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Information Technology - Design Officer
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Information Technology - Systems Administration Officer
What does an Information Technology Design Officer really
need to
know?
Basic
The hardest thing to achieve is a website's unique
look and feel. The website is not an end unto itself but a
framework on which you will display your data. Therefore, the masthead
(the banner across the top of this page) must be informative but not
intrusive, since "real estate" is precious on the desktop. The beginner
is often carried away by a great banner design that winds up hogging the
page. Doing so is not only overkill, it also belittles the visitor's
intellect, since after you've seen it once, repetition becomes tiresome.
Also, the larger the masthead, the less space it leaves for the
information. If visitors cannot read your page easily, they'll go
elsewhere.
In the world of typography, conventional wisdom has it
that a simple serif font, such as New Times Roman, is the most legible
and, therefore, preferred. This is true when that font is presented on
coated white paper. However, the computer screen is a different
environment. The typeface you see on this page is 10-pt Arial, which is
readily displayed as "Helvetica" in non-Windows environments (Unix, Mac,
and so on). It is a non-serif font, meaning that it has un-terminated
straight strokes. Generally, this is easier to read on the screen,
because the computer screen's pixels can handle its display better. If
the user has a glass monitor of reasonably high resolution, there won't
be
much difference between the two fonts. However, in the case of a flat LCD or plasma display,
Arial wins over Times Roman every time.
Never use more than two typefaces in your design. No
matter how beautiful they might be, if you have three or more typefaces,
your page will look like a font sampler and the visitor will soon tire
of it... and move on. This page bears two related typefaces: [1] Arial
within this panel, the masthead and the navigation buttons, and [2]
Arial Condensed on the left side bar below the Squadron Support
button.
Germany's Bauhaus (literally "building house") was the
20th century's most influential school of design. Started as a backlash against the
rococo revival of the turn of the century, its designers postulated that "less is
more," and proved it. New York skyscrapers, magazine design, automobile
styling, and many common household items have all been designed
according to the rule of "form must follow function" which lay at the
core of the Bauhaus design ethic. Personally, I cannot improve on that.
If you have not mastered the above, no matter how great a
technical effort your page might reflect, it won't be esthetically
pleasing. And esthetics is at the core of acceptance and usability. Most
visitors won't be able to explain this to you, but will simply go
away.
Advanced
Training in fine arts helps, especially in the areas of
sculpting and architecture. The "Golden Mean" - that is, the ratio
1/1.6180, is ever-present in the Parthenon, probably the most beautifully
proportioned building ever erected. No one knows how the Greeks arrived
at this ratio, nor how they came to adopt it across the board in their
buildings. But even the naive onlooker will prefer it to some other set
of proportions, that the untrained observer usually describes as "too skinny" or "too fat."
Hot links are the most ingenious invention to come out of
the Age of the Internet. You can touch a hot link and instantly be
transported to another spot on your page, or to a different page, or to
another website anywhere in the world. If you're linking to a page in
your own website, have it open in your normal window. But if you are
accessing a remote site, open it in a new window -- that way, when
you're done with it, by closing it you'll be back at your own site,
at the very spot from which you called the external link. Opening
internal pages in a new window is not a good idea, because you can
easily forget where you are and keep on navigating in this new window. If you do this
often enough, you can wind up with a browser that has spawned too many
windows, your PC will run out of memory, and your browser will either
freeze of fail. Or your whole PC, depending on the version of Windows
you're running, can crash, throwing away any unsaved data you intended
to return to later.
Ease of navigation is a goal that seems to elude many
webmasters. If navigating your site is difficult, you won't get too many
repeat
visitors. To test your navigation scheme, enlist the help of naive
users, give them the URL, then ask them to find a specific page without
telling them how to get there. A quick success speaks well for your
website; if the users uniformly fail or take too long, it's time to
devise a better navigation scheme. This website uses the "drawer and
folders" paradigm, where each button on the top menu bar opens a "drawer
page" that has its own left sidebar with a list of "folders," each
leading to a page. It works.
Clutter kills a website faster than anything else. If you
have a very busy opening page, and you make it look like your corner grocery
store's bulletin board, you'll expose your visitors to visual
overload and they'll have difficulty finding anything. If they can possibly
get away with it, they won't put
themselves through this experience more than once.
A website that has an enormous logo and masthead on each and every
page is shouting "Me! Me! Me!" and can get very tiresome. To
say nothing of the valuable screen area you're taking away from the
visitor and giving it needlessly to your masthead. Most people
object to this visual bombardment and inequity, even if they can't tell
you why they don't like your page.
Avoid animation and visual effects, or else visitors
tied to a simple telephone modem will be forced to wait too long to get the
information they want. Make no mistake. A website is only a vehicle for
conveying information. If you doll it up so much that the information is
lost, obscured or delayed, your website won't be able to do its job.
Below are links to some well-designed pages, picked
strictly for their appearance, data organization and navigation. Some,
however, have too much animation for users who lack broadband access.
Please visit them and note both their strengths and weaknesses. And
compare them to this one.
http://www.gm.com/
http://www.mbusa.com/index.do
http://www.yale.edu/
http://www.ibm.com/us/
http://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQuerier.jhtml?pq-path=2/6868&pq-locale=en_US&_requestid=2970
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