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The Ten Web Commandments

The following is a list of guidelines you always should take into consideration when designing a web site.

1. Know Your Goal
Before you begin doing anything else for your web site, you need to understand the purpose the site will serve. Writing it down is a good exercise, but you should also keep it handy throughout the site development process. Referring back to your goal helps you focus your time and your ideas because you are constantly evaluating ideas based on whether they are meeting your stated mission or missions.

For example, the purposes of this web site are two-fold: to serve as an online portfolio of my design work and also to act as a resource for my students. Just about everything I do is geared to serve those two goals.

2. Plan Your Site on Paper First
Good web design often starts with a pencil and paper. Before you start coding or working in FrontPage or Dreamweaver, it’s good to have an illustrated schematic of what you are aiming for. Even a crude drawing will do. You should design what a basic page looks like, where your links will go, navigation, etc. You can also make a diagram which indicates what the main page will be .

Many designers then progress to making a comp, which is a mock-up or “composite” of the web site in graphics program such as Adobe Photoshop, or Adobe Illustrator. While this comp doesn’t have functional links, it allows the designer to preview the appearance of the page, and some designers use the comp to actually generate some of the live graphics for a page.

3. Know Your Audience
Knowing who will visit your site is just as important as what your site goal will be. The audience that you serve can impact how you design the site in many ways…

Audience determines the style of the site.
For example, a cartoonist’s web site might be flashy, colorful, and irreverent but a bank’s web site should project a more classical and formal image.

Connection speed affects design.
Some surfers such as college students access the web with a super high bandwidth and can quickly download large graphics and streaming media files. On the other hand, surfers in developing nations may have slower and less-reliable connection speeds, and pay a premium for web access time, so long download times would be inadvisable.

Section 508 and Visually Impaired
Visually-impaired surfers use browsers that read aloud the contents of a page to a user. If this audience is important to you, you need to know how to build your site to be compatible with your audience‘s software. Making sure your site is accessible is becoming a very common practice for web sites even if they are not directly related to government work.

4. Design the Distribution of Your Information
You don’t want your homepage to be a warehouse of information, but rather a table of contents which acts as a springboard that links users to the different areas of content.

You also want to avoid the opposite problem of “buried treasure,” where users have to click on 10 links just to find one piece of information. Strike a good balance between how easy it is to access the content and the importance if the content. The most important information should be easy to find. Less important information can be more removed.

5. Have Clear Navigation
It should be simple for any visitor to navigate to the most important pages in your web site. Visitors shouldn’t be able to get lost. They need to know where they are and how to get back to the main areas. You don’t want to be accused of having what Vince Flanders calls “Mystery Meat Navigation.”

6. Keep Your Site Simple
Not everyone that visits your site updates their browser regularly, so if you use the latest and greatest web technologies in your web site (for example, FLASH movies), some surfers will not be able to see them. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t add them at all, but don’t use them for mission critical elements such as your main navigation links. Of course, you need to know your audience.

Don’t add any special effects just because they’re cool. Every aspect of the site should serve the site’s overall goal and purpose. Besides, a simple and elegant site is often easier to navigate than one crowded with graphics, text, animations, etc. Less is more.

7. Use Common Fonts
When you’re making a Web site, you can leave your text set at the default font or you can specify be sure to use common fonts... fonts that everyone is likely to have installed on their computer. Why?

When someone visits your site, if they don’t have the font you’re using installed in their computer‘s font library, the text will be rendered with a default system font. This can change not only your design intent, but other, more important issues like how big the text is, etc.

Common Fonts
Each user will have different fonts installed. These fonts are the most common:		Also common, though not quite as universal, are Microsoft's Core Web Fonts:
Serif	Times New Roman Times	Serif	Georgia
Sans-serif	Arial Helvetica	Sans-serif	Arial Black Impact Trebuchet MS Verdana
Monospace	Courier New Courier	Monospace	Andale Mono
		Cursive	Comic Sans MS

If there is an unusual font that you want to use sparingly, however, you can always save images of the text as graphics (as I did for the links at the top of this page).

8. What You See is Not Necessarily What They Get
Remember, a web site is not WYSIWYG (“what-you-see-is-what-you-get”), but rather, WYSINNWTG (”what-you-see-is-not-necessarily-what-they-get“). So with this in mind, preview your site with different browsers... Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, both Mac and PC versions, older and newer versions, with Java turned on and off, etc.

9. Do Not slow down Your Visitors
How do you slow down visitors? By requiring that they sit through a splash page, for example. Also by having slowly loading graphics or animations. Don’t put up any impediments between the surfer and your site.

10. Minimize Download Time
You want your web site to upload and download as quickly as possible, so you should be sure to optimize all of your graphics and movie files and any other types of files (such as PDFs) that appear on your web site. Optimizing means that you reduce the file size as much as you can without sacrificing visual quality.

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