By TONY PALERMO, MAd Society Webmaster
As you may have noticed, my webpages aren't flashy. I don't have many graphics or blinking text. I am mostly concerned with the text and ideas I'm presenting. When it comes to form, I model my webpages after good book layout principles. That means I try to control spacing between paragraphs, indentation and font size to make my webpages easy to read.
Easy to Read
My eyes start to go south after a hour of web browsing, so I never use those awful textured backgrounds. They may look cool at first, but you have a hard time making out the text on them. I thought about colored text, but noticed they don't reproduce well when you print a page from your browser. Layout- wise, I use tables to control the width of columns of text. It is tough reading long lines of text, so I have small columns like a book. I use small lines between paragraphs to keep sub-heads and related text together and use indents to keep related paragraphs grouped intelligently. Like a good book, the layout shouldn't work against the reader. Tell that to Wired magazine.)
Easy to Navigate
I use a lot of navigational pointers to make it easier to hop around the page and back and forth between related pages. To make for easier downloading use, I have built in a (dreaded) recursive link to each page so if you are viewing one of my pages off-line, you can just click on the page's URL and it will dial in and take you there. Likewise I named my pages with unique file names so when you download my pages they won't overwrite something else already there. How many times have you downloaded a page called "INDEX.HTML"?
Easy to Search
For Yahoo and other search engines, I have made sure my page titles are unique and descriptive. This way when they are displayed by the search engine viewers have a better idea of what the page contains. Sometimes the search engine results are cryptic or just the naked URL, which is not very inviting.
Easy to Steal
If you like the looks of my pages, just download them and examine the source code. I have notated them extensively, so if you want to steal how I do indented paragraphs or short paragraph breaks you can just cut and paste. I used regular text editors to compose them, no fancy dedicated authoring tools.
Once special note though: You can steal my techniques, but don't steal my content. I work very hard writing stories, articles and songs. I have registered my copywrites and will not take kindly to plagiarism. Ask my lawyer.
Don't Call Me...
As the father of three (including twins toddlers), I don't really have time to answer a lot of e-mail asking about tips and tricks, so please don't bug me. If you want links to websites about page design and HTML tricks, use the search engines. I have plenty of my own content to maintain let alone keeping up with links to somebody else's pages.
I hope this answers some questions about the design of my site. It sure is a lot of cludgey work to go through to publish a decent looking document, but I know the technology has to get better. Doesn't it?