Page Design – Lynch & Horton |
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Questions to Guide your design.
The overall graphic balance and organization of the page is crucial to drawing the reader into your content. The most effective designs for general Internet audiences use a careful balance of text and links with relatively small graphics. These pages load into browsers quickly, even when accessed from slow modems, yet still achieve substantial graphic impact.
Readers first see pages as large masses of shape and color, with foreground elements contrasting against the background field. Secondarily they begin to pick out specific information, first from graphics if they are present, and only then do they start parsing the harder medium of text and begin to read individual words and phrases.
white background and black text (green menu and header?) Ariel, Helvetica, sans-serif; haven't decided on size yet same font, colors or tones, headers, footers, and menu/navigation layout balance the text and graphics, clear menu navigation, small consistent graphics A Web page can be almost any length, but you've only got about forty-five square inches "above the fold" � at the top of your page � to capture the average reader, because that is all he or she will see as the page loads. One crucial difference between Web page design and print page design is that when readers turn a book or magazine page they see not only the whole next page but the whole two-page spread, all at the same time.
horizontal rules, icons, large type, graphic bullets
The "safe area" for Web page graphics is determined by two factors: the minimum screen size in common use and the width of paper used to print Web pages. Most display screens used in academia and business are seventeen to nineteen inches (forty-three to forty-eight centimeters) in size, and most are set to display an 800 x 600-pixel screen. Web page graphics that exceed the width dimension of the most common display screens look amateurish and will inconvenience many readers by forcing them to scroll both horizontally and vertically to see the full page layout.
title, author, creation/modification date, copyright, links to sitemap, contact, resources, index/homepage
I should try to keep most of my pages within a 800x600 (760x410 pixels) viewing area to avoid horizontal scrolling. |