Designing Effective Web Sites: A Concise Guide

Designing Effective Web Sites: A Concise Guide

This concise handbook helps students across the curriculum build web sites, a skill they can use both in college and in the workplace. The guide covers two essential elements: usability and the structure of an effective site. Students learn the importance of determining a web user's short- and long-term goals before developing and testing a site. In addition, students discover different methods of designing a site and creating devices for smooth navigation--plus the key concepts of structure and page layout. Includes a fully integrated web site. About the Author Johndan Johnson-Eilola works as Professor in the Department of Communication & Media at Clarkson University, teaching courses in information architecture and usability, technical communication, rhetoric, and mass media. He has gained international recognition for his contributions to finding intersections between practice and theory, and has published extensively on information work, hypertext theory and practice, computer-assisted writing, online communities, and the politics of technology. His published work includes Datacloud: Towards a New Theory of Online Work (Hampton Press, 2004), Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition (with Anne Frances Wysocki, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc, Utah State University Press, 2004), Central Works: Landmark Essays in Technical Communication (Co-edited with Stuart A. Selber, Oxford University Press, 2004), Designing Effective Websites (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), Professional Writing Online (with James E. Porter and Patricia Sullivan, Pearson Education, 2000/2003), Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing (Ablex/Greenwood, 1997)Johnson-Eilola's research and scholarship has won several awards, including the Computers & Composition Distinguished Book Award, Best of Kairos, Best Article in Computers & Composition, the Technical Communication Quarterly Best Article Award and has published essays in collections that have been awarded the NCTE Best Collection of Essays in Technical and Scientific Communication several times as well as the National Council of Writing Program Administrators Best Book Award. He has also contributed chapters to numerous journals and anthologies in the field and served as keynote or featured speaker at the Computers and Writing Conference, the Conference of the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication, the Watson Conference on Rhetoric, and the Conference on College Composition and Communication, among others.His curren