NWskiers.org

Build Your Club's Website

Website Design Guide
Introduction
Organize
Style
Audience
Page Size
Layout
Font
Unity

All Hints

New to NWskiers? Begin Here
Members
Pick a Club
Comm. Members
Club Reps.
What's New
Newsletter
NWSCC Events
Club Events
PACRAT Racing
What We Do
Member Benefits
Skiers' Directory
Community Serv.
NW Advocates
Helpful Stuff
NW Resort Guide
Ski Links
Build A Website
Ski Articles
Personal Profiles
Person of Year
Past Ski Trips
Snowsport Safety
History
Officers
Join NWSCC
Far West Ski A.

Use tables to give your site a constant grid format	It's not especially easy to implement, but a site can have consistent columns that fall into a grid, much like a newspaper or a magazine. Because of the limitations of HTML, horizontal alignment of text and graphics is difficult to control. But you can at least define vertical columns by using a table. Example Good Page: Cascade Ski Club using tables, and typographic hierarchy Bad Page:  Cascade Ski Club not using tables or typographic hierarchy.  The content is the same
Keep your pages short	Set an upper limit to the amount of text you put on each page; somewhere between 200 and 500 words per page is reasonable. The first page should have the leas amount of text, and the pages deeper into your site can have more text. Example Bad Page: an example of to much text on a single page Good Page: links to in-depth material, and liberal use of bullets
Create style guidelines, with some contrast between other sites	Although it's important to maintain consistency throughout your site, you also want to provide enough contrast between its various site on the same server. NWskiers.org , for example, has many pages on the web, and if they all looked the same, the content difference would not be as clear.  Notice that the Style guide has a different color than the regular site, but has continuity since the text, and boarders are the same.  Compare Pick-A-Club Page to this page
Establish site wide consistency rules	Consistency is important in all design, but it's extremely important with the Web. Because one mouse-click can send someone to a new site at any time, a consistent style provides a significant visual cue to let people know they're still at the same site. (This site for example, use the same color, format, and text style for entire Web site.)

How to make a Ski Club Website is brought to you by NWSCC and Chris Miller