Basic Development Guidelines

Every web page developed for our class and hereafter should meet the following standards:

1. Show due consideration has been made to the four basic web guidelines
   • Know Your Audience
   • Less Is More
   • Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should
   • Most People Spend Their Time On Other Web Sites
2. Follow the development cycle
   • Think
   • Design
   • Test
   • Refine
   • Build
   • Test Again
3. Follow appropriate web naming rules:
   • No capital letters in file or folder names
   • No spaces in file or folder names
   • File and folder names should be short, but meaningful
   • No special characters should be used in file or folder names
   • Listen to the podcast
4. Be XHTML 1.0 Transitional in its Document Type Declaration
5. Use CSS 2.1 to control all presentation of content
6. Store CSS rules in external stylesheets
7. Construct all pages using modularized code
8. Write text in web pages to follow these guidelines:
   • Be scannable
   • Use 50% fewer words than print
   • Be organized using a markup heirarchy (typically by use of headers)
   • Use objective language
   • Written in an inverted pyramid style
9. Use tables sparingly, marked up correctly and never for page layout
10. Validate all web pages with no errors or warnings using the W3.org html validation service
11. Validate all CSS with no errors or warnings using the W3.org css validation service