SITEMAP

Design > Sitemapping : Navigation : Screen Resolution : Spliced Sites : Info Architecture : Site Standards : Storyboarding : Tables Intro : Frames Are Evil : Table Tips : Proportionate vs Absolute : View Source : Consistency

if there's a standard, stick to it.

The web is a fairly recent development, and has changed with great speed. It's understandable that standards are only just beginning to be developed and agreed upon.

There are a few basic principles that are probably familiar to you as a web user, even if you've never really thought about them. These include such characteristics as clicking on a logo at the top left to take you back to a site's homepage; main navigation being at the top or left-hand side of a screen; legal/authorship and other less commonly used but omnipresent links being at the bottom of the screen, etc.

On a more formal level, there is a set of protocols to ensure consistent behaviour in a range of browsers, accessability issues and the like. These are known as the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards. You can read more about these at www.webstandards.org, and if you're intending to get into designing large, dynamic sites then you should learn more about W3C compliance.

Many of the W3C standards emphasise CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which I don't use personally. They're great for big sites, but I believe not an absolute necessity for sites like this one. They're a bit complicated to work with and only compatible with "modern" browsers (IE5 and above). You might think everyone uses at least IE5 and above, but I get regular visitors using IE2 and they're among my most important - They're search engine "spiders" (automated scripts), skimming through my content to decide upon my search engine rankings.

I'll cover CSS in a bit more detail in the Building chapter when I discuss Templates and other ways to ensure consistency throughout a site.