| Effective
Web Page Design: The Bad |
- Avoid Backgrounds that Make Text
Difficult to Read
You can't go wrong with black text on a white background. Test any other combination
and textured backgrounds for readability of text.
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Avoid
Flashy Colors and Design
Student might be visiting your pages often and spending a lot of
time there, so the colors and design should be inviting, not jarring. Of course, educational web sites tend to be somewhat conservative
in color and design.
Avoid the Use of Frames
Frames technology is getting better, but frames still can be problematic: because each
frame has a different URL, frames are difficult to bookmark and link; they can make
printing the right frame a problem; they reduce screen size for the supposedly important
information; they can cause copyright problems when pages produced by others open up in
one of your frames; and frames can make it difficult for viewers to leave a site.
Avoid Inconsistent
Fonts
Inconsistent fonts make pages difficult to read. Arial and Times
New Roman are conventional fonts that work well.
Avoid Heavy Use of
Graphics
The web is a graphic environment, and graphics can make your pages look nice. However,
graphics increase download time, and too many graphics and graphics that are too big can
cause your pages to take a long time to download. Remember that no one viewing your pages
at home will have the kind of download speed that we have at the college.
Avoid Large Image Maps
An image map appears at the top of this page. Image maps are clickable images that link
viewers to different web pages. A large image map can take a long time to download, and
viewers cannot navigate your pages until the image map loads.
Avoid Blink
is also distracting and should be avoided. In fact, it should be
banned.
Avoid Scrolling Marquee
Text
Avoid Long URLs
The URL is the web address, and whatever you
name a file when you save it in FrontPage becomes the URL for that page. Most likely, you
will have all of your pages linked somewhere so that people will not have to remember the
URLs, but it's best to use short and concise URLs, all in lower case.
Avoid Using
Bleeding-Edge Technology
Just because you know how to do something is not a good reason to do it on your web
pages, and the more complicated the technology, the more likely something will go wrong.
And remember download time.
Avoid Inconsistent
Design for Related Pages
Pages that are part of a series should have a similar design.
Avoid Assuming that
Your Pages will Look the Same for Everyone
Most likely, they won't. Among other factors, your pages can look different depending
on your viewer's web browser, browser version, and screen resolution.
Avoid Long Pages
The longer the page, the longer it will take
to download. In addition, a surprisingly high number of web users do not scroll down web
pages.
- Avoid Orphaned Pages
Orphaned web pages contain no links to your other web pages. Wherever viewers are in
your series of web pages, they should be able to navigate your pages with a mouse click.
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