with all things, finding out as much as you can beforehand will save you a whole lot of headaches later.

In addition to gathering as many user characteristics as you can, you should keep in mind the following two things that are common to all users:

•  They are visiting your pages because they are interested in the information you have put there.

•  They are using some type of Web browser to visit your site.

Knowledge of these two factors provides a good basis for beginning your Web page design. The next two sections investigate some of the specifics of each.

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NOTE:  Unless you have the luxury of developing for a homogeneous group of people, you will probably have to design your pages to be accessible to the broadest audience possible. In the absence of proper information about your audience, designing for maximum readability is the best rule.

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Corporate Intranets: Designing for a Homogenous Group

If you are working on an intranet page for your company, one thing you can typically take advantage of is a common platform. Many companies that put up intranets get a site license for their browser of choice. After you know that everyone is using the same browser, you can design to that browser’s level of performance. If your intranet users are using Netscape Navigator 4, for example, you can design pages with frames, client-side imagemaps, Java applets, and the <LAYER> tag (a Netscape extension to standard HTML). If everyone is using Internet Explorer 4, however, you could use one of the Microsoft proprietary tags such as <MARQUEE>. Additionally, everyone is most likely running the software on the same platform with the same connection speed, so you can design to those parameters as well.

Another advantage you can harness in a corporate intranet design situation is a common culture. Most firms have a way of doing things that can be captured on the intranet pages. This gives the pages a context to which all your users can relate.

Some cautions go along with intranet design, though. First, you should make your intranet site sufficiently different from your external Web site so that employees can quickly tell the difference between the two. Additionally, because intranets tend to support people in their work, your intranet design should be as task oriented as possible. Many firms make the mistake of using their internal organizational structure as a basis for their intranet information design, but this doesn’t provide the best service to the intranet users.

Designing for an audience whose members are more or less the same is a luxury that few people get to experience. If you find yourself in this situation, be sure to make full use of the characteristics common to your users.

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Choosing Information

When you choose information for a page and choose how you are going to format that information, you should think about how you can minimize the effort the reader has to make to understand your message. If a page has relevant content that is presented in a well-organized layout, readers are much more likely to get something out of it than if the page is crammed with a lot of extraneous information and is displayed in a cluttered way.

When choosing what information to put on a page, keep the following two—often competing—parameters in mind:

•  What information does the page need to get across to accomplish your communication objectives?

•  What information is your audience genuinely interested in reading?

The first point in the preceding list presupposes that you have good and proper reasons for wanting to post content on the Web in the first place. Assuming that you have key communication objectives you want to reach, distill the messages that support those objectives down to their bare essence. Dressing up your messages with frivolous content or burying them in irrelevant information means the reader has to make a greater effort to extract them. This reduces the likelihood that your readers will come away with the messages you want them to receive.

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NOTE:  If you haven’t formulated what goals you hope to achieve by creating Web pages, go back to the drawing board and write some down. Your set of goals should be one of the driving forces behind your decisions about what qualifies as appropriate content.

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On the other side of the coin is the information in which the audience is interested. A visitor to your Web page also has specific objectives in mind. In a perfect world, your audience visits your pages because they want to read the messages you want to convey. When visitors leave your Web page and understand your message, both of you have satisfied your objectives.

Of course, the objectives of a Web page author and a Web page reader are not always convergent. In these cases, you may need to include content on your pages that attracts the audience you want. You have to achieve a fine balance, however. You must include enough content to get people to your page, but not so much that it obscures the message you want to get across.