This web site was recommended by a student (thanks Kelly-Anne) and deals with some golden rules for web design. My first reaction when I read through them was that the Ten Commandments listed were spot on! This ties in partly with the topic of next week’s lecture on navigation design.
I did pause to think about the recommendation to keep your pages below 100KB. This sounds like the advice we used to use five years ago to account for modem users. Surely I thought, things have moved on. If you stop and think though, modems haven’t got any faster in those five years, 56K is still your lot. Broadband use is hovering around 50% of home users (maybe a little more) so there are still a large number of people stuck in the Internet slow-lane who don’t appreciate graphics-laden pages.
I really agree with the comment about Marquee tags! They are so “My First Web Site”. It is dismal to have to mark an assignment where four or five different marquees scroll across the screen with their own timelines. It isn’t big and it isn’t clever! They never get high marks.
Another good source of inspiration for web design is Jakob Nielsen. He’s a usability guru who publishes regular advice on web design. Some people think he advocates dull web sites, but his comments make a lot of sense. His book Designing Web Usability
