Design tips

School of Geography, University of Leeds


There's only one thing you must never do, and that's use 'click here' as link text

There are any number of perfectly well reasoned explanations for why you shouldn't (it's to do with the philosophy of linked "hypertexts"), but at the end of the day it's really just a prejudice which has stuck from the early days of the web, and that's that. Use it and you will be the butt of every web designer's jokes. I'm sure you're pretty scared.


Other tips


Web design often seems fraught with designing for the lowest possible denominator, the oldest browser, and the widest used html codes (which seem to be revised every week). Don't let designing for reactionaries hold you back, but do make sure your pages 'degrade' as nicely as possible when viewed on browsers other than the latest Firefox or IE. If you do this then you will probably keep your site accessible to everyone. A sound idea is to stick to using the last official html outline rather than the latest one. Most browsers will support the last specifications while few browsers will implement the latest codes completely.

New to the net, and want to get an idea about what is considered good and bad design?

Check out Web pages that suck or the The Yale Web Style Guide.

If you've read through these pages on writing basic web pages sequentially, you now know easily enough to write a competent homepage. Give it a go, storing the page on your web space. If you want some more practise, and made the last exercise page, then try using tables and the School stylesheet to make it look like this.


Go on to learn about some useful sites.

[School of Geography homepage] [Leeds University homepage]