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17.1 Top of the Tips
The most important tip for even veteran authors is to surf the Web
for yourself. We can show and explain a few neat tricks to get you
started, but there are thousands of authors out there combining and
recombining HTML and XHTML tags and juggling content to create
compelling and useful documents.
Examine (don't steal) others' pages
for eye-catching and effective features, and use them to guide your
own creations. Get a feel for the more effective web collections. How
are their documents organized? How large is each document?
We all learn from experience, so go get it!
17.1.1 Design for Your Audience
We continuously argue throughout
this book that content matters most, not look. But that
doesn't mean presentation doesn't
matter.
Effective documents match your target audience's
expectations, giving them a familiar environment in which to explore
and gather information. Serious academicians, for instance, expect a
journal-like appearance for a treatise on the physiology of the
kumquat: long on meaningful words, figures, and diagrams and short on
frivolous trappings like cute bullets and font abuse.
Don't insult the reader's eye,
except when exercising artistic license to jar or in order to attack
your reader's sensibilities.
By anticipating your audience and designing your documents to appeal
to their tastes, you also subtly deflect unwanted surfers from your
pages. Undesirables, such as penniless college students surfing your
commercial site,[1] may hog your
server's resources and prevent the buying audience
you desire from ready access to your pages.
[1] Not that there's
anything wrong with that. We both started out as penniless college
students and, years later, wound up writing for
O'Reilly.
You can use subtle colors and muted text transitions between sections
for a classical art museum's collection, to mimic
the hushed environment of a real classical art museum. The typical
rock-'n'-roll crazed web-surfer
maniac probably won't take more than a glance at
your site, but the millionaire arts patron might.
Also, use effective layout to gently guide your
readers' eyes to areas of interest in your
documents. Do that by adhering to the basic rules of document layout
and design, such as placing figures and diagrams near (if not inline
with) their content references. Nothing's worse than
having to scroll up and down the browser window in a desperate search
for a picture that can explain everything.
We won't lie and suggest that we're
design experts. We aren't, but
they're not hard to find. So, another tip for the
serious web page author is to seek professional help. The best
situation is to have design experience yourself. Next best is to have
a pro looking over your shoulder, or at least somewhere within
earshot.
Make a trip to your local library and do some reading on your own,
too. Better yet, browse the various online guides. Check out
Web Design in a Nutshell by Jennifer Niederst
(O'Reilly). Your readers will be glad you did. [Section 1.6]
17.1.2 Consistent Documents
The next best tip we can give you
is to reuse your documents. Don't start from scratch
each time. Rather, develop a consistent framework, even to the point
of a content outline into which you add the detail and character for
each page. And endeavor to create CSS2-based style sheets, so that
the look and feel of your documents remains consistent across your
collection.
