Writing and designing your professional website

Some advice for your project

Managing your web presence

• Professional versus social

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• Search engine results
• first ten results
• driving your professional results to the top (SEO=BS)

Audience considerations

• Who is going to read your website?

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• Who do you want to read your website?

• Who to model your website after

Use of multimedia

• Use images of appropriate size/resolution
• Learn how to use photoshop/GIMP now

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• Use open source or common file formats
• default=.pdf
• avoid proprietary file formats whenever possible
• if proprietary is necessary, offer alternative experiences

More on multimedia

• Embedding
• Do use to reduce load times (and support mobile)
• Do test plugins on different OS and browsers
• Don't embed 75 items on one page; be selective
• Don't embed documents; link or use thumbnails

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• No "moving parts"
• Don't set AV to start upon loading

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Ease of navigation

• Information architecture: simple, flat

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andrewroback.com

CV

Design

Papers

Blog

search and tags

Ease of navigation

• Information architecture: complicated, tiered

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andrewroback.com

About

Design

Papers

CV

Contact Info

Print gallery

Web gallery

films

tech comm

Blog

Infinite documents

Managing your web presence

• Consider layouts
• grid example

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• Readability
• typeface and font size
• text / background
• headers and chunking

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Bold headings

Clear subheadings

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Readable blocks of text typically use serifed typefaces (they have "feet" on the individual characters) and are left aligned. Readers experience less fatigue and confusion when reading well formated text.

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Go big or go home

Unreadable blocks of text use script typefaces and are justified, which results in awkward spacing and "rivers" of vertical space in text blocks.

Protecting your personal information

• Avoid machine readable text

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• Don't list your home address on the web

• Consider Google voice for publicly listed number

• Use the <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tag to stop a search engine from crawling a page
• limit this to semi-private pages, as you want search engines to find your pages!

What good designers do

• Test on multiple OS and browsers
• Your website will never look exactly the same...
• ...but it may be broken or look terrible to some users

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• Make accessible design
• Low / no vision
• accessible nav saves time
• alt attribute describes visual elements
• scalable pages

• Consider mobile devices
• Your site should load quickly and not break
• Avoid flash

What good designers do

(cotd.)

• Don't violate copyrights
• It's rude, and the mark of a hack
• It's illegal, and you can get sued (or worse)
• "no copyright infringement intended" has no legal meaning

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• Creative Commons
• Personal copyright control
• Goldmine for reuse and remix
• Creative Commons Flickr

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That's it