[NOTE: this was originally written in the early 2000s when I worked at the University of Pittsburgh and is now hopelessly out of date an all but the most general suggestions. In winter 2006 I hired Flink Designs to re-engineer the back end of sterneworks to work on Textpattern, a content management system; Bad Subjects now also runs on a CMS called Plone; Drupal appears to be the industry standard as of summer 2007; and the University of Pittsburgh Communication Department has replaced my dated design with something more standard and current.]

Web design is easier than word processing, and in some ways it is more rewarding than print publishing. You can easily reach a large audience, and you can be as esoteric, creative, or weird as you like.

I don’t think that the world wide web will solve the world’s problems, but I routinely use the web in my writing, reading and teaching.

My design philosophy is simple:

1. Make the page easy to understand.

2. Make the site easy to navigate.

3. Make the page easy to download.

4. Don’t be afraid to have a lot of text on your page, BUT

5. Don’t forget that it is a visual design.

6. Within those parameters, use as little technology as possible to make it look good.

For this site (and for the Department of Communication website, which I redesigned in the spring of 2002 with a few collaborators), I used Macromedia Dreamweaver and Photoshop, though one can get by with much simpler programs. I help maintain the Bad Subjects website, and for that I use two free programs: Arachnophilia and WSFTP LE.

Here are some sites that have helped me to think about web design. Of course, they will take you to many other links.

Web Pages That Suck (http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/)

Useit.com (http://www.useit.com/)

Web
Page Design for Designers
(http://www.wpdfd.com/index.htm)

Scroll down this page for info on how to get your site up at Pitt:

(http://technology.pitt.edu/documentation/index.html)

I also recommend that you buy yourself a good .html reference book. If you use a program like Dreamweaver (which I like) or Frontpage (which I don’t) there are many well-written after-market manuals and "for dummies"-like books from which to choose.

Also, remember that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. I stole most of my tricks from other people. Just don’t copy a design verbatim (at least not without giving the original author credit), as that can cause some hard feelings.