~ Designing The Website - With YOU In Mind ~

Click on the options below to read that section:

• How This Website Was Designed & Written
• Techniques For Creating A More User-Friendly Website
• Simple Techniques for using Pictures
• Incorporating The Writing-For-The-Web Style

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How This Website Was Designed & Written

This website was designed with YOU in mind.

We don't read webpages the way we read books, word by word. In fact, 80% of us scan rather than read. We also like to take a more active, interactive role while surfing, such as clicking on interesting tidbits of information to find out more. Webpages written and designed to match these reading tendencies tend to be much more appealing.

Techniques For Creating A More User-Friendly Website

Techniques utilized here to create a more pleasurable surfing experience incorporated the following useability principles:

• simple and clear navigation enables you to reflexively surf to desired website contents and back
• a width of the textual part of the webpage was chosen to mimic that of a paperbook page, for a more comfortable reading experience
• the width of the entire webpage is only 760 pixels; even if you have a screen resolution of only 800 x 600, you still won't have to scroll from left to right in order to see the whole page
• the font chosen here, Verdane, was designed specifically for the Web, and is thus the most readable font of all for viewing online
• the webpage is designed to download relatively quickly even if you have an older computer with more limited memory
• any nifty special effects to be incorporated will be chosen that required textual coding or programming (HTML) as much as possible, rather than those that require heavy graphical effects, to avoid slow loading times.

Simple Techniques for Using Pictures Online

Photos used in printed publications don't show up well online. They also must be saved in a form suitable for the web and often resized, both of which results in loss of quality. Thus, any pictures included here would be chosen and modified so that they:

• have fewer people or objects in them
• have more simple backgrounds or settings
• are close-up shots

Cropping such images goes a long way toward making them more visible, legible, and appealing even if they are resized, or in thumbnails.

Incorporating the Writing-For-The-Web Style

Finally, webpage contents were mostly done in the writing-for-the web style, which involved:

• reducing verbosity by 50% overall
• translating lengthly paragraphs into simpler bulleted lists
• creating simple, meaningful titles and subtitles that allows you to quickly decide whether to read or skip to the next paragraph
• using short paragraphs and sentences, each containing one idea only
• utilizing the newspaper 'inverse pyramid' approach, with the most important information summarized at the beginning (here, it's usually done through a series of links at the top of the page when necessary)