Site Layout

Your website should be both attractive and usable. Although your site will be made up of a number of pages, your design should be consistent throughout. It can be advantageous to use one page layout for your entire web site, which includes all the features, navigation bars, and colors. This uniformity will make your web site user-friendly and attractive. This is a very important component of the site.

The page layout can be based on the company's theme and/or colors. The layout can also include a header, which is the company name and logo that will appear on every page. The colors can be based off your logo, or colors that enhance your logo.

A concern in web site design, especially when it comes to layout and graphics, is size. Different Internet users have different monitors and view different resolution. What may look great on a resolution of 1024 X 768 may not look so good on a resolution of 800 X 600.

• First page and home page fit into 640 x 460 pixel space
• All of the other pages have the immediate visual impact within 640 x 460 pixels
• Computers have differing monitor display sizes: (512 x 384), (640 x 480), (800 x 600), (1024 x 768), and larger.
• Monitors have different resolutions and can make pages look smaller or larger.

But remember, the end user's page layout is not entirely under your control. Web site layout suffers from certain limitations.

• Browsers can change font size.
• Browsers can change window size.
• Some Internet users are displaying the Web on television screens, palmtops, text-only devices or Braille readers. Will your page retain a logical sequence?
• Users can turn off graphics for faster downloading and to limit transition time.
• Different browsers and different versions of browsers can use different settings for the same HTML tags.