Page Design & Layout in HTML

Key elements of web page design

• Text content - 100 & 500 words per page. The smaller number of words the better. People loose attention and interest easilt when bombarded with too much textual information.
• Text breaks - use lines or image every 40 to 100 words.
• Page length - no more than two to four screens at 640*480 resolution.
• File size - should be less than than 50kb per page, including images. Animated GIFs should be less than 100 kb per page. Be aware than sound and video files are large. Use applets if necessary. Images contained within compiled Java applets should be smaller than the images the applets include.
• Speed - try to get the first screen, both text and key images appearing in less than 3 seconds over a 28.8 bps modem.
• Colors - do not use more than two to four thematic colors. Too much color tends to blind people and 10% of the population is color-blind.
• Fonts - use three fonts at the most. This includes both graphics and text.
• Blank space - the background image or color should appear on atleast half of the page.
• Contrast - do not put colors in the background which is close to any text color or any color in an image. Also use patterns in background tiles sparingly. The best background is generally white. If not white then try to be consistent.
• Tone & style - all text & graphics should be consistent in mood and theme. They should all look similar without color clashes for instance.
• Overall impact - the page should appear balanced and attractive as a whole. This is the difficult part. What appeals to one may not appear to another. The best guide to web design is to look at other pieces of software which are widely use. Look at windows. Windows is the perfect example. In fact any GUI-based operating system is a good example of how to maintain consistency. Anything which is different to most other on-screen objects is small and un-assuming.