B-School > Communication Services > Faculty Resources > Design Tips

Design Tips
A list of suggestions for faculty who are developing or redesigning their web sites

Avoid like the plague:

1. Textured backgrounds and colors for text or links which are difficult to read

2. Images that take a long time to download (Shrink your graphics as small as possible without quality loss.)

3. Scrolling Text, Marquees, Blinking text and Constantly Running Animated gifs

4. Orphan Pages (Since users may come to any of your pages without seeing the home page first, make sure that your web site's name, a link back to the main page and some information about where they fit in with your site structure is included on each page.)

5. Inconsistencies (Site navigation should be in exactly the same place from page to page, fonts should be used consistently, overview and title of page should be in the same format and location.)

6. Dead ends (All pages should have at least one link to go somewhere.)

7. Broken links (Check regularly that all your links will not lead to a page that no longer exists. This is especially important with external links in this fast-changing web world.)

8. Flash intro pages without a "skip intro" option

9. Browser/screen incompatibilities (Make sure your site works with different browsers and screen sizes. Some pages that display great in Netscape on a PC with a large screen may look terrible in Internet Explorer on a Mac with a small screen. Test your site on different screens, browsers and platforms. Also, see the site Viewable With Any Browser.)

Please feel free to:

1. Identify your site as part of the school. Since your site is on a university server, you have an obligation to situate your site as a part of the University of Texas and The McCombs School of Business.

2. Use the school name and logo correctly. The guidelines for the usage of schoo logos are avaliable at the logo download site where you can download a logo that complies with the rules and is already formatted for the web.

3. Create clear and consistent navigation links so that all pages on your site are easily accessible from all the others.

4. Use links to universal Business School pages, such as UT, B-School, MBA, Career Center, TexasNexus, Alumni, and MOR directory.

5. Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for easier control over the look of your pages. See CSS Resources on the Development Resource Page.

6. Specify a multiple font-family like " Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" so that if your users lack one font, their browser can use another one.

7. Edit and proof-read the content of your pages. Even if a site has the best design misspellings and bad grammar are very distractive to a reader.

8. Name your alt tags for those who do not have their picture viewing enabled.

9. Ask a friend to tour your site and quietly observe how they explore it to identify and change those parts of it that could be confusing to visitors.