Webpage Layout and User Friendliness

Users traverse a page on a web site in only a few basic ways. It is easy to follow the flow of what we, as designers, envision for a page, instead of really focusing on our audience and the true functionality. Functionality goes beyond aesthetics. This includes screen resolution, browser capabilities, and designing for alternate client environments. As far as layout is concerned, for a usual informative site such as a periodical, it is usually a paper-based reading pattern. The paper based reading pattern follows a left to right, then down, and left to right zig zag. A secondary pattern is screen-based, which is more landscape oriented: How you would view something on a television. This is a circular pattern, beginning center top proceeding to follow a clockwise motion back around. This must be considered when designing content for location placement.

Tips on Formatting Site Content for Your Audience

Using headings, lists, and a consistent structure will help to unify your symmetric main ideas, while declaring  them from those of other levels. Make line by line reading sensible and summarize, so the onlooker will know in an instant if it pertains to what is of interest to them. You have to think about how a user intends to interact with the information on your Web page.  Is a reader more likely to read or scan your pages? This will be useful in determining whether or not you arrange your page in a paper-based pattern or a screen-based pattern. Use a grid to format your content. You can choose to do this by using HTML tables and setting the cellpadding property to '0'. Tip: Be sure to create CSS documents to guide the formatting on your Website, it will be a lot easier to edit later!

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