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ChaPter 11 • Designing effeCtive outPut 311

consUlT The books. Something that can add to your expertise in this new field is to read about
Web design. The following are some books on website design:
Eckerson, W. W. Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your
Business, 2nd ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010.
Few, S. Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.
Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Incorporated, 2006.
Flanders, V., and D. Peters. Son of Web Pages That Suck: Learn Good Design by Looking at
Bad Design. Alameda, CA: Sybex, 2002.
McNeil, P. The Web Designer’s Idea Book, Vol. 2: More of the Best Themes, Trends & Styles in
Website Design. New York: F+W Media, 2010.

look aT soMe poor exaMples of Web pages, Too. You can learn from others’ mistakes by
critiquing poor web pages and remembering to avoid those mistakes. Examine the website found at
www.webpagesthatsuck.com. Despite its “counterculture” name, this is a wonderful site that provides
links to many poorly designed sites and points out the errors that designers have made on them.

creaTe TeMplaTes of yoUr oWn. If you adopt a standard-looking page for most of the pages you
create, you’ll get the website up and running quickly, and it will consistently look good. Websites
may be made using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a language that allows a designer to specify the
color, font size, font type, and many other attributes only once. These attributes are stored in a style
sheet file and then are applied to many web pages. If a designer changes a specification in the style
sheet file, all the web pages using that style sheet will be updated to reflect the new style.

Use plUg-ins, aUdio, and video very sparingly. It is wonderful to have features that the
professional pages have, but remember that everyone looking at your site doesn’t have every new
plug-in. Don’t discourage visitors to your page.

Specific Guidelines for Website Design
Good websites are well thought out. Pay attention to the following:
1. Structure
2. Content
3. Text
4. Graphics
5. Presentation style
6. Navigation
7. Promotion

sTrUcTUre. Planning the structure of a website is one of the most important steps in developing
a professional website. Think about your goals and objectives. Each page in the overall Web
structure should have a distinct message or other related information. Sometimes it is useful to
examine professional sites to analyze them for content and features. Figure 11.12 is a screen
capture from the DinoTech website. The purpose for the site and the Web medium work well
together. Notice that there is great attention to supporting users on the site. There are words,
graphics, JPEG images, and icons. In addition, there are many kinds of links: to RSS feeds,
video, sub-Webs, chat rooms, a search engine, and many other features.
To help plan and maintain a solid structure, a Webmaster can benefit from using one of the
many website diagramming and mapping tools available. Many software packages, including
Microsoft Visio, have Web charting options built into the software. Although helpful for develop-
ment, these tools become even more important when maintaining a website. Given the dynamic
nature of the Web, sites that are linked to your site may move at any time, requiring you or your
Webmaster to update the links.
In Figure 11.13, a map of a section of the authors’ website is shown in the Microsoft Visio
window. In this example, we explore the website down to all the existing levels. Notice the links
to HTML pages, documents, images (JPEG, GIF, or PNG files), and mail-tos (a way to send
email to a designated person). The links can be either internal or external. If a link is broken, a
red X appears, and the analyst can investigate further. This Visio file can be printed out in sec-
tions and posted on the wall to get an overall picture of the website.