Chapter 27: Writing and Designing for the Web Summary

Chapter 27: Writing and Designing for the Web Summary

This chapter walks you through how to write and design a website. You need look at the following seven web page elements – a heading, body text, preformatted text, lists, images, background color and tables. You need to look at each element and figure out what is best for your site. You need to remember that simple is best different computers display things differently and the user is king or queen. The user needs to be able to change how your site is displayed on their screen. You also need to understand some functions you can have on your page. You need to know about and understand hyperlinks, menus and forms. I believe every website should always have a menu – a table of contents in other words. That way the user can easily navigate throughout your site. Hyperlinks and forms may or may not apply to your site. You would need to make that decision as you build your site. In order to get started in creating a web site, you need to think about the purpose of your website, the site’s audience be and the site’s central topic. When establishing you site’s central message, you should write out the main idea or the “mission statement.” As your site develops, you need to keep this mission statement in mind, sticking to it and/or add secondary goals for your site. After you have your mission statement, you need to realize that no one will read your entire site, your site may have many small audiences, websites are not linear and you may need to build your site in phases. You can have a single home page and then pages that branch out from it. You can study similar sites to get some ideas, look at organization, what the voice of the site(s) are, what words are being used, is it understandable, what are the sentences used, are they correct, and look at the design. You then can gather and prioritize your content, gather all your supporting materials and then design and develop individual pages. Make sure when drafting your site you identify the site, provide clear links, introduce and title each page, keep all your pages uncluttered, and save your webpage as HTML. You need to get feedback on your website just like you do when you write an essay. You can check over your site yourself, get peer review, and check all the text and graphics, provide a feedback link, post the site to the web, check for universality, announce your site, monitor your site and then make adjustments and updates as needed. Building a website seems a lot like writing an essay; it is just a bigger project. There is a lot of the same guidelines you have to follow for both a website and essay. You need to gather and organize you thoughts, write or deliver them in a clear and complete way, keep in mind who your audience is, get peer review and then post and share your work.