Webstyle Guide Thoughts (cont'd)

More thoughts on Webstyle Guide elements:

2) In terms of instruction, everyone should have read the Site Design Themes section: especially the teaching and instruction subheadings. I find the graph on user contact time, found right here, to be very illuminating.

Basically, user time and narrative non-lineararity (if that is a word) are proportional: Increased user time with and an increasingly non-linear narrative style requires a much more focused user. Such an application would be appropriate for a higher education audience. For my website, I'm in the "Training" bubble. According to this graph, a linear narrative would require more user contact time -or- if I want more user contact time, then I would have to increase the linearity of it. I think that's great, but I take exception to the site's assertion that having contextual links is a bad idea in terms of instruction: it's distracting. I concede that it may be a bit distracting for some users, but I really think that many would take advantage of contextual links and use them only when necessary. Also, I also think that tabbed browsing changes this assertion, too. A user can click on contextual links and a tabbed browser will load the page in the background while the user focuses on the current content. In my website, I think I provide a good balance between linearity and contextual links without giving the user an undue burden.

3) Typeface/Typography section: I didn't think that fonts would be so fascinating. But, since I've been harping on about certain website's poor choice of font, I thought I'd explore this heading. Here's the page. I didn't really know much about the serif vs. sans-serif fonts: serif is the traditional print font while sans serif is better for computer monitor viewing. If one wants their user to print out the webpage, then a serif font is useful. Serif is also useful for headlines (as in a newspaper) and small print on screen. All the rest should be in sans serif. As applied to my least favorite website, drudge.com, how does it stack up? I looked at the code and opened up Drudge's style sheet file. For headlines and small print, sure enough, he uses a san-serif font for headlines and small print (Helvetica and Verdana). For normal text, he uses Courier New (which is a font that was originally designed for IBM typewriters: if you remember, it was the kind with the ball) which I would assume falls under the "serif" category. Here's more proof that Drudge is just "wrong." He has it switched around: for normal text he should use a sans-serif font while using a serif font for headlines and small print. No wonder I get a headache when I go to this site! (Ok, it's the politics, too). For my website, I'll make sure to keep that distinction: sans-serif for normal text, etc. It's this little detail that I haven't thought of before that caught my eye. Oh, I might also want to implement a "print this page" link somewhere in my instructional website: it would combine all the steps in one content area of my site and arrange them on an easily printed out page.