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  • Sustainable Design
• A Sustainable Web?
  • A Foreign Concept
  • Glossary of Terms
• Design Concept
  • The Importance of Visual Design
  • Design Impact
  • Potential Harm of Good Design
  • Getting Started Designing
• Material Treatment
  • You Are How You Treat
  • Naming Files and Folders
  • Naming for Indexing and Clarity
  • Naming for Versioning
  • Mistreating Your Images: 7 Deadly Sins
• Document Structure (XHTML)
  • The Concept of a Markup Language
  • A Brief History of HTML
  • Basic XHTML Rules
  • XHTML DOCTYPE Declarations
  • XHTML Tag Types: Block and Inline
  • The Basic XHTML Tag Set: Block-level Tags
  • The Basic XHTML Tag Set: List Tags
  • The Basic XHTML Tag Set: In-line Tags
• Advanced Document Structure
  • Working with Classes and IDs
  • Classes in Action
  • IDs in Action
• Document Presentation (CSS)
  • Introduction to Cascading Style Sheets
  • Some CSS Vocabulary
  • CSS Selectors
  • CSS Properties: Text and Font
  • CSS Properties: Margin, Padding, and Border
• CSS for Design and Layout
  • Background Images
  • Image Replacement Techniques
• Introduction to PHP
  • What is PHP?
  • Repeating Content Across Pages

You Are How You Treat

One of the first things I notice upon visiting a Web site is how carefully materials are treated; I doubt I'm alone in this. I watch for things like how files get named (and in turn what URLs look like). I read for carefully proofread text (and feel pain whenever I find mistakes on my own sites, to be sure), and for text that engages me. I'm also looking at how images are treated: whether they have nice composition, have good color, low compression, etc.

Treating our materials with care can be one of the first steps to achieving rhetorical success—or at least keeping site visitors from leaving our site immediately, thinking that we don't care about our own work.

Updated on Sun. Feb. 19 2006 at 11:15PM