Web Design & Development

And this brings up my next point. If your intended audience would have the latest browser, and is constantly updating, then, by all means, use the newest and best versions of DHTML. But, if you're designing for the education field, you'll want to make the site more accessable.

Some Navigational Hints: Put some sort of "Landmark Title" on every page. It's very easy for a visitor to get lost in a site. If you include a title on each page then they will know exactly where they are.

Be consistant. It can really be confusing to a visitor if the navigation buttons change order, or are on the left of the page one time, at the top of the next page, and then at the bottom the next time. Try color (or background) coding your pages. Constant color changes can be very confusing. If you have several sections in a site, then each section could have its own style, but be consistant within each section.

Try not to put every possible tag, image, and animation avilable on your page. I'm sure you've seen pages that are so distracting because they have animations, and blinking text, and music playing, and scrolling information, and ... Try to be clean, clear, and concise.

Be careful of image size. This includes java scripts, music, video, and multiple images. These all take time to load, and web users are basically very impatient people. You want your visitors to stay on the site, not get bored while it loads and leave.
We'll be talking about some of these items later (such as images and links) and you'll learn about others (such as java scripts) in another course.

Lemay give some excellent ideas on good and bad design. Let me add one thought. We'll be discussing changing the colors of text, active links, and visited links. I strongly recommend keeping links blue and visited links purple. People are so used to these colors that they may not even try to click on a different colored link. And then you need to be careful about changing the text color to blue if you are going to include links.

And a thought about links and navigation. As Lemay states, you should always provide a return link, rather than depending on the browser's back button. But, when you are linking to an outside site you cannot provide a link on someone else's page. And, in some cases, visitor's may be able to access your page from several different points. So, which of these points would a "back" button link return you to? (And we'll be talking about opening a brand new window with a target tag) In these cases, the browser back button may be the best, or even the only, way to return to the previous page. It's a good idea to provide some information to tell the visitor this. For example: because I didn't know how students might access these comments (from CourseInfo Announcements, or from the index page, or copying the url and pasting it into the browser) I have provided some directions at the bottom of each page. (See below)

Note -- I have also used these comments pages to show you how to keep text readable on a background. I used the Crinkled Paper background, but included a table with a plain background for the text. (See Lemay p.259)

Real World Example:
One final thought on design. I mentioned earlier that I work at a place where we design web pages. Chris has just been working on a site that will be pulling its audience from a wide range of computers and users. He actually designed 3 separate sites. From the index page a user can choose "text only", or a "normal site" for most users, and a "rocket site" with Flash animations, buttons, etc. for those with very fast and larger computers. This seemed to be the best solution for the clients, and the users that the clients hoped to reach.