Web Design

Compared to printed publications the web has several advantages: it can be up to date, immediate, interactive and responsive. Printed publications exist in a physical form, page size is fixed and a quick leaf through will reveal the amount of text and the type of images they contain. In contrast the contents of a web site only become apparent after lengthy browsing. The web is therefore a new medium with its own rules. Effective design is essential to a web site's success.

Elasticity is the key word when comparing web pages with the printed page. The web is accessed with browsers that have no fixed window or font size. Web design that imitates print - with fixed page widths and conventional headers and footers - looks wrong when the user's window or font size happens to be different from what the designer expected. Ironically, it often looks worse when the user prints the page. The same applies when web sites are designed as if they were CD publications, with fixed sized windows and predefined fonts. Web pages should be elastic: designed to respond to changing font and window sizes.

Images with garish colours, photographs with freckled faces, dotty graphics... these are all hallmarks of web design circa 1995. Some of those resulted from the use of a small palette of 216 colours for all graphics and text. Nearly all computers sold today can display millions of shades of colour. Web design can use subtle shades to give depth and intensity to the pages. Careful attention to the technicalities of image publishing will ensure that even on computers with a limited number of colours, modern browsers will do a good job of automatically translating the colours to their nearest available shade.

[text written in early 1997 with minor changes since]

Personal home pages and entertainment sites can be unpredictable and unstructured. Some users even enjoy finding their way around a complex maze of links. But a web site for an organisation or commerce should have a clear structure - it cannot count on chance or great effort by the user.

Navigation buttons should allow a combination of three types of link: vertical, lateral and polar. Vertical links are the main links between content pages and the home page. Lateral links connect two or more pages that are complementary to one another. Polar links (or star links) connect several sub-categories to a central hub. If these links are balanced and presented in such a way that the user forms a clear mental image of the site and learns where everything is located, he or she is more likely to spend time browsing the whole site and to revisit.

The Web is built with hyperlinks. External links make a site useful as a gateway to other resources on the Internet. Link management should be part of an ongoing quality assurance exercise in order to avoid dead or obsolete links.