Steve's Brief Guide
To "Good Web Style"

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The goal of this page is to point out a few VERY BRIEF things about "good" web style. I emphasize the "very brief" part of this description because trying to explain what makes for a good web site in the few words that are on this page is a little like trying to explain "good writing" in a few paragraphs. It's more complicated than that. But it's a start.

A Few Sites on Style and Other Things HTML

Here's a collection of links to get you started on your quest for "good web style" and for making your web sites more sophisticated and spiffy:

• Styleguides 100 Dos and Don'ts Probably the best place to start for simple web page production, this is just what the title suggests: a simple series of lists on classic dos and don'ts, some of them obvious, some of them less so.
  
• The Web Style Guide Well-written and incredibly complete, this version of the work by Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton is one of the best and most complete guides to web style out there.
  
• IBM Ease of Use- Web design guidelines They say this is for "novices," but it is perhaps a bit more detailed than that, and it is also to me about that frequently used term "usability."
  
• Web Pages that Suck. Learning "good design" from "bad design."
  
• useit.com: Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design. Lots of stuff here, including Nielsen's take on what counts as "good" and "usable" design.

My Idea of "Good Web Style"

I don't want to say too much here about what I think counts as "good style" because I think the other sites that I list above do better than what I could do quickly here, and also because (since this site is for my students creating web sites) I don't want you to think about creating web pages only in terms of "what Steve likes." But I would like to offer a few ideas that I think count as some of the most "basic of basic rules" for good web design:

• Keep it simple. I am a firm believer that most web sites that are a sea of animated graphics and huge images and fancy JavaScript doodads and all the rest are ineffective and not persuasive. And I'm an especially strong believer that this is the case with sites designed to make some sort of point, like a web-based essay for a college course.
• The writing comes first. This is certainly a debatable issue, but I'd argue that the web is a textual interface where writers can publish writing in new and exciting ways. What I'm getting at here is you will want to include graphics, you'll want to take advantage of the hypertextual features of the medium, etc. But don't forget that your audience will want to not just look at your site; they'll want to read it. That means (to be simplistic about it) you need to have something to write and you need to write it well.
• Be sure to divide up things on your site into manageable chunks. Another way of putting this is to think in terms of Web sites, not Web pages. Web sites that break the text up into smaller chunks by dividing it up onto separate pages tend to be easier to read. Also, when you have a lot of text like this site does, bulleted lists like this one are usually easier to read.
• Use backgrounds that help readers read your writing, not ones that make it hard. If your background is a dark color, use a light color for your text; vice-versa if your background is a light color. Avoid using a patterned background with text because it's hard to read text in any color on a background with lots of different shades and textures.
• But don't forget the graphics and colors. "Text only" sites are boring-- you've got to do something to take at least some advantage of the graphic possibilities of the web by cleverly incorporating images, colors, backgrounds, etc. On this site (for example), I have some graphics, backgrounds, and arrangement issues to try and make the opening page interesting enough to encourage people to read further. I've also included graphics where I think they can help explain things within the text (like I do on some of the other pages on the site).
• You can break rules, but only if you know what rules you're breaking and why you're breaking them. Always remember that this web stuff isn't rocket science, nor is it particularly fixed. After all, the web's style is still rapidly evolving and is likely to continue to change, mostly as the result of improvements with the technology and experiments with the rules. But if you want to do something on your page that seems to be a "violation" of some of the style guidelines that you've researched, then you ought to have a reason for it.