Overview

Improve your web page/site design skills by providing a set of web design guidelines for your consideration.

Right off the bat, a disclaimer:

	Web design is a creative, expressive process
	There are few (if any) absolute rules

And then a disclaimer disclaimer:

	There are, however, many guidelines and conventions by which people will judge your site
	If you break these conventions, you should have a good reason (inspiration?)

Our guidelines tour will include:

	Correctness Rules - items that must always (well, 99.44%) be followed or your web site is considered "broken"
	Style Guidelines - from important to trivial, we'll discuss style issues on all aspects of your web page(s)
	Conventions - some conventions that today's web sites are using that may be helpful to you
	Evaluation Sites - web sites that will help you in evaluating your web site and others

I'm presenting guidelines accumulated primarily from:

	"Homepage Usability" by Jakob Nielson & Marie Tahir, 2001... this excellent book has a poorly-designed, tiny web site at www.useit.com/homepageusability though the publisher has a very nice site at www.newriders.com
	"Web Style Guide" by Patrick J. Lynch & Sarah Horton, 1999... this is a deeper, more technical guide through web style issues. The publisher has a site at (Yale University) www.yale.edu/yup
	Spring 2001 IFS 115 class by Dr. Sally Fowler, sally.fowler.faculty.noctrl.edu ... Dr. Fowler's IFS 115 site provided an additional voice and some of the evaluation site links that I used.
	My own experience creating web sites and consulting