1. What will be the most crucial part of your homepage and how will that affect your design?

• Visual and functional continuity are important to any homepage. It is usually the first page of the website that the audience views, and thus is essential in showing that the site contains current, accurate, and useful information. With this in mind I will need to design my homepage in a way that balances both visual elements and graphic information.

2. The author states that the “way readers of English read” is important to page design. Using this concept as a guide, which part of your pages are the most important ?

• Taking readers of English into consideration, both the tops and the left sides of my pages will be very important. English readers read from left to right, top to bottom, and therefore the top of the page will be the first place they look at on the webpage. Keeping this in mind, the header and left navigation menu will need to be visually appealing with clear text and be consistent on each page.

3. What colors will you use for the background and text in your site?

• I will use a white background, the text in the colored navigation menus will be white, and the content text (center of page) will be black. Colored text that matches the header and/or navigation bars will be used for headings within each section

4. What fonts/sizes will you use in your site for heads and sub-heads; for text?

• The font for the text within the site will be Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif. Text in navigation bars will be Verdana, Ariel, Helvetica, sans-serif. The font size for text will be 12 pixels, headings within the text areas will be 14 pixels and bolded, and navigation bars will be 14 pixels. The page logo in the header will be a UTCSW logo.

5. What page elements will assist you in developing consistency within your site?

• My website will consist of pages that are consistent in their layout and in terms of titles, sub-titles, headers, footers, navigation tools, fonts, and organization hierarchy. Consistency will enable the reader to easy find information from page to page, and present the information in a unified, professional manner. This will allow the reader to adapt to the design and be able to predict the location of information and navigation across all pages of the website, as well as give the site a graphic identity. Use of CSS will enable me to achieve this consistency.

6. What are some ways that you intend on achieving balance within your site?

• Balance will be achieved by using a consistent screen layout with suitable contrast, and by careful planning and placement of graphics, menus, text and links.

7. How will your web pages compare to a printed page?

• Computer screens are generally smaller than printed pages, and it will be important to keep the width of page graphics within the area that most readers will see on their monitors. As in a printed document, I will use clear headings and subheadings, divide my text into chunks of information, and number sequential pages within the site.

8. What types of elements can become graphic distractions if not used sparingly?

• Horizontal rules, bullets, icons, bold graphics, and other visual markers should be used appropriately and sparingly to avoid a distracting, confusing layout. Images and text that are used together without careful thought and planning can be distracting to the audience, as can backgrounds that are bright, unpleasant primary colors, large type when used inappropriately and excessively, and overuse of bolded text.

9. What are considered graphic safe areas and how will it affect your website?

• Graphic safe areas are determined by 1) the minimum size of the computer screen in common use and 2) the width of the paper that the webpage is printed on. Web page graphics that exceed the display screen will cause the reader to have to scroll to see the full page layout, and this is simply unacceptable. Keeping this in mind, I want to build my website to accommodate the minimum screen size of 800 by 600 pixels and print correctly on a standard letter size paper. My pages will contain a lot of text and some of my readers will want to print information, so I will need to design my pages to print properly. I will design with a maximum width of 560 pixels and maximum height of 410 pixels.

10. What information will be found in the page header and footer through out your site?

• The header will contain a department approved UTCSW logo and perhaps a graphic. The header will clearly identify the site as pertaining to the MSSW field program. While the title elements will be standardized across all of the pages in my website, I'd like to use a different image for each section, for example a photo of Henson Hall on the homepage, a photo of students on each “Information for Students” page, a photo of the city for each “Information for Field Instructors” page, etc. The footer will identify the basic page data such as the site creator, affiliation with CSW, the date that the page was last modified, and a link to the homepage. I will use a navigation menu on the left of each page, and perhaps also include a text menu at the bottom of every page.

11. How does the reader's monitor size affect your page design?

• Readers will have different monitor sizes and it will be important to create pages that can be displayed on some of the smaller monitor sizes. The pages will need to fit the monitor screen adequately without them having to scroll to view the entire page. The bulk (or at least most important) of my information will need to be kept in the top screen of information because it will be visible to all users.

12. Page Design Plan - tentative model of my homepage.