Creating Web Pages For Dummies®

Chapter 14. Designing a Good‐Looking Page

In This Chapter

• Minding the principles of good design

• Avoiding design no‐nos

• Working with tables, frames, and layout

One of the trickiest issues in creating and publishing Web pages is creating and maintaining the overall look of each Web page. Some pages look great. Others look okay. Still others look hokey and amateurish. And how good a page looks varies considerably depending on who's looking — after all, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Up to a point, anyway; some pages are so bad, or so good, that everyone agrees on them.

When you create your first Web page, as described in Part I of this book, it really doesn't matter how your page looks. You're just trying to have fun and get a little experience. But if you're creating a Web page a lot of people will be looking at, or if you're practicing to create a Web page for business or career use, you're going to want it to look good. And explaining how to make a Web page look good is hard.

The overall impression a Web page makes depends on many different factors — the balance of white space (empty space) to text and graphics, the size of text used, the font used, appropriate use of headings versus regular text, and appropriate use of bulleted and numbered lists, hyperlinks, and other eye‐catching elements. Each of these factors has to be “right,” but “right” is hard to define — you know it when you see it. All the choices you make have to work together as a whole.

It usually takes a professional ...