The three sources of good web writing:

To write well for the Web you have to be at least competent in three areas, or be a member of a team with others who are:

Content ideally should be material that will come across more fully and effectively on the Web—that would benefit, in other words, from its multimedia, hypertext powers. Put the other way round: the Web is not the best medium for publishing or reading a continuous document of wall-to-wall text. People will just print it. That's just using the Web as a means of distribution. Minimally, a Web page needs some visual content (even blogs usually include some), and it is best when it is more than decoration.

There are many topics, whether about personal experience, information, or social concerns, that benefit from using the powers of the Web. This quarter, we will focus on the representation of place/locality on line—that is, sites which aim to convey what is unique about a place, or about one issue in that place. Clearly photographs, maps, and sound naturally bear part of the weight of representing place. The Study Sites tab has a list of sites we can learn from. We will devote time both to analyzing and critiquing these sites and in making some of our own.

Design borrows a number of basic principles from graphic layout and display (especially use of color, whitespace, edges and overlays, and typography), and is also developing some guidelines for hypertext structures and navigation and the use of images and sound. For design, layout, and typography, we will study the sites in CSS Zen Garden and we will select and work with some basic page layout templates from Open Web Design, learning how to modify them to meet our ends. We will make extremely sparing use of tables for layout.

We will give particular attention to scalable or liquid layout, assuming that our work will be viewed at 24-bit "True Color" depth and 1024x768 resolution or above, but that the browser window and font sizes may vary over a considerable range.

Technology not only implements design decisions, it also stimulates the search for ways to use it. Here we will be using Cascading Style Sheets (see CSS Zen Garden)and Javascript (for popup windows, rollovers). We will work with sound and image editing software—always using free programs that you can download privately. I don't do Macs; if you are wedded to one, you probably have some support system already.   In addition to  CSS, we will work on controlling windows (decoration, location, and sizing) and to control of visibility.  Mastering the technik is a great stimulus to design.

Characteristics of the Web As Medium→