Lecture 5: Comments on Lesson 2: Digital Design

Welcome to Lecture 5! We will continue our discussion on Web Page Design.

Five site-accessibility tips to help comply with Section 508

For those who are not aware, Section 508 refers to a 1998 amendment to the Rehabilitation Act requiring government agencies to give “disabled employees and members of the public access to information that is comparable to the access available to others.” [Section 508 (29 U.S.C. ‘ 794d)]. If you’re doing Web work for a government agency, Section 508 probably applies to you, too....click here to continue reading this article.

Notes from The Lesson Plan

The learning objectives of lesson 2 include:

• Understand the importance of navigation aids.
• Understand the principles of site design and site structure

In this lecture, we will examine these two important aspects.

Navigation aids make a site more accessible and usable. As the reading states:

A rich set of graphic navigation and interactivity links within your Web pages will pull users' attention down the page, weaning them from the general-purpose browser links and drawing them further into your content.

The problem occurs when we tend to confuse the difference between "previous and next pages" with "back and forward". Therefore, navigation bars which will take the reader to a true previous page instead of back to where they came from can be very helpful.

Site Design

Remember the five steps to organizing your site:

• Divide your content into logical units
• Establish a hierarchy of importance among the units
• Use the hierarchy to structure relations among units
• Build a site that closely follows your information structure
• Analyze the functional and aesthetic success of your system
  

Determining a proper site structure for your site is one of the more important activities. In the following interactivity, site structure selection is emphasized.

Site Structure Selection

Design Standards

Without clear design standards, your overall enterprise Web presence will evolve as a patchy, confusing set of pages — some well designed, some disastrous, and all mere parts of a dysfunctional system. A lack of design standards also limits Web use by imposing complex design decisions on new users who would like to develop sites; it's a daunting task to have to develop new graphic design and interface conventions instead of being able to adopt a professionally designed system of corporate intranet standards.

A great video presentation on design standards can be found at: The Value of Standards in Web Design

I will be showing this in the classroom on Thursday night as well.