My design philosophy
I started the foray into web design in late 2003, and basically jumped in with both feet. I eagerly read up on all the latest and greatest in web design (and still do). From all of my research, I have developed some of my own opinions about web design. When designing a website, I try to follow these practices:
-
Write a well-structured document
This means using the standard html tags such as <h1> to indicate the structure of the document, and tags such as <li> to properly indicate lists. Making a structured document ensures that it will be easy to read in many different formats, including search engines, which may use markup to generate a summary of the document. Search engines also base their page rank on these tags, so the proper use of them can increase page rank. (See this in depth article on web standards and search engine optimization) -
Use standards compliant and accessible markup
The World Wide Web Consortium is an international collective of programmers and web designers who set standards for various web technologies. One of their goals is to make the web accessible to all people. They also provide ways for designers to validate that their websites are standards compliant. The orange and white logos found on most of my sites are proof that they have successfully been validated by the w3c. -
Ensure that the site functions on as many platforms and browsers as possible
The first step in making a site cross-browser and platform compatible is to validate it with the w3c. Unfortunately, not all browsers are compatible with the w3c standards. Therefore I also make sure to test that all my sites work on all the most-used browsers (Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer). -
Make the site easy to navigate for the user
A good site should have navigation menus in easy to find places, with appropriate and meaningful names. -
Use good urls
If I see a link to a page such as http://robfelty.com/design/examples, it is very clear that I am about to go to a page about examples of Robert Felty's web design. This is not the case with links such as 'foobar.org/?this=that&cryptic_Code=7a8d9f34850'. Having good urls also helps users navigate more easily. And once a url is out there, it is important to make sure that it stays there. If at some point in the future the page gets moved, the old url should continue to work. -
Don't leave out the little guy
While flashy sites with lots of graphics,videos, bells, and whistles can be appealing, it is important to remember that many people in the world still have dial-up internet connections, and viewing these pages for them can be painfully slow and frustrating. For this reason I try very hard to include images and videos sparingly, and to offer small and large versions whenever possible. -
Design for the future
This involves thinking about the future needs of the site before starting a project. Obviously one cannot foresee the future, but one can design a site with flexibility in mind, so that the style of the site can be easily changed, and so that one can easily incorporate new pages and features.
