|
BOOTLOG 005 04/10/05
BUILDING A WEBSITE, part 5
I make no claims to being a web page designer and I am
impressed, and occasionally in awe of those who do it well and manage to make a
living out of it. My credentials for writing on the topic of web page layout
and design rest solely on the few fairly basic sites I have created over the
years and this one. I can also draw upon my experiences as a long-time web user
and almost three decades in electronic and on-line publishing. Yes, I know the
web wasn’t around 30 years ago (at not least in the form we know it today) but
I was involved in early days of Teletext (does anyone else remember the Texas
Tifax decoder?), and I was a regular contributor to the Post Office’s (as was)
pioneering Prestel on-line information service. I still have a ‘Tantel’
terminal used to enter text and lay out pages somewhere in my loft, but that’s
another story for another day.
Essentially there are three ways to create a web site:
pay someone to do for you, use a web editing authoring program (see part 4)
with ready-made templates or create a site from scratch. Since you are reading
this I’ll assume that you want to have a crack at designing and building your
own web site and apart from being a lot cheaper than paying someone you have
total control of what it looks like and it can be very satisfying.
Templates are ideal if you want to get a site up and
running quickly but the downside is that your site could end up looking like a
squillion other template-based web sites. Designing a site from scratch is the
best option if you want something really distinctive, and have the time to
spare; it also helps if you have artistic tendencies and a good working
knowledge of HTML coding though such skills are not essential (and might even be
a hindrance) if you just want a simple functional site.
BootLog started out as a template and in retrospect this
was a mistake because it rapidly outgrew the limitations of what an
off-the-shelf website can do. This site will eventually have more than 2000
pages but for sites of 20 pages or less, say, a template is undoubtedly the
best place to start. However, as was pointed out in part 1 planning and
preparation are paramount and in order to make a template work you need to have
a very good idea of how many pages your site will contain from the beginning.
One of the main advantages of a template-based site is
that all of the page links are set up for you at a very early stage in the
process. In most web page authoring programs once you have settled on the
number of pages, and how they connect to each other -- usually by reference to
a simple ‘tree’ type diagram -- all you have to do is choose the template style
and things like colours and textures for the graphic design elements. After
that you simply fill in or change the default wording in the boxes and buttons
and insert or copy and paste your own words and pictures into the boxes and
frames provided.
It is all very simple nowadays and a good part of
automated or ‘Wizard’ driven site building involves ticking boxes but there is
still plenty of opportunity for it to all go horribly wrong. The biggest
problem is that web-authoring programs usually present users with far too many
choices so it is easy to get bogged down in unnecessary detail or go overboard
and end up with a site that at best looks messy, at worst could be completely
unreadable.
Web page design is more of an art than a science and
there are as many dos and don’ts and ‘rules’ as there are web page designers
but the key points to remember is that the information on your web site should
be easy to read or understand and easy to find.
My best advice, which I am ashamed to say I have ignored
on far too many occasions, is KISS or ‘keep it simple stupid! It’s mostly commonsense really, so as far as
possible avoid using bright or dark colours and complex textures for
backgrounds or anything that makes it harder to read. Blocks of text should be
in a clean, light and simple black typeface on a white or very light grey
background. Paragraphs should be short and punctuated with large or bold face
subheadings. Try not to mix typefaces on a page and limit the use of fancy or
old-fashioned fonts for body text and headings. Don’t forget to spell and
grammar check your text, and before anyone writes in mentioning pots and
kettles, yes I know there are one or two misspellings on this site, but my
excuse is that there’s well over a million words in the archives, most of them
are spelt correctly, the rest I will get around to…
You can’t rely on visitors to your site’s home page
venturing past the bottom of the screen so make sure that all of the important
information and navigational links are at or near the top of the page.
Naturally enough there’s a huge amount of advice on web
page design, on the web, most of it good, some of it bad but my recommendations
for a solid no-nonsense approach to the basics of design and content can be
found at:
www.tlc-systems.com/webtips.shtml
http://doghause.com/top15.asp
www.useit.com/alertbox/9605a.html
part 6 --
page design basics
Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
|