I have never considered creating my own website. However, learning that websites offer simplified ways to do this and also learning some design tips puts it on my radar. Here are a three the design tips I will incorporate when I do make my own website.

1. Keep the user oriented! Use multiple “you are here markers.” The Web Style Guide recommends highlighting navigation items in a menu that appears in the same place on all pages. Another backup marker could be a highlighted tab. The organizational and section titles also serve this purpose. This is especially important for users who may have landed haphazardly on your website’s middle. (I was actually finding I was getting annoyed with the “Web Style Guide: Interface Design Section” because I was not sure where I was in the guide and there was no obvious indication of how many pages were there. This is partly because I did not “land” on the important Table of Contents which would have let me know not to read every single page I encountered.) So case in point, make it single, double, or even triple obvious to the user where they are within your website!

2. Always tell the reader who created the content and what institution they are associated with. I tend to shy away from wanting to associate my name publicly with my work, but I suppose it is a necessary evil. The world wide web is so faceless that it makes sense people need to be able to know who the source author is and what affiliation he or she is representing.

3. You need a menu list and search box to support the two kinds of users. Make search available on any site with more than a few pages and users expect to see it in a certain place. That is true! I always look in the upper right hand corner for a search box. Although, I did not know that I was sometimes searching the whole internet and not just the website I was in!