website.qxd  4/9/2003  11:52 AM  Page 12

WEB DESIGN

a

Make sure your pages are not crowded with so many bells and whistles that your users

cannot  find  what  they  want.  White  space  is  important  and  you  should  use  it

effectively. 

a

Each page on your site should be functional (just as the kitchen in your house is designed

for cooking, the dining room is designed for dining, etc.). 

a

Many people do not have fast connections to the Internet. Graphics take forever to load.

Many serious researchers shut off the image-display function to speed up load times and

avoid the distraction of advertisements and other extraneous information. If you have to

use graphics, make them minimal and/or provide a text path. 

a

Blinking text, running footers, and tinny music may be popular with designers; they are

not popular with serious web users. 

a

As  noted,  this  is  the  web     you  are  supposed  to  be  making  hypertext  connections,  not

linear and hierarchical connections. 

a

If you designed your page for Netscape 4.5  on a high resolution monitor using a specific

web editor that may be the only configuration in which it looks good. Try checking your

page in several different browsers such as Internet Explorer 5  and on several levels of

computers before mounting it. You may be surprised at how it appears. 

Standards and Guidelines

If you want to have your page mounted on a server, you will have to follow the standards and

guidelines laid down by the server s owner. The owner of the web server shares legal liability for

the content mounted.

Intellectual property, as it relates to the ownership of materials mounted on the server, permission

for certain links to be made, third party ownership of technology/applications used for document

creation,  etc.  are  matters  of  valid  concern  for  server  owner,  website  creator  and  website

maintainer. Once mounted, your page is available worldwide.

If you have violated someone s intellectual property rights, he or she will find out about it. Every

document, design, file and the like has an owner. You must not mount anything on your page that

is owned by someone else without written permission. .urther, you must not indicate you are

the property owner if, in fact, you are not.

Generally speaking:

a

All documents should be coded to the accepted markup standard. 

a

All documents/pages should provide a link to the site homepage. 

a

The URL should appear within every document/page. 

a

All documents/pages should carry accurate creation and revision dates. 

Copyright  NESIS 2002

12