"Life is too short to make all mistakes one’s self and then learn from them. So learn from the mistakes of others.” 

Mohammed Alfie Hamid, 6.11.00

Before you start designing your own website, look at these websites. They will introduce you to some elements of a good website. By focusing on good and poor design, you will know what to avoid and be better able to choose what to include in your own website.

Here are some basic questions of design that you must ask yourself when designing a site or reflecting on someone else's site.

How easy is it to find your way around the site?  

Finding your way around a website is called navigating.  You are going to look at some sites to see if you can easily click from link to link to get around the site and back to where you started from.

Compare The Cuban Experience with The Himalayas. Which one do you think is easier to navigate through? Why? Try to find reasons for this difference.

Next, consider why !Ke e /Xarra //Khe and Ancient Egypt are described as having "dead-end navigation". What do you think is meant by this term? 

If you have a look at The Soundry, you will see that the authors have included a section on the home page, called a site map. This is devoted to explaining how to find your way around the site.  This is really helpful, particularly when a website is large.

How informative is the site?

Consider the content of the site, and make sure that there is something useful enough to read. How do you intend to make sure that you write about things that others will want to read?  Some websites are just made up of lots of links to other sites, and do not contain very much information themselves.  

As the World Wide Web has so much content on it, your website is competing with other content. It is important that you think about the purpose of your site, and make sure that the information suits that purpose. No one wants to follow lots of links only to find little information of substance. Nor does anyone want to wade through reams and reams of information to get to what they are looking for.

Good websites often include links to other credible resources. Most Web designers try very hard to keep readers inside or internal to their own site. They try to avoid people going off into other sites and not returning to their site. To do this they make it obvious   when links are going to take the reader outside of the designed website. They also include links to useful descriptions, explanations and advice.

Have a look at this site on Dolphins. This site is particularly well organized with a large amount of information and very good notes on where the information came from. 

If you need to find out more about the site or the information contained in it, then you should be able to see a contact address of the author(s) and something about the author(s). Have a look at this site on Healing the Nation. You will find not only photographs, but even short paragraphs about the authors' friends.

It seems like an unimportant thing, but, in order to allow other people to enjoy their visit to your website, you are going to have to consider how attractive it is. You will decide which colours you are to use and how well they go together.  

We think that the site The Himalayas is tasteful in its design and !Ke e /Xarra //Khe makes effective use of its colours, although everyone likes different colour schemes. Quite substantial research has been done into the use of colours and combinations of colours for reading in the World Wide Web. Whereas novice web designers often use background textures and colours, many Web designers now use plain white backgrounds with black or navy blue text. 

The Living Africa site has a continuity of style.  In other words, the colours, pictures, graphics, and arrangement of the text give it the same design for each page. 

Consider why some people believe that the animations are annoying in the site and see if you agree.  Sometimes the design is just too busy and overcrowded. 

Compare The Cuban Experience with The Himalayas and decide which one has the best graphic design. Is a more colourful design always better?

When choosing a design, it should be relevant to the subject matter.  Just imagine swapping around some of the designs from sites you have just looked at. You can imagine how inappropriate it would be to use happy cartoon animals on the page if the subject matter concerned people dying of AIDS?

Similarly experienced Web users find "click here" instructions very tedious, and generally prefer discrete navigation frameworks. Novice users tend to need more guidance and in some cases prefer bigger clearer navigation buttons.

How readable is the information on the site?  

"In some cases, the spelling and the grammar is so bad that you do not want to read further because you do not have faith in the reliability of the information. It is always important to think about both presentation and language in designing a web site."

How quickly does it load?

Once you start being creative, you are going to want to include pictures,  photographs, and perhaps some animated graphics (graphics that move). You will be so excited about this that you will forget that these items need to be transferred along a telephone line and will take a long time to appear on the screen. 

Have a look at the Trailing the Transistor site and see how long it takes to load the home page on your screen. You may have to wait a minute or so. Trailing the transistor has a very appealing home page graphic that appears unexpectedly and in a most unusual way. However, it is probably missed by most readers, because they have clicked to go to the next page long before the graphic appears.

Look at how long it takes this VolcanoWorld [online] site to load. Some sites have this problem on more than one page and so viewing the site becomes very boring and it is costing users for the time they are spending on the telephone. It is best if readers are at least able to read some text while graphics are loading. 

From looking at all these sites and referring to the different characteristics that we have outlined  above, you hopefully have some ideas about what good Web page design is about, and about what you should include and avoid.