Making Web Content

The Design of the site includes navigation, color scheme, and repeating graphic design elements to give your website a consistent look.

What is good design? Check out these three infographics that focus on visual communication, typography, and color theory.

  1. Keep the design simple as it supports the story you want to tell with your site.  Consider drawing a map and/or creating a mock-up in Google Slides to see what content is where and how a reader moves from one page to the next.
  2. Design the pages with accessibility in mind so that the largest number of people can view the site without missing out on features.  In addition to the top accessibility features, also consider what your website looks like on a small screen like a phone.  
  3. Avoid the trap of continuing to add content to one page. Such additions will make your website appear disorganized. This applies to both text and visual elements as a clean look will also make it easier for your audience to see your main point.
  4. Make sure your navigation includes ways to get back to the home page.
  5. Choose your plugins carefully. WordPress can make your life easier as it has tools you can plug into your site for additional functionality.  But with plugins comes the responsibility to ensure that they work reliably, which adds a layer to the maintenance of your site. 

Finally, while this is not quite a design element, consider also privacy and security – this is why we want you to start with a private site that only you and a couple of other people can access. Know that your site is by default public, so you need to make it private. Please check with Academic Technology on how to do this.

Design

Text should be short and concise. Use headings and subheadings to chunk the text for greater accessibility. Think about how you read websites:  what keeps you reading a website and how do you decide to move away from a site?

What kind of photos, or digitally created images, do you want to use?

  • High-resolution images provide great detail but are also very large files and can take a long time to load. Think about your Picture size vs picture file size – what is a good balance for quick loading and good quality?

Tips

  • For the most part, your images will be stored in your Media Library, while video and audio files can be embedded from Imagen, or from an outside source, like YouTube or Vimeo. Just click the Add Block icon ⊕ to find the appropriate block for the media type you want to insert.
  • All student Carlsites initially have 1 Gigabyte of storage; if you need more data think about lowering the size or quality of some of your photos. Typically, high-quality photos take up 1/2-2 megabytes, so it’s okay to have a couple of high-quality photos in your Carlsite’s media library, but too many will fill up storage and make your website slow.
    For example, images like logos or thumbnails don’t need to be high quality. Try to save space by making them lower quality and smaller to save space.
  • Software for image creation and editing is also available through Carleton:
    • Make sure your images contain alt text.
    • For students looking to reduce image file size and resolution to save space, there are easy ways to do so on your home computer. For Mac users, use the Preview app to reduce image sizes; for Windows users, use the Photos app.
    • Carleton also offers Adobe Software licenses, including Photoshop for students who need image editing software. You can find this software in some public labs or can request it from the ITS Helpdesk.
  • Personal photo:  Consider if you want to have a personal picture on the website.  If yes, think about what you want this photo to look like.  Is it a professional headshot (Check the Career Center’s schedule for offering professional photography)?  Would you add a personal photo to your resume?

  • If you want to add a video to a WordPress site, you should know that Carleton does not use WordPress to manage videos natively. Please do not upload videos to your media library! You can, of course, still add videos to your website — you just need to embed them from another source: YouTube, Vimeo, Imagen, or other services.
  • Keep the video short – not longer than 5 minutes, but shorter is better. Make sure to use closed captioning.  Video files are large, so you need to decide where to store your file as your WordPress site will not have enough storage.  Some options, as long as you are at Carleton, include Panopto and Imagen.
  • What kinds of videos do you watch online?  How will these videos help you decide what kind of video to include?
  • [Note: While the WordPress Media Library supports video uploads, our installation of the software does not. Follow the instructions for uploading media to Imagen.]

When uploading your resume, be sure to remove any personal information such as home address and phone numbers.