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.