Design Considerations
When designing and building your Parish Web site, there
are numerous elements that need to be considered. Many of them are
mainly aesthetic in nature, but we will focus on a few things that
have a significant effect on the overall usability of your site.
Frames
Frames are used to divide a Web page into separate
"windows", if you will. Each frame comes equipped with a
scroll bar, which allows the user to scroll the frame without
scrolling the contents of the entire page. At first glance, these
seems like a nifty trick. But let's look at a couple inherent
problems with frames.
"I didn't want that page!"
Frames are actually pulling two or more separate pages and
combining them in your browser's window. Although many of the Web
design suites have made the handling of frames significantly easier,
it can still be difficult to ensure that the proper pages will be
delivered to your user. With all of the other headaches facing the
Parish Webmaster, it is safe to say that dealing with frames is not
worth the hassle.
"Did I bookmark this?"
Another major problem with using frames on your Parish Web
site is that they do not usually "bookmark" properly. One
goal of your Parish Web site is to provide your visitors with
information that is relevant to their lives. It is also important to
ensure that these visitors can find their way back to any pages that
they found pertinent enough to warrant bookmarking in their browser.
Unfortunately, frames don't usually bookmark very well.
More often then not, the only thing that is bookmarked is the outer
"frame", while the inner contents of any particular frames
are up for grabs. This does not tend to build goodwill between your
Parish Web site and its visitors.
Tables
Originally, HTML was created as a relatively simple way to
present text and data on the internet. It allowed for very basic
formatting such as displaying text in bold, italics or underlined.
Some color could be added to jazz things up a bit, but that was
about it. The default positioning for content is left-justified
(flush left), but HTML also supports centering and right-justified.
There wasn't much of a need for anything more.
Most of the information was from Universities and
researchers, and these folks weren't worried about form... they were
interested in substance. They needed to be able to share text in a
fairly straightforward manner, and required the capability of
presenting data in tabular format. They weren't overly concerned
with graphics and layout and the aesthetics of page design.
As the Web became more popular and people expanded the
ways in which it was being used, designers began looking for a way
to apply good design and layout principles to the medium. What these
ingenious designers came up with was a way to simply utilize an
existing capability of HTML: tables.
Due to the fact that researchers needed to be able to
share large quantities of data, HTML was designed to allow the
creation of tables with which to organize and display such
information. Designers noticed that these tables allowed the
placement of content in locations other than left- and
right-justified or centered. Why couldn't they organize graphics and
menus, as well as the substantive content, by creating a large table
and simply placing the elements in the cells of a table? And that's
just what they did.
Whenever you log onto a Web site and see a column of menus
along one side, chances are good that they are laid-out in a table
whose borders are invisible. Likewise, when a graphic is placed on
the page with text flowing around it, the designer has placed the
graphic in the cell of a table and the text has been placed in the
cells surrounding it. This and much more is achieved by utilizing
HTML tables. In fact, in order to place elements even more precisely
on the page, designers began nesting tables within the cells of
larger tables... which may even be nested inside yet another table!
Hand-coding HTML tables can be a nightmare. Nowadays, all
good Web design programs allow for much easier creation of tables.
Many allow placement of elements with pixel-level accuracy, for the
program generates the necessary HTML tables behind the scenes.
Regardless of how you create the tables needed for
the layout of your Parish Web site, it is imperative that you
understand at least the rudiments of how they work. Eventually, you
should gain a much more thorough understanding of how to achieve
good layout through the use of HTML tables.
Presentation vs. Meaning
When you are building your Parish Web site, there are two
concepts in particular of which you should be made aware: Presentation
and Meaning These are actually two very different ways in
which you can set-up your site's content. HTML was originally
designed so that Web site owners could encode the meaning of
information, rather than its presentation.
As an example, the heading of this section is encoded as a
third-level heading (<h 3>), rather than Times New Roman, 12
pt. Thus, this heading will be displayed by your browser in
whatever font and point size you have set as a default for a third
level heading. The code has told your browser the meaning of
the text, but not exactly how to display it.
When you code the presentation of the information,
you are actually telling the browser how to present it to the
viewer... font type, size, attributes, etc. The problem with this is
that the font you have chosen may not be supported by a particular
browser. On the other hand, some surfers set their default fonts to
some pretty bizarre types. In those situations, forcing the presentation
on the browser may help maintain the integrity of your design.
When trying to decide how to handle the Presentation
vs. Meaning issue, you need to which matters more to you...
maintaining the fonts you have chosen for your Parish Web site or
ensuring the greatest degree of browser compatibility? Of course, it
is not quite a dichotomy. You can actually propose a short list of
alternative fonts, and the browser will use the first one in your
list with which it is compatible. This method allows the Webmaster
to have a greater say over how a browser displays the content (presentation)
while alleviating some of the cross-browser compatibility problems.
Fonts and Typefaces
When you begin building your Parish Website, it will be
extremely tempting to use one (or some) of those super-cool fonts
that are cropping up all over the place. Especially when you are
trying very hard to create a site that is different from all
the rest... one that really stands-out in a crowd! Unfortunately, if
you have chosen a font that is not supported by your visitor's
browser, the browser will simply present your content in whatever
the default font happens to be. Thus, your article written in
Beesknees may end up being in Times New Roman after all.
There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to choose
which font to use for your Parish Web site, as long as the choice is
made with your site's goals in mind. By this, I mean, if you are
trying to share the teachings of Christ with people, then you should
do everything you can to make it easy for them to read your
content. Following are some basic guidelines you can use.
The standard fonts/typefaces are often split into two
general categories: serif fonts and sans serif fonts. Serifs are
those tiny horizontal lines at the top and bottom of letters. It has
been generally accepted that these tiny lines make the font easier
to read. Times New Roman is probably the most common serif font.
Sans serif, then, are fonts that do not have the horizontal top and
bottom lines.
It has been my experience, and some independent studies
have agreed, that serif fonts are not necessarily more readable in
electronic copy. This probably due, at least in part, to the
difference in resolution between print copy and electronic copy.
Printed copy usually has a resolution of between 180dpi and 300dpi.
These words you are reading right now have a resolution of
approximately 72 dpi. When you lose the resolution, you tend to lose
the overall effect of the serifs. The lower the resolution, the more
readable the smoother fonts become.
For body text, I prefer to use Arial, a sans serif font,
for 12pt. size and Verdana for 9 or 10pt. is. Although Verdana,
another sans serif font, is not as commonplace as Arial, it is still
extremely widespread. If you use Arial as you first alternate font,
you should be in good shape.
For headlines, I prefer to use Verdana in a large point
size, usually bold-faced. Again, if you have Arial as your first
alternate font, you will have covered virtually all browsers and
your Parish Web site should be significantly more readable.
Cascading Style Sheets
If you have ever used the text formatting or
"styles" feature of a word processor, then you are
familiar with the concepts behind Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). In a
word processor, you can specify certain text as Heading 1, Heading
2, Heading 3, Normal (or Body), etc. and the program formats the
text in accordance with the preset parameters. In order to change
the presentation of the entire document, all you need to do is
change these parameters. For instance, you could change all Heading
1 text from 14pt. Times New Roman to 16pt. Arial.
The major difference between the word processor example
and HTML is that, in HTML, you can control every page of your Parish
Web site from one central style sheet (provided that each page of
your site is linked to the master style sheet). When you change the
parameters of a given element, the change is made on every page
which is linked to your master CSS.
It is important to remember that all of the content on
your Parish Web site will need to be styled properly. Each
heading must not be formatted within the document.
Instead, level one headings should have the <H1> tag, level
two heading should have the <H2> tag, etc... If you apply the
actual formatting to the headings, you will defeat the functionality
of CSS and will be forced to change every page by hand if you decide
to change the look and feel of the text on your Parish Web site.
Although not all versions of even the popular browsers
support CSS, we at the ParishWebmaster still highly recommend using
the feature. It is a tool that is becoming too big to ignore, and
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has already included CSS in
their HTML standards. It is only a matter of time before Cascading
Style Sheets are universally supported by web browsers. |
