style guide
Consistency
Consistency in every feature across a website is essential to user experience and to the branding of your web site. It gives a polished look to the site and encourages visitors to look around because they feel comfortable and at home. Any sloppy or inconsistent formatting or behaviour is likely to loose you readers quickly.
Features such as font type and size are obvious factors that must be the same from page to page of a site. Also important though, is consistent formatting such as the space between paragraphs, and between titles and paragraphs.
For large sites with a large development team a written style guide is essential for ensuring consistency across the site. Decide on your typographical choices early and allow everyone to apply them throughout the project.
Of course standards complaint sites that use a site wide CSS file for their presentation, have an enormous advantage in keeping site styles consistent. Not only in keeping them consistent, but when a change is needed—which it invariably is—adapting the entire site is as simple as changing one line in the CSS file.
Previous Posts
Latest Links
- Trumpet Quartet
- Bella Tromba this week recording at EMI with Kanye West.
- Are we designers or developers?
- I struggle with this one as well. My title at work is Software Engineer as well, which doesn't help matters.
- Dear W3C, Dear WaSP
- I'm not sure what I think about this. There seems to be a lot of general moaning about this stuff and not very much doing (with a few notable exceptions).
- The King of Web Standards
- Jeffrey Zeldman crowned by Business Week Magazine
- iPhone Javascript and spec benchmark
- Interesting JavaScript benchmarks on the new iPhone vs. Mac Book Pro
