Mark+Stewart,+HTML+and+CSS

Mark Stewart's HTML and CSS Homework Write-Up:

[|Old Design]

[|New Design]

I thought that the original web site was pretty well done in and of itself. Link lists were categorized in intuitive ways--basic links, news links, other resources links, and external CNMS links (on the bottom). The web site held a large number of resources without a cluttered design, and was visually appealing in general--a few pictures to make it more visually interesting, but not to the point that it became noisy. It was difficult to come up with changes that would provide an improvement.

My redesign adjusts some of the settings to make the overall design a bit more readable and immediately intuitively parsible. The changed colors make the edges between the three main bodies of links more obvious, so that a user will more quickly, intuitively "snap to" a particular segment, and identify it as something separate. The changed colors in the alternating-color links in the middle also was designed to make the distinctions between those slightly more readable. I also increased the link text sizes proportionately to make it all a bit more readable in general. In this case, this had little effect other than improving readability. Since the layout is fairly sparse, there was no risk that this would make any of the text noisy or intrusive with respect to other parts of the page, though this would be a risk with a more complex layout.