A Few Design Guidelines

This is clearly a work in progress.

These are a few of the key guidelines I try to follow as I create my course web pages. I will admit that I fail to follow many of them much of the time. I will also admit that the list I came up with today may differ significantly from the list I would come up with tomorrow.

Provide a uniform "look and feel" for your web pages. When students are in your course web, they should quickly realize that they are on the pages and know how the pages are organized. Similarly, a uniform appearance helps students realize when they've left your web pages (and therefore are on pages that may be less trustworthy).

Make sure that it's easy to move to the "front door" to your site from every page. Your front door is the entry to the various parts of the site. Since you won't always be able to predict where students will go from a particular page, at least make it easy for them to return to the beginning. [I tend to combine these two and have a standard set of links to key parts of the site that I insert in every page.]

Make sure that it's easy to move from the front door to the key parts of your site.

Keep pages small. Studies show that people read less on the computer screen. Small pages also help ensure that your site better conforms to "multiple path" philosophy of hypertext. [I violate this principle more than most.]

Put the site name in the document title. Too many pages have similar names. When someone bookmarks a page (or just glances at the history), it should be easy for them to identify pages from your site as being from your site.

Include a last changed note on each page. Many readers find it quite helpful to have a "last changed" date on the page, particularly if they want to compare it to a version they've saved or printed.

Use your filenames and hierarchy to describe your documents. For example, the URL of this page, http://www.math.grin.edu/~rebelsky/Workshops/Web/Grinnell/Summer1998/design.html , tells you a lot about the page. Compare it with the URL of the participants list, http://www.lib.grin.edu/Classes/Participants.html . A good naming scheme can also help ensure that documents remain meaningful (see below for more on this). [On the other hand, mine is quite painful to type, but good links can help ameliorate that problem.]

Create a new site each semester, even if you're teaching the same course again or reusing materials. Courses often change, and their sites change even more frequently. If you or your students have references to the site and it changes, the references become valueless. I also consider the historical record valuable. [This, more than most of my guidelines, is clearly a matter of preference.]

Think about design. It's tempting to just throw something together, but by thinking about issues like the ones above, you can make your sites more useful for your students and yourself. I try to read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox columns (at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ ) for good design ideas.