©William J Ferns, I. Models for Websites: What’s Involved in Building and Maintaining a Site?

©William J Ferns, Outline Basic Decisions about Your Site The DON’Ts and DO’s of Web Design Structuring Your Web Site

©William J Ferns, Choosing Your Tasks (Review) Basic Decisions about Your Site: – Purposes / Goals – Site Functions – Site Appearance

©William J Ferns, The DON’Ts of Web Design a/k/a The Rogue’s Gallery Time Wasters –Splash pages –Bandwidth hogs with lots of graphics Ugly Interfaces –Inconsistent design page-to-page –Lists that go on forever –‘Cool’ pages that are hard to read/use –Distracting animations –Recurring audio clips

©William J Ferns, The Rogue’s Gallery (cont’d) Bad Maintenance –Anonymous Pages –Aging paging –Missing Links –Infinite Loops Implicit ‘Rope Policies’ –Pages that are too browser-specific –Pages that rely on high-powered add-ins –No ADA compliance

©William J Ferns, The DO’s of Web Design A 'What's New' section –Web users thrive on getting the ‘latest’ info – Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages –Gives instant feedback to common questions Help the user find out what’s in the site –A search engine for larger sites –A site map for smaller sites

©William J Ferns, The DO’s of Web Design (cont’d) A feedback mechanism:  Minimally, an link  Preferably, links to specific departments Consistent navigation –inform the user where she is, and where she can go – Linking instructions –help strategic partners set-up links to your pages –

©William J Ferns, The DO’s of Web Design (cont’d) Links to affiliates Privacy policies & security information –disney.go.comdisney.go.com Location, location, location –Provide your real-world address/locales –Maybe directions & map (MapQuest) ADA Compliance –For visually impaired, text-only and ALT-tags –For hearing impaired, provide text for aural info –

©William J Ferns, Structuring Your Web Site How you want to let visitors navigate your site How you want to organize your content How you want to control how visitors reach content You should think about how your structure your web site, based on:

©William J Ferns, Sequential Structures Simple to navigate Linear content and narrative, in some order (chronological, alphabetical, etc.) Easy for novice users Constricting for experienced users Generally applicable to smaller sites

©William J Ferns, Hierarchical structures Tree structure Breaks site into logical sections, based on function, or strategic outreach May have hierarchical substructures At lower levels, content is delivered linearly

©William J Ferns, Hierarchical structures (cont’d) Beware the ‘too- shallow’ structure and the ‘too deep’ structure--all menu, no content

©William J Ferns, Hierarchical structures (cont’d) Limited # of menu choices at each level Content where appropriate Some levels go deeper than others, depending on the purpose We want a ‘balanced hierarchy’

©William J Ferns, Grid Structure User can navigate from section-to-section or in deeper detail Useful if categories are consistent both across (‘Departments’) and down (‘What we do’, ‘Contact us’, etc.)

©William J Ferns, Web Structure Most flexible Utilizes WWW’s power for linking & association Difficult for novices Users may have trouble understanding the site’s structure

©William J Ferns, Evaluating Structures Simplicity (novice users) Complexity (expert users) Linear NarrativeNon -Linear Narrative

©William J Ferns, Lynch, P.J., & Horton, S World Wide Web style manual. New Haven: ale University Center for Advanced Instructional Media (C/AIM). December, J., and N. Randall The World Wide Web unleashed. Indianapolis: Sams Publishing. Horton, W. K Designing and writing online documentation, 2nd edition.New York: Wiley. Sources