Designing Websites

If your doctor diagnoses you with a condition or disease you know little about, you might use the internet to find out more about your treatment and groups that can support you.

The website you find might just be one page explaining that the support group meets monthly at a certain location, giving a contact address and telephone number. The website might run to several pages with pictures, case studies, events, reports and news.

You do not have to be an internet wizard to get a website. There are plenty of courses where you can learn web design if that's what you want (see "courses you can do").

If you just want a website where you can fill in the details about your organisation, look at the various free ones you can get on the internet. In Suffolk there is a website just for community groups at www.onesuffolk.co.uk (see "free help/software" section)

For comprehensive guidance on how to develop a website, please visit the ‘Website’ section at the bottom of the page of the ‘Online Guides’ of the Media Trust website at http://www.mediatrust.org/online_guides/index.html.

Writing for the web

Reading onscreen material is a very different experience from reading printed material and your internet site needs to reflect this.

Online readers tend to scan text rather than read it in full. They prefer short, straightforward, informative text. The goal is to see how little time it takes to get all the information a user requires.

Did you know? Less than ten per cent of internet readers ever scroll beyond the top of web pages.

To be effective, onscreen text must at the very least be:

• Quick to access

• Up to date (update contact names etc. if they change)

• Easy to scan

• Brief but linked to full information and contact points.

When you write for the web it should be about 50 per cent less than its paper equivalent. Research has shown it takes longer to read from a computer screen than from paper, plus most readers will only scan the page. Aim for 250 words a page.

So, here are some tips:

Home Page

Your home page is the first thing that a visitor sees and it is therefore important to give a good impression so that they will want to look at the rest of your site. (Imagine that you are looking for a book, a good design on the cover will tempt you to have a look).

Here are a few basic rules for your home page:

• Base your overall design on your existing logo / colour scheme so that it can be easily associated with your organisation
• Do not make the page so big that you need to scroll down to see all the content (it will put people off)
• The content should include a picture and three or four short paragraphs which give a basic description of who you are and what you do.

Menu Structure

Before you start building your website you need to sit down with some sheets of paper, list all the information that you want to provide on your website, and work out a logical structure so that visitors can easily find what they want.

This will usually result in the following headings:

• Home Page

• About Us - who you are (including people and what they do)

• Our Services - what you do

• News - keeping visitors updated

• Links - for useful contacts

• Contact Us.

If you get your initial planning right you should find that if you need to add more pages / information in the future it should fit easily into your existing menu structure and make your website easy to manage.

If you have a particularly large website it may be worth including a Site Map which lists all the pages in a simple structure, again making it easier for visitors to find what they want.
 

How can I make my website DDA Compliant?

The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) was passed in 1995, and from October 1999 included requirements for websites under "access to goods, facilities and services".

It is possible you will be prosecuted if your website is not DDA Compliant.

A "Checklist of Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" can be found on the World Wide Web Consortium website, and if you require help or guidance please contact Simon Waldron at SAVO.

Whilst the detailed requirements are quite complex the basic rules include:

Useful Tools

To test whether your website is compliant, both for DDA and W3C, there are a number of FREE tools which can be found at http://validator.w3.org/, together with information on how to rectify errors.

How can I make my website be found by Search Engines?

Search Engines have become more and more intelligent over the years and whilst there are no guarantees of getting your website listed the following tips can help (and some of them are also required for DDA Compliance:

• Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) when building your website (this speeds up your website and also allows you to make global design changes easily) See http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/ for information.

• Ensure you provide comprehensive details in META TAGS for Title, Keywords and Description. See http://searchenginewatch.com for details.

• Ensure all 'images' have alternate text, if possible include your Keywords.

• Try and include as many Keywords on your Home Page.

• Set up reciprocal links with other websites (which it is why it is useful to have a Links page)

Finally

Get someone from outside your organisation to proof read the website before you publish it. Spell check on your computer only checks you’ve spelt the word correctly. It doesn’t check you’ve chosen the right word e.g. smoking was “band”!

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