Technical professionals increasingly are using and creating information for use in online environments. Creating and using online media requires you to:
- Know the differences in the ways readers read and use materials online and in print.
- Understand the differences among the variety of online media.
- Plan online applications by determining the purpose and the type of media to use and by analyzing the audience.
- Organize hypermedia by thinking about structure, designing material with the reader in mind and anticipating reader choices, developing links by considering how readers navigate, orientating readers on the home page, making it easy for readers to find their way, and using graphics judiciously.
- Design online text to be as concise as possible and use bullet points or other reader cues to direct the audience's attention to the important information.
- Design online help by first developing graphical user interface (GUI) standards and a prototype based on those standards, then testing the prototype for usability.
- Plan hypermedia documents by first thinking about the audience, the content you want to convey, and the purpose of the page, then establishing standards for HTML markup and graphics.
- Understand principles for designing effective online graphics.
- Recognize that marketing Web sites require designers to use specialized marketing techniques to sell the product, service, or idea.
- Edit online applications to ensure that the text is concise, the media and content work together, navigational aids are clear, lists are used effectively, the tone is appropriate, acronyms and abbreviations are understood by the audience, and the text is free of typos and misspellings.
If your online application will be translated into other languages, be aware of how the translation process might affect the design of the screens.
