Maintaining a Web site is essentially a battle against entropy. The following list of ten principles is hardly exhaustive, and many of these fundamentals are also true of any document that appears on the computer screen. However, these ten are the top considerations that govern my current Web design work, and for me they form the basis of a design philosophy that allows aesthetic freedom while respecting the intrinsic nature of the Web as a communications medium. I'll be exploring the other characteristics of Web pages that govern the graphic and interface design. The site structure should be visible on every page We take the structure of most of information sources for granted.
Tables of contents are in the front of books, indexes are in the back.
At a glance you can assess a book by its page size and number of pages. It's the predictable underlying structure of books that makes a complex organization scheme almost invisible to most readers, allowing the content to dominate the reader's attention. Documents on the computer screen inherently offer few contextual cues to the depth, breadth, and context of information offered in other pages of the site. Individual Web pages also differ from print pages because they are not always obviously bound to a greater whole. If your reader is to understand the provenance of a document and how the information on the page relates to the rest of the Web site, you've got to provide that information for them on every page of the site .