Designing Your Course Site

Follow these guidelines to design a course site that is easy for you to manage and useful to your students:

• Keep it simple
  For the most part, your students will not be visiting your page just for fun. They will be coming for information they need, and the easier you can make their visit, the more they will use your site. Don't make them click or scroll a lot to get what they need.
  
  
• Imitate paper documents
  Many of your students will be printing out the information they need for later reference. If the information looks great on the screen but is confusing on the printout, your site will be less useful than it could be.
  
  
• Organize as an outline
  Again, speed and brevity should be the prime motivators in your design process.
  
  
• Use descriptive titles and links
  Tell people what things are and where they are going. Help them make good decisions as they navigate your site. "Click here to see something really cool!" is not helpful.
  
  
• Use standard fonts
  Fast and clean. Fast and clean.
  
  
• Avoid wide widths
  When you print a Web-page that is extremely wide, often much of it gets cut off by the paper page margin.
  
  
• Follow "fair-use" guidelines
  This is a controversial topic, but for some "helpful considerations," visit TEP's Guide to Fair Use Issues.

Additional web design guidelines (NOTE: The below links will open in a new browser tab or window)

• Yale Style Manual is a very comprehensive guide to layout, graphics, typography and overall navigation for websites.