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Development of educational or informational material for distribution and access through the World Wide Web is a powerful form of paperless publishing. Web pages offer a flexible way for your audience to access and even interact with your information and resources. The coding behind those pages, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), provides the framework for your information, determining how it will be displayed in a WWW browser. But fleshing out your WWW pages requires more than simply learning HTML and devising a solid hypertext structure in which to place your educational content.   Creating memorable pages calls for the application of good design principles. Whether your Web pages are geared toward educating medical students or delivering information about your department to the campus and the world beyond, strong design, good typography, and effective color choices can determine how well your audience receives your message, and whether they will return to your pages. Elements of space, placement of images, number of words per line, color of backgrounds, color of foreground text, size of charactersthese and many other factors of design and typography can affect how successfully you convey the content of your Web resource.   Like HTML, design is learned. For the Web page publisher, it means taking another look at what design choices have been made (however unconscious), and how to implement any changes. This requires time and practice, but an argument can be madeif the content of your resource is important, any time spent considering page design is a worthy investment.

Considering the incredible amount of Web-based information published daily on the Internet, and the time it takes to create (or convert) existing content to an HTML format, it is no wonder that so many sites look the same. We have been learning from one another. It saves time to copy the structure of an existing HTML document and use it in another, and it appeals to some creative souls to generate a gaudy, multi-layered background for their home pages. The unfortunate side-effect of such widespread information sharing is that many of us have been passing around some significant design errors, from one Web page publisher to another. In addition, there are design flaws inherent to HTML and built into popular browsers like Netscape.   The author calls on an established body of theory related to the design of books and other print materials, along with the design of graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Examples of practical ways to better design Web pages will be provided in subsequent pages.

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