Effective Webpage Design
This article appeared in the TESOL CALL-IS Newsletter, vol. 18, no. 1, p. 6. It came from a presentation given at TESOL 2000 in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, by Charles Kelly and Thomas Leverett. Other websites related to the program appear below.
Effective Webpage Design
TESOL (2000) Discussion Session Report
June 13, 2000
Webpages have a number of functions in the ESL/EFL world: they advertise programs, give students and teachers access to resources and learning materials, and act as class pages. Members of the discussion session also mentioned having students make their own, as a learning experience, and using a webpage as an orientation page for a homestay program, thus allowing people to communicate with their hosts before meeting them. As webpages become more ubiquitous in our world, the main points of this discussion become more pertinent.
The most common oversight of webpage makers is failure to recognize that not all of their users' browsers are the same; throughout the ESL/EFL world, both speed and size are highly variable, and many users are on yesterday's machines. There are many ways to keep HTML code to a minimum, making your page load faster and making it easier to use. The amazing functional ability of webpages to connect the user to any other site in the world has been dampened somewhat by the novice pagemakers' urge to clutter, adding frames, animated images, javascript, CGI or SSI script, or unnecessary frames or buttons, thus making pages harder to read, slower to load, impossible to cache, or no longer backwards compatible. In the same way one has to weigh the advantages of putting things in a table (visually pleasing, organized presentation of information) against the disadvantages (slower loading; one doesn1t see anything until the entire table is loaded; a different appearance on smaller browser windows), one also has to weigh the advantages of, for example, using javascript to make quizzes, against the inevitability that some users will be locked out of the opportunity to use them. Frames, for example, can disable the users' back buttons, making them go home angry, never to return. Research shows the world's users to be increasingly savvy, but also pragmatic and impatient, unwilling to tolerate pages that, for example, load audio programs onto one's machine, or place cookies, without users' permission.
Webpage makers can respond by becoming more aware of users' needs and providing what they want: useful content; fast-loading and printable pages that provide what they promise; cutting-edge technology used judiciously and effectively; high usability by even the handicapped; active maintenance that prevents linkrot; and, finally, a sense of professionalism, a promise that materials on the web not only respect copyrights, but also have the quality and technical expertise that were previously associated only with textbooks. As more of the world comes to rely on the web, page makers attract notice not just for having pages, but for making and keeping them in a more usable, professional way.
Thomas Leverett & Charles Kelly, June 2000
Material from this discussion can be seen at:
http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/Articles/Kelly-Guidelines.html and:
http://www.siu.edu/~cesl/teachers/pd/prdr4.html
http://www.siu.edu/~cesl/teachers/pd/ew.html
Picture: Just Passing Through, by Tom Leverett
reproducible by permission
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