HTML Look and Feel Guidelines


Guidelines:  Stickiness  Modularity  Cohesion  Consistency  Speed  Dimensions  Limit Frame Usage

Stickiness

The homepage and main section webpages should be interesting and compelling.

Rationale: Many users quickly will navigate to other websites if the main webpages do not capture their interest.

Modularity

Where practical, keep the webpage small enough to be displayed without requiring scrolling. If possible, break large webpages into a set of related smaller webpages. Group the information on a single web page into multiple related chunks.

Rationale: Small webpages download faster, and modular webpages are easier to understand.

Cohesion

Keep the webpage cohesive, containing only related information.

Rationale: This guideline makes easier to understand the webpage.

Consistency

Use a consistent background and color scheme on all webpages throughout the website.

Rationale: This makes the website more understandable.

Speed

Try to keep each webpage small enough that it can be downloaded in less than 10 seconds over a 56K BAUD line.


Rationale: Most users will not wait longer than 30 seconds for a webpage to download without getting frustrated.

Dimensions

Try to keep the width of webpages less than 535 pixels. Try to keep the height of webpages less than 3 times 295 pixels.

Rationale: This width eliminates the need for horizontal scrolling on most browsers on most monitors. This height eliminates the need to scroll down more than twice the browser height.

Limit Frame Usage

Limit the use of frames to no more then 3 or 4.

Rationale: Too many frames either make users scroll vertically and horizontally or else cuts off the content of tiny frames. Many search engines have a hard time dealing with frames.




HTML Design and Coding Standards:  Content  Look and Feel  Behavior  Navigation  Text  Color  Images  Sound