350/570:465 Resources for to Web Page Design, Usability, Writing

There is as yet no accepted theory of Web Page design.

The understated school of thought puts content first and visual elements in the background. The killer school regards visual metaphors as primary in communication.

Here are some books and web pages to help you decide how you feel about these issues.

1. http://www.useit.com. Jakob Neilson's usability studies. See especially his Alertbox and his "Ten Good Deeds in Web Design," "Top ten mistakes of Web design," and "How people read on the Web."

2. http://usableweb.com/ Usable web: more than 400 links on human factors, interface, and design issues.

3. http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/hfweb/index.html A forum for human factors engineers and designers

4. http://wdvl.com/Internet/Writing/ Web Developer's Virtual Library: Writing for the Web:

5. http:webpagesthatsuck.com Learn from the mistakes of others. Also available as a book.

6. http://www.webreview.com/ Excellent pages on building e-commerce sites, including authoring, design, multimedia, and resources

7. webdesign.about.com Web design at about.com (formerly The Mining co)

8. http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/management/planning/improvingsiteusa.asp Microsoft web design and usailioty guidelines

9. http://www.ibm.com/ibm/easy/design/lower/f010100.html IBM Ease of Use Studies

10. http://www.notes.net/usability Lotus Notes Usability Page

11. http://www.eastgate.com/HypertextNow/ Mark Bernstein's HyertextNOW columns

12. http://www.baddesigns.com/examples.html Bad designs page

13. http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm Interface Hall of Shame -- don't miss the lists of books and web sites:

    The "third generation" school of thought is represented by David Siegel, whose Creating Killer Web Sites is said to have ben responsible for killing the Internet by demanding more bandwith. Actually Siegel insists that web sites have functioning visual metaphors for their content and not just "cool" effects.

    David Siegel. Creating Killer Web Sites. (Hayden, 1996). The book that started "third generation" Web design. Support web site.

    David Siegel. Secrets of Successful Web Sites. (Hayden, 1997). Project management. Support web site.

    Nick Heinle, Designing with JavaScript: Creating Dynamic Web Pages (O'Reilly, 1997, CD-ROM). When the book first appeared (foreword by David Seigel), Nick was a 17-year old high school student.

    Raymond Pirouz, HTML Web Magic (New Riders, 2nd ed. 1998). Advanced HTML. Support Web site.

    Anne-Rae Vasquez-Peterson and Paul Chow. Teach Yourself Great Web Design in a Week. (Sams, 1997, CD-ROM). Interesting ideas which are based on universally available 3.0 level browsers.

    Internet World (periodical). See regular "Deconstructing the Web Sites" feature.

    Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton, Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites (Yale, 1999). Based on the online manual at http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/

    See The New York Times Mondays (Business News) and Thursdays (Circuits) for up to the minute news of company web sites, web studios, advertising, web usage, and issues of content, media, copyright, and investment.

    Molly Holzschlag. Web by Design. (Sybex, 1998). Comprehensive tutorials. Support Web site. Rebecca Frances Rohan. Building Better Web Pages. (Academic Press, 1998).