Operation Manual
90 Web Design from Scratch
The Home page can be a cross between a greeting card, a magazine
cover, an advertisement, and a main menu for the rest of your site.
There’s no question that well-rendered graphics add interest, but don’t
feel obligated to illustrate every single section link with its own GIF.
Remember that some users still turn off graphic loading when browsing
Web sites, in order to speed up access to textual info and skip
advertising. These users will never see your images; make sure your
text hooks them.
For these as well as other visitors, make sure you provide alternate
text captions for each graphic, using the Web Picture Manager dialog
(on the Tools menu). You can select individual graphics and then run
the Wizard to set individual captions. The captions will hold attention
as the graphics load, and convey the essence of the image for the text-
only user. Blind users with special software can hear the alternate text
(via synthesized speech), and so will not completely miss the pictorial
content.
Large graphics have their place, particularly if they double as
hypergraphics (see below), but you certainly don’t want more than a
couple of 50K graphics per page. And anything that’s going to take a
minute or two to load had better be worth it!
A Design Checklist
Before starting out, you should ask yourself these basic questions:
How many pages will you need?
What basic composition will you use?
Where will the navigation bar go, and what will it look like? Do
you want to use a text-based navigation “header” or “footer”?
What font will you use for headlines, body text, and captions?
Which color scheme will you use, and will you customize its basic
colors or Web colors? (In Web Wizards, body text is marked with
Scheme Color 1, but you can depart from that convention.)
The success of your site probably depends more on high-quality
content than on any other single factor. As a rule, people will be
visiting your Web site because they’re interested in what you can tell
them or offer them. Your job is to make that reward as accessible as
possible, and make the site’s design quality integral to the experience.
You don’t want any elements that throw up barriers to access, or stand
out like sore thumbs to detract from the visitors’ positive response.