Guidelines

What do you know of web design principles?

• You have already spent some time in examining some aspects of design. Web Publishing (Module 6), and produced some simple web pages.
• You are already familiar with concepts about word processing and graphic design as part of your ordinary library duties.
• Combined with your clear ideas of what a teacher librarian does (i.e. brings together user and right resource as fast as possible) the challenges of website design are covered.

The basic idea is KISS (Keep it Simple S…)

There are some extra sites you might want to visit. Web Design

What kinds of design parameters are important to you?

• Have a look at what other schools have done.
  • School Websites and Design
  • School Library Web Sites and Their Design.
• Establish of ascertain your school
  • print style guides
  • web style guides.
  These will need to be established especially if there are a number of different school websites.

Speed

This is important. Students and teachers need to find what they want quickly. Pages need to load in seconds. The priority is for each page to load quickly and provide information as easily as possible.

The website necessarily should be as accessible and usable as possible, both for ordinary users and for those who are disabled in some way. Look at some of the recommendations Usability and Accessibility. The resource is only worthwhile if students and staff find it easy to use, and it is only fair for you to make it possible for disabled users to access it easily.

• Try to make the code as uncluttered and uncomplicated as possible. This depends on web authoring software. (See the remarks about web authoring software on the Infrastructure page)

• Learn as much as possible about webpage design so that the site is as error free as attainable. There are websites that will check your code. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

• Try Cascading style sheets. If used from the beginning they can make your job much easier. Set up a style sheet for the whole website and you never have to add font colours again!

• Even the colours you choose can make your site easy to use or not. Colour blind users or users with different screens may find your text invisible. Colours for the Web

• Use larger fonts than with print because reading on a screen is different than on a page. You might want to set a cascading style sheet so that your normal font is 100%, which will show normally in whatever browser is used. Fonts suitable for print are not necessarily suitable for a computer. San serif fonts are easier to read on a screen because of the flicker of the monitor. Verdana is good as it was created for the computer. There is quite a lot of research in this area. Read some of this: Fonts for the Web.

• Aim to make the website as accessible as possible to as many browser platforms as possible, with easy loading in as wide a range of screen and colour resolutions as is practicable. You can check this with the help of Anybrowser.

• Use templates so you and any users can load subsequent pages easily. Dreamweaver and FrontPage have many templates available or you can construct your own.

• Do not use backgrounds that are heavily textured, very busy or very dark as they make any text on top very hard to read.

• Don't make the user scroll too much. Two "pages" downwards is probably enough.
  
  

• Active Server Pages can also be a useful addition to your site.

Presentation and Appearance

• Use a few small illustrations to make it relatively uncluttered and load quickly.

• Many free graphic sites ( see some at Web Graphics: Design and Resources) allow you, as a non-commercial user, to use their resources if they are acknowledged properly. Try to make the pages visually attractive without slowing them down too much

• Take pictures with the school digital camera and use relevant and interesting original shots. Provide thumbnails which link to larger pictures, so initial pages load quickly.

• Add content to tables as they assist with layout and are easy to navigate and read. Set tables to 90% of screen size rather than an absolute size so the page can be read in any size window. Some earlier version browsers cannot handle tables but it is the best way to make the page manageable.

• Splash screens and flashy illustrations can be impressive. Java and Flash are fun to play with to augment your site, as long as you keep an eye on loading in various browsers and speed taken

Navigation

(See also Structure)

With search facilities, site maps, navigation bars and common borders users can access all parts of the site, so the organisation is a matter of the author's own choice. (Don't use frames!)

Bring it Together

Later when you are closer to presentation you might lie to use some validation services like World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Netmechanic for checking code
; Anybrowser that checks compatibility with older browsers and webXact where you can check for usability issues.

Activity: Design

Establish a design and style guide. Clarify or consider school guidelines. Choose or design templates and themes; choose fonts and colours, think about possible navigation methods. You might want to set up a cascading style sheet.

Submit a draft of this now! Remember to write your journal and contribute to the Bulletin Board.