[Note: This is just a preliminary version, but it should suffice for the time being.]

[Note: These pages assume a familiarity with both
basic analytical writing and everyday use of the Web.]

GENERAL PRINCIPLES

Starting assumption:


Although all research and writing are in some sense similar, web pages work differently than paper pages. Accordingly, the principal challenge of web design is not technical: It is conceptual.

Preliminary planning:

As in the case of any written term paper or other academic exercise:

(1) Determine the essential facts and arguments that you wish to convey (in general/all things being equal). Then determine to what extent the following two considerations facilitate or complicate attainment of that goal:

(2) Consider the relation between what you wish to say and what your target audience already knows and is capable of understanding. Or, to use the language of literary criticism, who is your intended reader?

(3) Consider the strengths or drawbacks of your genre or vehicle of communication.

Print media vary widely in tone, intellectual difficulty, writing style, amount of available space, etc. (consider the difference between scholarly and popular writing, books and journals, etc.). Web sites, too, display wide variations.

Our principal concern, though, is with the difference between print and the Web.

The distinctiveness of the Web bears in particular on points (2) and (3):

—tend to "scan" (rather than "read" in a—supposedly—traditional manner)
—expect visual aids (layout, formatting, images) to guide the eye to what is most important
—are impatient with large amounts of plain text

• Accordingly, studies further show that the most effective Web treatments of a given topic tend to be only about half as long as the equivalent print version. In fact, after a typical Web page has been radically edited down, readers often insist that it contains more information than it did earlier.

Result: the Web rewards economical expression.

drawbacks:

Selection and organization are crucial to any piece of writing, but they are arguably more important and more difficult on the Web due to the emphasis on brevity. Web-surfers tend to be unforgiving.

advantages:

(1) One can make a virtue of a necessity:

By forcing you to make ruthless choices in subject matter (what to include or exclude), arrangement (where to put it), and wording, Web design teaches you intellectual discipline. You can easily apply the lessons to your traditional print essays.

(2) Although the Web demands great discipline, it also rewards you with a degree of flexibility unmatched by print, thanks to its ability to include multiple levels. The farther down you travel from the austere top pages of a site, the more freedom and space you will find.

Because one can write and read in non-linear fashion, you and the reader can go off on as many tangents as you wish without precluding the option of sticking to the straight and narrow (for other readers, or for the same reader on another occasion). Links have an additional advantage: Unlike a reference note in a print work, a link can take you to the whole source itself, and not merely to a title. A scholarly site could in principle contain is own vast library of source material. Two outstanding examples are The Valley of the Shadow: Two American Communities in the Civil War and Do History (based on the prizewinning biography of a New England midwife in the Revolutionary and Early National era).

Lay out your site accordingly