Remember that the Web is based on the idea of interactive hypermedia. While Web surfing, you probably encountered some sites that gave you reams of text you scrolled through to read. You also encountered some sites that caught your attention with good design and then engaged your participation by allowing you to explore the information in your own way. While presentations of the first type may provide valuable information, you probably remember the second type because they stimulate your interest with both information and activity. Strive to create a site of the second type.

          Searching the Web for documents about good interactive design results in hundreds of references. The sources listed below are among the best, but you may want to conduct your own search. These documents fall into three major categories: Style Guides, HTML Guides, and Design Guides.

Style Guides
          Although the title "Style Guide" appears on many Web documents, some of these are really about design and others about HTML. True style guides deal exclusively with style issues, such as when to divide text, what kinds of navigational devices to use, or how to present multimedia information to optimize readability. The following references describe concepts or issues involved in planning and evaluating the presentation of information using hypermedia.

WWW Style Manual, 2nd Edition.
Produced by the Yale Center for Advanced Instructional Media's (C/AIM) Patrick J. Lynch, and Sarah Horton, of Dartmouth University. A style manual for the design of Web pages and Web sites. Covers graphic and information design, page layout, Web graphics, site organization, navigation, and Web multimedia content.

Form + Function
A professional design group, Vivid Studios, shares their process for planning great Web sites.

The Sevloid Guide to Web Design.
Guide author John Cook says, "A well designed site can be the difference between success and failure." This guide provides over 100 tips on web design, organized into categories of page layout, navigation, content and graphics.

Guide to Web Style.
Rick Levine of Sun Microsystems, Inc. offers a cookbook for helping people create better web pages. Thoughtful hypertext guidelines for both beginner and experienced web designers.

Web Development.
By John December, December Communications, Inc. This manual discusses processes and elements of Web development as well as the qualities and characteristics of the World Wide Web.

Best Ideas for Spinning Your Web
This appears to be a work-in-progress by Diana Pounds, Iowa State University. But it has such great references for the University community that we decided to include it anyway. You'll have to visit the sections individually:
Section 1
Section 2
Section 3
Section 4

Art and the Zen of Web Sites
Tony Karp, TLC Systems Corp., provides a simple, elegant presentation of advice, truisms and pointed questions on navigation, design decisions, and technology.

HTML Guides

          References for the use of the Hypertext Markup Language -- the language used to code documents for display on the World Wide Web. These resources will be covered in the section of this guide devoted to writing HTML.

Design Guides

          Most of these guides are written by graphic designers. They provide information about making a Web site look good as well as information about good style.

Web Page Design for Designers
Joe Gillespie's site is dedicated to promoting and furthering high standards of design for World Wide Web pages. Aimed primarily at graphic designers and web designers who want to brush up on the skills required for this new technology, it is in itself, a prime example of state-of-the-art web page design.

Interface Design for Sun's WWW Site
Case story of the redesign of a major web server with screendumps of nine iterations of the home page design.

Learn by example - Best and Worst

          The following sites don't fit well into the "style guide" categories. Rather, they give examples of both good and bad Web site design.

Project Cool: Coolest on the Web
By Martin-Davis. "Here we give a fair stab at highlighting some of the things that work on the web and explaining what makes them cool to us: writing, design, content, graphics, execution, originality, interactivity, and presentation."

Web Pages That Suck
By Vincent Flanders. "The purpose of this web site is to help people design effective and aesthetically pleasing web pages. My methodology is somewhat different -- I firmly believe that if a person is exposed to bad web page design they'll be less likely to use these techniques in the pages they create."

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