Laying Out Your Site

I'll try to cover that in 3 pieces:

• Page Layout
• Page Flow
• Style Guide

Come on in and make yourself at home.

Page Layout

I find a great deal of comfort in a well-organized page. I like to see titles, white space, a strong identitiy and, most of all, be able to read the information on the page. I don't have any animation (yet) and I've steered clear of maps and other fancy images. The main reason I did this was because I can't stand to wait for minutes to get a page downloaded. Usually I'm looking for something in particular and I'm in a hurry.

I'm partial to those kind of sites and I wanted to make my own site one that loaded quickly and was as easy to navigate as I could make it. I would suggest that your page(s) have a well thought out title that appears at the top of the scroll window and also appears in bookmark entries. As a sidebar, put in META tags to help web-crawlers properly classify each page. This will help other people find the page and allows you to exercise some level of control over how your page is categorized..

Put navigation aids at the top and bottom of your pages. Make them consistent and helpful. These buttons, maps, or whatever form you choose, will make it easy for surfers to move through your site. Sometimes they'll even see them in the order which you intended. I push putting them at the top and bottom due to my aversion to having to scroll the page to find them. If you have them in both places then folks are less likely to use the BACK button and go where you intended for them to go instead.

Use graphics to illustrate a point or provide a link to a more detailed picture, but don't throw in useless clutter just because you can. Remember, there are lot of people out there who cruise with images off because they have to pay for the time they use and can't afford to download garbage.

Backgrounds can destroy a site. A background on your computer might look great but on someone else's it completely hides the text. I've tried a lot of backgrounds on my pages because I like the color and effects as much as the next person. But almost without exception, I've had to go back to a solid color, fade the background, or look for some really neutral ones to provide the best results for my pages.

Put some kind of identification on your pages. You don't have to get as anal retentive as I have about the information at the bottom. But let me tell you, when I go back to maintain my pages after being away from them for several months, it is very helpful. Again, it's part of that comfort thing - I've tied all my pages together through a similar appearance and it's just part of the template I use to start building new pages.

Your page layout will be your signature, your impression. It's as individual as your fingerprint and if it's applied consistently your viewers will recognize your pages just like the works of any great artist (or so-so artist in some cases).

Page Flow

While this may not appear like it's that important, this is critical to attracting and keeping visitors on your site. When you're on a mission looking for information you want to be able to explore a site very quickly. You don't want to have to waste a lot of time trying to figure out some cutesy gimmicks that may send you off to outer space.

At the top level, offer your readers a "sketch" of your site, a table of contents - something that will encourage them to go deeper in your web. Keep it simple and attractive so somebody will stop and look. Ideally this will be a high level description (and links) to your main branches. Selecting one of these links will lead to a topic that you will present to some degree of detail. I've got a branch that goes down to one page and I've got a branch that goes to a current topic with access to back issues. This will help you keep your reader's attention and focus your efforts on developing material for a branch.

Offer your visitors a structure and let them test the boundaries of your pages. Let them know when they've gotten to the left edge, the right edge, the top and the bottom. Always make sure that each page allows a way for a viewer to get to your Home Page. Remember that people may bookmark a particular page or find one of your pages through a search engine. They won't have travelled down your designated path - but give them a way to go back up your path.

In spite of all the hype about "new paradigms", a lot of your visitors have been brainwashed for years to "read" things from top to bottom and left to right (with my acknowledgement to the American flavor of that statement). You're welcome to try other methods and maybe you'll be instrumental in changing peoples' ingrained habits. I'm not one much for fighting those things so I choose to present my material in that fashion. I like to contain my site in a tree structure. I allow moving side to side on the first level of branches but I don't provide a way for a surfer to move from a deeper page on one branch to a page on another branch. This keeps them from getting lost in your information.

Style Guide

And you probably thought I'd said all there was to say about style didn't you? Believe me there's a lot to be said for style since that's what you want to have a lot of. I'd surfed a good deal before I finally started to build a web site. I created my first set of pages, went surfing, saw some new ideas, and re-did all my pages. I probably went through that cycle three or four times before settling on the current format. Each time I modified the pages it was much harder to do. First, it wasn't too exciting because it wasn't new material but just maintenance on existing stuff. Second, there were more pages to do each time I decided to update them all. Finally, some of the changes were fairly drastic and the last time I did an overhaul it took several, solid weeks. Not the kind of time you have to spend on "hobby".

There were several documents that helped me decide on the style you see today. I had been using the HTML Reference Manual produced by Sandia National Laboratories and really liked the layout and solid feeling. Then I stumbled across the Web Style Manual produced by the Yale Center for Advanced Instructional Media which helped add the finishing touches to my template.

The resulting "style" is a reflection of my personal taste, with guidance from experts in dealing with information flow in this environment, and a good dose of "what I like when I visit a site". Your style should reflect your tastes but don't ignore the universe of successful pages that have a track record for providing useful information.

The Rusk Family . . . "the Legend Continues"