Visual Design Profiles: Making Sense of Web Site Design Guidelines

Profile #3: All Content -- high need to deliver specific content.

1 Use the simplest and most direct layout possible.
Follow this guideline by --
  • limiting the frequency and variety of:
  • heading sizes,
  • font sizes and colors,
  • font treatments,
  • embedded lists, and
  • clarifying graphical elements (decorative bullet points and horizontal bars) to the smallest number for which a distinct and justifiable purpose may be stated.
Restrict both the width and length of text blocks to improve readability.

2 Use the simplest and most direct structure possible by keeping content as high in the hierarchy as possible.

This means creating "shallow" structures. The rule of thumb should be to limit discrete hierarchical levels to four. When a "shallow" structure results in more than 7 - 10 major choices on one screen, those choices should be grouped into a perceptually smaller number. See Yahoo! for a site in which a huge number of major choices are effectively grouped together so that the organization still appears simple. Documents should be presented as coherent wholes, but should be less than 32K and less than 5 screens long.

Eric W. Weisstein's Home Page includes a few graphics (a couple pictures of Erci and a few illustrations), but it is primarily an access page to his "treasure troves" of information. Eric's site is very large for a personal page but he has created a shallow structure at the top of the page to show all the major areas of the site at a glance.

3 Consider every graphic critically for its information value.

Only "content critical" graphics should be used -- images that convey or support the primary content of the site. Jakob Nielson's Home Page, which is filled with text and links that provide information about issues of Web design, is a good example of a site in which the use of graphics is deliberately and appropriately quite limited.

The Geometry Junkyard is a very plain site in which every graphic (after the title graphics) has an important content-bearing job to do. The layout of the pages is simple and easy to read. The pages that show students' email exchanges regarding the problems retain their email formatting, making it clear what they are.

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AMTEC 1997 Conference, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
Elizabeth Boling, Barbara Bichelmeyer, Kurt Squire, Sonny Kirkley
Indiana University
Last updated 1 June 1997
URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~iirg/RESEARCH/AMTEC97/profile3.html

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