Recommendations
- Architecture
- Breadth Leads to Depth
- Browsers
- Doctype
- Fonts
- Page Dimensions
- Site Structure
- Training
- User Focus vs. Internal Focus
- Validators
These recommendations cover general site-wide characteristics. Accessibility and content recommendations follow.
Architecture
Group broad categories of information on a site according to users' needs.
Breadth Leads to Depth
Page levels should be organized to provide increasing degrees of detail for those who require more information.
Browsers
Northwestern University supports Internet Explorer version 8+ and the latest versions of Firefox, Safari and Chrome. We do support the user-specified Internet Explorer compatibility or quirks modes.
Doctype
Northwestern University recommends using XHTML 1.0 transitional as the doctype for web pages.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
Fonts
Arial is the preferred font for text. Recommended settings (in order of preference): Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; and Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif. Font sizes should be defined in your CSS using relative sizes (em's).
Page Dimensions
Pages can be flexible or fixed-width. Designs should accommodate for 1024 x 768 displays meaning that your content should fit within approximately 960 pixels wide. If a fixed-width page is meant to be printed, provide a "printable version" with a separate style sheet (for print media).
Site Structure
Awareness of conventions in web design will help you to plan your site's structure, navigational elements, and page design so that your site visitors can quickly and accurately find what they're looking for.
Make the site's structure obvious on the home page with a visual hierarchy to "clearly and accurately portray the relationships between the things on the page: which things are related, and which things are part of other things" (Krug).
Training
We provide training for departmental sites that reside in the Web Content Management System. Visit our WCMS site for more information.
Become familiar with Dreamweaver, Adobe's web page editing program. Northwestern University Human Resources Training and Development offers Dreamweaver classes. Call 847-467-5081 or e-mail training@northwestern.edu. Dreamweaver instruction books are widely available as well.
User Focus vs. Internal Focus
Try to organize sections and content according to users' needs, not necessarily by departmental organization or hierarchy. Try to identify what items a user would logically want, even if it means grouping functions from different areas together.
Validators
Use a validator to ensure the site's compliance (validate both XHTML and CSS) with W3C coding recommendations.
W3C Markup Validator
http://validator.w3.org/