Design and Style
The website can be a way of involving parents, carers and the community in children’s learning. Communication can be a two-way process if visitors are offered the opportunity to get in touch with the school via the school’s enquiries e-mail address or to submit their views on school activities/policies.
Think about the following:
- Designed and structured so that information is easy to locate.
- You need to remember that text prepared for a printed publication, such as a school handbook, will not work well on your website unless you adapt it.
- Always use a general page heading that quickly identifies the content of the page.
Fonts
- Limit the fonts you use as the more unusual ones may not be displayed on the audience’s computer.
- Sans-serif fonts (e.g. Arial and Verdana) are easier to read on screen than serif fonts (e.g. Times).
- Use different font sizes to help readers understand the importance of different headings. Make sure that all pages use the same set of font sizes.
- Use bold to emphasise headings and sub-headings to make them stand out.
- Never underline a heading as underlining is used to indicate a link to another page.
- Use colour to emphasise important words or points or create a coloured background for the headings. However, choose the combinations carefully for the sake of readability.
- Keep things simple. Avoid flashing or moving effects with text – many people find this annoying.
Accessibility
‘Web accessibility’ means making sure that a website can be accessed using any browser, that it can be easily navigated and that the content can be easily understood. Some things you should consider are:
- keeping language simple and sentences short
- using high contrast colours for text wherever possible
- avoiding the use of text on a patterned background
- giving graphics a title to help visually impaired people who use text-to-speech tools.