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Web Page Layout
Page Depth or Length
Research has shown that most visitors to a web page will not scroll down more than one or two screens. With this in mind, the rule of thumb in good web page design is to keep your overall page length to a maximum of two screens. Since you have no idea what size screen your students will be viewing your pages on, it is best to aim for the average screen size which is a monitor display resolution of 800 x 600 pixels. One to two screens would be a page that is a maximum of 295 pixels deep. (A good way to test is to preview your page on an older, smaller monitor and see how many scrolls it takes to get to the bottom.)
Note: There are instances when this rule can be broken. For example, you may want to provide a document that is fairly long that students would probably print out to read. In this case it is okay to go over the two-screens rule.
Page Width
Many students still have monitors that are 14 to 15 inches in width. If you use tables to confine your pages and set the outside dimensions to 100 percent, your content should re-size correctly on screen and diminish the chances that students will have to scroll to the right to see the end of text lines or the edges of graphics. (See Inserting Tables in Web Pages.)
If you plan on students printing out your pages however, you should be more specific in your width dimension of your table. The maximum width for printing well to either standard letter-size paper or A4 paper is 535 pixels.
Content Design
Many users find it much more difficult to read on a computer screen compared to reading text from a print-based publication. Visitors to web pages often scan text rather than read it word for word, especially if it is fairly long. To allow ease in scanning it is wise to break your information into short, concise paragraphs separated by a blank line.
It is also a good idea to insert bold subheadings to emphasize the main topic of the text that readers can skip down to get an outline of the content of your page and then quickly identify a topic of interest (note content design of this page).
Tell me more about type styles (fonts)
Tell me more about background color
