Designing and Building Web Sites

1
Designing and Building Web Sites

• Part of the General Studies Programme

2
Scheme

• Planning a website (audience purpose)
• Structuring your site (hyper-links, frames, menus
  etc)
• Using HTML and FrontPage (Text, colour,
  graphics, audio)
• Third party interactivity (message boards, guest
  books, dynamic links pages etc)
• Programming interactivity (DHTML, JavaScript,
  VBScript)
• Launching and promoting your site

3
Course Outcomes

• Working knowledge of HTML and FrontPage
• Appreciation of different design strategies
• Design and implement a website of your own
• Must be from scratch, although you could redesign
  an existing site.

4
Purposes of Web Sites

• Learn more about a topic?
• Buy one of your products?
• Hire you to perform a service?
• Communicate more easily with you?
• Be motivated into taking some action?

5
Principles of Navigation

• What
• Consistency
• Unobtrusive
• Link to home
• Where am I ?
• Use Outliner in Word

• How
• Table links
• Image Map
• Frames
• Navigation Bar
• JavaScript menu

6
Fonts

• Keep it simple
• Serifs for headings
• San Serif for body
• But dont use two serifs or two sans together
• Create an impression
• Formal or casual, body or display, friendly or
  serious, cool or warm, modern or traditional?
• www.will-harris.com

7
Colour

• Maximum of 2 or 3 colours recommended
• Not all browsers will show your colour as you see
  it therefore simple is best
• Design your screen for 600 x 800 resolution for
  greatest compatibility

8
Speed

• Minimum graphics necessary never use bitmaps,
  better to use jpg for photos, gif for pictures
• Split your pages up
• Use framesets to save changing constant
  text/graphics
• Beware multimedia
• FrontPage calculates download time

9
Some food for thought

• http//www.ineasysteps.com/
• www.coolhomepages.com
• http//www.will-harris.com/index.html

10
Free resources

• free components for your site
• Bravenet
• Javafile.com