Beginning Web Programming with HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Second Edition

Chapter 10. Design Issues

This chapter looks at design issues that affect specific parts of pages—text, menus, tables, and forms. Each is addressed in its own section, and each section contains helpful tips that will make your pages not only look more attractive, but also easy to use for more visitors.

First, you look at text and how to align it, space it out, and control the width of columns. You will then look at choosing fonts and font sizes, and you'll also learn how background images can affect readability of text.

Next, you look at navigation. This topic covers three areas: menus, links, and search features. Almost every site has a menu that helps the user navigate among sections of the site. If your menu is not clear, people will not be able to explore your site, and they won't look at as much of it. So you need to be aware of some key points in designing menus so that they're easy for the user to understand and use. Most sites also feature links in other parts of the page than just the menu, and you need to make it clear to users what the links are on your site so that they know where they can click. You can use techniques such as color, underlining, and change of cursor icon to indicate to the user where links are. Finally, a search option can help users find what they want on a site rather than having to navigate, or a search option can help if they've tried navigating but can't find what they came for.

We'll look quickly at how adding shading to tables can help a user follow ...