Summarize and Reflect on Week 3

This week’s readings were focused on what makes a website well designed. Chapter 7 concentrated on designing the interface and navigation. Interface basically refers to how a page looks and how one interacts with it. Navigation design is a specific part of the interface design and is focused on how people find their way around your site. Finding the way around the site is extremely important. The whole reason you have a site is to supply information and content. If the reader can’t find the content easily they will not spend much time at the site. The key to good interface is a simple plan. It is wise to start with an outline or flow chart to guide you through the design. As was talked about in other chapters you need to design your site to be viewed on various monitors with different browsers. Horizontal formats tend to work best for this. Whatever navigation style you choose should be simple and clearly understood. A reader should know where they are and where they are going. Good repetition will let the user to navigate by not having to look at different places on each page to find common elements. Use of a site map or index is a good idea so a user can get a good idea of where all your content is located and how to get to it. Chapter 8 provided a number of case studies of good and bad sites. It reviewed specific items to avoid when designing. Many of the items, such as not using all caps and having a contrasting background to text, were emphasized. The two checklists at the end are great tools to use when evaluating not just existing sites but sites you create. The Diigo readings provided another take on evaluating websites. The readings focused on evaluating the website using other criteria. They explained the importance of looking at why the website was created and who created it. Questions you should ask are; Is it biased? Is the information accurate? Does the creator have an agenda? Websites are created for all different reasons and you should be careful when viewing and trusting the content. The article written by Kim Guenther dealt with designing web pages and how to organize information. Using a method like the inverted pyramid taken from traditional journalism is a smart approach. Picking an appropriate style guide is important and especially useful when organizing websites which may have multiple contributors. When multiple people are providing content you must be sure to use uniform statements and brands. The most important part of the article I thought was at the end. The last paragraphs were about making sure your site is easily found and searchable by sites like Google. The best sites are useless if nobody can find them.