I find myself somewhat frustrated by the book assuming that we’re going to be working on these mammoth web sites. I understand that they have to assume the most difficult possible scenarios, but it would be nice if there were tips for figuring out which bits should apply to smaller sites. I liked all the attention paid to redesign in chapter 10, but again, I wish I had read all this before I had to submit my proposal. I now see a lot of other things I could have addressed, but couldn’t figure out how to frame or articulate.
In any case, I wanted to share some resources I found that I hope you might find useful in designing your sites. The book mentioned content management systems pretty briefly, without really explaining them—I’m not saying that I’m the right person to do that, but I think they are worth looking into. The person who presently runs the site I’m redesigning uses one, while the webmaster (please hear that word dripping with sarcasm) who designed the much larger site I presently maintain did not use a CMS. When I saw how much the CSM helped to organize and simplify the maintenance of a site, I couldn’t believe that I was doing it the hard way. It is… well, it’s really hard to describe. I found an open source (read: free) CMS that anyone can download and use. If you are curious, check out Joomla and read more about what it can do. This is something that may not be worthwhile for little sites (under 20 pages), but if you anticipate a lot of growth, it might be worth it to use this as a foundation to make it easier on your successors.
I also found some good sources for pixel fonts. Fonts like Verdana and Georgia were actually created to be viewed on-screen (as opposed to printed), but even they tend to look pretty crummy at less than 10px. Sometimes you really need to have tiny print. At least when you use a font specifically designed to be used at these sizes, you're doing your best to ensure legibility. Check these out:
Also check out Fonts by Cal Henderson and Grixel for lots more options.
6 comments:
Thanks for the tips on the fonts. I'm so accustomed to the hundreds of options we find in our various programs that I often fail to realize that actual people designed these fonts, and many of them may have been designed with a particular medium in mind.
I want to thank you, also. I'm sure the fonts will come in handy. I my case, my "client" supplied the font for the website. He wants all his sites to be consistent.
Tiny little fonts are cute with their small little pixels. Thanks.
I agree, that it would have been helpful to have read more in the IA book before writing our proposals. There are several things I learned in these chapters that would have been useful in writing my proposal. Thanks for the font information, it can make a big difference in readability.
Funny you should mention CMS. In the current Professional Writing Institute class we are using both a Wiki and CMS site to create team-driven documents. In terms of our class, electronic media, filing, storing, and managing the text and images for web publication will definitely be helpful for the large (or growing) sites.
Thanks Elizabeth!
I agree with Elizabeth that Morville and Rosenfeld’s writing is limited in scope in that they do not acknowledge those who are creating smaller websites. The one thing that I did like about the Neilson and Loranger’s book on web development was the fact that the authors address audience members who potentially are building small, medium, or large websites. Nielson and Loranger’s work provides guidelines and plenty of examples for each of these audiences.
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