Web Design

Designing for the web involves having something to say (the more creative and interesting the better), and effectively using appealing graphics and interactive elements to appropriately capture your visitor's interest.

1. Design (audience and goals): The design process starts with identifying the intended audience for the page, determining their interests, and specifying desired goals to meet that audience's needs (giving them what they want). This process first starts with the site as a whole, and then applies to each page.
2. Implementation: Once you know what you want to communicate, and who you want to communicate to, you create the web pages in your site, using either page layout tools (such as Macromedia Dreamweaver (my favorite), Microsoft Frontpage, Microsoft Publisher, Netscape Composer, AOLPress, Adobe GoLive, Adobe Page Mill, or Corel Barista) or you can also develop your pages directly by writing HTML commands.
   • Text on a web page should be clearly written, expressed appropriately for the intended audience, and free from distracting errors, be they errors of fact, spelling or grammar.
   • Web graphics should be relatively small (for fast downloading), catchy, and enhance the message being communicated by the text.
   • Navigation aids should be clear and easy to understand and follow. They should provide a clear path through the options that the site presents.
   • HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is a set of commands to browsers that describe how to display a web page. Web pages are almost always ultimately a set of HTML commands and links to other files.
   • DHTML (Dynamic HTML) is an enhanced set of HTML commands that add more layout, formatting, and interactivity to a Web page than is possible with HTML alone. It provides a way to enhance an otherwise static web page with elements that interact with the visitor's actions, typically mouse movements and clicks, to provide some visual response to the user's actions.
3. Validation and posting:

   Once your site is published to your server, it is a good idea to run a code validator to verify that your HTML code is error free. There are a number of validators available. Netmechanic provides a validator that will check your site free of charge.

   Another useful free validator is available from ZDNet.

Design Resources

A list of books on various aspects of Web design. This list presents books that I have found interesting and helpful in expanding my understanding of these topics: site and page design, graphics development, dynamic HTML, doing business on the web.