Week 12 Guidelines for Designing a Good Web Site for ESL Students

This week, I've surfed the web and found an article about web design guidelines. Here is the link: http://iteslj.org/Articles/Kelly-Guidelines.html

The author points out that one of those guidelines is to make your site friendly and fun to use. Its purpose is to make the site as attractive and fun as you can without making it slow. In this guideline, we need to consider two things. One is to make your pages as visually pleasing as you can without slowing them too much. How to do this? We always need to weigh "good-looking" vs. "fast-loading". We also need to remember to view the pages without images, to see how pleasing your page looks to people who don't download images and a visually pleasing text only page is also needed. The other thing we need to consider is don't annoy your visitors. Remember to ensure the visitors don't need to wait a long time for pages to download and display. Also we need to remember people don't like crowded pages, irritating color combinations, blinking text, animated images, excessive use of images and too much advertising.

Another guideline is to remember that what you think is true may not be true. Something we need to pay attention is:

1. don't assume people will enter your site through the main page.
2. even if your server is fast, not everyone will get your pages quickly.
3. don't assume all visitors using new browsers can view pages with Java and JavaScript. Some have either or both disabled in their preference settings by choice.

To conclude, I think we always need to think from the visitor's point of view. I agreed with the author that one important thing is to ensure the web pages aren't irritating. We should learn those irritating things from other websites when we find it, so we can avoid them in our pages.