Website_Design
Site Unity
Organization
Typography
Page_Layout
Style Guide
Audience
Page Size

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Site_Map

Related_Tutorial
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Summer_98
TechFair_98

Divide into 5 -7 section	The overall structure of a site should be logical. In general, sites should be divided into about five sections, give or take two. A nice example of this rule can be found at Prof. Collier's SOCIOLOGY 339 Site which divided the course into just a few sections: Syllabus: information about the course Lecture Outline: calendar & links to course notes Feedback: student give feedback to the instructor Pre-Quiz: online quizzes Grades: students get their grades online External Links: links to the WWW
Make your site only three links deep	Don't make people click through too many successive pages to get from point A to point B. The rule here is, "You shouldn't have to travel through more than five pages from anywhere to get to the content you want." Try for three links. The further your visitors have to travel, the more of them you'll lose along the way. Some people have a hard time navigating from the Portland State University Home page because the actual content is buried to deeply to find. So try to strike a balance between presenting too much information at once, and a relatively flat hierarchy.
Home Page
toolbar should be discreet, elegant, and efficient.	Because it will probably appear on almost every page of your site, the toolbar should be discreet, elegant, and efficient. While visitors may initially be impressed by the magnificence of a large toolbar, they will eventually get annoyed. If it's large in dimension, it will take up too much valuable screen space. If it's a large file (too many kilobytes), it will take too long to load (see file size). Make it easy on everyone--keep your toolbar small. Notice on this page, the toolbars use smaller typeface than the body text, and use a different font to make them stand apart from the body of the document.

Website Design
Site Unity | Organization | Typography | Layout | Style Guide | Audience | Page Size
All Hints | Site Map

Related Tutorial
Web Images | Scanning Images

Contact Nancy Perrin, or John Rueter. PSU's FIPSE Project coordinated by Nancy Perrin and John Rueter, © 1998. Page constructed by Chris Miller. Last updated on June 23, 1998. For more see the About Page.