ASD Web Design Guidelines

This section is specifically about designing your web pages; the "do"s, "don't"s and "should"s related directly to how your page is going to appear in a web browser. There is also a set of policy-related guidelines that you need to read.

Part 1: Introduction

The first two questions to answer when you're building a website are "Who's the audience?" and "What is the purpose of the site?". If you haven't answered those questions, do that before you do anymore coding. Those two questions will drive the design of your site. On the ASD website, the answers will vary some, but by and large, we can assume a few things.

Our Audience

Parents of students, students, staff, and people hoping to become one of those are the main people that will be using our site. We also get traffic from the media and other school districts. That gives a huge base of people with a wide variety of needs and expectations.

We're fortunate in Anchorage to have a higher than average number of homes with computers and Internet access, but we must not assume that all of those computers are new or that they have the latest and greatest software. As one example, millions of people access the Internet through AOL on slow modems and older computers. Some may have computers only a year or two old, but if they've never upgraded their software, they could be using a browser that doesn't meet the current HTML specification. Others may access the Internet using special software that reads web pages, or they may have difficulty using a keyboard (which become an issue when designing your navigation.)

Basically, we have to assume a pretty low common denominator, technologically speaking. This doesn't mean that we're stuck building simple sites or that we can't use the newest technology. It just means that we have to build our sites carefully and with our entire audience in mind.

Our Purpose

One word. Information. We can get into all sorts of discussions about what kind of information and how it should be presented and distributed, but it comes down to that one word: Information.

Peope come to the ASD website to find out something about the district. If we can provide something BEYOND that, so much the better, but if people come to the ASD site to find something and they can't because our design has gotten in the way, then we've done a disservice to that person and to ourselves.

The Internet and WWW have matured to a point that the circle has come back around -- the info is the key. Long downloads and superfluous page geegaws are distracting and although we're not "competing for eyeballs" the way a commercial site has to (like the battle between Amazon and Barnes & Noble, for example), making our website difficult to use or navigate is counter-productive.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Accessibility
   
3. Good Design Habits
   
4. The Gray Areas
   
5. Things to Avoid
   
6. Wrap-up and Links
7. Printable Version (one big page)