Website Design:
Considerations for a Good Website

Your website should consist of 4 - 7 (please no more than 7!) pages devoted to a coherent topic, one that can be described generally and then more specifically. The general description should be made on the index page, and the second level pages should be concerned with the more specific aspects of your topic. There could be third level pages that branch from a specific topic, but this is not necessary for a good site.

The navigation in your site is extremely important. A visitor should be able to get to any page in the site from any other page in the site, which means that you develop a standard navigation bar and include it on all pages in the same place. A standard navigation bar means just that, the same text (or image) appears on all pages. Students sometimes think they should leave off the name of the page they are on, but this causes great confusion for the visitor.

Your website should have a consistent "look and feel". This was very difficult when pages were styled crudely using HTML attributes. Now that we are using Cascading Style Sheets, the task is simple. Use the same stylesheet for every page in your site, and all you have to do is change a few items in your CSS file to get a brand new look. Your website project must not include any CSS except in your external style sheet.

When you take your webpages out into the world, you may not want to include the XHTML validator button, but in this class it is not only required but a badge of honor and must be included on each page of your website. I highly recommend including it when you present your portfolio to a prospective employer. Having your pages validate to the highest W3C standard is no small accomplishment. The webpages in your website project must all validate under XHTML 1.0 strict.

You are not allowed to use any features in your website that have not been covered in this class.

Expectations in the world of web design include the following rules of the road:

- the index page is always named index.html
- all images are kept in an images folder
- because many servers are case-sensitive and don't handle spaces in filenames well, all filenames should be lowercase and include no spaces.

Your website project does not have to include all of the HTML and CSS features that we have studied in the class. However, it should certainly include a few images, and you should include some of the things that you have learned (box model, divs, 2 column layout, tables, forms, ssi, etc.). Of course, if you submit a website that uses requirements from one lesson, and then after it has been graded, want to remove some of those elements, that is fine.