LHCb Web Guidelines

Follow the CERN Guidelines for publishing on the web

Design of the BaBar web : P.Palazzi (talk to LHCb June 1996)

Goals of a good web design (source PC magazine)

• achieve consistency - develop a common look and feel
• develop a simple navigation scheme
• keep to 1 or 2 fonts
• reuse images
• keep pages to 2 or 3 screens each (in general fewer longer pages is better)
• make sure content is no more than 3 clicks away

Things to avoid at all costs :

• Don't use frames
• Don't use customised colours to distinguish visited (use red) and unvisited (use blue) links
• Don't use light text on a dark background
• Don't use background pictures
• Don't use animation - users hate it, interferes with information retrieval

Features of a good web page:

• 'readability hurts' - avoid wordy text, focus on content - readers are looking for keywords
• 'whitespace hurts' - the more whitespace the more complicated, overdetailed, visually confusing
• link brackets are good : [Vertex], [Trackers], [RICH],   [MUON] ....
• link bullets are good as is being used in this list.
• image links have problems : dont change to show you've been there, border not clear, not recognisable
• text links should be just long enough to be descriptive

For  tips on writing good HTML see Jakob Nielsen's Top Ten Mistakes of Web Design and Tim
Berners-Lee's Style Guide for online hypertext.

This page last edited by JH on December 20, 2000.