Comments on writing good web pages

Frank E. Ritter

3 November 1997

Some Factors

• Speed
• Colour
• Esthetics
• Audience
• Media: sound, clips, others
• Printability
• There are many more, see Preece and references
• Choosing factors is what makes this a question of design

Some Tactics

• Put up URLs
• Sign your work
• Keep the site up to date because *you* use it
• Be prepared for multiple browsers
• Support movement between pages
• Provide a map
• Support search engines (as appropriate!)
• Choose appropriate fonts
• Keep fonts clear, viewable, and small in number
• Avoid as many known errors as possible
• Develop a theory of use

Examples

Psychological Soar Tutorial and U. of Nottingham Soar site and a GNU site

Three minimalistic designs

MacSpotLight first page helps sort out nearest server

MacSpotLight Main page has lots of confusing icons, slow to load, and useless colour

The Web Enquirer a currently non-active site

Online books page a big site, showing some attempts to keep things organized

Cognitive architectures an online book/reference aid with search and multiple links

Pirelli awards too slow to load

References

Print

Communications of the ACM, August 1995, 38(8)

Kommers, P. A. M., Grabinger, S., & Dunlap, J. C. (Eds.). (1996). Hypermedia learning environments. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum.

McDonald, S., & Stevenson, R. J. (1996). Disorientation in hypertext: The effects of three text structures on navigation performance. Applied Ergonomics, 27(1), 61-68.

McKnight C., Dillon A. & Richardson J. (Eds) (1993) Hypertext: A psychological perspective.

Shum, S. B. (1996). The missing link: Hypermedia usability research & The Web. SIGCHI Bulletin, 28(4), 68-75.

URLs

SIGCHI Bulletin

Introduction to programming HTML

CERN's guide to writing html

Page with additional pointers

Lynch and Horton at Yale (recently purchased by Microsoft to go with Cambridge)

Notes from Temple U.

Notes from CMU (also not owned by Microsoft)

10 commandments of HTML

The U. of Nottingham's web guidelines